National Colonial Farm Entry at Piscataway Park
Accokeek, Maryland
One of our stops on last month’s cross-country tour was the 200-acre National Colonial Farm on the Maryland peninsula about ten miles southeast of Washington, D. C. where we were welcomed by a host of colorful swallowtail butterflies, friendly squirrels, and flock of heritage breed Hog Island sheep. The farm has operated since 1957 as a partnership between the National Park Service and non-profit Accokeek Foundation. It is one of the nation’s first land trusts and includes the farm and large vegetable garden, heritage sheep, swine, and cattle breeding program, and maintains a visitor and education center. Farm buildings include colonial era Laurel Branch Farmhouse (c. 1770) and “Bachelor’s Choice” estate Tobacco Barn (c. 1780).
Regenerative agriculture coordinator K. C. Carr had recently harvested the farm’s small stand of Red May wheat using sturdy aluminum scythes with long steel blades. Using the ancient method, they then thrashed the cuttings with wooden flails and cleaned the grain with screen sieve. The yield was still rather limited so all the seed was saved for planting season but K. C. hopes there will be enough next year for servings of Accokeek bread and biscuits. Red May is a flavorful soft red winter wheat but the region’s 18th century production was devastated in the 1770s when Hessian troops brought over from Germany to fight against the Americans in the Revolutionary War also brought the Hessian fly. The farm’s seed stock was generously provided by our friend Ed Schultz from Colonial Williamsburg’s Great Hope Plantation.
The first large scale American open-air museum and living history farm was Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan which opened in 1929. Influenced by similar places in Sweden, antiquarian George Francis Dow (1868-1936) restored buildings on the grounds of the Salem, Massachusetts Essex Institute between 1898 and 1910. Virginia’s Colonial Williamsburg opened in 1934 with major support from John D. and Abby Rockefeller, Jr. The living history movement’s fascinating story in the United States is profiled in Jay Anderson, Time Machines: The World of Living History (1984). One of the movement’s most influential advocates was Ellis Burcaw, longtime professor of history and museum studies at the University of Idaho in Moscow.
With son Karl and Accokeek Regenerative Agriculture Coordinator K. C. Carr
Laurel Branch Farmhouse (c. 1770), National Colonial Farm
Prominent American art collector and critic Christian Brinton (1870-1942) also championed the approach throughout the inter-war years in a storied career that resulted in over 200 published articles and dozens of curated art shows. Brinton moved easily among artists, intellectuals, and government cultural administrators to foster appreciation for art and history by arranging for exhibitions in leading galleries of prominent painters and sculptors, as well as lesser known artists who he believed merited wider attention. Although basing his far-flung endeavors in Philadelphia, Brinton traveled zealously throughout Europe from 1912 to the Thirties to collect and study exemplary works of Nordic, Slavic, and German art. He sought to uplift distinct national trends in modernism and use gallery exhibitions and publications to improve cultural relations.
For these purposes Brinton organized the European-American Art Committee which included representatives from the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Pennsylvania Museum of Art, leading European art museums, and members of the diplomatic corps. Through these ambitious efforts and other associations arranged by Brinton, highly visible exhibitions held in various American cities included Contemporary Scandinavian Art (1913), Russian Painting and Sculpture (1923), and Contemporary Belgian Painting, Graphic Arts, and Sculpture (1929). In the introduction to the Scandinavian exhibit catalogue, Brinton made his case for enriching national aesthetics of “soil and tradition” to uplift spirits instead of perpetuating the “souless convention” of nineteenth-century classical styles or pursuing abstract universals.
Notwithstanding the Romantic tendencies of Swedish artists like Gunnar Hallström (1875-1943), Brinton found in his paintings and others by Anders Zorn (1860-1920), renown for his landscapes for portraits, and Denmark’s Karl Shou (1870-1938) a refreshing naturalism of coloristic beauty. Scenes of everyday country life including Shou’s The Farm and On the Border of the Field and works by Hallström were included in the popular 1913 exhibition. Zorn’s pensive watercolor Our Daily Bread (1886) depicts his aged mother tending a mealtime campfire to feed workers who harvest grain nearby.
Anders Zorn, Our Daily Bread (1886)
The International Studio XLIV:173 (July 1911)
In the summer of 1912, Brinton visited Norway, Sweden, and Denmark in preparation for the exhibition under the auspices of the American-Scandinavian Society. In additional to arranging loans of notable art works, the trip introduced him to living history “open-air” museums that showcased what he termed “the humble, anonymous treasure troves of peasant industry” seen in indigenous decorative art, rural architecture, and farm tools. The world’s first open-air museum had been established at the Bygdøy Royal Farm near Oslo (Kristiania) in 1881-1882 when King Oscar II of Norway and Sweden arranged for the relocation of four farm buildings and a medieval stave church from Gol in the Hallingdal Valley to his summer country residence. Gol was my maternal great-grandmother Sunwold’s ancestral village. Restoration and management of other historic structures that followed from the area were transferred in 1907 to the Norsk Folkmuseum which had been established in 1894 by historian Hans Aall (1869-1946).