and he's been overseeing it for over a year and i can tell you she's born and bred bred to glean from this area she knows it will she was a keep both on the nassau street side of the road and on the right hand side of the road at the university and then here she is i think we're pretty lucky but it is you tell us a little bit about i can give a little history and because i love the historical s remember when it was first the library and that recent for a very long and before we knew i you all took over and made it very much alive and wonderful so tell us a little bit about how you've moved down the lane over into the cornfield and there you are at the update farms did yes there were just two miles from or a little over two miles from where we used to be on nasa street so you're right we were in being brick house which is that brick georgian historic house right next to the garden theatre the garden theater is actually named the garden because it's in the location of the old kitchen garden of that eighteenth century home so it used to be that that house was not surrounded like buildings like it is today it's one of the earliest buildings on that the street certainly one of the earliest buildings that still on its original foundations so princeton had a long history of moving historic homes there were over two hundred homes in princeton that were moved from one one location to another either within the town or from other places into town there were people who had entire businesses that employing people moving buildings we have some wonderful historic images of houses being rolled on logs down and i want treat we had one of the corner of her street really would just more of us i mean they moved in on logs and connected to power lines and plumbing it was much easier to just sort of pick up a house and move it it wasn't really linked to anything specific on that lot so bainbridge house is actually pretty special that it it's sort of untouched in that one  spot and it we were very lucky to be there for fifty years and to interpret that site but you're right it was a small building and we had the opportunity to purchase the optic farms d directly from the object family when sarah and stanley uptake died in the first years of the two thousand so serin family epic where one full generation of many many uptake siblings  and they were the last two siblings of that generation left in the had been living together in that farmhouse for decades and they just kept up with everything i mean it was amazing what's so incredible about that farm is it with a witness we say the especially the updike period of the farm that farm is incredibly old it has a history dating to before when the upticks moved there in eight hundred ninety two it was one of the earliest several large farms and that land had actually been purchased by that community directly from an easter the proprietor so it's really just some of the earliest land ownership of european settlers in in this area so we're very lucky to be on this incredibly storied and historic piece of land but the optics themselves were witness to incredibly significant agricultural change i mean when they purchased that property in the two hundred ninety s i think eighty seven percent of mercer county was farmland and now today when they sold it to us in the early two thousand i think that number was down to thirteen per cent so just the amount of the the way that their industry and lifestyle is shifting around them while they were occupying site it's crazy to imagine and we're so lucky that we have this intact almost two hundred acres of farmland still on quaker road and touched it such a rare piece of what is really an agricultural heritage i mean you know seven percent there was that that was you know just over a hundred years ago you when you farm you think now was there and we had mules going up and down i mean it's amazing it is so we're we're not exclusively interpreting agricultural heritage there but it certainly is undeniably a part of the narrative that we can tell out out there is different from what we were doing on nassau street but we're operating the historic farmhouse which we've renovated very similar only to be a brick house where the first floor is our museum galleries we actually had a bit more space for exhibitions than we had in  two not one but two public bathrooms compared to the zero public bathrooms and they were just so we're really happy that we can be fully operational and provide these interpretive spaces for the princeton community and our offices are moved to that site in eighty ninety two that basically same year they built this large massive barn that they used mostly for the storage of for the threshing of hay first during some crops and  for some animal stalls the upticks did keep cows but they never really they were never a dairy so they were using mostly that for their personal milk consumption but we have this three thousand square foot barn we were not we didn't it so impeccably constructed that we didn't need to replace any of the horizontal means we did replace some of the columns that were holding up the structure just because we needed to restore the foundation but those beams able were  locate to the allegheny plateau in north western pennsylvania they're all hemlock which is a very common building material but that that plateau had some of the last remaining old growth how much forest on the east coast so by the time in the ninety's rolled around those huge forests with massive old growth trees that were pretty pretty much gone u calling it was an early americans pretty much decimated those stories of trees but this barn is is still built with some of the last remaining old growth lumber and old growth wood is incredible wood i mean this wood is in playing that or you know not even an inch wide on the siding of the barn they've only been painted on one side for almost one hundred thirty years and we didn't need to replace actually it we replace less than five pieces of siding which is incredible that it held you think about the fact that the state used to that nearly ninety percent of land in the state used to be devoted to agriculture agriculture can't really happen without these are supporting buildings  but that i think the state estimates that are there are less than a thousand barns for meaning that are older than one hundred years old and so our barn falls into that category but it's incredibly difficult to come up with ways to repurpose these buildings  lot of times if you're a private homeowner this building world will simply sit and they're expensive to restore and you know what are you going to do with this massive building if it's just your home property so i think we're really thrilled that we were able to model a successful adaptive reuse of the structure and we tested out some interesting techniques to solve the dilemma as in the in the barn because you know when you're not when you're using something constructed for the purpose of a barn ago that was i don't know what they were some special honor and but it was to me amazing just amazing now i want to know how old the barney is and now my grandchild is attending a camp there really she can hurt the week to go to it's really wonderful and it's called the digging dog barn or digging dog farm or where they ever and it goes every morning ok we can find it well found you want to be our friend but let's go for you it'll be fun to me more because i'm curious to know the future what you're going to be doing a little bit besides the temporary exhibitions on different topics in our permanent exhibition at the uptick farmstead is called the einstein salon and innovators gallery which highlights the collection of albert einstein the three dimensional objects that we have in our collection it's really one of the largest collections of three dimensional albert einstein materials in the country if not the world which is a resource that we're really proud of we try not to  albert einstein museum but he in definitely