The Authenticity Problem At Historical Recreations

It is interesting to see how these buildings were put together and to hear about mid-18th-century life, but I left feeling somewhat unsettled: I was looking at a historical site, but not really. When I talk to reenactors, I think about what they are saying about their “lives” and “times,” but I am also thinking about them as contemporaries for whom this is a job: What kind of job is this? What do they get paid? How much of the year do they work?

Authenticity generally takes a back seat to the experience. A downtown area of Salem is devoted to the famous late-17th-century witch hysteria, filled with displays of hanging nooses, torture devices, piped-in shrieks, and people in period costumes, but one quickly sees that none of the buildings are of 1690s vintage and that the events of the Salem witch trial actually took place in a breakaway town that named itself Danvers (in order to avoid the stigma of the trials), about five miles away. One may go to the local Peabody Essex Museum to see more than 550 actual documents from the time of the Salem witch trials, but downtown Salem itself is just a theme park. Visitors learn something about the period of the witch trials and they may have fun in the process, but they can’t trust their own eyes.

More in the way of the Louisbourg fort is Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia, a 175-acre historic site that is dedicated to the telling of and demonstrating late-18th-century life in the new nation. Approximately 100 of the many buildings on the site date back to the last quarter of the 1700s, while several hundred others are reconstructed to look like homes and workplaces of that era, based on documentary and archaeological evidence.

Two connected museums focus on American folk art and 18th-century decorative art, but it is in and around the other buildings where the curators’ extensive research pays off. Based on probate records, letters, and other inventories, the Colonial Williamsburg curators know “what furniture was in which room, where that furniture was made, what type of tableware was in the dining room.” From soil samples, they are confident which plants grew around the houses. And, when they don’t have full information, they “look to period precedent” to determine what probably went somewhere. Period objects and the occasional reproduction piece of furniture are in the majority, but the houses also have many fully authenticated items for visitors. “A large percentage of our visitors want to know that that clock, that chair, that table, was actually there 200 or more years ago,” says Ronald Hurst, Colonial Williamsburg’s vice president of collections, conservation, and museums. “We are sticklers for authenticity.”

There also are reenactors spread around Colonial Williamsburg, dressed in period costumes and talking to visitors about “current” events (of the 18th century) while working in some period occupation (basket-weaver, blacksmith, brickmaker, carpenter, farmer, milliner, shoemaker, wigmaker, and woodworker, among others) and using reproduction tools and materials (copied exactly from ones in the collection). One sees what a historical period was “like” without really seeing a historical moment, a different but not necessarily lesser type of truth.

My experience at the fort in Louisbourg or Colonial Williamsburg was largely made up of the conversations I had with reenactors. Undoubtedly, what they told me was based on someone’s research, but that is very different from reading someone’s letters from that period. At the Lincoln Cottage in Washington, D.C., a museum established in 2008 in the soldier’s home that Abraham Lincoln used as a summer retreat during his presidency, every piece of furniture on display is someone’s guess about the kind of thing that was likely to have been there. “We figured out early on that we weren’t going to find the original pieces that were here when Lincoln was president,” says Erin Carlson Mast, the Cottage’s now-retired executive director. “There were no furnishings from the Lincoln period on site. There were no contemporary inventories of what had been here, or any sketches or photographs of the interior.” As a result, the Cottage was furnished in the style of the time “using period furniture and a high degree of conjecture.”

After a while, I get tired of things that might have been there but weren’t and want the real thing: This is where Lincoln sat down and read battlefield reports. This 18th-century letter reveals what someone was thinking at that time, and this is the type of handwriting that they learned in that day and age. The real thing focuses my mind, whereas replicas and period objects do not.

At the Petersen House, across the street from Ford’s Theatre and where Lincoln was brought after being shot by John Wilkes Booth, none of the furnishings were there at the time, either. Everything on view is of the period but, unlike the Cottage, the National Park Service, which owns and operates the Petersen House as well as Ford’s Theatre, has had the benefit of numerous photographs revealing the furniture and decorations in the house at the time. “We used the photographs to track down period pieces that looked like the original ones — the same wood, the same upholstery — and I think we got it down to a T,” says William Cheek, site manager for the Park Service.

At Ford’s Theatre, none of the interior is original; the presidential box was recreated based on photographs taken at the time by Mathew Brady. Looking at old things, or things that are made to look like old things, is not uninteresting, but our minds are led in different directions than when examining authentic objects. If we see period or reproduction 19th-century furniture in a room Lincoln visited, we are likely to ponder how people lived back then and notice the style of upholstery and type of decorative carving on wood tables, picture frames, and chairs that were in vogue at the time, rather than think about the experience of the 16th president seeking moments to relax and collect himself at one of the most important points in American history.

The German writer Walter Benjamin heralded the growing ubiquity of replicas in his 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” The widespread availability of photo reproductions of paintings and other artworks breaks the hold that tradition and custom — what we call authenticity — had on progress, permitting the modern mind to take new and old ideas, mash them up, reshuffle them, and form a new whole. Ultimately, Benjamin was putting into words what Braque and Picasso expressed in paint as Cubism. “That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction,” Benjamin wrote, “is the aura of the work of art.” It is difficult to disagree with this logic, and we can be thankful for illustrated art books, posters, and other readily available photographic documentation that allow us to “know” works of art (not to mention foreign landscapes, buildings, clothing, and even the topography of the moon or Pluto) without personally having to travel to see them. Our knowledge, and the ability to make use of what we have learned, is increased and advanced in this way.

Still, aura matters, and for good reason. The presence of a historical object focuses the mind on it, its maker, and its context in ways that replicas, reproductions, and photographs of it cannot. I don’t in any way condemn the experiential historic site — how otherwise would I know what a certain time in the past looked and felt like? — but I recognize it as a kind of truth that is only kind of truthful.

Daniel Grant is the author of “The Business of Being an Artist.”