S12 E35: Delaware State of the Arts - Historic Odessa Foundation

What if you had the opportunity to unlock the hidden stories of historic artifacts in the collections of the Historic Odessa Foundation? You're about to get a front row seat on a journey through time as we navigate the captivating tales of the Corbett and Wilson family collections, objects that have witnessed history unfold, from the 1770s to later generations. Executive Director of the Historic Odessa Foundation, Debbie Buxton, and author Dr. Philip Zimmerman, join us to share the rich history and intriguing stories woven into the fabric of their new book, A Storied Past Collections of Historic Odessa.

Get ready to be captivated by tales of community involvement and connection in Odessa, such as the heartwarming story of a quilt crafted for a dying individual and the fascinating evolution of mid-19th-century chairs labeled 'Odessa'. Discover how these pieces are not just objects, but portals to the past, revealing the intricate networks of those who lived before us. We also explore the technological marvels of the time, such as the automated lathe technology from Chairville, NJ, that played a crucial part in creating these historic objects. This enlightening discussion underscores the Historic Odessa Foundation's commitment to preserving and celebrating their heritage and offers insights into how you can get involved. So sit back, relax and let's unfold the pages of history together.

The Delaware Division of the Arts, a branch of the Delaware Department of State, is committed to supporting the arts and cultivating creativity to enhance the quality of life in Delaware. Together with its advisory body, the Delaware State Arts Council, the Division administers grants and programs that support arts programming, educate the public, increase awareness of the arts, and integrate the arts into all facets of Delaware life. Learn more at Arts.Delaware.Gov.

Delaware State of the Arts is a weekly podcast that presents interviews with arts organizations and leaders who contribute to the cultural vibrancy of communities throughout Delaware. Delaware State of the Arts is provided as a service of the Division of the Arts, in partnership with NEWSRADIO 1450 WILM and 1410 WDOV.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:10

For Delaware State of the Arts. I'm Andy Truscott. My guests today are Debbie Buxton, the Executive Director of the Historic Odessa Foundation, and Dr Philip Zimmerman, the author of a new book the Foundation has published, entitled A Storyed Past Collections of Historic Odessa. Using rich archival and genealogical sources, dr Zimmerman brings to light here for the first time an extraordinary array of decorative and fine arts from the Collections at the Historic Odessa Foundation. And as we kick off, can you help provide a bit of an overview of the book A Storyed Past and what inspired the creation of this book?

Speaker 2: 0:50

The book grew out of some informal contact over the last oh many years where I and others would find particular objects of interest in the collection. And over the last several years I spent more and more time here in Odessa looking at the collections and I started to badger Debbie about a book on the collections. And let me pass it back to you, debbie, in terms of how the book actually started.

Speaker 3: 1:23

Well, actually it's kind of a funny story. You know, we belong to Winitour Museum for 50 years and so our collection was part of Winitour's collection and we were also, you know, understood to be just sort of mixed in with Winitour's other 100,000 objects. So when we went, when we became our own identity in 2005, we had a big job ahead of us to build a new brand and really a new identity for Odessa, and we've been working on that for a long time and the collection was was always at the forefront of those, those discussions. When you are a brand new startup institution, you know there's a long list of priorities. We own six major buildings, a half a dozen outbuildings and 72 acres of property here in the historic center.

Speaker 3: 2:18

But about, I would say, four years ago there was an episode on Antiques Roadshow and some of our staff saw that episode and there was a wonderful sampler that came to light and the dealer that was looking at that sampler and identifying it for and authenticating it for the owner pointed out that there was one almost identical to it in the Winitour collection. As soon as we saw it, it was ours, it was in the collection of the Historical Odessa Foundation, so it's sort of lit a fire under us. Philip had been bugging and it seemed like, okay, the timing's right, we need to address it now, but also finding the funding to support the research and the survey of the collection, which which was is a significant project. It took us some time, but we were finally able to secure funding and really get it off the ground.

