Village Voices
With its spontaneous and informal style, Historic Eastfield may be preservation's ultimate summer camp.
By Jean Dunbar | From Preservation | November/December 2007
Peggy Flavin, a preservationist from Gloucester, Mass.,
prepares a traditional meal by the hearth.
Credit: Richard Howard
Though I never-ever-walk down an unmarked road into somebody else's woods, I followed the instructions mailed to me. My car had already crunched down a country lane in New York's Rensselaer County, past an abandoned house and onto a faint path threaded between a barn and a pond. Now, as instructed, I left the car and scuffled along the dusty path, as frogs sang by the water and insects thrummed and creaked in the weeds.
At a split-rail fence, the path entered a dense woodlot. Quickly, a tavern appeared, then shops, houses, and a church with headstones in its yard. None of the buildings looked newer than 1850. They edged a green eerily free of modern sidewalks, paving, and wires. Privies huddled discreetly. Had I fallen down a rabbit hole? Strayed into Brigadoon? A babble of unmistakably 21st-century voices proved otherwise. I'd found Historic Eastfield, preservation's best-known secret.
Don't feel out of the loop if you haven't heard of Eastfield. The place doesn't advertise, nor is it open to the public. It's not on any map-even a Mapquest search comes up empty. Yet for the past three decades, history junkies have found their way to a preservation summer school at this village near East Nassau, N.Y. Like so many others, I've returned to Eastfield again and again-led the first time down its dusty lane four years ago by an invitation to teach, captivated quickly by its swashbuckling take-no-prisoners approach to studying the past. "Just about all the major players in any given field show up at an Eastfield class," says Margaret Pritchard, curator of prints, maps, and wallpaper at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. "Discussion there is the cutting edge."
For those concerned about preservation's future, Eastfield is a wealth of inspiration, though its own future is somewhat uncertain.
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Historic Eastfield may be preservation's best-known secret. To find your way to a summer workshop at the village, go to greatamericancraftsmen.org, where each spring Donald Carpentier posts the schedule. (The Web site has online registration.) Courses in 2007 included The American Tin Trade, 1750-1875; Tinsmithing; British Ceramics: The Development of Technical Genius in the British Ceramic Industry, 1650-1850; and Techniques for Dating Historic Structures. Workshops lasted between two and five days and cost between $285 and $475.
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