Dr. Stoermer is a professional historian with a doctorate in Early American History from the University of Virginia; he got his baccalaureate at Tulane University in New Orleans and his Masters at Johns Hopkins. He had already established a strong reputation as an academic — teaching at the University of Virginia, Brown University and the College of William & Mary, and publishing on subjects ranging from the political education of George Washington to religious history in the 18th century — before coming to work at Colonial Williamsburg in 2010.
In his three years working at what he calls “the largest living history site in the world,” Stoermer wrote the “Revolutionary City” master narrative and implementation plan, oversaw interpreter education, helped reinterpret most of the organization’s public programs, was the spokesperson for historical affairs, managed the fellowship program and assisted with fundraising. He was one of the creators of Colonial Williamsburg’s popular “RevQuest: Save the Revolution!” alternate reality experience, and is the author of the forthcoming Official Guide to Colonial Williamsburg.
So what brings a high-ticket guy like that to a small-town attraction like HHS? “Colonial Williamsburg was a fantastic training ground,” says Stoermer. “To take all the lessons that I learned there, and my academic background, and bring it here to really make a difference at this place — it was just an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.” Noting that “there are more original buildings here on Huguenot Street than there are in Colonial Williamsburg,” Stoermer seems particularly impressed with HHS’s extensive collections, which are still in the process of being fully catalogued and the great majority of whose holdings are rarely or never exhibited to the public. “One of the things that really drew me to Huguenot Street was how remarkable not just the buildings are, but how exceptional our collections are, both in terms of our material objects and their archives, and their ability to bring those stories to life.”
“We’re not going to be Colonial Williamsburg North, but…Huguenot Street’s a remarkable place, and it does have the potential to be a real engine for Ulster County and the mid-Hudson River Valley to really bring people here in a variety of ways to experience our programming, to want to come back and to help be an anchor for New Paltz and for the region,” he continues. “I’m not saying that it’s, like Colonial Williamsburg, going to become a $150-million-a-year organization. But it doesn’t need to be to make a major impact on this area. The potential is there in terms of kind, if not degree.”
Stoermer says that he has already begun researching comparable heritage tourism sites to quantify that potential. “I did a fairly comprehensive analysis of not just the history of Huguenot Street, but of similarly situated historic sites up and down the East Coast to see what sites like this, in similarly sized regional areas with metropolitan areas close by, with budgets like this and audiences like this,” he says, “The visitorship here has been just a couple of thousand a year for each of the last couple of years. We see the potential to increase that dramatically — mainly because we’re going to be able to guarantee that people are going to be able to come here and have a diverse range of experiences on a regular basis, by being open for a much longer period of time during the year, doing more evening and weekend programs, focusing on more specialty tours and events that highlight important aspects of this place and its history. And we’ll be doing them in creative, dare I say even provocative ways — to really dig down deep into the questions that drove the way people did things here and why they did them.”
The challenge of how to bring the stories of New Paltz’s founders to life is the aspect of the job that really seems to engage Stoermer’s enthusiasm. “We don’t want people on the outside looking in at history here,” he says. He cites recent programming expansion to include the lives of women and of black slaves on Huguenot Street as examples of the types of targeted visitor experiences that he’d like to see emphasized in the future. “We’ll have what I call a ‘core guest experience,’ which would be the stories that we could tell in each of the houses and in our Collections Building about the people and the buildings and the objects. And then we’d be able to have special interest tours and events in the evenings that can explore in depth particular aspects — for example, an experience that’s built entirely around the story of slavery, the story of women, around the American Revolution or the Civil War, or about the Native American experience.”
Each stone house would present a different aspect or era of New Paltz history, in Stoermer’s vision, and the experience would be as immersive as modern museum technology and HHS’s budget allow. “In 2014, what we’re going to do is test out a lot of these different interactive experiences, so that you can have a much different kind of experience in each house, with an eye towards making sure that we are drawing people into the experience,” he says. “It’s not just the things that they are seeing: It’s the things they’re smelling, the things they’re hearing; it’s even the things that they are tasting. How many of their senses can we engage that put them in this 360-degree experience into the past?”
Stoermer doesn’t rule out roleplaying characters from history as part of the interactive experience. “Wouldn’t it be interesting if we could get to the point — and this is something we’re considering — to be able to create immersive experiences for guests, so that they can really live a day in the life of a patentee?” he asks. “If you do it right, you put people into the shoes of these people from the past, and you get them to start thinking about the choices that they would’ve made…You’re putting a letter into their hand and they’ve got to then figure out a clue. That gets them into a mindset from 100 or 200 years ago. They have to start connecting the dots between now and then. And the minute that they start doing that, they start looking at everything around them in a different way.”
In the interests of both engaging the senses and forging regional tourism partnerships, Stoermer is already seeking to collaborate with restaurants that serve the same potential clientele as HHS, with the intent of “inviting local chefs down to put their own modern twists on recipes from our historical collection, and then pairing them with local craft beers.” An event already in the works for 2014 that he hopes will draw in the local community is a convocation of Huguenot Street descendants from all over the country, to be called the Gathering. “It’s going to culminate in an entire weekend in October that is going to be dedicated to Huguenot history and heritage. That’s about food and music and dancing and stories and histories,” he says. Also on the agenda for 2014 is a lecture on “the international diaspora of the Huguenots. We’re going to be bringing many more scholars and writers here as a regular thing, so that the people of New Paltz can count on having an interesting, quality experience here on a regular basis.”
Whether you come to the Street from far or near, whether you’ve got an iota of Huguenot blood or not, Stoermer wants your historical experience to be tailored to your own personal quest for knowledge and to whet your appetite enough to want to come back. “Being sensitive to an individual’s connection to the past, to the range of interests that people have, is a critical part of making sure that the experience will be a dynamic one, and in the end be a memorable one,” he says. “If we focus on that, we can make a very special place even more remarkable.”
According to Stoermer, “History is about ordinary people doing extraordinary things, and finding out why they did those things. But that ends up being more about questions than about answers.” By the end of this year, local residents will likely have answers to some of their questions regarding what’s in store for HHS.
“What we want is to be a sort of cauldron for ideas here and to be fearless in the way we approach this,” says Stoermer of the planning process. “We want to be known as a place that is going to be forward-thinking and pushing the envelope when it comes to historical interpretation: the kind of place that people can look towards as an example for how you can bring a renaissance to historic sites — especially in this economic climate.”
A wonderful idea. The potential is fantastic.