Speaker 1: 3:12

Talk to me a little bit about how the Historical Odessa Foundation's collections are different or varied from what they might see at other historic sites around Delaware.

Speaker 2: 3:22

The big difference between these collections and those of many museums and other historic sites is that these collections have a much higher percentage of objects that belong to the site. We've talked about what Odessa is and what it is not, and if you imagine a museum period room, it is assembled by a curator with that curator's idea of what is most appropriate or what is most interesting to him or her. What historic Odessa has in the two houses are an assemblage of objects that have been there for a long, long time, whether we like it or not, which means we have objects from the 1770s, which is the period when the two houses were built, but we also have objects from later generations, and we have objects that have been repaired and objects that have, oh goodness, come in from all unusual circumstances, and it provides a layered historical look at all of these collections, and there are only a few other historic houses in the country that have this kind of collection. Clearly, places like Mount Vernon, monticello or Stanton in Philadelphia are the ones that have enormous percentages of original furnishings, and I don't want to mistake the houses in Odessa for those. But the houses in Odessa are special because of that one criterion, where so many of the collections have been preserved, either on the site or in one.

Speaker 2: 5:06

Telling anecdote. There is a collection of objects here in Odessa that were gathered by a member of the John Janvier family John Janvier being an important furniture maker of the second half of the 18th century and this individual was a trained librarian in the mid-20th century and when she was in retirement in the 1960s and 70s, she was actively gathering Janvier furniture from the family that had owned these things and had identified who had made it. So she had maybe a dozen pieces of furniture and many manuscripts which, for one reason or another, she then offered to Winitur because of Winitur's ownership of the two houses. Winitur bought the furniture. It's installed here in Odessa and it forms a corpus of the work of a particular craftsman from Odessa, which is quite extraordinary.

Speaker 2: 6:09

The other collections in the houses include a body of furniture in one house, the Wilson house, that was actively assembled by a descendant who then opened the house as Delaware's first historic house opened to the public in 1923. So that material is there. The other house was purchased from the family in 1938, restored by Rodney Sharp, and then he furnished it with all sorts of things, including things from the immediate area. And then the fourth body of material is material that has come from Corbett and Wilson descendants. This came into the site between 1972, where they're about, and up until a couple of years ago, where first Winniter and now Historic Odessa under Debbie's leadership. Now Debbie's impetus has been to gather things from the family, and that provides a large body of material. Can you share a little?

Speaker 1: 7:26

bit about how the Corbett and Wilson family collections shed light on the history of Odessa and also the larger region.

Speaker 3: 7:33

Well, I think it's. You know, odessa was a port in the 18th century and in fact they shipped 400,000 bushels of weed out of the town of Odessa. So it was a. It was a really economically thriving town. The? It's the shortest distance over land between the Chesapeake Bay and the Delaware River. It was an Indian trade route before you know the ink, the Dutch and the Swedes and the English Came into the area. You had a community of craftsmen that settled here and there were I mean, the Jamveer family of cabinet makers are probably Delaware's most prominent cabinet-making family. In addition to that, you had some important clockmakers that were in the region, including Duncan Beard, who lived and worked in this town. And so I think when you look at, when you look at the things that were made here and Were purchased by the, by the people who lived in these homes, and they just never left here, that's Extraordinary. I mean these things were made here and never left the town and in some cases we even know what rooms they were in. I mean that just doesn't happen.

Speaker 2: 8:42

It's it sets us apart another aspect of all this is that when we look at some of the furniture that was made here on Odessa, this is furniture that was made between 1774 and the early 19th century. If you take an object like a card table or a dining table or a chest of drawers and you put it out in the marketplace or you put it into a museum environment and have a parade of experts look at it, they cannot tell the difference between a Odessa, delaware made piece of furniture and a Philadelphia piece of furniture. That, I think, is telling. The reason that we can assign it to Odessa is, in some cases the objects are signed by the maker. In other cases they have extraordinary provenances, histories of ownership that identified clearly that object having been tracked through different generations and Coming back to the historic houses, and we know it was made by an Odessa Individual.

