 So, good evening, everyone, and welcome. For those of you whom I've not yet met, I'm Pat Parazzini, Director of Alumni Engagement, Regional Chapter Development for Fairfield University, and I am so thrilled to be able to bring this event to you via Zoom. In my position here at the university, I have the pleasure of working with alumni from across the country, coordinating with chapter leaders, and volunteers to host events that keep alumni and parents connected to and engaged with Fairfield. We have nine regional chapters from Boston to Washington, D.C. alphabetically, and from Boston to San Francisco geographically. So, isn't this the perfect day to host this event? It's a snowy evening here in New England, and we have the ability to travel from the comfort of our homes. A couple of reminders, if you would, please make sure your audio capabilities are turned off, and if you should have any questions during the presentation, feel free to use the chat function, and our guest docent will answer all questions at the end of the presentation. So, grab your bug of hot cocoa, get comfortable, and enjoy. Before introducing our guest docent, I'd like to share with you all a little background on the genesis of this event. It was the brainchild of the Fairfield-Westchester County's alumni chapter, our local chapter, and specifically, chapter leader Tom Clements, class of 2009. Tom was a student athlete during his time at Fairfield, a member of the men's soccer team, and has been the communications chair for the chapter since 2018. So, I'd like to pass the baton to Tom to introduce our docent for this virtual tour. Tom, take it away. Thanks very much, Pat. Well, good evening, everybody, and thank you for taking the time to join us for this special tour of several historic New England locations. I'd like to introduce you to our speaker this evening, Melinda Huff. Melinda serves as the museum operations manager at Historic New England and oversees the organization's day-to-day museum and tour operations. With over 25 years in the museum field, she's held curatorial and management positions at Harvard University Art Museums to replace Historic House and Garden in Washington, D.C. and Winterthur Museum in Delaware. Melinda's been with Historic New England for 13 years collectively, serving as collections manager from 1995 to 2000 and in her present role since 2012. She holds an MA in art history from Tufts University and a BA from the University of Delaware. She lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts, with her husband, 10-year-old son, and dog, Duke. So without further ado, take it away, Melinda. Thank you. Thank you so much for inviting me. Can everybody hear me? Yeah? Great. Thank you so much for inviting me to speak with you tonight. It's a pleasure to be able to bring history and beauty into your lives in a cold and snowy night. I assume that you've signed up for this session because you have an interest or affinity in the history of New England, its buildings, its landscapes, its people, and its objects. And so for that, too, I thank you. Our work at Historic New England wouldn't be possible without the interest and support of people who share our collective interests. And while I'm virtually here with you tonight, I know we'll be able to share all of these things in person again soon. Historic New England was founded as SBNEA, wait for this long, mouthful society for the preservation of New England antiquities in 1910. And our mission is to share our home's open space collection and stories from the past through today. We are the oldest and largest regional heritage organization in the nation. While I'm going to highlight several of our museum properties tonight, I did want to give you a sense of the work we do as an organization with a glimpse at our five program areas. So the first is homes, farms, and landscapes. And that's what mainly I'm going to be talking to you about tonight. We have 37 historic site attractions in five New England states, nothing yet in Vermont. So if anybody knows of a great house with a great endowment, we'd love to talk to you with great collections. We have house museums and farms and 1284 acres of farmland, fields, forests, and garden. We do house tours, public and private, public programs, function rentals, land conservation and open space for the enjoyment of all. And of course we are a membership organization and I'll put the URL up at the end if anybody's interested in joining us as a member. We'd love to have you as a member or a visitor at our sites or at a public program. We also have an arm of community engagement and leadership. These are partners that partnerships that are designed to capture history as it happens. So on your screen here you see on the left hand side, we've just recently in the past couple of years finished up a project on the history of the hay market market in downtown Boston. We've worked on a project recently on immigration in Haverhill, Massachusetts, and then we also have a strong internship and volunteer program that you can see on the right. We collect artifacts, archives, archival material and stories. So we have over 123,000 household objects in our collection and over 1.5 million archival documents that's photographs, you know, manuscripts, architectural plans and drawings. They capture life in the region from the 17th century to today. We have a vibrant school and youth program, programs to go in the classroom, home school programs, summer camps and lots of partnerships with local