Posts Tagged ‘The Wren’s Nest’

Tote Bags are the New Other Kind of Bag

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After many a moon without them, we finally have tote bags back in our grubby little hands.  Welcome back, friends!

If you’re the type of person who carries things from one place to another, these tote bags will be perfect for you.  They not only hold things, but come with straps to keep your hands free and your shoulders laden with weight. Innovations!  Yes!

The totes come in a beautiful “natural” color and feature either Brer Rabbit in orange or our lovely logo in forest green.  Great for outfit coordination, they’ll prove the name of our museum is not actually “The Wren House” wherever you go.

These beauties are a steal at $7 a pop and will be up on our online store soon.  In the meantime, shoot us an email if you want one!

Decatur Old House Fair — Right Up Our Hallway!

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This may come as a shock to you, but the Wren’s Nest is more than a National Historic Landmark celebrating literature, folklore, and African American history.  It is also an old house.

A surprising (to me, I guess) number of visitors come here just as eager to discuss 100-year-old window panes as they do the work of Joel Chandler Harris.  Living in an old house is a unifying factor, I tell you what, and Lain and I are in the know.  (Let me just say that space heaters become really, really important.)

Which is why we’re so excited about the second annual Decatur Old House Fair on March 6th.  The fair brings together experts in repair and maintenance, design, energy efficiency and historic research with owners of old houses and the likes of you and me.

Last year’s fair — with the awesome tagline “The Greenest House is the One Already Built” — yielded our relationship with Tom Bretherton, who ended up installing our windows during our restoration.

In fact, Lain had such a great time he’s now on the 2010 volunteer committee.  If joining a committee isn’t a sign of love, I don’t know what is.

Added bonus: one of our Board members, Ken Thomas, is co-leading the “Researching Your Old House and What Style is My House?” seminar.  Yay Ken!

Hope to see you there!

This Is What The Wren’s Nest Looks Like With Snow On It

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No white after Labor Day my heinie.

For the record, we ain’t afraid of snow.  The house will be open for tours tomorrow starting at 10, and Curtis will be telling Br’er Rabbit stories at 1.

Georgia Traveler Features the Wren’s Nest, Amelia, and Curtis

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Georgia Traveler, everyone’s favorite travel show not starring Michael Palin Anthony Bourdain Rick Steves, stopped by the Wren’s Nest a few months back for a segment on their “Book Tour” episode.

Amelia did most of the talking:

Curtis did most of the storytelling:

And Georgia Traveler did a bang-up job.  Thank you, Georgia Traveler! Watch the entire episode online, here (just click on the “Watch” icon next to the page title).

Our segment starts about 4 minutes in, but the whole episode is worth your time.  They stop by the Uncle Remus Museum, Flannery O’Connor’s Andalusia, the Margaret Mitchell House, and the Grit.

P.S.  Do you know how hard it is to find a screen grab where people don’t look like they’re drooling?  It’s medium-hard!

Victorian Christmas is This Sunday from 12 – 4pm! We’re Telling You So You’ll Come!

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Well here we are, post-Thanksgiving and into December.  That can only mean one thing — our annual Victorian Christmas Open House!

This Sunday, December 6th between 12 and 4, we’ll be offering tours of the museum, storytelling, activities for the kids, delicious real food, and everyone’s favorite not-real food, birthday cake!

Why birthday cake, you ask?  Because we’re rapidly approaching Joel Chandler Harris’ 164th birthday, silly.

It’s all free and a great opportunity to see the home at its best. Not only has our recent restoration made the place undeniably lovely, but we never look better than when we’ve been gussied up with historically accurate decorations.

Last year’s Victorian Christmas included highlights such as:

• a kid being called out by Catherine, volunteer and Asian Cajun, for taking 14 cookies at once
• no one touching the cold beverages
• a child rolling down the front stairs and emerging completely unscathed thanks to the padding of her down coat.

Though it may seem impossible, I think we can top it this year.

So hey!  Join us!  It’ll be great.

Wren’s Nest Conservation Update — Bathroom Construction Is ON

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With 11 months of conservation work behind us, the entire project finally is coming to a close.  It’s been a long, rewarding road, and naturally, we wanted to end on a high note — the bathroom.

Did you ever visit our bathroom?