Speaker 2: 9:52

But my point here is that in this little town of Odessa, which is At least a day's journey from Philadelphia, the quality of workmanship here was Extraordinary and, quite frankly, it was much higher than other places of equal distance from from Philadelphia. If you think of Philadelphia as the center of a wheel and along the rim are several different object-making communities, typically the distance from an urban center Shows up in the quality of workmanship, and what I'm saying here is that the Odessa workmen are Making things that are essentially Indistinguishable from Philadelphia, which I think is both telling and important what motivated the historic Odessa Foundation to undergo this careful examination and interpretation of the collection over the last recent years well, I think that, in addition to just, you know, creating this book, to to bring the collection out into the sun, so to speak, we also were very motivated to work on the catalog information that was available to us.

Speaker 3: 11:06

This collection had not been seriously looked at for many, many, many years. Probably the last serious survey of the collection would have been done in the very early years when John A H Sweeney, who was a curator at Winotour and was in the first graduating class of the Winotour Program in Early American Culture, wrote his thesis Grand Drone in the Apokonomic about the Corbett House. The collection had been added to and there were new family pieces coming into it and you know we wanted to connect the dots. We wanted to take a look at everything that was here closely and study it closely and really be able to bring this information to the public. So part of this overall project, in addition to the book, was creating a new online catalog that anybody can access by going to our website. So that, I think, was just as important, if not more important, than the book itself.

Speaker 2: 12:08

The bottom line is that museums and historic houses have a responsibility to the public to research their collections, obviously within available resources and everything else, but this is something that should be happening more regularly than it does.

Speaker 2: 12:29

As Debbie says, the fact that it's been, oh goodness, 50 years since this collection has been carefully reviewed is an indication of just how rare these kinds of events are.

Speaker 2: 12:46

It is not what should happen. What should happen is that museums should be regularly reviewing their collections. That said, the reason why it's happening now at Odessa, I think, is a combination of where the organization is, what resources it has available, those resources being both funding and personnel. Lots of extenuating circumstances come into play, but I hope that by doing the book and by putting the database online, we can somehow open up this collection so that many other people can get involved in the content that these objects represent and kind of keep pushing the organization to keep looking at what it has and, in that sense, keep reinvigorating its presentations to the public. That said, I also would like to think that when others and here I guess I'm talking about people with particular interests in the material when they realize the quality of collections here, that it will then put Odessa in their own sites, if you will, in terms of places that they want to visit and collections that they want to learn about.

Speaker 1: 14:11

Can you share the impact you hope this book will have on readers and the broader understanding of early American history in Delaware?

Speaker 2: 14:18

Well, as an author, what I have tried to do in the book is something that I have done with other publications that I've been involved in, and what I try to do in these things, andy, is to number one, present a very clear image, a word image and a photographic image of the objects, with careful descriptions and appropriate evidence, which means footnotes and the footnotes are there for those people who want to say why is he saying what he's saying about the object. I want to make sure those reasons are there, and that's the kind of model of scholarship that I've been pushing all of my career. That said, the content that I want to share with readers is the kind of information that I would like to think would allow them to tap into a variety of interests that they may bring to the book. I don't know why people pick up the book and why they would read through it, but I would hope that when they pick up this book, they would find several kind of aha moments. There are some stories, there are some objects in here that are really very poignant.

Speaker 2: 15:31

I've lately been looking at quilts and reminding myself that there is a quilt in this collection that was made as the person for whom it was made was dying. It's an 1844 quilt that was begun about 1842. And it's one of these signature quilts, which is to say different squares have the name of a different person. The squares on this quilt come from all over the eastern half of the United States. This is the network of the individual for whom the quilt was made. The quilt then is in lieu of a hundred Get Well cards or a lot of verbiage. It stands at the center of a network, and if that doesn't shape somebody's thinking, I don't know what will. And there are just a whole bunch of those kinds of stories. Here's another story that I think is kind of fun.

