This study explores the use of gardens and agricultural spaces at historic house museums, and the potential these spaces have for supporting positive change. At the turn of the twenty-first century, house museums grappled with a crisis of limited funding and ever shrinking visitor capacity, which continues to affect the success of these spaces today. I argue that garden spaces can provide interpretive revitalization, community relevancy, and increased income for historic house museums that can positively support a house museum. By surveying house museums throughout New Jersey and Pennsylvania, I show that garden spaces provide a tool for house museums to gain stability amidst crisis. / History

This thesis provides an analysis of Shirley Plantation’s operation as a historic house museum from 1894 to the present period, and the Carter family’s dedication to keeping the estate within the family. The first chapter examines Shirley Plantation’s beginnings as a historic house museum as operated by two Carter women, Alice Carter Bransford and Marion Carter Oliver, who inherited the property in the late nineteenth century. The second chapter explores Shirley Plantation’s development as a popular historic site during the mid-twentieth century to the early part of the twenty-first century, and compares the site’s development to the interpretative changes that had been occurring at Colonial Williamsburg. The third chapter analyzes and critiques Shirley Plantation’s present interpretative focus as a historic site, with the fourth chapter offering suggestions for developing an exhibition that interprets the history of slavery at the plantation.

Historic house museums (HHMs) are contradictory spaces, private places made public. They (often) combine the real with the reproduction. Drawing from object reverence, taxonomy, and tableaux over a century and a half of practice, the American HHM arrives in the present as a Frankenstein's monster of nostalgia. Chamounix Mansion has been a youth hostel since 1964. It has also been a historic house museum, though when it became one and when—if—it ever stopped being one is an open question. Chamounix is a space where the past, present, and future all share space, as guests move through historic spaces, have conversations about anything or nothing at all, and plan their next day, their next destination, their next major life move. It is a place that seems fertile for meaning-making. It also provides a fascinating case study of what HHMs have been and what they might become. The Friends of Chamounix Mansion employed the methods of other HHMs as it tried to achieve recognition as an HHM in the 1960s, but by the 1980s, they began claiming the hostel’s usage as another form of authenticity. As HHMs face a variety of challenges today, and seek to make meaning with visitors and neighbors alike, the example of Chamounix Mansion offers a case study of how embracing usage might offer new directions for meaning-making. / History