schools. Unfortunately we haven't seen many kids on our site recently but we hope that will change soon. Unfortunately if any of you own a historic house, you may be familiar with the process of thinking about how to protect the features, the historic features of your historic home. And we have an easement program. It's one of the only ones of its kind in the country and our easement program helps homeowners identify features like even a stone wall or a staircase, a fireplace that might need to be protected from further alterations or neglect and the easement does not prevent future sales leases or estate planning but it does help you to protect important historic features in your home. And then finally our last arm is our preservation services. So in addition to caring for our own buildings, using best practices, we provide outreach to homeowners through historic homeowner consulting, preservation intervention strategy. We have a whole list of white papers on our website so if you're looking for information about replacing windows or working on certain aspects of your home, please check out our website section on the white papers. So with that I just wanted to give you a little bit of background of what Historic New England does, who we are in addition to Operating Historic House Museums. Now I mentioned that I am the Museum Operations Manager, which means I oversee the day-to-day management at all 37 sites and that means my job is to make sure that you have an excellent tour when you come to our site but also that you can find the restroom, that your ticketing process is smooth and so the big picture from soup to nuts, when you step on our property we want you to have a great time and enjoy your experience. So let's start the tour. I'm going to go through a handful of properties today. Not all 37, we'd be here all night but it's some of my favorites actually and I'm trying to pick geographic, some geographic variety, date variety and also the type of property that might be interesting for you all to visit. Now this is our only Connecticut property, Rosen Cottage is in the quiet corner in Woodstock, Connecticut, built in 1846 in the Gothic Revival style and you can see it down, the house itself is in kind of the lower portion of the center of the slide. It was built, it's the summer home of silk merchant Henry Chandler Bowen and his wife Lucy Tappen and the entire complex with a boxwood part hair garden and ice house, the garden house and carriage barn reflects the principles of writer and designer Andrew Jackson Downing who was kind of the Martha Stewart of his day. He stressed practicality along with the picturesque and offered detailed instructions on room function, sanitation and landscaping. A house like Rosen Cottage was a conscious effort to convey status and especially with the Gothic Revival, I think looks like a church, the morality of the people who lived inside. And here's a facade view. You might notice the color of the house, that might be the first thing that stands out for you. It's known locally as just as the pink house and its unorthodox color has been a distinguishing character since the home's completion. In 1883, the New York Times called the color, quote, a brilliant crushed strawberry. Historic New England's paint analysis determined the house has been 13 different colors, all of them a shade of pink since it was built in 1846. The current color is called coral bronze and it is the color of the house was painted in the 1880s. So we've chosen coral bronze to be consistent with the interior of the cottage, which I'm going to show you in a minute, which reflects the redecoration of the house in the 1880s. By the way, the Bowens had 10 children. So beginning in 1870, the largest Fourth of July celebrations in the United States were held at Rosen Cottage. Four United States presidents visited Bowen's summer home as his guest and speakers for these celebrations. Ulysses S. Grant, Benjamin Harrison, Rutherford B. Hayes, and William McKinley, and other prominent visitors included nearby residents Henry Ward Beecher, Julia Ward Howe, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. The parlors at Rosen Cottage were used for formal entertainments and informal family gatherings and included cousin parties, dinner parties, tea parties. As you can see here, the house is adorned with gothic revival furniture, with trefoil arches, stained glass. So you kind of get the idea of the themes that they're going for. Design elements that you might find in a gothic church. The 1880s wall coverings in the house, in the public spaces, are type known as Lincrusta, and it was introduced by Frederick Walton in England in 1877. So Lincrusta, it's wallpaper, but it's actually has a three dimensional quality. It's produced by pressing a mixture of wood pulp and linseed oil into fabric or paper backing to create a raised texture. So it's quite luxurious and would have been luxurious in its day. Now over time, this has been a major conservation project for us to get these wallpapers and keep them in good shape, because over time the wood pulp degrades the finishes dull. And this is, Rosen Cottage is one of the only places in the world where you can see this paper intact in its original setting as it was originally hung. The Parterre gardens at Rosen Cottage are an integral part of the house as well in keeping with Downing's ideas of the relationship of landscape and the architecture. Downing and others believe that just the site of a properly landscaped gardens