Week 2: House Museums and Historical Context

Hello Reader!

This week’s blog post is a little different than what I originally planned. Since my internship at the Bonnet House Museum and Gardens doesn’t officially begin until next week, I decided to take this opportunity to explore the broader context of house museums in the United States. I had initially considered writing about plantation houses, but ultimately felt that the topic wasn’t relevant to the work I’ll be doing at Bonnet House. That said, Emma J. Walcott-Wilson’s article, "Cultivating Memoryscapes: The Politics of Language at Plantation House Museums in the American South," is a compelling read that highlights the complexities of interpretation and memory at those sites.

Instead, I’m focusing on the history and role of house museums more generally, using Bonnet House as a case study and drawing from Patrick Butler’s Interpreting Historic House Museums. According to Butler, a house museum is defined as a museum that centers on the preservation and interpretation of a single historic residence or a complex of structures tied to one primary home. These spaces play a crucial role in making history come alive by combining architecture, personal artifacts, and narrative interpretation.

Evelyn & Frederick
The Bonnet House exemplifies this. Though its modern story begins in 1919 as a wedding gift from Hugh Taylor Birch to his daughter, Helen, and her husband, Chicago artist Frederic Clay Bartlett, the property itself has witnessed over 4,000 years of history. It sits on a site once used by the Tequesta people and may have been one of the first areas of Spanish contact in the New World. After Helen’s untimely death in 1925, Frederic eventually returned with his second wife, Evelyn Fortune Lilly, and the couple transformed Bonnet House into a lively, art-filled winter retreat.

Evelyn’s donation of the property in 1983 to the Florida Trust for Historic Preservation ensured that Bonnet House would be protected for future generations. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1984 and recognized as a historic landmark by the City of Fort Lauderdale in 2002. Despite facing threats from nearby development, it remains a vital cultural site and example of historic preservation in action.

Mount Vernon
House museums have a long legacy in the U.S., beginning in earnest in the mid-1800s when Ann Pamela Cunningham led the campaign to preserve Mount Vernon, which opened as a museum in 1860. This effort is often considered the model for historic preservation in America. Federal involvement deepened during the Great Depression with the Historic Sites Act of 1935, which gave the government power to preserve and interpret historic properties for public benefit, helping institutionalize the preservation of house museums as a national objective.

As I prepare to begin my time at Bonnet House, I’m reflecting on how house museums connect academic study to lived experience. These sites offer rich opportunities for educators and historians alike to explore questions of memory, identity, and cultural heritage in ways that go far beyond the textbook.

See you next week for my first week at Bonnet House!

Maria Formoso

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