Speaker 2: 16:31

There are some mid 19th century chairs, a set of six chairs, in the collection. The bottom of each of the chair seats has the name of the maker and the name Odessa, which of course is the place from where they came. So the term Odessa on the bottom of the chairs tells us that the chairs were made after 1855, when the town changed its name from Cantwell's Bridge to Odessa harkening to Odessa in the Ukraine, which was a great grain shipment center. And poor little Odessa in Delaware had kind of lost its way in terms of being a grain shipping center and was trying to recall some of that grandeur. So these chairs made by a little shop here in Odessa have evidence on their turnings that I had never seen.

Speaker 2: 17:25

And, as I say, I've been doing this a long, long time and I researched into that and I believe that those chair parts were made in by an automated lathe we're talking mid 19th century automated lathe, which is a very rare piece of industrial equipment. And there was a town in New Jersey, appropriately called Chairville, which no longer stands. It was created when some investors built a factory in 1842 or 1840, established the town and they started making chair parts which they then shipped to Philadelphia where people bought them and assembled chairs. Well, our guy in Odessa must have bought his chair parts from Philadelphia and they came from Chairville, new Jersey, which is kind of just across the Delaware River but not convenient to him. I mean, he wouldn't have had access to that kind of supply of parts.

Speaker 2: 18:23

But you know, that kind of story reminds us that people are really connected in ways that surprise us. They're connected by the railroad that came through. They're connected by river boats that went up to Philadelphia and down. They're connected by religious organizations. They're connected because they've got to see people and they're not many people between here and 20 miles from here, so that connection becomes one that they use all the time. So there's another kind of anecdote that comes from looking at this stuff. I hope the book has got enough of those kinds of these are not strange stories. These are normal stories dealing with objects in perhaps strange ways. You know, objects telling stories.

Speaker 1: 19:09

Debbie, given the book's focus on local history, can you share a little bit of the efforts that the Historic Odessa Foundation has made to involve the community in both preserving and celebrating this heritage?

Speaker 3: 19:20

Oh, yes, well, we're very involved in our community. In fact we rely on the community. The Historic Odessa Foundation is fully staffed by volunteers. We only have two full-time staff people here and we have about a half a dozen part-time staff people and the balance of our operation is volunteers. So you know they become very involved in pretty much everything that we do.

Speaker 3: 19:47

In addition to that, we do a lot of programming for the community. We consider ourselves a community resource, a cultural resource for the area. So you know we get people involved. For instance, the local high schools have an art show here every year and their students AP art students work is on exhibition in our visitor center, you know, for about a month, and we do a lot of programming like that. We have an extremely active school tour program. We do about 4,500 school children in the region and we raise money for a scholarship program to help with all of that. And we also have a membership program that people can become a member of the foundation, which also helps to support our preservation and education mission.

Speaker 3: 20:41

So there's a lot going on. We cooperate with all the other nonprofits in the area. Odessa has quite a few nonprofit organizations within the town limits, considering the town is extremely small. There's only a little over 300 residents here, which is about the same as it was in the 18th century. So we're a tiny little town within a much larger community. Now the MOT area, middletown, odessa, townsend area, of course, is exploding.

Speaker 1: 21:10

As we wrap up a little bit, can you tell us where we can purchase a storied pass? Collections of Historic Odessa.

Speaker 3: 21:15

You can purchase the book online at historicodessaorg. You can go to the website and make arrangements. You can pick it up here at our visitor center. We're happy to mail it out to you. It's also, as I said, available online through Amazon and other outlets and if you Google the title of the book, those outlets will pop up for other places that you can buy it, and they can find out all that information at our website, historicodessaorg.

Speaker 1: 21:43

Debbie Philip, thank you so much for joining me today and, as Debbie had mentioned, to learn more about the Historic Odessa Foundation, visit wwwhistoricodessaorg.