could elevate public taste and morals. A Parterre garden, he believes, should have irregular curving beds. Edges should be marked distinctly with boxwood, which you can see there. Those boxes are laid out in boxwood. The Parterres are laid out in boxwood. And currently, the Parterre garden contains 21 flower beds with more than 4,000 annuals that are planted every year. And this looks like it's at the end of the summer, so you can't quite see the entire pop of color that exists. One of my favorite spaces at Historic New England is this space at Rosen Cottage. This is a bowling alley built in 1846. It's certainly not the first of its kind in the country, but it's the oldest one that remains. Our alley is a little over 53 feet long, 10 feet shorter than today's standard bowling alley. And it was a 10-pin bowling alley, which was very popular in the 1840s. And it replaced nine-pin bowling in 1841, which was banned in Connecticut because of its association with gambling and drinking. Mr. Bowen of Rosen Cottage was a strict teetotaler and did not abide gambling or smoking in his house. So it became nine-pin. The 10-pin replaced nine-pin bowling. That's Yankee ingenuity, I think. They just added another pin to get around the law. So we're going to leave Rosen Cottage now, and we're going to go to Casey Farm. So that's southeast of the quiet corner of Connecticut. And you might be familiar with Casey Farm or Sounders Town and Jamestown, Rhode Island, because they're on the way to Newport. And I put this property in our slideshow not for its value as a historic home visit, but for its value as a visit of the farm itself as a landscape and the historic farm buildings. The main house was built around 1750. But in fact, the property was owned by the Casey family from 1702. So it's more than 300 acres. It stretches from Narragansett Bay. And there are 10 miles of stone walls, many of which are five feet high. And they divide the field areas of Casey Farm. So you imagine all of this maintenance. It's an incredible maintenance job just to keep the stone walls intact every year. It's a working organic farm. And we host the coastal growers market every Saturday in from May to October. There's also a community supported agriculture program with over 200 families as its members. And there are annual seedling and plant sales. So if you're ever on your way to Newport on a Saturday, I highly recommend stopping in at Casey Farms. There are trails you can hike. And it's quite a peaceful and different experience from touring our houses. This is a mentioned our school program. And I wanted to give a big shout out to our project program that's huge in Rhode Island. Students learn about bird lifecycle of the endangered Dominique chicken breed, which is raised at the farm. And farm educator goes into the classroom, takes a clutch of eggs. Three weeks later, the eggs hatch in the classroom. The eggs go back to Casey Farm. And then the students go and visit their chickens on site a few weeks after that. So it's a great way for students to learn about free range chicken and farming on one of the oldest farms in Rhode Island. We do a wonderful farm to table fundraiser there every year. And we have events, weddings, and the like that you could rent the site for. And in some ways, very little has changed over the centuries at Casey Farm. Indigenous people were drawn to this fertile strip between the Bay and River because of the abundant food source. The same 300 acres that were surveyed in 1652 for the Casey family are the same farmer's work today. It's really an amazing preservation story, land preservation story. Continuity was maintained by eight generations of ownership of the one family from 1702 until historic New England acquired the property in 1955. Moving a little farther north, we have the Eustis estate, which is built in 1878. It's in Milton, Massachusetts. So Metro Boston area of Massachusetts. It is our most newly acquired property in the aesthetic style. Not what's known as this aesthetic style. It's designed by renowned Boston architect William Ralph Everson. It sits on 80 acres of picturesque landscape at the base of the Blue Hills. And in fact, the adjacent Blue Hills reservation was once part of the Eustis estate as well. It's full of stunning intact architectural design and details, which I'm going to show you in a minute. And it's a historic site unlike any other in the greater Boston area. I mentioned it was occupied by the Eustis family, but it was occupied by the family from the time it was constructed until the time we acquired the property. And I think we acquired it in 2013. And we opened it to the public in 2015. So we took about two years to get the house ready. The Eustis family had occupied the house up until that time. They only really painted the walls. They did very little. So what we were able to do in terms of paint analysis and research, we were able to uncover all these amazing finishes and replicate all these amazing finishes that you see. I'll talk about them in a minute. But this is the living halls. So it was the first impressions visitors had of this young couple's home. And this was their starter home. This was built for WEC Eustis and his wife, Edith. They had two twin boys and a daughter, Mary. And this was their starter and final home, I have to say. But guests would enter through the vestibule. That's the upper picture with the stained glass, where they would encounter a pair of dramatic stained glass windows, colorful yet obscuring the view into