Edwards home gets reimagined makeover
County historical society to take visitors through the ages starting Saturday
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WARREN -- The opening of the Morgan History Center provided the Trumbull County Historical Society the opportunity to do something new with its John Stark Edwards House.
A change, however, was necessary regardless.
"House museums across the country are dying. That's a fact," TCHS Executive Director Meghan Reed said. "The American Alliance of Museums estimated during COVID that between one-quarter and one-third were not going to survive because most are all-volunteer run and not supported enough to keep that going. It's a trend 10 years coming. We knew early on we had to make some changes at the Edwards house to be relevant to the community and provide something that people would want to see."
The new configuration that will be unveiled Saturday redesigns each room to reflect a different era in the history of the house, which was built in 1807 on South Street and moved to its current location at at 303 Monroe St. NW in 1986.
"We created a plan that took the Edwards house from a house with all of our stuff in it to an immersive experience, where each room is a specific family that lived in the house," Reed said. "It's really an 'if these walls could talk' type of experience."
Making that idea a reality took extensive research -- finding information about the families who lived there over the years, trying to determine who the residents might have been when it was used as a boarding house, looking for furniture and appliances to reflect each time period.
"We spent countless days researching which wallpaper would have been appropriate," Reed said. "We spent way too much money on one 1940s pattern to then read an article about Gertrude (Malloy, the volunteer curator who live there from the 1940s until 1970) that specifically said she hand-mixed the yellow paint for her kitchen because she loved yellow so much. So we scrapped the 1940s wallpaper and went with yellow paint. We actually found a sample of the yellow paint in the room, which was amazing that we could reinterpret the space off of it."
The individual stories allow TCHS to tell larger stories about the Civil War (a Civil War doctor lived in the house in the 1860s and 1870s), the 1930s steel strike and the economic decline when the steel mills began closing in the 1970s.
Free guided tours will be offered every half hour between 1:30 and 5 p.m. Saturday. Starting next week, guided tours will be scheduled at 2 p.m. Thursday and Friday and 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. on Wednesday. Admission will be $5 for adults and free for TCHS members and SNAP / EBT cardholders through the Museums for All program.
Tours will be limited to six people. COVID-19 protocols partially are the reason, but Reed said the main factor is the size of the house and its rooms.
"I'm really excited for the reinterpretation because it gives us a chance to be much more diverse in the stories we tell," Reed said. "It also gives us a chance to have some fun with it. It's not just a house with bunch of old things, and I hope when people come to visit and do a guided tour they will really think of it as an experience."