Narrative component pnly of the lavishly illustrated PowerPoint debuted at the annual Antiques Forum at Colonial Williamsburg

1. Making History/Making Place: A New England Portrait
-Intro “Making History/Making Place: A New England Portrait”
Let’s talk about the artists and antiquarians who used collections, monuments, story-
telling and the built environment to preserve, protect, and promote New England –
and by extension – the America, they loved. Let’s talk about what it takes to
preserve and protect the America we love.
- Intro Collage
Since my journey began 36 years ago, during a summer spent car camping and
photographing early Vermont architecture, my passion for place, past and
community has blossomed into an almost obsessive search for localisms and the
qualities of indigenous cultural expression that generations past did so well and our
times do so very poorly. My mission is to foster local awareness by developing
experiences, services and programs that connect place and past and by encouraging
teachers, politicians, artists and civic leaders to adopt an affirmative action for local
knowledge and civic engagement as the key to community renewal; to promote
interest in the qualities that give places a sense of accomplishment and a connection
to the flow of something bigger.
For inspiration I turn to OUR founding fathers – the antiquarians, antiquers, and
institution-builders of old - men and women who used art and history to uncover
what Wendell Berry describes as the “invisible landscape of communal association.”
Maya Angelou speaks of how our lives have already been “paid for” pointing to
evidence of the toil of past generations. Angelou preaches gratitude and urges that we
add value to future generations, or, as Berry puts it – to be communities “in which the
past has prepared the present and the present safeguards the future.”
Now, more than ever, our ability to do so is compromised. One doesn’t need to listen
hard to hear the insistent drumbeat urging us to adopt top-down global solutions to
local problems, to embrace fads and fashions that originate anywhere but home and
above all to keep buying whatever they’re selling. How ironic that the long-
stereotyped and ridiculed regional mindset is now the thing at risk. Globalism, while
not without value, conspires against localism and by doing so against community and
freedom - a fact we must rectify with a new kind of affirmative action that puts place
and community first.
To preach the power of place and past, it helps to have a place to call home. For 40
years mine has been New England, specifically the CT River Valley and more
specifically the metro Hartford/Springfield area from which Christine and I fan out
like birds, rarely going far in our migratory rounds of a few dozen places we
increasingly know, by heart.
So let’s have a little fun picturing New England and reminding ourselves why the
work and stuff is not only worth caring about but fighting for.
Civil War as Crucible for National Memory
Regional Antiquarians
The Antiquers
Landscapes into History: The Antiquarian Impulse in Art & Literature

2. I won’t dwell on it, but one would almost be shocked today to visit an art
museum and see new “cutting edge work” that considers place, past or
community with anything but disdain. Nothing is associative. Everything is
ironic – most, but not all, gives me heartburn. This was not always so.
Rediscovery of Early New England Art
Antiques
Yankee Ingenuity
“New England people.... (are) sober, orderly, patient, active, industrious, and
persevering... intelligent, ingenious, acute, versatile, (AND) ready when
disappointed in one kind of business to slide into another. . as if they had been
bred to nothing else.” – T Dwight
Historic Preservation, Placemaking & the Built Environment
A Legacy at Risk/ National Mission at Risk
Alas, Gertrude Stein’s famous line about there being no there, there in Oakland,
California applies increasingly to most places today. A place is a space with
character. That’s it – you’re either for it or against it. It begins with assigning
greater value to the people, institutions, stuff and stories that strengthen our sense
of place and community. Our museums and schools, have an essential role to play
in fostering pride of place and civic identity. America’s genius may be science, but
it absolutely is civics – a fact we ignore at our peril. So why does No Child Left
Behind exclude history, civics and social studies from the masteries? If it was a
plot against us, it couldn’t have been better designed. This aspect of NCLB is
screaming for reform. It is way past time to put education, at all levels, back in
place. It begins with taking stock of our physical and cultural environment and
doing what we can to see whole cloth in fragments. If Janine Skerry can recreate a
ceramic history from fragments – we surely can reconstitute community the same
way – and must. Anything less is hurling our bequest in the face of those who
paved the way.
- Whence Goes Freedom – Maybe it’s time? Last evening, in a sidebar with Phil Zea
about the recent political shocker from Massachusetts – we agreed that a little
rebellion now and then is a good thing– and might have recounted Thomas Jefferson’s
questioning “What country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from
time to time, that the people preserve the spirit of resistance? …..The tree of liberty,”
he continued “must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and
tyrants.” We observed that our passion for American politics isn’t because
government can help the business we love (though God knows a better use of public
money is hard to imagine), but because we are certain that the memory business is
indispensable to self-government which, last I knew, was the point here.
Housing History: A Search for Place, Past & Community
So, what am I doing to help? After 30 years of institutional living, I’ve adopted a
Declaration of Independence of my own, working with institutions and
municipalities, families and foundations, to advance the interdependence of place,
past and community – because I believe that this, the most successful mission-
based experiment in self-government in world history, matters but requires
maintenance. We haven’t outsourced the maintenance contract yet, so that’s what
it’s about.
- Gatekeepers for America: Small Museums & historical orgs – I love the National
Trust, but I wouldn’t expect a big corporation like that, or anything big, to
instinctively get why, if the grassroots dimension of what they’re about dies,
there’s hardly a point in their carrying on. Their mantra about “too many house
museums” bothers me, not because it is wrong, but because it is incomplete. Half

