Urge to preserve comes from knowing place history

COURTESY STEWART MARTIN PHOTOGRAPHY
LIVING HISTORY: In the yard at the Rhode Island Historical Society’s John Brown House Museum, walkers listen to the tour guide’s introduction before a walking tour begins.
COURTESY STEWART MARTIN PHOTOGRAPHY LIVING HISTORY: In the yard at the Rhode Island Historical Society’s John Brown House Museum, walkers listen to the tour guide’s introduction before a walking tour begins.

Even the experts can discover new things in the midst of teaching others.
When local historian and tourism advocate Ray Rickman recently was leading a walking tour centered on the life of Edward Mitchell Bannister, a 19th-century African-Canadian painter who adopted Providence as his home, he knew his work wouldn’t be done until after the walk concluded – and maybe not even then.
“I’ll go back, and they’ll be something there I’ve never seen before. A couple of times someone will ask me a question that just floors me,” Rickman said.
For instance, a 12-year-old on a tour asked what the names of one family’s slaves were and Rickman did not know. He subsequently did the research and can now answer the question.
But walking tours, those who will run them throughout the summer say, are about more than teaching history. The tours help preservation efforts, thanks to the tours’ inimacy.
“It works here, because the scale of the city is small and the streets are friendly,” said Barbara Barnes, tourism-services manager for the Rhode Island Historical Society. “You don’t see in a car what you see on foot. You see the truth of what the city is, and you’re not just glossing over it. It’s just a great experience.”
Barnes has been guiding tours around Providence for about 20 years, the last 10 of which have been at RIHS.
The society runs its “A Mile of History” walk on Benefit Street every Tuesday through Saturday at 11 a.m.
Created in the mid-18th century, the street is an urban neighborhood as well as a museum-like collection of original Colonial homes, thanks to preservation efforts begun in the 1950s.
“It gives people a chance to hear a little bit about architecture, a little culture, a little bit about preservation,” Barnes said. “The preservation part of it is important. It’s the changing fortune of the most historic street in the city and the role of historic preservation in making that so.”
The Providence Preservation Society, whose founding in 1956 was proposed to begin preservation work on Benefit Street, recently began its second season of “Talk the Talk and Walk the Walk” tours. They are neighborhood-centric pairs of a lecture held on a Thursday evening and a tour held one or two weeks later. Each is concluded by a stop at a bar/restaurant in that neighborhood.
Executive Director James Hall came up with the idea after coming aboard two years ago.
“Instead of just gathering up a collection of random buildings, I wanted to try to give a history, because that’s where preservation happens,” Hall said. “The audience for any preservation organization is people who have chosen to live in a historic community because they care about it. This isn’t something you happen into.”
But it doesn’t necessarily have to be that way. Even as Hall’s talks and walks are designed with PPS’ membership in mind, there are efforts to broaden the audience.
Holding the talks at the society’s headquarters, the Shakespeare’s Head building on Meeting Street built by one-time Providence Gazette printer John Carver, allows some showing off of archival photographs, among other things.
“We want people to know what PPS is, [for them] to feel an attachment to that building and room,” Hall said.
RIHS’ Benefit Street tour and the RiverWalk tours, which coincide with WaterFire lightings and are presented in collaboration with WaterFire Providence, highlight the city’s riverfront architecture and are designed for nonresidents.
Barnes said they are successful in attracting tourists. There typically are a handful of attendees during the week and anywhere from 12 to 20 on weekend tours. RiverWalk tours in August, she said, have had as many as 100 participants.
“We’re not trying to run a three-credit history course in an hour and a half, but we’re trying to make sure the history is told really well,” Barnes said. “If you’re interested, you can get a lot of history on these tours.” Rickman, who leads some tours through PPS as an independent contractor, as well as for the Rhode Island Black Heritage Society (which includes the Bannister tour), argues that not enough is being done to promote the city’s history – through tours or anything else – to tourists especially, but to residents as well.
“It’s probably verging on disgraceful that we’re letting this economic engine barely drive,” he said. “We could turn Benefit Street into the most historical mile in America and attract a million people a year. And it’s simple. Put two costumed people on the corner, remove the mailboxes and we turn into Williamsburg [Va.]”
Increased tourist and resident interest, he said, only could serve to help preservation efforts. He points specifically to the Edward Bannister house on Benevolent Street, owned by Brown University and once boarded up due to its structural condition and slated to be moved for museum use.
“I think we were able to do that almost by using my tours. We appeared [in local media] several times and now [there’s] a plaque in front of the house and we’re exposing the whole community to his historic house. It gives us a sense of pride.”
RIHS has several “Personally Providence” tours planned for the summer. Guest guides, including Rickman, will lead 90-minute walks on themes, including African-American history on College Hill and Literary Providence, which will focus on H.P. Lovecraft, a 20th-century science fiction author.
PPS’s series will focus on the Armory District, South Elmwood and Brown University’s modernist buildings.
Its first series stop was the Sharpe Building at the Foundry Complex, once the home of the Brown and Sharpe Manufacturing Co., late last month.
That talk and tour was the idea of a woman who participated in last year’s tours and lives in the Sharpe Building now. She offered her home as a tour stop.
“So, I think the proof is in the pudding that the participants wanted to interact with us further,” Hall said. •

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