Putting historic preservation into practice: the Friends of the Caleb Pusey House, Inc. and the twentieth-century restoration of a seventeenth-century Pennsylvania home
Date
2006
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Americans have long had a fascination with ideas of memory, history, and preservation. Following World War II, the United States experienced a surge in the formation of organizations committed to preserving historic sites for patriotic, memory-creating, and educational purposes. National foundations, like the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and federal, state, and local legislation, like the Historic Preservation Act of 1966, greatly affected the historic preservation movement and the organizations that conducted preservation work in America. Small, local historic preservation groups, created and run primarily by women, worked diligently to save sites with connections to local, state, and national history. In preserving historic sites, these groups often established new research methods, restoration practices, and fundraising techniques. One such organization, which came of age during the post-World War II historic preservation era, is the Friends of the Caleb Pusey House, Inc. This paper uses the Friends of the Caleb Pusey House, Inc. as a case study, exemplifying the sort of small, local organization dedicated to preservation that was typical of this period.