Tucked away in the northwest corner of Delaware, at a DuPont family estate that opened as a museum in 1952, is the single largest collection of American antiques anywhere, at least according to our guide at the Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library. With fully eight stories of period rooms decorated from floor to ceiling and wall to wall (including a number that were moved in their entirety from other estates over the course of several decades), as well as over four hundred acres of outdoor gardens to explore, it is impossible to see everything within the complex in only one single day. Yet– with the goal of trying to see as much as possible while we were there– in addition to our introductory seasonal tour we signed up for two reserved tours that allow small groups, limited to four people due to space constraints within a historic elevator, to explore otherwise inaccessible areas of the structure. Moreover, in between these three hour-long tours we had time to explore some of the permanent exhibits covering more than two centuries of American folk art and crafts, temporary exhibits including a particularly popular display on Downton Abbey, and family friendly parts of the grounds such as the aptly named Enchanted Woods.
The first tour we undertook, Fashionable Furnishings, was dedicated to exploring the sixth floor of the mansion (the oldest parts of which date from the 1700s), which contains the nicest guest room I’ve ever seen, one floor below Mrs. DuPont’s own bedchamber, since these offered the best view of the grounds. This was perhaps my favorite tour of the day, highlights of which included a whole room devoted to Ben Franklin memorabilia as well as tales told of the ironic origins of the DuPont Company from a family of immigrant pacifists who quickly became gunpowder makers at the site of the current Hagley Museum. The second tour we undertook, American Interiors, focused on the seventh floor of the building, where Mr. DuPont’s suite of rooms (decorated in the French ‘Empire’ style) sits down a long hallway from the Billiard Room, which might have been my favorite single display at the entire site. A collection of coins, innumerable miniature furnishings, and a Parlor with several games were other highlights from this tour. The Yuletide Tour (our final trip which covered parts of the first, third, and fourth floors) which focused on the holiday traditions of the family who once inhabited the home, seemed both crowded and quite rushed but included a number of the most interesting rooms in the entire building such as displays on the DuPonts’ Christmas and New Year’s traditions as well as visits to the Dining Room, the Piano Room, and an indoor sporting arena enclosed by the facades of four different period storefronts. This tour also touched on two controversial issues by highlighting the key role glamorous cigarette smoking played in the lifestyles of the rich a century ago, and on the way these lifestyles depended on clear class lines that kept servants in their place, for example, by wallpapering their sitting room in light colors to show dirt.
A focus on class distinctions was also evident in the exhibit on the Costumes of Downton Abbey, though there was a much better balance between displays about the rich and working class there, perhaps due to the show regularly depicting both groups. This exhibit, which was the most crowded display besides the holiday tour, was structured around a sequence of activities from morning through night with a strong emphasis on comparing and contrasting life on country estates in England and the United States. Another excellent temporary exhibit, about American Tin Ware, was put together by a doctoral student in the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture at the University of Delaware, although most of the largest displays are permanent, including the huge Campbell’s Collection of Soup Tureens which was donated in 1996 from the company’s former museum in Camden, New Jersey. Other interesting permanent exhibits include a chronological trip through the evolution of ‘Fashionable’ home décor from the 17th through the 19th centuries, crafts displayed alongside the tools used to produce them, and an entire wall full of chairs. The extensive efforts made by the museum to create a family friendly atmosphere encouraging multiple generations to come together were also on full display with a Hands-on-History Cart exhibiting a corset on a model that seemed popular, a Touch-It-Room containing a Colonial Kitchen among other play areas, and the fantastical displays found in the gardens uphill from the museum. The elementary aged exhibits at Winterthur seem to share elements with both the Pippi Longstocking room at the American Swedish Historical Museum and the interactive stations at the Jersey Shore Children’s Museum, while also suggesting a desire to keep up with key contemporary practices in museum studies.
Keeping up closely with new approaches to educating public audiences is especially important for the staff at Winterthur because their primary mission to preserve the artifacts and teach about the lifestyles of the rich runs counter to most major recent trends in historical scholarship. Indeed, public historians since the 1970s have played an especially prominent role in trying to tell the previously untold stories of those on the margins of society, and while the staff at Winterthur is well aware of the social and cultural turns in American historiography over the last half century (and are ahead of the curve when it comes to conservation and curation) they are somewhat constrained in their ability to stay fully cutting edge. The location of the museum (which is not easily accessible except by car), the well-dressed and seemingly all white clientele that comprised the audience on the day we visited, as well as the relatively high cost of admission also all function together to reinforce the idea of exclusivity. Indeed, in an age of increasing economic inequality Winterthur serves as a display of ostentatious wealth that requires multiple visits to totally take in. Still, I’d like to return to see the floors I missed, maybe on a summer tour of Winterthur.