the hall behind. And once inside the hall, visitors were impressed by this imposing fireplace. So that's the bottom slide. It always is amazing to me. I have to go up and touch it every time. But this is molded terracotta on the bottom part of the fireplace. And it's set behind an arch that's covered in gold leaf. So we know that was the treatment, the paint treatment that the Eustises had. The richly carved staircase, which you can see in the slide, stores three stories up. So if you were standing at the base of the staircase and you looked up, it went up all three stories. Opposite the front doors, plants from the estate greenhouse would have thrived in the large windows. Oh, sorry, definitely not the Eustis estate. OK. The dining room was restored to its 1870s decorative scheme. Gold paint applied to textured walls so they would take a sand mixture for the wall color and mix it into the paint and then cover it over with a gold kind of mica material. It really would make, you can imagine, just a glittering fact with the gas light that was in the gas chandelier that's over the dining room table. And the ceiling also had a metallic finish of mica in it as well. So it really must have been grand to sit in an evening entertainment in the Eustis estate dining room. Unlike many of our properties that Eustis estate, we got a handful of furnishings. So we were able to supplement those furnishings with period pieces. And I'll talk about that in a minute, how we were managing that as a museum. Just lastly, the tiles for those ceramic nerds in the audience. The tiles on the dining room fireplace were produced by Jay and J.G. Low Company of Chelsea. They're a famous kind of arts and crafts or aesthetic style ceramic company in Chelsea, Massachusetts. And of course, one of everybody's favorite space in the house is the service area. We like to think of it as our own little Downton Abbey here. The service area with its coal fire range and water heater to the right of it was equipped with it was designed for practicality and to be carefully hidden from public view. So the Eustis visitors never got to see these areas. But if you are a visitor, you do get to see it. You also see the call bell system and the speaker system in the slide below. So our approach at the Eustis estate has been one of be our guest. So I mentioned we put in reproduction furnishings in much of the house. You can go to the house and sit on the furniture. Well, in non-COVID times, let's say that. We've had to make some changes in the last several, the last year. But you can go to the property, sit on some of the furnishings, and really take your time through by using our web app. And you can zoom in on all the furnishings in the room. It gives you the history of the site. And you can even go to it from the comfort of your own home at Eustis.estate. So that was really for us as an organization, a seminal moment when we said, we're not going to make people wear shoe covers and say, don't touch things. We want people to enjoy, sit down. You can go to the library, pull books off the shelf and read them. You can spend the whole day there, in fact. And it's been very popular. So now we're moving on to the Gropius House. Very different aesthetic. So I hope I always run into people who say, oh, modern architecture isn't my thing. And I say, come for a tour of the Gropius House. We'll change your mind or at least get you to appreciate the Gropius House and modern architecture. Built in 1938, it's located in Lincoln, Massachusetts. It's the second most visited property that we own, by the way. So people come from all around the world to visit. They take a true trip to Pilgrimage to see the Gropius House. It's the home of architect Walter Gropius and built for his family when he and his wife, Issa, and his daughter, Adi, moved to the United States from Germany. Walter Gropius was the founder of the German design school known as the Bauhaus and was one of the most influential architects of the 20th century. And he came to be the head of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, also called the GSD for short. The house is modest in scale. People are always interested that it seems so small when they go inside. But it was a family of three. It was the home of a family of three. And keeping with the Bauhaus philosophy, every aspect of the house and the landscape was planned for maximum efficiency and simplicity. Gropius House combined traditional elements of New England architecture. So there's batten wood panels or batten wood boarding on the outside of the house. Brick and fieldstone is part of the patio system. But there is also the use of innovative materials like glass block, acoustical plaster, chrome banisters, and the latest technology and fixtures. And one of the things visitors like the most is when they walk in, it feels like the Gropius is just walked out of the house. It's filled with families' possessions that include an important furniture collection designed by Marcel Breuer. And I'll show you a few of those pieces. Here's Walter Gropius in about 1960 in a photograph of him on the stair hall. Chrome banister, cork floors, kind of interesting use. And glass block. You can see the glass block from the inside. It provides light, but it also provides privacy as well. And an interesting kind of component we talked about combining traditional elements of New England architecture. This is a center hall plan. It's just not the same center hall plan that you would find in a, it's not the same center