Spots struggle to maintain audiences -- and business

Some places are offering more hands-on activities that resonate with kids.
Washington Post
STURBRIDGE, Mass. -- Historical fact: In the 1830s, many rural New Englanders followed a religion so strait-laced that they did not celebrate Christmas.
Accordingly, at Old Sturbridge Village -- an outdoor museum where an 1830s town has been re-created down to the cider mill and the Gloucester Old Spots pigs -- they used to ignore the holiday as well.
Used to. Until, in the past few years, attendance started to slip.
"How many times can you tell the story, 'They didn't celebrate it'?" asked Susanna Bonta, a museum spokeswoman.
Now, in December the village gets a makeover that might make a Puritan -- or a historian -- blanch. There is a Christmas tree (not popularized in the United States until the 1840s), a visit from Santa Claus (who didn't take his current form until after 1850) and a series of nighttime tours showing the village lighted by (electric) candlelight. These are times for creative thinking at the country's "living history" parks, where officials worry that their old formula of restored buildings, costumed interpreters and anvil-banging demonstrations is losing its tourist appeal.
Museums from Virginia to Michigan are trying to add an edge. How about a walk-through theatrical production? An overnight stay in a pilgrim's house? Who'd like to try on 19th-century replica underwear?
In this fast-moving age, apparently, just making the past come alive isn't enough.
"It's just a larger, competitive world," said John Caramia, a North Carolina museum official and past president of the Association for Living History, Farm and Agricultural Museums.
There are dozens of living or "outdoor" history museums around the country, offering strolls through such attractions as a cowboy camp, a prairie farm and a Shaker village. The largest of these parks is Virginia's Colonial Williamsburg, a 301-acre re-creation of the state's 18th-century capital.
There, historical re-creation is big business: The park sold 729,000 tickets last year, about the same visitor total as Washington National Cathedral, and pulled in about $188 million in revenue.
Tough times
But in the past few years, business has been getting slower. Williamsburg park's ticket sales were down 5 percent in 2004 and 9 percent the year before. Other parks tell similar stories. At the Jamestown Settlement, a Virginia park re-creating an even earlier era of Colonial history, paid attendance fell from about 521,000 in 2002 to about 423,000 last year. A decline in visitors led Old Sturbridge to make its first cuts of costumed staff in recent memory.
"We have a lot of trouble, much more trouble than we used to, in getting them here," said Beverly K. Sheppard, president and chief executive officer of Old Sturbridge, a cluster of relocated buildings around a town common, about 55 miles west of Boston.
Part of the problem, undoubtedly, has been factors affecting travel in general, including terrorism scares and high gasoline prices.
But some museum leaders see a scarier trend: They're losing the interest of today's kids, who more than ever are driving families' vacation decisions.
This may have to do with the agricultural theme of many living-history museums, which might not resonate with urban children whose grandparents didn't work on a farm.
"They get farming, stability, barns and sheep, and that is irrelevant," said Mark Leone, a professor of anthropology at the University of Maryland, who thinks that these museums should undergo radical changes to embrace high-tech media and to show a less sanitized picture of the past.
But beyond their subject matter, museum officials also wonder about their methods, which tend to be watch-me-do-it instead of do-it-yourself. "I don't think people want to be shown as much," Sheppard, of Old Sturbridge, said. "They want to do more."
So here come the changes, many taking cues from the hands-on exhibits popular at children's museums. Jamestown offers chances to grind corn and scrape animal hides with an oyster shell. Young visitors to Old Sturbridge can build a New England-style wall out of foam "rocks" and try on 1830s-style children's undergarments over their clothes. Even greater immersion was available this year at Massachusetts's Plimoth Plantation, whose name comes from an old spelling of "Plymouth." A few families were allowed to spend the night in a re-created Pilgrim house or in a Wampanoag Indian wetu, or dome-shaped dwelling.
In the spring, Williamsburg will aim to add drama to its dusty streets by putting on a pair of theatrical performances that simulate events in the city during the 1770s and 1780s. These performances, which repeat every two days, will allow tourists to feel as if they're walking through the city both before and during the Revolutionary War.
Living-history parks say everything is on the table -- or nearly everything. Caramia, who is chief operating officer at a restored Moravian community in Winston-Salem, N.C., said there was one historic item that he couldn't ever see winding up the hands of modern tourists.
"People would love to shoot period guns," he said. But "all you need is a little accident with black powder, and there's going to be all kinds of legal issues."
For now, however, it might be too early to tell if the changes are having the desired effect. At Old Sturbridge, even the spiced-up Christmas offerings didn't seem to hold everyone's attention -- while a tour guide talked about the holiday, many of the children in her group tuned out and started kicking snow at one another.