Mystic Seaport Museum: Seaport Village, Part 2
I recently had an adventure in the Mystic / Lyme region of Connecticut and spent about a day and a half at Mystic Seaport Museum. This is the second post in a six-post miniseries about my visit. Yesterday, I covered Part 1 of “Seaport Village”, and today will cover Part 2, where I visited the meeting house, two residential homes, a one-room schoolhouse, a pair of shops, and a reading room for sailors. Upcoming posts include “Preservation Shipyard”, “Galleries”, “Boats, Signs, & Shows”, and “Bonus Houses”.
Aloha Meeting House
In 1851, Aloha Meeting House was constructed as the Seventh Day Baptist Church of Greenmanville, a historic village of Mystic. The building stood for 104 years until it was restored in 1955 by the James Foundation of New York. This foundation was named for Arthur Curtiss James, a copper mine and railroad inventor who owned two well-known yachts both called Aloha. Today, the space is used for exhibits and family-oriented shows. At my time of visit, the exhibit was called The Art of the Boat: Photographs from the Rosenfeld Collection. It featured the black-and-white photographs of yachts taken by members of the Rosenfeld family — father Morris and sons David, Stanley, and William — between 1881 to 1992, an incredible eleventy-one years.
Buckingham-Hall House
Out of all the buildings in the Seaport Village, Buckingham-Hall House was the most like a classic historic house tour. An English style flower garden surrounded by a white picket fence stood in front of the two-story late Georgian style house. Visitors entered into a main room and soon came into the kitchen with the large red brick fireplace. An interpreter had cooked lunch in the morning, and a second interpreter explained the usage of 18th century kitchen appliances. Visitors then climbed steep stairs to the second story, where looms and quilts were on display. After a round through the bedrooms, complete with four-poster beds covered with drapes and “Sleep tight; don’t let the bedbugs bite” style bed frames, the tour was complete.
Drug Store & Doctor’s Office and School
As classic staples of the living history museum, the combined Drug Store & Doctor’s Office and the one-room Boardman School could not be passed up. Medicine bottles lined the walls inside the drug store, which was designed to reflect interiors in the 1870s. while the school was filled with little desks, a potbelly stove, and an audio recording of children reciting their lessons. The school building was originally from Preston, CT but moved to its current site in 1949.
Hidden stories were everywhere at Mystic Seaport. According to a bronze plaque affixed to the outside wall of the drug store, the building was dedicated to Dr. Nathalie Alice Strahan Sheldon, M.D., ship doctor of the brigantine Albatross, along with the wife of its captain. She was lost in the Gulf of Mexico on May 2, 1961 when the ship sank. Further research revealed that Dr. Strahan was among the first women to graduate from Cornell Medical School. She and her husband, Christopher Barrows Sheldon, founded Ocean Academy in Darien, CT during 1959, a mere two years before the tragedy. The somewhat top heavy Albatross overturned and sank due to a microburst or “white squall”, which lasted a mere ninety seconds. The story was soon published as the book The Last Voyage of the Albatross (1962) written by one of the survivors, and then turned into the movie White Squall (1996).
Burrows House, Seamen’s Friend Society, & Ship Carver’s Shop
Pretty little Burrows House set right near the water was constructed sometime during the early 19th century. The house was moved to its current site by Mystic Seaport in 1953. My favorite part of the house was its flower garden in back. Nearby was the cheery yellow American Seamen’s Friend Society Reading Room. While I initially thought this building could be Quaker or Christian Scientist in origin due to its name, it was instead a separate organization created during the 1820s and dedicated to religious revival, temperance, and the abolition of slavery. Although the society was defuct by 1975, Mystic Seaport owns all the records for anyone interested in researching this niche topic. Finally, the Shipcarver’s Shop held tools and examples of wooden carvings that would have decorated the boats. No professional carver was on duty that day, but a staff member explained the basics of carving.
The rating for this museum will appear at the end of the sixth post in the miniseries.