On two
very different, yet equally meaningful, ways to use a historic site.
James
Monroe’s longtime home, Ash
Lawn-Highland, sits just down the hill from Thomas Jefferson’s much more famous
Monticello, and it’s
fair to say that Monroe’s home will forever be in that shadow of that most
prominent Charlottesville, Virginia, and American landmark. The relationship
between the two houses and sites, much like that between the two
Founding Fathers and Presidents (and their neighbor James Madison),
is certainly an interesting one, and could lead to plenty of American Studies
analyses in its own right; but I believe that we owe it to Monroe and his home
not to analyze them solely in that light. Moreover, having had the opportunity
to spend two high school summers working at Ash Lawn-Highland, I came away
particularly interested in the relationship between two quite distinct elements
of the site.
The first,
and far more traditional, is the site’s recreation of Monroe’s home and era, its role
as an educational and performative historic site. There are a couple of
interestingly unique components to that role, to be sure: Monroe, an alumnus of
the College of William and Mary, left his house to that institution, and so its
educational
connections are long-term and multi-layered; and the site is a working farm,
making its recreations not just performative but in many ways quite productive
as well. Yet despite those unique qualities, Ash Lawn-Highland’s identity as a
historic site parallels it very fully to other similar sites, from Monticello
and Madison’s Montpelier to
America’s many other historic
houses. Such sites, as we discussed at length in this spring’s
NEASA Colloquium, have their strengths and weaknesses, their
opportunities and limitations in how they connect audiences to the past; they
are in any case an invaluable part of our national heritage, and Ash
Lawn-Highland is certainly a representative and interesting example of the
type.
But every
summer for many decades, Ash Lawn-Highland has featured a very different event:
the Opera Festival (known,
when I worked for two summers in the ticket and box office, as the Summer Music Festival). While
some of the shows perfomed in the Festival are period pieces from the era of
Monroe’s life, many are not—each summer includes at least one 20th
century musical, for example; and many of the operas that have been performed
over the years are likewise outside of the context of Monroe’s era. Yet what
struck me about the festival, which for most of its run saw the shows performed
on the site’s grounds (they have apparently moved in recent years to a
different Charlottesville theater), was precisely what it contributed to the
experience of Ash Lawn-Highland: a new perspective on the home, in every sense;
a chance to sit behind the main house on a summer evening, to see it in a
different light (literally and figuratively), to have an experience that felt
not at all disconnected from the goals and identities of America’s founders and
of the educational, historical, and cultural legacies of their lives and era
and purposes of the sites that remember them. There are many ways to connect to
a figure like Monroe, and the world of which he was and is a part; in the
Festival, Ash Lawn-Highland highlighted precisely the variety and power of
those different approaches.
Next Cville story
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Hometown stories you’d share?
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