Major Museums Coordinate Efforts

For Historic New England Driving Tours

Many Americans these days are making their holiday travel and vacation excursion plans here in the United States. Many wish to drive, sometimes with friends or family, seeking an experience that is entertaining, yet offering an authentic learning experience that would also interest their children.

About two years ago, eight of the nation’s premier, outdoor, living history museums began creating “Historic New England Driving Tours,” a program offering “the best of New England’s past.” Now launched for the 2003-04 vacation seasons, this program features uniquely themed driving tours and coupon discounts.

Working together are Canterbury Shaker Village, in Canterbury, N.H.; Hancock Shaker Village, Pittsfield, Mass.; Historic Deerfield, Deerfield, Mass.; Mystic Seaport, Mystic, Conn.; Old Sturbridge Village, Sturbridge, Mass.; Plimoth Plantation, Plymouth, Mass.; Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vt.; and Strawbery Banke Museum, Portsmouth, N.H. These eight respected New England museums tap into the real-life stories of four centuries of “living history” that have shaped the development of America. Some would call it the very DNA of our nation. The museums are all within two or three hours of driving time from each other.

“Historic New England Driving Tours” offer visitors a choice of four themes: (1) In the Country: Period Homes and Historic Gardens; (2) Along the Coast: Seaside Houses and Gardens; (3) The New World: Making a Life in New England; and (4) Plain and Fancy: Art, Architecture and Antiques of New England. Each theme features three to five of the eight museums and provides driving suggestions that give visitors a choice of a direct route or a scenic journey.

People can also choose the suggested themes as references to design their own independent itineraries. It’s possible to select a museum from each theme based on individual tastes or to please every member of the family and still enjoy the discounts.

The program is offered in the form of a free, 16-page, color brochure that describes the themes, driving routes and the eight participating museums, and also includes discount coupons. Download a brochure from www.HistoricNewEnglandDrivingTours.com or request one by mail from Historic New England Driving Tours, PO Box 855, Plymouth, MA 02362.

These family-friendly, open-air museums tell four centuries of authentic stories in a “living history” perspective that puts people in touch with the best of New England’s past and some of the earliest days of the American experience.

Walking through centuries of historic houses, working craft shops, fields, farms, barns and gardens, tall ships and small boats, art-filled parlors and galleries, stores, taverns and inns, visitors have the opportunity to meet history interpreters and role players portraying figures from the past. Visitors can also discover for themselves the historical and cultural accomplishments of earlier Americans, who helped shape us as a people and a nation.

“By stepping into early New England life at these museums, visitors can re-live the many authentic stories and real-life experiences of early Americans from the perspectives of Native Peoples to the sea crossings of early European immigrants, newly formed social, religious and commercial communities that tilled the land for food and medicinal plants, and tended early breeds of farm animals,” explained Nancy Brennan, executive director of Plimoth Plantation, speaking on behalf of the eight museums. “They built homes, churches, businesses and ships, and went on to bend their creativity to folk art, decorative art, tools, toys and textiles, and watercraft ranging from hand-hewn canoes to ocean-going ships,” she continued.

“We know of no other group of American museums, well respected as individual sites and institutions, that have banded together like this to offer such a collective, in-depth scope of the authentic American experience,” Ms Brennan added. “The ‘Historic New England Driving Tours’ program offers enjoyment, fun, learning, authenticity and the opportunity for discovery in an era of many other highly commercialized attractions. These eight museums are child-friendly and family-friendly, and easily available to all.”

Canterbury Shaker Village (telephone 603-783-9511 or visit www.shakers.org) is situated on a rolling hilltop surrounded by open fields, woodlands and ponds, and consists of 694 acres, 25 original buildings, more than 21,000 artifacts and many thousands of books, photos and manuscripts from a Christian communal society originally established by the Canterbury Shakers in 1792. Visitors can learn and experience the customs, inventions, furniture, architecture and values of this Utopian Shaker society, watch crafts being made in the Shaker tradition, and traverse three easily accessible nature trails to see the archeological remains of old mills and dam sites.