hall staircase that you'd find in a colonial house, but still a center hall staircase. One of my favorite rooms in the whole of historic New England is this tiny, tiny office, although if I had it today and I had to work next to my husband during the Zoom culture, I think I might, you know, I don't think it might, I don't think it would be my favorite room anymore, but this is a Marcel Breuer designed desk. It was designed for Issa and Walter Gropius. It was a tandem decks desk and it was specifically designed to be equitably divided for Issa and Walter Gropius. So I don't know if you can see that there's up in the kind of left hand corner by the curtains. There's a hint of the spiral staircase on the outside and I'm just gonna go back. So the spiral staircase on the outside of the house that you see there leads up to Walter Gropius's 13 year old daughter's room, Ati. Ati had her own entrance to her room, which was very liberating. Must have been for a 13 year old teenager, but you do notice that he could see everything, they could see everything from the outside of the house as she would enter from, and they could see from their office. And you can see all these little artifacts of the Gropius's life, just as we live with our artifacts on our desk today. And I'll tell you a little bit more about that in a minute, whoops. This is the living room. So the living room has an open plan and very large windows. Again, think about how revolutionary this must have been to use a huge plate glass window in a house in 1938, really groundbreaking in a lot of ways. And it really invited nature in. Most of the furniture, by the way in this room is Marcel Breuer furniture designed by him. And as I mentioned at the Eustis estate, there are certain areas where guests can make themselves at home. But so here at Gropius house too, you can see our visitor enjoying sitting on Walter Gropius's reproduction lounge. This is not actually his chair, but you can source this furniture today. And here's a visitor, they're Gropius groupies who come from all over the world to see his home and they can't believe they're actually sitting in his living room, lots of Instagram pages from Gropius's living room. So the dining room is also an open space. And here's the dining room. It's right off the living room, but it can be made more private by using the curtains that you can see kind of on the edge of the photographs. Gropius introduced theatrical and dramatic lighting over the table. Again, things that we take a little bit more for granted because we have lots of options for our lighting today, but on the picture on the right, that pinprick light was not something you could commercially buy for a home setting that was more for an industrial use. And it was very innovative Gropius. It would have been very evocative to have your friends sitting around that table and being picked out in the light. And in fact, Walter Gropius entertained a lot and a lot of people that a lot of famous artists, musicians, intellectuals in his time. And then the kitchen, the kitchen is a small but functional space here, access through a door in the dining room, not a huge kitchen with the center island, very functional again. And one of the great things about Gropius house is we know exactly with absolute certainty where every item was supposed to be right down to those hanging pot holders above the stove because the Gropius's daughter, Adi, who recently two or three years ago now has passed away, but she's been with us on the journey of the Gropius house since we acquired it in 1982. And she was 13 when she moved in the house. She has photographs, she shared all of her knowledge with us and helped us really recreate the look down to all of the dish towels that the family had, which is really amazing that we've had from that relationship with her and still continue with her daughter, Adi's daughter today. Okay, we're moving north, North Shore of Massachusetts, Blaster, Boe Port. I put 1907 as a date, but that's really when the house starts to become itself. It spans over a period of almost 30 years until its owner, Henry Davis Sleeper, dies in 1934. This is actually our most highly visited property. And Sleeper was an interior designer. He was a friend of Isabella Stewart Gardner, Celia Boe, A.Pia Andrew. It sits on Eastern Point, which is an exclusive neighborhood of Gloucester, overlooking Gloucester Harbor. And this picture really doesn't give it justice, but it is a beautiful estate and it's even more beautiful to be able to sit on the terrace at Boe Port and sit and look out over Gloucester Harbor. One of the great things about Boe Port is that Sleeper as an interior designer is putting together these objects in a way that is stunning using light and color and arrangement and really making the room come together. And one of the greatest honors I have as one of the things I do every year is I help to open the house because there's lots of dusting and cobwebs and everything that we have to clear away to get the house ready to be open. But I get to dust all the objects in this room every year and I love doing it because you can pick the objects up. If you as a visitor can't necessarily do this, but if we're cleaning the objects, you can. And one of Sleeper's tenants was an object doesn't have to be perfect. So some of these objects have cracks or chips in them, but he didn't care about that. He wanted the pieces to come together in an arrangement for you to see the overall effect. So this is one of five dining