Читать книгу Travels Into Our Past: America's Living History Museums & Historical Sites - Wayne P. Anderson - Страница 3

Recreating America’s past

For the past 60 years as we have traveled around the U.S., we have been impressed with the time, energy and expertise that has been spent preserving our country’s past in living history museums and historical sites. In recent years we have been amazed by the sheer number of these attractions that have been added and improved with buildings, artifacts and re-enactors brought together to give visitors a meaningful slice of history.

The Step into History website on the Internet lists over 550 places in the U. S. where you can see and experience life as it was in some era of the past. The historic periods covered by these museums range from the earliest settlements such as St. Augustine in Florida to the American Museum of Science and Energy in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, that tells the story of the ongoing research on sources of energy.

Most living history museums are outdoors with authentic buildings and structures from the past. The original living history museums such as Williamsburg in Virginia and Old Salem in North Carolina are on the original historic sites with the original buildings. The newer living history museums, on the other hand, have been constructed with buildings that have been rescued from destruction around the countryside and moved to the museum area, recreating as nearly as possible the original setting.

Some of living history museum sites cover a large area of land such as Old World Wisconsin at 876 acres and Williamsburg in Virginia at 301 acres. Sometimes a whole area of a community has been reconstructed or has been saved such as the squares and buildings in Savannah in Georgia or the houses in the two-block area around Abraham Lincoln’s home in Springfield, Illinois. In other cases much energy has gone into renovating old buildings and getting them on the National Register of Historic Places. Sometimes these homes such as at Macon in Georgia have been preserved and renovated at great expense to the owners.

The buildings in many of the more recent living history museums come from small towns and farms. For example, in our state of Missouri, in St. Louis and Kansas City urban renewal destroyed many historical places, but in smaller towns such as St. Charles, Lexington, Hermann and St. Joseph, the land on which old buildings sat had little commercial value, so they were left undisturbed.

When the appreciation of the past came to the foreground, they were there to be renovated. It seems that practically every state had one-room schoolhouses, small churches, vacant post offices, and old railroad stations standing empty. Others had lumber mills, grain-grinding mills, and sometimes waterwheels driven by small waterfalls. These added to the charm and historical significance of their living museums’ re-creation of history.