Hancock Shaker Village (800-817-1137; www.HancockShakerVillage.org) is situated on 1,200 acres of woodland, farm and meadows. Opened in 1961, the village interprets the lives of the Shakers who lived there from 1783 to 1960 and has for more than 40 years conveyed the relevance of the Shaker experience to modern-day visitors.

It offers a restored historic farm with heirloom gardens and pastures populated with “heritage” livestock, the original Shaker water system — a marvel of historic engineering which runs a 19th Century turbine and woodworking machinery — as well as many interactive exhibitions, programs, demonstrations and authentic portrayals of Shaker life.

Historic Deerfield (413-775-7214; www.historic-deerfield.org) is one of New England’s most unspoiled, carefully preserved and protected historic villages, with 12 historic house museums, a 19th Century schoolhouse and a decorative arts center displaying more than 20,000 objects made or used in American between 1650 and 1850, all on a mile-long village street that is shared by present-day farmers, boarding school students and visitors from all over the world. Guided and self-guided tours are available year round.

Mystic Seaport (860-572-5338; www.MysticSeaport.org) — also called The Museum of America and the Sea — is the nation’s leading maritime museum where visitors discover the stories that connect us all as Americans. Climb aboard and see the Charles W. Morgan, the last wooden whale ship in the world; experience firsthand life in a 19th Century seafaring village and view exhilarating exhibits; touch the wheel of a ship, haul on lines, help set a sail or sing sea songs along with the chantey men; and smell the hearth cooking, fragrant gardens and the tarring of the ships’ rigging, an unmistakable reminder of life at sea, among other opportunities at this museum.

Old Sturbridge Village (800-SEE-1830; www.osv.org) is a re-created village that tells the story of the daily life, work and community celebrations of New Englanders in a rural town in the early 19th Century. This historical landscape of more than 200 acres — the largest outdoor living history museum in the Northeast — includes more than 40 structures relocated from around New England or authentically reproduced using historical construction techniques.

Demonstrations include blacksmithing, hearth cooking, pottery, gardening, shoemaking, farming and quilting. Opened in 1946, Old Sturbridge Village provides modern-day visitors with a deepened understanding of their own times through an authentic, personal encounter with the New England of the past.

Plimoth Plantation (508-746-1622; www.plimoth.org) is the living history museum of 17th Century Plymouth. Through a combination of living history and more traditional exhibits, the museum tells the story of two cultures — the “Pilgrims,” or English colonists who arrived in New Plymouth in 1620, and the Wampanoag People, who had already lived in New England for thousands of years.

The museum has six sites where these cultures are explored: a re-creation of the English colonial town in 1627, the ship Mayflower II, Hobbamock’s (Wampanoag) Homesite, a modern-day crafts center, a barn housing rare and heritage breeds of livestock and an indoor exhibit, “Thanksgiving: Memory, Myth & Meaning.”

Shelburne Museum (802-985-3346; www.ShelburneMuseum.org) was founded in 1947. Situated on 45 acres of gardens and landscaped grounds, it is one of our nation’s most eclectic collections of art, Americana, architecture and artifacts. Its 39 galleries and exhibition structures display more than 150,000 objects spanning four centuries.

Outstanding collections of authentic folk art, decorative arts, quilts, decoys, tools, toys, textiles and transportation vehicles are exhibited along with paintings by masters such as Monet, Manet, Cassatt, Degas, Andrew Wyeth, Thomas Cole, Winslow Homer, Grandma Moses and many others. The museum’s 25 authentic 19th Century structures include a covered bridge, a round barn, a lighthouse and a 220-foot restored steamboat.

Strawbery Banke Museum (603-433-1100; www.StrawberyBanke.org) is a waterfront neighborhood that has been continuously inhabited since the 1600s. The original homes, shops, taverns and gardens of the people who called this neighborhood home are preserved and restored to represent snapshots over time. Through ten furnished period houses, eight exhibition houses and five period gardens, the museum represents the late 17th Century to the mid-20th Century and role-players and interpreters tell the stories of community and neighborhood life here over four centuries.

Named by the first settlers for the wild berries found on the riverbanks and saved from urban renewal in the 1950s, the museum preserves an actual neighborhood where visitors can connect with the past and its people.