SHOW HOMES

It’s a humid summer day in Plimoth, Massachusetts. The year, they say, is 1627. I walk into a small, thatched home on a slope overlooking a calm bay. With thunder rolling in the distance, the lady of the house, Goodwife Jane Cooke, offers me a marble from a fabric sachet. I slip it into my pocket, which looks quite different from hers — I’m wearing a pair of basketball shorts, while she’s garbed in a white coif and smock and a celadon-green waistcoat with large silver buttons. A pot of cabbage and onions, spiced with garlic, salt, a bit of crushed pepper, and vinegar, simmers on the open hearth behind her, which stands at the center of the house. Experience Mitchell, her son-in-law, says Cooke’s mother has added some ginger, too. “Aye, she’s mixing it up,” Cooke responds in an uncanny English accent. Mitchell is a farmer, like almost everyone in the village; in contrast to their ancestral England, or to Leiden, Holland, where they settled before Plimoth, there is no blacksmith or tailor, though there is a surgeon. “If you need a bloodletting or a tooth pulled, you may see Samuel Fuller the Senior,” he says, with similar pronunciation. “We are currently in debt with a joint-stock company, and we are collecting goods while taking care of crops. And these goods we shall bring back to England, as for it is most needful to be doing as such, for the sooner we are to pay off this debt, the sooner we will be able to get a portion of land that we have been promised.”

This scene is representative of the encounters that play out all year long at Plimoth Patuxet — a living-history museum formerly known as Plimoth Plantation. One of the main exhibits is a painstakingly accurate recreation of the village established by a group of English families in Cape Cod Bay in the 17th century, following their harrowing transatlantic journey aboard the Mayflower in 1620. The site is historically inaccurate — the Pilgrims, as the families became known, settled four or five miles away, in a region that has been inhabited by the Wampanoag people for over 12,000 years. In addition to the village, the Plimoth Museums (the spelling is that used by Governor Bradford in his contemporary account of the Christian colony, adopted to distinguish the institution from the modern town of Plymouth) contains a Wampanoag homesite, a crafts center, a grist mill, and a 1957 full-scale reproduction of the Mayflower, which last set sail in 2020. In contrast to the eerily staid ambiance of wax museums or dioramas, Plimoth Patuxet brings the past vibrantly back to life thanks to actors who portray the Pilgrims as accurately as possible, down to the period dress and accents. While Goody Brewster might ask a visitor to help her grind corn or pluck sage from the garden to make toothpaste, Captain Miles Standish may command a group of visiting schoolchildren in an impromptu muster drill. To ensure the authenticity of the reenactments, the museum turned to archaeological research, census data, historical accounts, and contemporary poems and letters.

America’s living museums are descendants of late-19th-century European folk museums dedicated to preserving regional traditions and culture. Yet, according to folklorist Jay Anderson, the attitude toward using historic sites that “demonstrated how people culturally defined and used the built environment and its artifacts” found greater favor in the United States than in the Old World. John D. Rockefeller funded the restoration of Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, in 1926 to better understand the lives and times of early Americans and appreciate their contributions to “the ideals and culture of our country,” per the museum’s original statement of purpose. And Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan, founded by industrialist Henry Ford in 1929, did away with the necessity for a historic site altogether — Ford moved, reassembled, and, in some cases, recreated over 100 historic buildings from across the world, including a 16th/17th-century Cotswold cottage and Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory complex. There’s no role-play at Greenfield, although there is period dress for programs like 1860s baseball games and amid-19th-century working farm. Ford, who was born in 1863, sought to preserve something of 19th-century life, which was fast disappearing — his anti-Semitism and xenophobia undoubtedly played a role in this conjuring of an all-American agrarian past, since he felt that the United States’ true nature was disappearing in part due to immigrants sapping the country of its “courage and demoralizing our ideas.” The irony wasn’t lost on Ford that his own Model T was a major catalyst in accelerating the speed of change.

Some living museums, like Plimoth Patuxet, originated in a post-World War II nation trying to discern where it came from, as Tom Begley, the museum’s Deputy Director of Research and Public Engagement, explains. The childhood dream of Boston stockbroker Henry Hornblower II (1917–85), Plimoth Patuxet was founded in 1947 on a deceptively simple idea: “We just wanted to tell the Pilgrim story,” Hornblower explained. The “charming, humorous” Hornblower, with his “broad, ready smile and a no-nonsense, never-defeated approach,” as Plimoth Patuxet’s website describes him, convinced his grandmother to leave the family’s 140-acre property to him for the sole purpose of building the museum. After her death in the 1950s, a wrecking ball leveled the family’s beautiful mansion; in its stead there now stands a recreation of the colony’s fort/meeting house, though the Hornblowers’ garden, designed by the Olmsted brothers in 1919, remains largely intact.

The meeting house, located high above the rest of Plimoth’s Pilgrim recreations, has gone through several variations since 1947; the current one, with its massive wooden beams and semi-open upper floor, dates from 1987. As Begley tells me, all the Pilgrims had to say about the fort was that it had a flat roof, meaning that historians and archaeologists have had to piece together the recreation to the best of their ability. In one corner, a staircase rises to the top floor where originally there would have been a ladder, one of Plimoth’s many compromises with authenticity for the sake of accessibility. Since nobody knows exactly what they were like, each of the Pilgrim homes is slightly different, representing a range of 17th-century construction possibilities: some have logs in the rafters, others are made from fully-hewn timber; some have shingles on the roof, others are thatched; some have dirt floors, others have floorboards, which would have likely been covered with straw. But, as Begley points out, “It’s not great for visitors to be trampling through hay.”

