A
D AY
I N
T H E
L I F E
SOUTH BERWICK, MAINE,
Site Manager
L
ast spring, as we were preparing to open the inaugural exhibition at the Sarah Orne Jewett House Museum and Visitor Center, Here by the Sea: Contemporary Art of the Piscataqua, my long to-do list briefly got the best of me. After one particularly busy day of preparations, I dreamed that our beautiful new galleries displayed not the artworks we had painstakingly juried months before, but a collection of rotten tomatoes. Of course, when I woke up, all was well and plans for the opening celebration were moving along smoothly. As the South Berwick, Maine, site manager for Historic New England overseeing the Sarah Orne Jewett House Museum and Visitor Center, Hamilton House, and Sayward-Wheeler House (York Harbor, Maine), there’s no time to dwell on strange dreams. There are budgets to manage, group tours
32
Historic New England Winter 2015
to book, public programs to plan, research to undertake, merchandise to stock, and staff to train. Not to mention exhibitions to open. When you are a site manager for Historic New England, no two days are ever alike. The fourteen site managers’ unified purpose is to ensure that the visitor experience at all thirty-six Historic New England museums is consistently excellent. But with a range of museum schedules and visitation, varied New England geography and weather, and the idiosyncrasies of historic structures and landscapes, site managers encounter all kinds of challenges and opportunities. Along with my team of guides, I have wrangled snapping turtles out of the bathroom and bats out of the heating vents at Hamilton House. We have seen a microburst narrowly miss Sayward-Wheeler House, while laying
waste to other nearby structures. I’ve fielded research inquiries on everything from local rock quarries to transatlantic maritime history to herbology. I’ve booked performers for concerts in the garden, including one who brought along his “limberjack” doll, which kept time to traditional logging songs. We’ve welcomed 2,000 cheerful visitors to our inaugural Hamilton House Fine Arts and Crafts Festival, which saw approximately fifty-six people per hour touring the museum. We’ve directed eighth-grade “Sarah Orne Jewetts” and “Dr. Jewetts” as they performed in our yard for an audience of third graders during South Berwick’s annual Hike through History. We’ve met descenSince 2013 Brooke Steinhauser has been Historic New England's South Berwick site manager, based at the Sarah Orne Jewett House Museum and Visitor Center. ABOVE