Kate Hughes

Although I have worked with online collections and digital historical databases in the past, this past summer working with the Hidden Town in 3D project was my first experience with creating a fully virtual museum exhibit. The three weeks my class spent as part of our “Maymester” experience with MTSU’s Public History program, lead by Dr. Molly Taylor-Poleskey, were an educational and inspirational whirlwind—it was just enough time to get a good taste of the project, but still leave me wanting more. And isn’t that always one of the marks of a successful classroom experience?!

I took this class at the end of my first year in the Public History Ph.D. program at MTSU. My earlier academic and professional background is in museums, material culture, and decorative arts – with a particular focus on the 18th and 19th century American South – and I have previously spent a good chunk of time as both a student and a scholar at Old Salem Museum & Gardens (OSMG) as well as at the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts (MESDA), which is located within the town. Despite my previous experience with OSMG, my favorite part of our three-week class had to have been our week-long fieldwork visit to Winston-Salem. I love nothing more than hands-on, boots-on-the-ground experience, and so getting to work with the OSMG and MESDA collections and walk around on the landscape where Christian David’s house once actually physically existed were welcome opportunities. Similarly, getting the chance to walk around Old Salem, and go through the various museum, archival, and archaeological collections, with OSMG and MESDA staff and friends was a critical part of our class experience. The knowledge that people such as Ben Masterson, Blake Stevenson, Cheryl Harry, Eric Jackson, Jerome Bias, Joel Cook, Johanna Brown, and Martha Hartley (amongst others!) shared with myself and my fellow students was invaluable as we worked to put together a virtual representation of Christian David’s early 19th-century dwelling. Particular stand-outs in my memory include our class sawing and hewing wood with Ben, Blake, Joel, and Samantha Smith, and cooking a full dinner for ten+ people over an open hearth, 18th-century style, with Jerome Bias. Both of these tasks speak to the lived experience of Christian David and the activities that he would have partaken in, and that would have been going on around him, during his lifetime. Creating this sort of connection to some parts of the physical experience of living in Christian David’s 18th- and 19th-century world are what living history sites such as Old Salem do best. While more often than not it is school-age children who visit Old Salem with their classmates and teachers, I think that these kinds of hands-on experiences are also vital for history professionals, as they serve as a reminder of the physicality of history, something that is not always apparent in the written record.

What draws me to working with history in the first place are actually the places and objects that we, as historians, can use to tell the stories of people from the past. The Hidden Town in 3D project is one new and exciting possible way of doing this. That being said, I believe in using new technologies and digital tools to teach and share public history, but always, always, always with a serious grounding in the physical, the tangible, the actual stuff. As a material culture scholar, my outlook is that the surviving material (in the case of Christian David’s house, this means the archaeological artifacts, the landscape itself, the other extant buildings in the vicinity, as well as the primary documentation) should always drive interpretation, and not the other way around. I don’t want my work to ever come at the expense of the remaining physical material that I believe it is our responsibility, my responsibility, as a scholar, a preservationist, and a museum professional, to steward for future generations. However, not everyone is always able to visit an historic site where interpretation is actively occurring, nor will everyone have the chance to access museum collections that are not currently on display during their visit. These things can be due to a myriad of reasons, ranging from travel and accessibility challenges to site staffing and storage conditions. For this reason, having virtual representation and interpretation as one option for learning about a site’s history, and the people and things that populated it, is a welcome and worthwhile one. My caveat, at this point in time at least, is that it should always be done in tandem with preservation of the physical site and historic artifacts.

A few years ago, during the summer of 2018, I was a student at MESDA’s Summer Institute (SI). It was then that my fellow SI student, as well as OSMG employee (and carpenter, musician, and living-historian-extraordinaire, amongst other talents!), Ben Masterson first presented his research on the construction of Christian David’s dwelling. Being able to revisit and build on Ben’s earlier work in a new context was a great reminder of how historical research is never truly finished—there are always new ways of looking at material, new technologies that can be employed to further analyze and share it, and new ways of thinking about and connecting even information that has been probed many times over. This is one reason why it is imperative to remember that this current virtual representation is only one interpretation of Christian David’s house. This particular interpretation is subject to the flaws that are inherent in any research project with a truncated time-limit. It also suffers from the inherent bias that exists within museum collections. The need to use physical objects for the 3D object scans results in only using objects that a) exist within the museum collection, which is biased due to the types of objects that survive and are kept in museum collections (things that are unique, original, high-end, highly-decorative, and/or “special” in some way) and b) accessible to us during the time of our visit, leaving out objects that are currently in storage or were unable to be located or moved.  

This project led me to thinking a great deal about museum bias, the pros and cons of digital/virtual vs. physical/in-person interpretation, and the value of our work as historians in the digital age. I think it is of vital importance to remember that the creation of this virtual interpretive exhibit of Christian David’s house is only possible because of the work of interpreters, curators, and researchers at Old Salem over the years. Also imperative to our digital work is the physical museum collection of the tangible objects of 18th and 19th century Salem, including the decorative arts, tools, houses, and architectural elements. While I continue to be excited by digital possibilities, it is this collection of tactile things, alongside the deep knowledge of decades of museum professionals, historians, independent scholars, collectors, and the lived experience of the local community, that together allow for any type of interpretation, be it virtual or in-person, of Christian David’s world.

I would like to say thank you to our professor (and founder of the Hidden Town in 3D project) Dr. Molly Taylor-Poleskey, as well as my fellow Maymester 2021 students Mandy Floyd, Robbie Kurtz, Meggan McCarthy, and Brandon Stephens, for a great learning experience (and a grand time!). Many thanks as well to the staff, volunteers, and friends of Old Salem and MESDA who shared with us their time, knowledge, and collections.