The accomplishments of the staff (both full-time and contractual) are clear from Gil Hennegar's overview of the work done to date as reflected in the research files. Indicative of their high quality is Lynne Hasting's Hampton (1985), and her more recent detailed study of the Music Room. If anything symbolizes the initial rationale for the preservation of Hampton as a National Historic Site, it is Eliza with her harp, by Thomas Sully. In many ways the painting is a metaphor for the history of Hampton and those who lived and worked there. It was the quest for this portrait that led to what remained of the Hampton estate becoming a public trust. It was Eliza's fortune, derived from her father's mercantile business in the city, that gave her husband, the third master of Hampton, John Ridgely, the means to live well and re-build the slave-based economy of the plantation in the years prior to the Civil War. Her fortune may well have sustained the life-style of the Ridgelys after the war.
More importantly Eliza and the other mistresses of Hampton, along with the slaves, the servants, and the tenants they helped manage, now should be the focus of the next phase of interpreting Hampton. From its earliest days, Hampton did not sit in splendid isolation overlooking the countryside. It was inextricably linked to the industrial development of Maryland through its ironworks and to the growth and development of the city of Baltimore. The first studies of Hampton missed the role of the city to such a degree that the otherwise excellent study by Charles Peterson confused the inventory of the Gay Street townhouse with that of Hampton mansion. As Bess Paterson Shipe has pointed out, life in the city was as important to the Ridgelys as was life in the country. Any interpretive program for Hampton should explain the link to the city and the inter-relationship between the two. From Sherry Olson's work on the history of Baltimore we know that Thomas Buckler was an early advocate of the Gunpowder watershed as a pure water supply for the city. Not until I began looking at the work done on Hampton did I realize that his ascerbic comments about Baltimore's unwillingness to listen to his good advice (written from his study in Paris) may have been firmly rooted in a vested interest in the project derived from his marital ties ( as second husband of little Eliza) to the Ridgelys who owned a large segment of the watershed.
But it is not the interaction of the masters and mistresses of Hampton with the world of the City alone that should be emphasized in the next phase of interpretation of Hampton. It is essential to understand the lives of the people who made such a life-style possible, the slaves, the servants (both free black and white), the laborers, and the tenants, and to reconstruct their world for the Hampton visitor.
Hampton offers a unique opportunity to study the totality of what Simon Schama recently has called Landscape and Memory, the interaction of people with their environment from the earliest days of settlement to the present. Some exercises will necessarily be more speculative than others. Recovering and conveying the presence, extent, and impact of native Americans on Hampton will be restricted by the available archaeological sites, and dependent upon an intrepretive framework derived from sites elsewhere. There is, however, an extraordinary wealth of information available about slaves, servants, laborers and tenants that can be pulled into a matrix of interpretation that will broaden the base of public interest in the history of Hampton. It will also increase public attendance at the site, especially IF the stories to be learned are told well, and are placed in a context that entices people to want to know more about the full spectrum of the varied worlds that Hampton represents.
There are two parts to this proposal:
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© Research proposal for Hampton 1995 Dr. Edward C. Papenfuse