3. of America’s cultural patrimony – very possibly the best half – is held by small
historical orgs, many as house musems, the best of which provide the most
extraordinary learning experiences in museumdom while simultaneously
epitomizing historic preservation. Foundations, grant guidelines and American
philanthropy are – with a few exceptions – asleep at the wheel and need to
readjust their priorities to keep our beacons and watchtowers shining brightly –
being the most faithful we can be to a national mission that is glorious and was
born out of the hearts and minds of people who walked these streets { ed. program
debuted at Colonial Wmsburg} and was clearly what inspired John D Rockefeller
Jr. to stretch so far and so well on behalf of a purpose so indispensable
- Placemaking – taking museological practice to the streets: Quebec 400th, New Bedford
NPS – inspirational - In “On the Beaten Track: Tourism, Art and Place” Lucy
Lippard talks about how “ homogenization pervades all the senses”... urging
that “if we spent half the energy looking at our own neighborhoods, we’d learn
twice as much,” noting that “few towns yearning for business have any idea of
the attractions hidden in their back streets”
Conclusion
Alas, when celebrities don’t get it, we are probably getting what we deserve for
elevating professional narcissists to high office. But I don’t get why Warren
Buffett & Bill Gates don’t get it – spending billions on global initiatives when,
really, isn’t the best way to make a better world to emulate and refine Puritan
John Winthrop’s “shining city upon a hill?”
Calvin Coolidge may not deserve a place in the Presidential Hall of Fame – but
when he retired from the Presidency, he became President of the board at the
American Antiquarian Society; John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, JP Morgan –
the leading economic giants of their age – all were passionately and explicitly
committed to elevating and preserving the American story – as were most
Presidents through Eisenhower, who retired to the battlefield at Gettysburg so
he could commune every day with the spirits of an epic past. Has a single major
political figure, corporate chieftain or celebrity had much to say or done much
to sustain, teach inspire? There are a few exceptions. But they are too few and
they aren’t well-known enough. American values aren’t a fashion accessory.
They require work that is sometimes unpleasant and involves calling out even
our peers and classmates when their actions undermine commonwealth.
- Heritage Tourism Maps – It’s not dead – it’s just beginning. But we need to stop
glamorizing the exotic at the expense of the necessary. Our government
subsidizes the airline industry in 101 ways. The spawn of cheap air travel is a
society addicted to the exotic and easily seduced by a travel industry whose
mission is to persuade you to leave home.
- Place Matters – brochures – Destination-building is an art. While I have never been
anywhere with nothing to recommend it, most locales do not have what it takes
to become model destination. But countless do that aren’t. They’ve hardly
begun to figure out what they have or how to make the most of it. It matters,
not just because tourism puts heads in beds, but because it is a way (not the
only, perhaps not even the best) for communities to grapple with pride of place
and civic identity, without which communities are like people who, in standing
for nothing, will fall for anything and will loose much in the process.
It’s an honor to have the Chipstone Foundation support my work with this closing
program. One of the highlights of my career and the strongest hint I ever had of divine

4. intervention was the alignment of planets that brought Chipstone, Wadsworth Atheneum,
SPNEA, Portsmouth Furniture, Hadley Chests, George Sheldon’s Memorial Hall, Israel
Sack, Laurel Ulrich, Phil Zea and I, together to produce an extraordinary cavalcade of
regional art under the banner of “Sense of Place: Furniture from New England Towns.” A
companion conference on “Innovation and Diversity in American Furniture” became the
1993 issue of Chipstone’s American Furniture journal and began with the premise that
inventive minds and indigenous expression is real and, contrary to Art History’s relentless
obsession with sources of influence (which I think diminishes the mystery of
imagination), “Innovation and Diversity” was a declaration of independence for American
furniture and it brought me to the writings of Wendell Berry – a source of influence I
happily acknowledge and to whom I couldn’t be more grateful.
If the word community is to mean or amount to anything, it must refer to a place
The past furnishes us with many examples of coherent communities, but not one that we
can Ago back to.@ We have no place to begin but where we are.
Community is a concept...that virtually no one has taken the trouble to quarrel with;
even its worst enemies praise it....however... neither our economy, nor our government,
nor our educational system runs on the assumption that community has a value...
If we are to protect the world’s multitude of places...then we must know them, not just
conceptually but imaginatively …with affection and by heart.
Art, architecture, and antiques provide visual and material evidence that reaches places often
missed by traditional History, - a portal into a world of memory and associations that connects
us to a flow that is bigger than we are and incorporates so many more nows than we have now.
Wendell Berry observes that “old town centers were built by people who were proud of their
place and who realized a value in living there. The old buildings look good because they were
built by people who respected themselves and wanted the respect of their neighbors. The
corporate outskirts, on the contrary, are built by people who take no pride in the place, see no
value in lives lived there, and recognize no neighbors.” This is what we’re up against and
again why the visual and material evidence matters so much.
Despite the current economic challenges, America is still exploding with innovators and
idealists. Young people want our country to matter – to revitalize America – an idea most
cherish and some feel is being degraded. We’re all environmentalists now and through our
stewardship of the physical and cultural environment, we are brought closer to home, closer to
one another, and closer to the ideals of our shining American city on a hill.
Bill Hosley
February 2010