New London Day, October 27, 2018, was the culmination of nearly a semester’s worth of work. We researched the community of New London, Virginia, which is only about 10 minutes away from Liberty University. It was a frontier and backcountry town during the late 1700’s and early 1800’s. New London was once the county seat for Bedford County, when Bedford included Campbell County, before the split in 1781/1782. At that point, New London essentially lost its reason for existence, because it landed on the county line and lost its status as a county seat, while at the same time, nearby Lynchburg took off. There was a temporary revival of the town during the health springs craze of the mid-to-late 1800’s with the Alum Springs Hotel resort, but eventually, the town dwindled back to a small community with a long history.
Several historical buildings still stand in New London. My team was assigned to research and prepare a tour of Mead’s Tavern, the oldest standing building in central Virginia. It was built by William Mead in 1763, the year the French and Indian War ended, and the year the Proclamation of 1763 was announced, prohibiting further white settlement west of the ridge of the Appalachian Mountains. Of course, the settlers who had fought against the French and Indians thought that they had earned that land for settlement fair and square, and many ignored the Proclamation and headed into the frontier. Mead’s Tavern sat on one of the major highways that pioneers would use to travel west, and another road next to it led north and south, so I imagine the tavern did good business between the locals and the travelers.
Sofia Becker, Delaney Adams, and I studied the history of Mead’s Tavern, including William Mead, the Roland Academy girls’ school that followed, and several other uses of the building throughout its 255-year history. We learned from Randy Lichtenberger, Barry Rakes, and Dan Pezzoni, among others, about old buildings and what the structures can tell us about the people who lived there. Luke Dixon, a senior at LU and previous Public History student, gave a lecture on the ins and outs of giving a tour, then proceeded to mentor us the rest of the semester, even showing up to help us out on New London Day.
To prepare for giving the tour, I made myself a short chronology of the history of New London, to keep myself sane in trying to mentally organize the people and events of multiple sites over 250+ years. As a team, we planned out our route through the building and the people, events, and items of material culture we needed to explain, emphasize, superficially cover, or leave out. I made myself an outline of what to discuss in each room on notecards to carry with me during the tour, and I also wrote out the explanation in paragraphs on my computer at home to give myself the practice of verbalizing it. We further practiced giving the tour with the team and Luke Dixon, who gave us pointers and was very encouraging.
On New London Day itself, we arrived early to set up barriers and signs and calm down our nerves. From 10 am to 3 pm, we were giving tours almost constantly, with Professor Donald having to intervene to make us take breaks here and there. Some of the time we gave tours on our own, and sometimes as a team, taking turns explaining each room. By the end of the day, we were exhausted but very satisfied with a job well-done and with the completion of the project.
The tips on public speaking and specifically on giving tours that we received came in very handy during the process. Naturally, we also got better at it as the day went along. I was a little scared and nervous, having never given tours before or talked semi-authoritatively to a group of strangers for an extended period. However, I received many compliments and am confident that I could do something similar again in the future. At the end of one tour, a lady told me that I have a gift for speaking and teaching. She told me she was an LU professor. This compliment made me very happy, since I am a social studies education student and nervous about my teaching abilities. I am happy to hear that I was able to communicate a clear and compelling story about the history of Mead’s Tavern.
At the end of each tour, I asked the visitors what they thought about why we studied old buildings. I got several valuable answers, but I loved making the point that we study them to learn about the people who inhabited them – people who were just like us, who had to deal with the politics of the day, make a living, love their families, and do many of the same things we do, just in a different context. As I saw on a bulletin board once, “History is about people. I am a person. Therefore, history is about people like me.”
Having done the research and given a successful tour, I think I am better prepared for a variety of future occupations and experiences. One of the keys to a successful historical site tour is to make the individuals who lived and interacted there come alive, to people the place with real persons. Glines and Grabitske (2003) advised tour guides to tell a compelling story that communicates a basic human truth and connects to the experiences of the audience.[1] One of the things giving a tour does is to force the individual not only to know the content but find a way to communicate it to a broad audience, which is the point of public history.
It seemed as if everyone who went on my tour seemed to enjoy it and get something out of it. We had an astounding number of people show up for New London Day (1200) and many of them took the Mead’s Tavern tour. We were going all day, and even had a few people show up late, hoping to get in. From the pictures in the media coverage, I guess at least the photographers liked it, maybe because our tour team wore historical costumes. (see below)
Were I to do something like this again, I would start earlier on the research for the content and the communication. I would also try to plan more team meetings to coordinate our themes, content, and tour plan. Overall, it was a good experience, and I would be interested in doing something like this again in the future.
Here are some links to the media reports on New London Day.
- The Friends of New London: http://www.newlondonmuseum.org/
- Liberty University News Service: https://www.liberty.edu/news/index.cfm?PID=18495&MID=292240
- Liberty Champion: https://www.liberty.edu/champion/2018/10/life-in-new-london/
[1] Timothy Glines & David Grabitske, “Telling the Story: Better Interpretation at Small Historical Organizations,” Technical Leaflet 222, in History News 58, no. 2 (Spring 2003): 1-8, accessed December 11, 2018, https://www.jstor.org/stable/42655519.
Rachel Gilbert 