Closing Column: What My “18th-Century” House Taught Me About Teaching
 Marie
E. McAllister is an associate professor of English at Mary Washington.
This essay is drawn from her 2003 Presidential Address to the East-Central
American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies. |
About three years ago my husband and I bought our first house. Most people manage that before their mid-40s, but I had one of those roundabout careers, so home was a series of apartments near big cities – not settled, but at least progressively less roach-infested. Eventually, though, I ended up in a town I like, in a job I love, and we started looking for houses.
We imagined a place in charming downtown Fredericksburg.
We hunted, and hunted, and hunted . . . then realized thousands of other
folks were competing to escape the subdivisions built last Tuesday.
Ten months later, still hunting, we saw the ad: “A journey through
history! Circa-1790 farmhouse!”
Well, I specialize in 18th-century literature. How could I resist? My
husband picked up the phone. Our Realtor kindly pretended to believe
that two teachers could afford to own a historic house. To make a long
story short, we bought it. The basement has flooded a dozen times already.
There were termite tunnels under the fresh paint. The hideous wallpapers
seem to be stuck on with superglue. But it’s home, and I love
it, and fellow 18th-century professors understand immediately when I
say that it’s taught me a lot about teaching.
Now, say you’re a teacher who’s just bought an 18th-century
house, and a student aide happens to complain that her historic preservation
class can’t find an old house for its documentation project. What
would you do? Thrilled by my great idea, I invited my colleague, Professor
Brown Morton, to turn us into guinea pigs.
A few days later Brown came to look at the house. He was terrific. “See
how they cut out the porch rails here?” “Did you know there
used to be a second staircase here?” But then he asked THE QUESTION:
“Why do you think this house is from the 1790s?” Um . .
. because the ad said so? Bad news: Although some features are right
for the 18th century, most of the detail looks suspiciously 19th-century.
Brown must have seen my horror. Perhaps, he tried, the house was just
extensively renovated in the 19th century. And anyway, the 19th was
a fine century, too. Hah! We 18th-century devotees know better.
I licked my wounds, and summer arrived. Now, many old houses in Virginia
have been retrofitted for air conditioning, sensibly enough. Ours has
not. For a Montana gal, even one who’s been on the East Coast
as long as I have, the heat was pretty intolerable. We took refuge in
the air-conditioned public records office. Exciting discoveries! At
one point our house was owned by Morgan Combs, former Mary Washington
president and namesake of Combs Hall.
Alas, the deed story ended sadly. Things were fine back to the 1850s,
but around then, three sellers swapped property back and forth a few
times. The piece of land that might have held our house was lost to
an age of deals done with a handshake.
Thank heavens for my able teachers in the historic preservation department.
At their suggestion, we tried other things. Whenever the humidity soared,
we read tax records or tracked census data. I constantly had the sensation
of going about things in the least efficient way, but I was learning.
Maybe I would eventually make it to the level of, say, a historic preservation
sophomore.
Then fall came and the students arrived. First they photographed the
exterior: we’d look up during breakfast to spot a sleep-glazed
student setting up a tripod to catch the morning light. It was a bit
like living in a fishbowl. From October to December, classes worked
inside, measuring everything that didn’t move. Our reward was
a set of drawings of the type preservationists do at the start of a
project (great for hiding awful wallpaper!).
Since then, I keep running into students who know my house better than
I do. Their complaints about how hard it is to measure a 40-foot chimney
remind me that I’m not the only one to whom my house taught valuable
lessons.
So what all did I learn? To start with, the house reminded me of the
difficulty of mastering a new discipline. My students are smart and
hardworking, yet they often lack surprisingly fundamental tools. Their
mistakes seem understandable when I consider my own confusion. Take
the Marye family, which owned our land back in the 1780s. Did the trail
of lawsuits mean John Jr. was a jerk, or was he trying to protect his
sister from her thriftless husband? I simply couldn’t tell.
Researching the house reminded me of the thrills of discovery. My colleague
Doug Sanford was descended from a family that once owned my land! For
my students, literary theory and criticism are an exciting new language,
just as the language of title deeds and tombstones was to me. If I can
keep that thrill of the new alive for them, I will have done my job.
Each time I had to ask another question that I felt sure
I ought to be able to figure out on my own, I became more admiring of
the courage that brings students to my door admitting confusion and
asking for help. The house even made me more aware of the variety of
perspectives in my classes. Not long after we moved in, an elderly stranger
knocked on our door. Roger had made up the wonderful packet of documents
we inherited with the house. Later we met his sister Enid, a physicist.
For her, history lay in the tangible. My own pleasure lay in the stories
I found when pouring over books and microfilms. My classrooms contain
Rogers and Enids and Maries, and I need to teach to them all.
The house also reminded me that scholarship is not just an abstract
endeavor. Our house was almost certainly built by enslaved African-Americans,
like so much of this country’s wealth. The early wills include
the names of slaves to be given to each surviving child – no last
names, of course, so it’s impossible to tell what families got
broken up by the death of an owner. When I invite my smaller classes
out to the house, we have a lot to talk about.
In the end, of course, my colleague turned out to be right. We never
did learn when our house was built, but it wasn’t 1790. A pair
of books from Simpson Library taught us to look at saw marks, nail heads,
and other things that date a property, and we reluctantly concluded
that our “eighteenth-century” house most likely came from
the 1830s or 1840s. But that’s OK. The house taught me one more
thing that’s useful to remember on days when half my students
have skipped their Swift or Pope in order to get to the end of Frankenstein
or Great Expectations. Other centuries may not be as wonderful as the
one I teach, but they have their good points too.