Architect and preservationist Charles Strickland, who busted the myth that the Pilgrims lived in log cabins, designed the first recreations of their homes. He thought they used foundations, but in 1972 the anthropologist-archeologist James Deetz, then Plimoth Patuxet’s assistant director, discovered that they actually used earthfast construction — timber posts set deep into the ground. Without foundations, the reconstructed homes rot just as the Pilgrims’ homes would have, lasting 20 to 30 years on average. One of the first cottages visitors discover in the village is half buried, with the chimney leading the descent. The central point of each of these small houses, the chimneys are tied into the framing: built from timber and clapboard covered in clay, they pull the entire structure with them when they start to rot. In order to make the replicas last longer, the museum has started experimenting, exchanging wood for concrete in each corner post, strengthening the chimneys, and uncoupling them from the framing. All of these modern interventions are hidden from public view.

Little has been discovered, Begley tells me, about the Pilgrims’ building methods since 1972, “but the way we use the houses to tell stories has definitely changed.” An on-site historian was introduced a couple of years ago, tasked with making sure visitors are given enough historical context to counteract living history’s tendency toward superficial interactions without substance. Unlike many other living museums, Plimoth is extremely specific in its mission, which is to depict the colony precisely as it existed in 1627. In the context of today’s politics, this creates its own set of problems. In the 1980s, the museum accepted federal funds on the condition that it become an equal opportunity employer. A Black man was hired as an actor, but the museum decided that if there was going to be a Black Pilgrim, the character needed to be based on a real person. Though historians agree there was a Black man, John or Juan Pedro, who lived in Plymouth in 1623–24, he came three years too early for Plimoth’s narrative. Begley says that they are now fundraising to build a colonial house from later in the century — around 1670 — so that they can tell a broader range of Pilgrim-related stories.

Plimoth Patuxet is also in the process of raising four-million dollars for new Indigenous programs and an exhibit building, a decision announced in 2023 after Wampanoag representatives called for a boycott of the institution due to a lack of “historical accuracy and cultural competence,” as Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe member Paula Peters described it. For many Indigenous people, the museum’s 2020 decision to change its name from Plimoth Plantation to Plimoth Patuxet — Patuxet being the Algonquian name for the area — had only served to highlight its inadequacies in this respect. The homesite, for example, had become run down, while Tia Pocknett, a Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe member who once worked at the museum, said Plimoth’s goal seemed to be to make a “Wampanoag Pilgrim Disney.” In response, the museum released a statement in 2022 affirming its commitment to “reflect the history and traditional knowledge of local and regional Indigenous people,” while at the same time admitting that there is “always room for improvement.”

When I visited the homesite on the last leg of my Plimoth Patuxet tour, I was struck by the fact that aside from a cooking arbor and replicas of a couple of mishoons (dugout canoes), there was only one home: a domed winter wetu with three fire pits, built in 2017. The summer wetu is now gone, though the museum plans to build a new one. Timothy Turner, Plimoth Patuxet’s Associate Director for Indigenous Education — a member of the Cherokee Nation, he has worked at the museum for 35 years — takes me through the process of making one of these wetus. In early spring, staff members go to New Bedford to cut down swamp-cedar saplings to be used for poles, which must be done when the sap is still flowing so that the saplings will be flexible enough to be bent to such a large degree without breaking. “Out of respect for that tree giving up its life to sustain our own, we use every single part of the tree that we possibly can, just as the Wampanoag people would do,” Turner explains.

Unlike the Pilgrim homes, which are completely inadequate for cold temperatures, wetus are perfectly suited for the environment — wind glides right over them because of their rounded shape, and any snow that collects on the roof insulates them further. Turner says that older Wampanoag people still remember their parents building homes like this in the 1960s, long after the Massachusetts building code had made them illegal. There are architectural compromises on the homesite as well: Wampanoag people would have used chestnuts or elms rather than cedars for their wetus; traditional wetus would measure up to 100 feet in length, unlike the much shorter Plimoth version; the wetu’s opening is much taller than it should be for reasons of accessibility; the long beds inside should reach right up to the fire; and instead of a single layer of animal skins, the Wampanoag would have had five to eight inches of furs on the beds, while the floor would have been covered with mats.

First-person living history has always had its problems. Historian Scott Magelssen argues that “it takes for granted a conception of time and history grounded in modernism and progress.” Performing the past necessitates a single, narrativized version of it, which requires that history be a stable, tangible thing rather than just “one of many possible histories,” as he phrases it — a view backed up by historian Jessie Swigger’s study of Greenfield Village, which found that visitors wanted to consume a “sanitary and entertaining past, free from the kind of conflict and culture that defined urban spaces such as Detroit.” Moreover, living museums do not encourage their participants to question the values that bring the field to life, says cultural anthropologist Richard Handler, which means that those “who simulate the past act out unconsciously the cultural values of the present.” So what does it matter if living museums, supposed sites of historical authenticity, are in reality stagey simulacra, Postmodern to their core? In these museums, the present seeps in through cracks in the foundations; anachronistic concrete posts and hidden fire detectors only go to show that the past is something we always bend to our will, a stage for politicized narratives that are all about today.