Exhibition Reviews

In 1963 the Smithsonian Institution stepped into a preservation crisis in Ipswich, Massachusetts, and saved an eighteenth-century timber-framed house from certain demise. It was moved to the nation's capital and reerected inside the then new National Museum of History and Technology where it became the centerpiece of an exhibition on two hundred years of American home-building technology. That exhibit felt dated by the 1980s, and the house was remanded to forlorn storage.	1
Now the house is the core of a new exhibit at the same museum, now known as the National Museum of American History, Behring Center. "Within These Walls . . ." is an ambitious, multipart project comprising, in addition to the exhibit, an online counterpart, a series of public programs, and even a Victory Garden planted on the museum's grounds. The main label of "Within These Walls . . ." is a model of clarity: "This exhibition tells the story of five families who lived in this house over 200 years and made history in their kitchens and parlors, through everyday choices and personal acts of courage and sacrifice." That cleanly designed and clearly written label sets the tone for the rest of the script and graphic palette.	2
The exhibit divides into five chronological sections and a concluding section on methodology and evidence. Each of the five thematic sections focuses on a single family (or household): the Choates from colonial gentility; the Dodges from the revolutionary era, including their employee Chance, a free African American man who at one time, perhaps, had been a slave; the Caldwells, early-nineteenth-century teachers and reformers; Catherine Lynch and her daughter, Irish immigrant laborers from the later nineteenth century; and Mary Scott and her family from the 1940s. Texts and images on rails and banners tell each family's story. Images of comparable individuals help fix a mental picture of the house's inhabitants where actual portraits or photographs were not available. A map usually appears in any section's graphic mix, which helps to tie these people to particular places in and around Ipswich. Written and printed documents—a will, a household account book, a child's primer, a ship's passenger list—are reproduced to show how they were used in reconstructing the lives of the residents. Artifacts from the museum's collections—a woodworker's plane, a military uniform, a piano—are sparely and intelligently deployed. Each section has an engaging interactive feature (for example, touchable models of the house over time and a heavy washbucket to lift in the section on Irish immigrants); and each offers period music with some excerpts (an abolitionist anthem, for example) connecting particularly well to the story.	3
The exhibition's appeal seems primarily cerebral, though the rich colors of the graphics, the subtle strains of the music, and the sturdily designed tactile objects appeal to senses beyond the intellect. Emotionally, the overall tone of the stories is rather cool, although I was drawn repeatedly to some of them, especially that of Chance, the aptly named African American who was "discovered" serendipitously in one line of his former owner's will. The curators' language here is admirably plain, even blunt: "Chance's service was one of Abraham Dodge's possessions. This is all we know about the life of Chance. More historical evidence tends to survive about the lives of whites than blacks, men than women, rich than poor."	. . .