Living Through History

Very close to us is a town called Sleepy Hollow. It’s an old town, even for around here. Washington Irving, of course, set his Headless Horseman story there. The Old Dutch Church and burial ground is still there. Even though I think it was mostly filmed on a soundstage in England, the way the town is depicted in the Tim Burton/Johnny Depp movie isn’t too far off from what the place really looks like. Except, of course, with gas stations, paved roads, traffic lights, convenience stores, etc. For anyone who wants to see the real Sleepy Hollow, and is hoping to find something similar to what’s in the movie, I’d suggest not going to Sleepy Hollow at all, but driving three hours north to a town in Massachusetts called Montague. Montague really does look like the town shown in the movie.

One thing that doesn’t exist on the West Coast but is thriving on the East is the living history museum. These are historic places reconstructed to look the way they did in an earlier era, where actors dress up in old-timey costumes and get into character, pretending to be everyday people from that time. Some of the more notable examples are Old Richmondtown (in Staten Island), Colonial Williamsburg, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, Sturbridge Village, and Plimoth (not Plymouth) Plantation.

When I was eight years old my family and I went to Plimoth Plantation. In the harbor nearby there’s a reconstruction of the Mayflower, cleverly called the Mayflower II. I made the mistake of asking one of the actors (I think he was supposed to be Miles Standish) what happened to the real Mayflower. His response was something like, “What sayeth you child? ’Tis the only Mayflower I know, what resteth within the confines of our fine harbour here.” I never did find out the answer.

Anyway, there’s a museum like this in Sleepy Hollow called Philipsburg Manor. Philipsburg Manor is an old farm, or it was the estate of a wealthy man named Philips. Or it was a place where no one actually lived but where slaves worked and imported goods were stored. Or it was a mill. I’m not really sure. All I know is that it cost me $12 to get in.

When these kinds of places are done right you leave having learned something. Philipsburg Manor wasn’t exactly done wrong, but let’s just say it could be improved. They had animals there, which was cool. There was a cow milking demonstration that was neat to see, and they had a cat on the premises who was very friendly. They had a ton of sheep for some reason. Maybe to give wool demonstrations. There was an old house, built in 1690-something. The one thing I could be certain about was that Adolph Philips died in 1750. He was the richest man in New York at the time (he also had a house on Canal Street) but no one has ever heard of him because he was a Loyalist during the revolution (even though the Revolution started 26 years after he died) and all his land was seized (and henceforth turned into a living history museum, I presume).

I’d like to think there’s still time for me to do something great in my lifetime. I’m not really working on anything at the moment. It most likely will happen by chance, possibly completely by accident. Like maybe I’ll drop the microwave in the bathtub one day and inadvertently discover the key to cold fusion. Either way, if that proves to be my fate, I’d love to have my childhood home turned into a living history museum.

I can imagine my parents’ house decorated to look exactly the way it did in 1987. Fortunately this would require no work at this point in time. There might be an actor playing my mom, reading the LA Times on the couch, while watching the Channel 4 news, drinking coffee, and talking to the cat. There might be an actor playing the gardener, talking about the way lawns were mowed back then, and how people in those days had things called “sprinkler systems” to keep lawns green in the summer.

At the very least I’d want continuity in my living history museum. No switching eras. Keep the focus clear. That’d be the only way to go.