Welcome from the Attingham Summer School: Day 1

Greetings from England. I want to start by introducing myself as the Museum Curator at Dumbarton House and explain the Attingham Summer School. Earlier this spring I was fortunate to be selected for the Attingham Summer School, a program in which scholars, curators, gardeners, architects, conservators, and leaders in the museum and complimentary fields are brought together each year in England for three weeks to study the Country House, it's gardens, owners, collections, and architecture, as well as issues and concerns of the past and the present that these houses need to deal with today, tomorrow, and in the future. We also learn about what worked in the past and what did not.

With an introductory tour and recception yesterday, July 1, at Apsley House and the V&A in London, we headed off today for West Dean College. Of course the customary tea greeted our group upon arrival and the 23 Americans and 26 non-Americans (participants from around Europe, as well as India, Australia, and New Zealand) started to prepare for what will be three weeks of intensive study and learning in the serenity of sheep filled pastures and 18th-century coutry houses.

I am sitting here by my window tonight thinking about the lecture that finished justed a few hours ago - Who Owns the Country House? by Jeremy Musson. While America is not thought of all to often as having the same granduer of country houses, they did and do exist. The first location for them that comes to my mind is Newport, then of course Nantucket and the Hudson River Valley to name just a few. But while several entities own the houses here in England, who owns them in America? I do understand that the dating is a bit different, by a century or two (sometimes even three), but in England, as Musson discussed, there are five main owners: private, institutional, local government, English Heritage, and the National Trust.

Lets look at this in another way that relates a little more to Dumbarton House; who owns the historic house or historic house museum in America? I think this is a better comparison than the country houses in America, even though it is not necessarily a direct one. Dumbarton House and Lyndhurst, just to name two, are both owned by private non-profits (The National Society of The Colonial Dames of America and The National Trust for Historic Preservation, respectively), while other places like the Clara Barton National Historic Site (Clara Barton House) is owned by the National Park Service. In Chicago, the Nickerson Mansion is privately owned, yet open to the public, and an example of institutional ownership would be The Highlands owned by Sidwell Friends School (originally owned by the Nourse family).

Once Musson's lecture is really comtemplated, the country house in England and the historic house in America are not that much different. Yes, maybe the sizes are not so relative, nor the original owners, but in the present time, many issues that are to be discussed in the Attingham Summer School will have comparable similarities to the 8,000 to 15,000 historic house museums in the United States, not to mention the historic houses that have been saved, or issued a new, second life as something else. (numerical resource: Pew Charitable Trust)

As I leave you this evening, the rain is coming down and the sheep are calling just outside my window. Please think about who owns the historic house museum in America and how does this effect the successes and failures of the houses and their property?