If so, you might have found yourself saying things like, “I think the toilet has been running for the last 14 hours.  Also, the wall is falling off.  And is the sink supposed to shoot cold, frigid water at you?  Gah!  Something just crawled in where the window pane doesn’t meet the frame.”

The good folks at Blalock Construction are overhauling everything, and boy are we keen.  Being that this is the non-historic part of the house, the possibilities are endless.  Why, this may even mean that by next week my regular responsibilities will no longer include “fixing the toilet all the damn time.”

Unfortunately, there is a bit of a downside to this.  You know how if, in your building, they’re working on the bathrooms you have to go down to another floor?  Meet our other floor:

Nothing but the high life over here, folks.

The Wren’s Nest Updated Its Site Design and Now Our Blog Looks a Little Goofy

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We’ll fix the goofiness soon, promise.

In the mean time, do you have any questions, comments, or concerns?

Part One: We Don’t Want You To Miss A Historic Preservation-Related Thing

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Throughout the week, Lain and I post some pretty darn interesting things (to people who like historic preservation) on a little website I like to call Twitter.  Maybe you’ve heard of it.

We also know that some of you have not jumped on the Twitter bandwagon, and have thus missed those posts.

Not anymore, friend, not anymore.

We’re going to try to regularly round up recent tweets from @thewrensnest.  Expect more links than you can shake a stick at.  Oh, and just so you know, the museum itself speaks in first person on Twitter and has no shortage of opinions.  I hope you enjoy.

Some oldies but goodies to set the mood:

• Typing is hard. Because I’m a house.
• (On Super Bowl Sunday) Note to self: please do not catch on fire today.
  
• What happens when you have fresh paint on your outside and there’s a tornado warning? I’m about to find out.

• Drat! The humans found my 45 star flags. I still don’t trust that Oklahoma.

• ATL Alleycat Black History Bike Race used me as one of their checkpoints. Thanks, humans.

More (recent posts) to come shortly!

1967 Editorial Condemns Segregation at the Wren’s Nest, Praises Uncle Remus

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This week I happened to read Malcolm Gladwell’s  “Atticus Finch and Southern Liberalism” and Kevin Kruse’s White Flight: Atlanta and the making of modern conservatism.

Both works tackle mid-20th century perceptions of “racial justice.”  For African-Americans, this meant equal rights.  For many whites, this meant “freedom of association” (or, in other words, the freedom to maintain segregated neighborhoods).

Yesterday I stumbled across a 1967 Atlanta Journal editorial about the Wren’s Nest by the esteemed journalist Reese Cleghorn.  It’s about racial justice at the Wren’s Nest, which had sided with the “freedom of association” camp even well after 1967.  Yikes!

The editorial is a damning criticism of the Joel Chandler Harris Memorial Association that ran our museum until 1983.  But it’s also an eloquent defense of Joel Chandler Harris and Uncle Remus that is just as relevant today as it was 40 years ago.

I love how Cleghorn points out that Harris’ desire for “the obliteration of prejudice against the blacks” was later completely ignored in the name of (the white version of) “racial justice.”

We Distort Them: Of Joel Chandler Harris and Uncle Remus

Reese Cleghorn, December 8, 1967

IT IS A grievous thing that Atlanta’s major memorial to Joel Chandler Harris is among the last of its public places to be segregated.

A suit has just been filed in federal court asking for an order to end racial discrimination at the Wren’s Nest, Harris’ home in West End.  The home is now a museum operated by a private association in memory of Harris and in honor of his “Uncle Remus” stories.  It has admitted Negroes in the group, by special arrangement, but it turns them away individually.

The courts will have to determine whether a private association may do this even though it is open to the general public.  But whatever the outcome, it seems in order to contemplate what Harris himself would have thought.

I am very glad that a granddaughter, Mrs. Mildred Harris Camp Wright, has now publicly expressed herself on that.  In a letter to The Constitution, she has refuted a report that Harris’ will required a policy of segregation at the Wren’s Nest.

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“GRANDFATHER HAD no will–everything was left to his widow,” she wrote.  “He had no idea that there would be a memorial to him–and if he had, he would not have required such a policy.  His stories were about the Negro, and were written with affection, sympathy, and understanding. “

I think Harris would have been appalled that such a practice could be followed even now, in 1967, at the Wren’s Nest.

In 1905 he wrote to his friend Andrew Carnegie that he would publish an Uncle Remus magazine, and that its purpose would be to further “the obliteration of prejudice against the blacks, the demand for a square deal, and the uplifting of both races so that they can look justice in the face without blushing.”

