|
|
|
|
|
|
Resources |
|
|
|
The Winterthur Estate Museum
| Article
# : |
11164 |
|
|
Section : |
LIFE
|
| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1986 |
1,850 Words |
| Author
: |
Dick Gould
Dick Gould is a freelance writer living in Fredericksburg,
Virginia. |
One time warp actually exists.
As generations of fiction writers have fantasized, there really is one place in this world where it is quite possible to transcend, perceptually at least, the natural barriers of time and space, to "be in one place while actually in another," to move at will from one era to another.
Access to this time warp is hidden away in an old country estate in the valley of the Brandywine River where it flows from Pennsylvania into Delaware. There is a reception center from which jitney buses shuttle modern visitors to a neutral zone where a staff of specially trained guides greet them and escort them through all or any part of the first two centuries of American cultural development, describing, explaining, and answering visitor's questions as they go.
As easily as stepping over a series of doorsills, tourists, amateur and professional historians, connoisseurs of antique furnishings, builders interested in historic renovation or replication--virtually anyone--can stroll casually from the dwelling room of a Shaker home in New Hampshire in the early 1700s, to the common room of a Delaware tavern of the early 1800s, to the dining room of one of the mansions along Broad Street in Pre-Civil War Charleston, South Carolina.
And it's all real, the original items, in a near-perfect state of historic preservation. There is a free-hanging staircase of a North Carolina home said to have been built in 1822. The design is said to have been copied from a book published in London in 1792, but it still boggles the minds of woodjoiners both
... (2000 of 11165 Characters)
Read Full Article
|
|
