"Having been around the block with regards to historical house tours, I have learned I learn more if I just clam up and listen. I’ve learned that people who volunteer to preserve and interpret at such places are mostly local heroes who care deeply about their hometowns and the people who lived there before them. I have also learned that the people who spend a lot of time in these old houses care very much about the houses themselves - their architectural adornments, the household items that indicate past customs and ways of life. Though they’re often dressed up in old-timey costumes, historical house guides often remind me of those modern painters who insisted a painting is first and foremost paint on a canvas, not a picture of the world. A lot of house tours are about the thingness of things. For instance, when one visits Jefferson Davis’s White House of the Confederacy in Richmond one learns that his bed was so short because most people back then slept sitting up; one doesn’t hear much about how on earth Davis could sleep at all given the fact that he was waging a war to keep human beings enslaved. And when one visits Andrew Jackson’s house in Nashville, one is more likely to hear about the painstaking restoration of the wallpaper and nothing much about how Jackson’s policies sent one’s Cherokee ancestors on the Trail of Tears. And though our lovely hoopskirt wearer addresses the dastardly [John Wilkes] Booth in the tavern part of the house, she spends as much time walking us through the Surratt household’s typical laundry day."
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Assassination Vacation, Sarah Vowell