rooms in the house. He entertained a lot and it would often match the menu to the dining room. This is the only room with white walls too in the house. I call your attention to the window which could be raised and lowered. So it would move down into the sash and you would be sitting on top of Gloucester Harbor while you're eating dinner. Now what is fascinating that we've discovered in the last year in doing some work that this window was installed around 1917 or 1918, it coalesces with the interest in ventilation with the Spanish flu. So this is just something that, you know, this history repeats itself and is informing us with our interest in ventilation these days. We also recently held a fundraising dinner which was kind of fun in this room as well. We didn't use Henry Sleeper's china however. When you exit the golden step room, you go immediately into another dining room and this is now, no surprise, called the octagon room. Again, using shape and color and repeating pattern to produce a specific effect. The room is in octagon shape, the rug is octagon, the doorknob is octagon, the table is octagon. So really, again, the repetition of shape and color really does play out here in Sleeper's aesthetic as it does here in the amber glass display in the house. Another one of my very favorite rooms in the house is the belfry chamber which is reached by a staircase that's hidden staircase. Everybody loves hidden staircases, right? So one of the things Sleeper was very concerned about was having his wallpaper match up in just the right places. So not only did he pick out the wallpaper repeat to design to go with the aesthetic of the room but he hand cut all of these shapes and put them in the, adhered them in just the right space to get the effect he was looking for. Maybe the bird over here and the tree branch climbing up the wall. And then finally, the last room in this house is the golden, the China trade room. And when Sleeper died in 1934, we're lucky that the Helena Woolworth McCann, Woolworth of the Woolworth fortune, and her husband Charles purchased the property. They didn't change very much at all. They understood Sleeper's aesthetic. And I think it takes a really special person not to want to move stuff around in your house once you move in. They bought the house with all the furnishings and they only made minor changes to this China trade room, which included the spectacular wallpaper which is hand painted Chinese wallpaper from the 18th century made in Philadelphia for Patriot Robert Morris. And Morris never used the wallpaper. Sleeper discovered it in an attic in Marblehead and he installed it at Bo-Port. And so you can see his all kinds of scenes of the China trade, the Canton, the tea making and China dishes making at all the Hongs. It inspired a very similar room at Winniter Museum in Delaware and influential to wealthy collectors like Henry Francis Bonn. And then the last property I'm gonna talk about, oh, this is Bo-Port. This is the terrace. You can get married on the terrace if you'd like. So for it. The last property I'm gonna talk about is special to my heart. It's the Lyman Estate greenhouses begun being built in 1798. It is the oldest greenhouses intact in America. And you can imagine greenhouses are really kind of ephemeral because they're made out of glass, right? But we are so lucky at historic New England to have these intact greenhouses that are, it's a huge sprawling complex and you can go in and on a day like today or tomorrow or whenever the snow stops falling, you can go in, take in, be drenched by the smells, the sights of the greenhouse. There are historic plants like the grapes, they're what the name of the grapes are, green musket grapes that are growing. Those are historic plants. They're very popular table grape. We also grow black Hamburg grapes, which are a dark purple black variety that has a complex wine-like taste and they still produce fruit and we taste them every once in a while. And so there are three main greenhouses that you can visit. This is the Grape House and that was built in beginning in 1804. There's the Camellia House, which if you go into the Camellia House today, the Camellias are just getting ready to bloom, usher into bloom between late January and middle of March, this is their time. And this greenhouse was built about 1840 for the burgeoning Camellia interest that was being developed by horticulturalists in New England, including the Lyman family. The Lyman Estate Greenhouses has one of the few historic collections in fact, in existence today. And it's really just a true escape if you're ever looking for a way to get away in the middle of winter, it's like going to Florida, because it's humid, it's hot. Now, this year because of COVID, it's different because we're only allowing six people in the greenhouse at one time. But so maybe next year, we'll see us. And here is also our orchid house and house plants. We have a selection of plants for you to buy as well. And our staff horticulturalist, Lynn Ackerman is an expert, she's been there 31 years. It's not like going to Home Depot and picking out plants, you have somebody there who can really give you expert advice on the plant materials. And we also try to buy very unique things. It's really just a special experience to be able to enter a greenhouse that is just so old. And I wanted to end here with a few notes on how we've been able to deal in the COVID and how this has changed our operations. And really, I think in some ways made us a stronger