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HOW THE PRESENT directors of the Wren’s Nest can look that attitude in the face without blushing is beyond me.  They and their predecessors have performed a a great service to the community by keeping this museum alive when it otherwise would have been neglected, but they seem not to fully understand about Joel Chandler Harris and Uncle Remus.

Many people do not.  The man and his stories have been enshrouded in the fog of the new white supremacist period that began, in earnest, at just about the time Harris died in 1908.  That was the year that Georgia embarked upon forced segregation.  Within two years, the legislature had done its deed, fastening that system upon us for half a century.

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TOO MANY PEOPLE look back through that fog from which we just now are emerging and think that a man who lived in Harris’ time must have though in the same way that many men of 20 or 30 years ago thought.  They would make congenial and gentlemanly bigots of men like Harris and, for that matter, Robert E. Lee (who, it is now forgotten, rose from his pew and went to the communion rail of his church with a Negro when no one else would).

People have forgotten, also, that the stories Harris put down in his “Uncle Remus” books were not his own, and he was always the first to say so.  They were the authentic lore, wisdom and folk poetry of Southern Negroes of that time.  They are today one of the worlds’ greatest collections of such literature.

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NOW SOMETIMES PEOPLE praise them as the inventions of a fine writer.  But Harris himself wrote of the stories: “Not one of them is cooked, and not one nor any part of one is an invention of mine.”  He was a man of great artistry who faithfully collected the stories wherever he could find them, usually from ex-slaves, and presented them in their true dialect.

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THE DIALECT VARIED, depending, for instance, upon whether he gathered them on the Georgia coast from “Gullas” (people apparently with origins in Angola) or in North Georgia from people who had come from other parts of Africa.  The stories were probably of remote African origin, he thought; folklorists, such as Dr. Stella Brewer Brooke [sic] of Clark College, have confirmed the African origins and the connections between these stories and others to be found in Asia.

The stories, and Harris’ care in setting them down, are part of a great heritage which is still not fully recognized by white or Negro Southerners.  To some, Uncle Remus is only Uncle Tom, and the use of dialect is offensive because of the racist manner in which dialect often has been used.

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HARRIS DID NOT like the confusion between his authentic use of dialect and the minstrel-variety use of it, which usually simply amounted to the telling of racist jokes.  He said he once intended “to apologize for the plantation dialect,” but then he realized that some of the greatest of English literature–in Chaucer, for example–is in the form of authentic dialect.

In his best days he paled when what he did was confused by the attitudes and prejudices of others, who seemed to be hearing something he was not saying.  The worth and humanity of the people out of whom the stories came was clear to him, and as evidenced in his letter to Carnegie, he hoped for the “obliteration of prejudice.”  His own words would be the best text for the Wren’s Nest.

The Wren’s Nest and The Allman Brothers Band’s “Big House” — A Side-by-Side Comparison

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The AJC recently reported that the Allman Brother’s “Big House,” where they recorded many of their most memorable and influential songs, will open as a (house) museum this December.

Not only do we look forward to welcoming the Big House into the club of Georgia landmarks, but we also look forward to teaching them the club password and handshake.

In the meantime, let me highlight some of the similarities between us and them –

• “The Big House” is a nickname the band members gave the house based on its size.  It’s big, you see.
• “The Wren’s Nest” is a nickname the Harris family gave the house because there were some birds there.

• The Big House is planning to present Duane Allman’s bedroom as it looked when he died in 1971.  Expect some serious funk action.
• The Wren’s Nest has preserved Joel Chandler Harris’ bedroom just as it was since his death in 1908.  Expect some serious spittoon and gourd action.

• The Big House will have a bandstand outside for shows and concerts.
• The Wren’s Nest has a concrete stage from the 1920s for children and their garbled singing needs.

• Members of the Allman Brothers Band would often stop by The Big House for a trip down memory lane.
• Old ladies stop by The Wren’s Nest to tell us how awful our “new” (21 years old) paint colors look.

• Some pretty awesome and influential art was created at The Big House.  You know, about Midnight Riders.
• Some pretty awesome and influential art was created at the Wren’s Nest.  You know, about rabbits.

Overall, the Big House looks pretty neat, and I’m excited to visit when it isn’t 106 degrees in Macon.  I will not arrive by motorcycle.  Thank you.