Mystic Seaport: Is recreated history authentic?

I recently returned from a New England vacation, part of which I spent in Mystic Seaport. This recreation of a mid-19th-Century Connecticut River port contains restored commercial structures, homes, museums, even a planetarium. Mystic's biggest draw, I suspect, is a regular flotilla of vessels— everything from a small Victorian-era motor launch to the majestic cadet training ship Joseph Conrad. The pride of the collection is the Charles W. Morgan, the only surviving example of a Yankee whaler.

Visitors will also find a corps of re-enactors who play various roles as they re-create life in 1850s Mystic. My group was addressed by a retired teacher who now enacts the part of the widow of a retired clipper ship captain. She and a fellow re-enactor staff the Seamen's Friend Society during the summer months.

I enjoyed my visit to Mystic Seaport, and I'd certainly recommend it to others, with one caveat: It isn't real.

An old, sad story

Like Henry Ford's Greenfield Village in Michigan, Mystic Seaport is an idealized recreation that uses historical structures brought in from other places. The Seamen's Friend Society is not the building that stood in Mystic in the 1850s. The Mystic Bank— a very impressive structure indeed— never served Mystic's inhabitants in the 1850s or any other time. The Greenmanville Church (built in 1851) is authentic, but the rest?

Mystic is the sad old story of a silted harbor restricting navigation and consequently causing trade patterns to shift to larger, better maintained harbors. The Greenman family owned a shipyard, but when fewer ships sailed into and out of Mystic, they opened mills to manufacture cotton and woolen goods. Now the mills are gone, and the port is back— after a fashion— but the church the Greenmans built for their workers and their families remains.

All gussied up

In effect Mystic becomes a Sweet Cheat of History. When you visit, you see no trace of a silted-up useless harbor or derelict mills; instead you see what appears to be a functioning 19th-Century community where fishermen clean their catches, shanty singers keep the taverns lively and widows of retired skippers hand out inspirational literature to sailors far from home.

I suppose this scenario makes sense for the tourists and visiting school groups. Would they really want to look at a patch of swampy shoreline, an old church and abandoned buildings? Probably not. Yet they represent the real Mystic story. River trade falls off; the mills become increasingly unable to compete against newer larger mills in the South, business dries up and the town withers and dies— only to be resuscitated as a tourist attraction.

This is blunt truth of history: Enterprises spring up, wither and die, be they empires or the Greenman Brothers' shipyard.

Does this narrative excite the imagination? Will it light up a child's eyes? As John Wayne would put it, not hardly. Thus we have Mystic Seaport with its jolly shanty men and its working planetarium and its very knowledgeable guide.

Sweet cheat, Philadelphia-style

This whole question of "raw history" versus "sweet cheats" has long interested me because I work across from Independence Park— another sweet cheat, albeit of a different sort. Rather than collecting colonial era buildings, moving them to Philadelphia and reassembling them, in the 1950s the creators of Independence Park bulldozed a nondescript commercial district and recreated it as a park dotted with historical structures. Some are genuine colonial structures that have withstood the onslaught of time; others are clever recreations that date from the mid-20th Century.

A tourist who has never been to Philadelphia assumes that what he sees has always been. Ben Franklin may have sat under this very tree.

Of course the truth is there, if you want to pursue it. You can learn via signage and exhibits that colonial Philadelphia was a rabbit warren of chock-a-block boarding houses and inns— after all, those government clerks had to eat and sleep somewhere. But if you prefer to believe that colonial Philadelphia was a beautiful park, you can do so. History will reveal as much or as little as you care to know.