organization. So we started out by opening our landscapes to the public first of course, because that's what we could do. But this has really prompted us to do more outdoor concerts and movies, partnership with our local theaters for outdoor performances, yoga, garden tours, arts and crafts festivals. We have a really high quality arts and crafts festival at Rosen Cottage in fact, in October if you're ever interested. And I told our festival coordinator today, I said, you've got to get a vendor that sells those mittens like Bernie Sanders has, you know. So, but anyway, they're really nice quality decorative and artisan products that we sell. And we were able to run those fairly well with limited capacity in the COVID but we really learned a lot from doing the programs in the time of COVID. We also were able to do summer camps and we are going to do summer camps again this year. So we learned how to do things safely and we'll do it again this year. We were able to open six houses in July. We also will be able hopefully to open many more houses beginning in June of this year. And our house tours were all done under strict COVID protocols, masks, social distancing, four to six people per tour pre book ticketing which we hadn't ever done before. So that was a challenge for us that we needed to, it was a problem, we knew we needed to solve it and this helped to accelerate how we were going to solve that problem for the future. We, you know, altered our tour route. So we're not going in the same way we came, not going out the same way we came in and we stepped up our cleaning and you can see the visitors in the bottom right of the Gropius house socially distanced and still able to take a tour. And then at the greenhouse, well, a greenhouse in a humid and not very much air circulation, at least for people, there's plenty for the plants, but we had to move all of our sales outside. And I have to say we had the record number of sales because people just wanted to have greenery and living things around them, I think. It was a really inspiring thing to see so many people coming out for our sales. Again, people still get married, recovered or no. And so we've pivoted to micro ceremonies, so 10 people or less, or depending on state restrictions, smaller wedding parties as restrictions allow. So we've still been able to continue on with some of these very essential elements for us as an organization, because if we weren't able to have the income from functions, that would be pretty devastating for us. And then my favorite outcome of the COVID is the Bow Port, bring your own picnics. And you can see these people, well, boy, they really came in style. You can rent the terrace at Bow Port for $250 and bring your friends in social distance and just really have a private, it's like you own Bow Port. You sit out on the terrace and enjoy your picnic with your friends. And so we are gonna continue that. That has definitely been a real upside. And then lastly, we were the recipients of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. And we were able to create six virtual experiences. And I hope you can see my screen. I'm gonna click into a virtual tour of Rosen Cottage. Bear with me while it loads. And you can go on our website, just go on our main page and you can go in and enter the house and tour all the different rooms in the house. And it's a really, it's called Matterport Technology. And it's really, this was something we never would have been able to do on the timeline that we were able to do it given the COVID. So, whoops, they wanna... So I just wanted to throw that up there as an opportunity for you when we go away tonight for you to go to our website and have a look and maybe experience some of these houses and properties in even more depth. We also have some upcoming virtual programs. I know you all are doing your own virtual programs with Fairfield, but please have a look at our options on historicnewengland.org and we hope to see you soon. Melinda, thank you so much. I will share, I would say we recorded this, but I will also share historicnewengland.org with the group as well. So that was fantastic. Thank you very, very much. I think I said this to you. Our Boston chapter went up to Gropius House in May of 2016 before my coming over to alumni relations. So I look forward to the day when we can schedule another one of the tours at one of your landmark locations. So this was terrific. I'm gonna ask everybody to unmute themselves and give Melinda a round of applause, because that was great. Okay. Thank you. And if anybody has any, if you wanna shoot me an email or happy to answer any questions. I will share this last screen with them. That'd be great. Thank you. Thank you, Melinda. Thank you. This was great. Thank you. Very informative. Thank you so much. And before we leave today, so this is being recorded, so it's gonna be out on our university YouTube channel. But before we leave, I'd like to encourage you all to visit our website to learn about other online experiences throughout the university. It's www.fairfield.edu forward slash alumni events. Again, I wanna thank you all for attending. I so enjoy hearing from alumni and parents. So please keep in touch. I look forward to seeing you all again soon, hopefully in person. But until then, be well, stay safe. Thank you. And go Stags. Thank you all. Go Stags. Thank you. Love you. Be well. Bye bye. Thank you. Thank you. Melinda, we had somebody from Greece. Just saw that. That's exciting. I can put that in my report.