This feature introduces you to colleagues in museums around New England. It’s often too easy for colleagues to feel isolated in their institutions—we hope this feature will break down the distances a bit. We also hope that it will reinforce your own enthusiasm for your work and cause you to reflect on the positive contributions that you make.
In this edition of the NEMA Member Profile, we feature NEMA PAG Chair Jennifer DiCola Matos, Executive Director at Noah Webster House & West Hartford Historical Society.
Tell us a bit about your career path. How did you end up where you are now? Did you always intend to become a museum director? What got you into the field to start with?
My first museum experience was at around age 9 when my parents took me to Mount Vernon and Colonial Williamsburg. I found them to be very magical. Looking back, I think that's what really sparked the love I have for museums. I started out as an Art History major at the University of Saint Joseph and after beginning work part-time in the archives of The Connecticut Historical Society, I decided to double major in History. At that point, I became very smitten with American material culture. When choosing a graduate school, I decided that the general field of “American Civilization” at Brown University was the best fit for my interests. I certainly did not intend to be a museum director. Honestly, I thought wanted to be a Curator of an American Decorative Arts collection. But museum jobs can be hard to come by, as you well know! After graduation, I ended up returning to The Connecticut Historical Society in the Education department. From there, I worked for 5 years as the Director of Education at the Noah Webster House & West Hartford Historical Society. And so began my love affair with house museums. It was a great combination of my interests, being steeped in history but also filled with material culture. Historic houses have the power to transmit us to another time in a matter of seconds. When the opportunity arose to be the museum’s director, I couldn’t pass it up.
What's the most interesting or inspiring part of your current role?
The most interesting part of my role, as E.D. of a small museum, is the sheer variety. You know that part of your job description that says “Other duties as assigned”? I get a lot of that. Woodpeckers are pecking holes in the back of the house, someone wants to know if they are related to Noah Webster, the HVAC system is making a weird noise, a lady stops by with an object she found in the attic of her West Hartford home, we need to buy a new sandwich board because ours got hit by a snow plow… You know, just a day in the life of a small house museum / historical society.
The most inspiring part of my role is that I get to inspire people about Noah Webster and West Hartford history. I hope that the enthusiasm I have for the subject will be contagious and make other people think about Noah Webster in a new light, or take a second look at that landmark they drive by every day. It’s such a struggle, with so many competing sources of entertainment, to get people to realize that museums matter. But the challenge only makes the reward sweeter.
How do you and your museum team relate the story of the life of Noah Webster to today's audiences? Do you find that the kinds of stories you're choosing to tell have changed at all since you started working there?
In the last year, there's actually been more opportunity to talk about Noah Webster because of the whole #WordsMatter movement. Word usage and definitions have been getting a lot of media attention these days, so it's a perfect entrée for us to talk about Noah Webster and the American language he created for our country. His 1828 An American Dictionary of the English Language is the basis for today's Merriam-Webster Dictionary. I'd say for the past few years, we've really been working to emphasize Webster's role as a founding father of our nation. This is in part due to Joshua Kendall's biography called "Forgotten Founding Father." People associate Webster with the dictionary, sure. But they don't usually take it to the next step, which is that Webster actually created an American language to unite our fledgling nation. You could argue that Webster's most influential contribution to our country was his "Grammatical Institute of the English Language" - a.k.a. the "Blue-backed Speller" - which educated literally millions of people on how to be American. As our country was just winning its independence, Webster was already devising a plan to bring this disparate group of people together. He believed it started with the nation's children, so he created a schoolbook that would not only teach them how to read, write, and speak using an American version of English, but also to instill them with feelings of patriotism and love for their new country.
The Noah Webster House has a great social media presence; funny, articulate, and in frequent conversation with current events. How did you and your team decide on your social media 'voice?' How do you keep up with it with a comparatively small staff?
When I was hired in 2014, one of my directives from the Board of Trustees was to enhance the museum's social media output. We are very lucky to have a leadership team that sees the value in social media and supports the effort we put into it. We do have a small staff, but we've come up with a loose schedule for posting on our three social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram). I say 'loose' because the important thing with social media is to keep yourself open for opportunity. You might have a great post prepared for phonetic spelling, for example, but if everyone's talking about memes that day, you've got to find a way to get into the topic. We kind of organically came up with a 'voice' for our social media account that is based on our take on Noah Webster. We seem him as really smart, a little snarky, and maybe a bit of a self-proclaimed fuddy-duddy. We do a mix of 'Noah Webster' type posts with general history / word knowledge and West Hartford-based trivia.
Your museum is very involved with the rest of the West Hartford community, especially through programs and events. Are there any collaborative projects or ongoing partnerships that you're particularly proud of? Any lessons learned that you want to share?
We’re very fortunate to have our museum located within West Hartford, CT. It’s a robust town of over 60,000 people and has a real sense of community. Our museum has a dual mission. We preserve the birthplace of Noah Webster, but we’re also a repository for the history of West Hartford, the community that molded Noah Webster’s future and is still thriving over 250 years later. In our programs and events, we always try to engage our community and provide them with opportunities to connect with their history and heritage. And we try to do that in fun and unexpected ways. A new and completely unorthodox partnership we established three years ago was with West Hartford’s Harvest family of stores including Harvest Wine & Spirits and the Harvest Country Store. This year will be the 3rd Annual Noah Webster Real Ale Harvest Fest that we put on together. Breweries are invited to participate in the fest by creating unique casks of real ale for the event. The only catch is that they have to use an ingredient from Webster’s 18th-century garden. We have a team of judges that names one brewery the Cask Champion, and there’s also a Taster’s Choice Award. We’ve had many takeaways from this collaboration, but I would say the biggest has been to know when to ask for help. My staff and I – we’re history people and word nerds. We’re not beer experts. But the managing partners of the Harvest family – they know beer and what people who like beer are looking for. By working together, we were able to come up with a really unique event that I hope will give it some staying power.
Where do you see your museum heading in the next five years?
Funny you should mention that, because we’re starting work on a new Strategic Plan this fall. In the next 5 years, I would like the museum to catapult Noah Webster into the national spotlight. He’s really been under-appreciated as one of the nation’s founding fathers. He is not recognized for his political work (though he made several contributions to our nation’s founding government), so he doesn’t get as much notice as the other founding fathers. However, I would argue that what Noah Webster did has more of a lasting impact in terms of how it affects our everyday lives. The language we use, the terms we use to describe what we see and experience every day, these are words that Webster defined for us. They are such a part of our everyday life that we take them for granted. Similarly, the legacy of Webster’s Blue-backed Speller also continues to affect us. The feelings of patriotism we are raised with, the love of one’s country, these are things that are ingrained in us as children. We don’t stop to think – whose idea was it to teach children about our country, its history, language, and morals?
What's on your personal museum wish list? (places to see, people to meet, projects to do?)
My favorite museums in the U.S. continue to be Mount Vernon and Colonial Williamsburg, so anytime I have a chance to visit them, I’m a happy girl. I would love to venture farther afield to see some of the big Gilded Age mansions, like the Biltmore. And I have a thing for castles. I’ve visited Neuschwanstein, Versailles, Chillon on Lake Geneva, and Windsor Castle. One day, I hope to get back to Europe for a castle-themed tour.