Five Questions With: Marjory Gomez O’Toole

Marjory Gomez O’Toole has been managing director of the Little Compton Historical Society since 2006. Four years ago, she returned to Brown University, where she earned an undergraduate degree in biology, as a part-time Master’s degree student at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities & Cultural Heritage. Here she addresses the programming and fund-raising work of the nonprofit she leads.

PBN: What is the historical society’s primary mission and how do you fulfill it?
O’TOOLE:
The Little Compton Historical Society’s mission is to preserve and share the history of our town for the benefit of the public. Two of the most important ways we do that are, first, by operating the Wilbor House Museum and, second, by creating a new special exhibition each year.
The Wilbor House Museum is an authentically furnished historic house museum. It displays three time periods, 1690, 1740 and 1860 and is a wonderful window into the lives of an ordinary Little Compton farming family, or for that matter an ordinary New England farming family.
Our special exhibitions change each year and are an important reason people visit us year after year. This year, we are focused on Little Compton’s historic houses. The house and special exhibition are open for tours Thursday through Sunday from 1 to 5 p.m. until Labor Day and then on Saturday and Sunday at the same time through Columbus Day. The business office is open year round.

PBN: The 2015 Historic House Tour is your biggest fund raiser. Tell us what’s different this time around.
O’TOOLE:
We offer a Historic House Tour just once every five years. It is our largest program as well as our largest fund-raising effort. This year is very different because for the first time we have embraced “Historic Houses” as our theme for the whole year and have invested a great deal of time researching the history of each of the nine houses on the tour: the Wilbor House and eight private homes. A small team of local researchers did the work throughout the fall and winter and used the information they discovered to collaboratively write a book containing the house histories.
The book is entitled “The Stories Houses Tell: A Collection of Little Compton House Histories,” and I’m very proud of the finished product. The research team was committed to going far beyond a simple chain of ownership to really try to understand the lives of the people who lived in these houses and how they fit into the world around them.
The stories in the book focus on the role of women and children, unmarried adults, people with disabilities, enslaved people, indentured servants, immigrants and tenants as well as male property owners. It also delves into the Little Compton custom of repurposing buildings – like one-room school houses and army barracks – into private homes.

PBN: How much money do you hope to raise and what will it go toward?
O’TOOLE:
We hope to raise $30,000 from the tour. The money will go toward our efforts to preserve the historic buildings on our museum campus and to continue to educate the public with new exhibits and publications. We are promoting the tour locally with posters and newsletters, but really hope to reach a wider audience through the local press and social media.
Traditionally, people travel from all over New England to take part in our house tours, which have been taking place since the 1950s. This year it should be so much easier to connect with people because of improved technology. The last time we did a tour five years ago, we did not even have a credit card machine. Now people can purchase tickets easily over the phone or on our website: www.littlecompton.org.

- Advertisement -

PBN: How many members and volunteers does the historical society have and how are you growing these numbers?
O’TOOLE:
The Historical Society has approximately 600 memberships, many of which are for couples or families, so we estimate that we have 1,500 members. That is a great number, considering Little Compton’s year-round population is less than 4,000 people. In addition to having year-round residents as members, many of our members are part-time residents with Little Compton roots that go back generations. Many of our members live quite far away, even internationally, but have ancestral links to the community and want to stay connected.
We have a core of 25 to 30 very hard-working, dedicated volunteers, but for special occasions like our Family Day celebration at the start of the summer or for the House Tour, we will have dozens more volunteers stepping up and helping out for the day. We will have approximately 100 volunteers assisting with the House Tour.
We consistently try to grow our audience by offering exhibits, tours, programs and publications that explore different aspects of our history – neighborhoods, artists, immigrants, pasttimes. There is always a new topic to explore.

PBN: The society will create a major special exhibition and publication exploring the enslavement and forced indenture of Little Compton residents from the end of the 17th century to the beginning of the 19th century using, a $10,000 grant from the Rhode Island Foundation. How and when will you pursue this?
O’TOOLE:
Next year’s exhibition on slavery and forced indenture is a perfect example of my public humanities coursework at Brown and my community work in Little Compton coming together. In the spring of 2014, I took a course on slavery in the Atlantic World with Dr. Linford Fisher and this spring I completed a course on the Ethno-history of New England Native Americans with Dr. Jason Mancini. Both professors encouraged me to return to Little Compton’s primary source records dating back to the 1600s to try and gain a better understanding of slavery and indenture in Little Compton. My early 20th century predecessor at the historical society, Benjamin Franklin Wilbour, created a list of 44 “Negros and Indians” in Little Compton that I found an intriguing place to start. After about six months of research, I had developed a list of about 250 enslaved and forcibly indentured white, black and Native people living and working in our community from the 1670s to the 1820s.
I was so moved by the personal stories of these enslaved people as they slowly emerged from the records, piece by piece, that I continued the research on my own with the help of a small grant from the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities. Now, the historical society has embraced the topic, and it will be our theme for next year with a new exhibition and a publication.
The Rhode Island Foundation is a generous supporter, and we hope to attract others. I also hope to convince people with connections to Little Compton to share their personal family documents that may shed more light on the subject. One of my main goals is to connect with the living descendants of people once enslaved in Little Compton. Though no local historian ever denied that slavery took place in Little Compton, it was often downplayed as a lesser kind of slavery than one would find in the American South or even in South County, Rhode Island. The evidence does not support that theory. Yes, on average, local slave owners may have owned smaller numbers of people, but their enslavement was just as binding and just as dehumanizing as anywhere else. The historical society and I are very eager to tell their stories as best we can.

No posts to display