Amanda Elledge Finn
North Carolina State University
National Council on Public History Conference 2019
Case Statement for “Making Radical Repairs” Working Group
The Historic Carson House in Marion, North Carolina is like many historic house museums that were opened in the 60s and 70s, it has a three-page National Register application, it struggles to make constant repairs to the original structure on a small budget, and it relies on community donations for the contents of its collections. The Carson House has two permanent collections: the domestic collection (the contents of the house) and the estate collection (the contents of the historic barn).
John Hazzard Carson immigrated from County Fermanagh, Ireland in 1771 and acquired approximately 3,500 acres of land in western North Carolina over a period of thirty years, through head-right and land-grant claims. The house, a three-story southern backcountry plantation in the Greek revival style, was begun in 1791, completed in 1793, and expanded in 1841. By the 1960s, the Carson House was all but abandoned and in need of significant repair. Three prominent school teachers and one Carson descendant raised money from the community, through the school system and private donors, to purchase the property and nine of the original acres.
After the house was purchased, a nonprofit organization was created to manage the property and the Carson House was put on the National Registry in 1966. From the 1960s on, the Carson House board asked for items to put into the museum from the descendants of the Carson family, many of whom still lived in the area. In addition, the founding board accepted items that were historically significant to the region, as McDowell county did not have a dedicated county museum. From this time on, the Carson House and its collections served two purposes: to interpret the lives of the Carson family who had lived in the house and to also tell the story of the surrounding area, primarily between the dates of 1770 and 1888, when the Carsons sold the property.
The Carson House incorporation has not ever had the funds to purchase items for the collection and are wholly dependent on items donated by descendants of the Carson family and local residents or items loaned from other western NC museums. As a living history museum, 95% of the permanent collection is displayed in the house and the historic barn, meaning that there is very little left to rotate year-to-year. In addition, there is no additional space to place a rotating exhibit that might attract repeat traffic. Paired with the expectation that the Carson House serve as an interpretative site for early western NC and McDowell County, their collections are firmly stuck in the past.
While the collection fulfills the mission to represent the Carson family, and even the founding families of McDowell County, there is only scant representation of the sixty-eight enslaved people who worked the plantation, the Native Americans (Cherokee and Catawba) whose lands the Carsons claimed, or the other poor white immigrants who settled western North Carolina alongside the Carson family. With very little means to purchase items that are representative of these populations, combined with the fact that these populations were less likely to have objects survive, the Carson House struggles with representation and the repeat visitors that accompany new exhibition material.
The Carson House is almost entirely funded by tours revenue, memberships and private donations, and fundraising events put on by museum staff and volunteers, with the county government adding only 10% to the budget every year. Many members of the local community do not engage with the historic house and 90% of their visitors are from out of town, despite the previously stated “mission creep” concerning county history. The lack of representation in their collection, paired with little new material to attract repeat visitations, alienates the local community. While there is a dedicated volunteer group made up almost exclusively of local, retired middle-class women, there is little diversity among this engaged group, as well. These struggles, in addition to a stagnated collection, also demonstrate a perceived cultural barrier within the community.
While some attempts have been made over the years to make the collections more representative, most of these efforts have failed to attract more members of the local community. In 2008, an initiative was formed by the executive director and board chairman to establish an “African American History Room” on the second floor of the Carson House. Descendants of Carson House enslaved peoples were contacted for materials, most of them out-of-state, and some excellent items were donated. A needlepoint sampler made in 1832 by Eliza Carson, an enslaved girl of about fourteen who had a Carson father and an enslaved mother, tells a surprising story about enslaved education on the estate. The owner of the sampler had participated in the Carson family genealogy project and was a confirmed descendant of the Carson family, facilitating her connection to the estate. Several other items that were donated were quilts and counterpanes made by enslaved peoples but were in possession of white Carson descendants. Despite this attempt to represent enslaved people at the museum, there was little local interest.
In 2010, another attempt was made to interpret a more inclusive narrative at the Carson House. After receiving grant funds from the Blue Ridge Natural Heritage Area, a part of the historic barn was transformed into exhibit space and agricultural tools were put on display. The interpretive plaques reflected the importance of farming in western North Carolina, paired with items that had been donated since the museum’s founding and had never been on display. Even though this aspect of the estate told the story of trade workers and small-scale farmers across western NC, there was, again, little local interest. In both examples, the public was not consulted about the theme or content of the exhibit, the donors, if they were still living, were not contacted about the exhibit, and many members of the public did not associate this agricultural past with their own.
One strategy for resolution is to involve the local community in the process of reinterpretation and representation. Asking members of the community, primarily underrepresented groups, to take part in the process of re-designing existent exhibits and cultivating new donations from diverse owners would encourage local interest. In addition, speaking with local museums who excel at diverse representation and contracting long-term loan items that underrepresented members of the community could help to interpret would breathe new life into their stagnated collections. In the case that material objects could not be acquired, applying for grants to fund oral history interviews with underrepresented populations, a focused lecture series that highlights aspects of the collection that tell diverse histories, or creating living exhibits, like a teaching garden, would help the collections become more inclusive.
Another inclusive action would be to allow these community groups to tour both of the permanent collections and give them leverage to re-write interpretative labels to tell a more inclusive story than the Carson experience of that object, with the help of the curator. The Carson House museum could offer members of these diverse communities places on the Board of Directors, when appropriate, and have events that celebrate their histories at the museum to continue to sustain relationships with members of these underrepresented communities. While a cultural change would constitute a change in practice, a change in static collections would open the door for crucial cultural conversations to happen.
Draft of Preliminary Vision Statement: America’s history collections are proactively inclusive of the evolving narratives that represent historic and current citizens of the United States and serve the purpose of educating global audiences on historic issues of contemporary relevance.