should be proud of that significant figure in in princeton history and in the world and history not only in the world of physics and science which of course he made incredible there's a legacy of of three of refugee advocacy in princeton this sort of grounded in man stein in the institute for advanced study he was so we're of what was needed while he was here he understood the with his rejection right he and out against racism in ways definitely a lot of people at the time really were not doing he provided a crash pad to marian anderson the famous african american alto singer when she performed at macarthur theater but was denied a room at the nassau in he was you know but i don't you know it's interesting in my generation my mother was very very dedicated to marian anderson and absolutely could not believe how unfairly she was treated not only in portland it's unclear i'm from ohio where that she went and it's fascinating because she i mean she was i don't think we can conceive how famous she was but i mean washington d c and that was that i just remember that clearly that this was it was a to do it was had to do and it was cold justice and justice was not being given  on and we're in a dressing but you know i'm i'm a woman and i think that that makes me acutely aware of of the importance of bringing to light stories that may or may not have been recognized or not of no malice but just no one really thinking about the importance of not seeing themselves in the narrative because the people who are writing the narrative were not women or not people of color so that's i mean that we've really been focusing quite a lot on recently especially with our school programs is making sure that we're bringing to light narratives in princeton that not only have to do with your richard stockton's and you're done with her students but also your marian andersons and your christine more howls and  honored her by making her the first woman their very new include in their i'm not sure exactly which they call it but in their great forgive me i  and immediately it was honored so i felt very badly because it was just a notion i had dinner with a friend of mine who used to teach in the friendship around camp she's in ash and i thought we never mentioned her how could reese you know but it's so funny you should say that because i think that you know there is a perception that maybe you know i spend all my time just like constantly thinking about these under represented there it is because you know i'm a woman but it's so easy to fall back into the trap of the stories that you've always been told or that you run with which happened to be the sort of dominant narrative we were  working on our we're developing some interpretive signage for the exterior of the uptakes farmstead site so we can touch on some of the historical themes that i was talking about earlier situating this site in the agricultural history of new jersey but also the history of the stony brook settlement that early early quaker settlement in princeton and also some native american history and so for the content for each panel we have you know the summary information and the poll quote but you know i was looking at the it all of the poll quotes and there was not a single there was one but i was working on it with our curator who is also a woman but it's so you have to work so much harder to find those perspectives that from women so if you're not really thinking about it or actively of our town and we would go to various places in new jersey for women and find out alice paul who i knew nothing about from cape may or wherever and he was just this new because she did look at him as a woman who mother had it's very curious but it's yes jokes aside it's it's so important and we're not you know this is not a new idea you know historical societies but representation matters so much in the historical narrative and it's so important to be honest about you know it isn't for us not like women didn't exist that's right but if we give off the end oppression that somehow they didn't exist because we're not including them in the narrative that's a dangerous or you know  in princeton princeton residence and i think the perception that the slaves that were here were from students allows us off the hook a little bit because you tell yourself oh this prison had all these students coming out of the south and they were bringing their slaves but it they wonderful forget it you know it was people who were living in princeton princeton residents people of the north every want to put it who were holding fleece princeton presidents held slaves and then there were also there was also a vibrant community of of free african americans and princeton sort of living in conjunction with these and slave people and trying to understand that dynamic is so important in terms of coming to terms with the history of our community right which as residents we are all can complicit in that history as we are we like it or not no it's important to be honest with ourselves and to be honest with the community about you know these these stories so that we can understand where we are now and how to move forward you know and i think of  that's it's something or very few we don't have very much information on these places because just talking about under represented narrative you know history is is dependent not only on what we ourselves want to talk about today but it's also dependent on what people in the past thought was important at that very moment because you know we delete e mails every day  and then they disappear but you know who knows one hundred years from now that might be part of the massive narrative of importance but no one hundred years from now will know about it because we decided to delete it so where is another reason why there are so few narratives are so much more difficult to identify the narratives of of women and children people of color you know in slave people servants people who were poor  as because the people who were retaining the records at that time looked at them as worthless and those people were worthless of the records that had to do with them or sort of relive what everyone you know about this in the future so in some senses you know there's been some great work done with places like that archaeologically that you have to rely on other forms of information to get about it that's a very good point to do and there it is but i keep seeing the people who are alive today who can tell you their grandparents is so rich in history and the historical society itself like you are saying is rich in history as an institution we had collecting for nearly eighty years and so we're lucky to have such a vast collection that represents all of these stories so if i were to sum up the way forward or what we see happening at the farm i'm i'm so deeply connected to the election that we've amassed and the stories that it tells so we're we're trying to reach oriental out of our programming to be really grounded in that material to have events come out of collections items what we're planning a series of events called white glove tours where people can we just pull out some materials from our collection that aren't on display or exhibition but just related to a random c n n people can explore that material and then on the flip side of that really see our mission as not only trying to make people aware of these materials related to local history and the local history that we're all grounded in by being resident here but also promoting a sense of historical literacy in general that if you think that there's a role for an organization to look at what's going on in the world and  provide people with the resources and the tools to understand the history that's that's relevant to what's happening right now and how how to teach themselves history how to become lifelong history learners right because it's so important for us to be aware of the past in order to be a dick participant today i can read you and i've mentioned before of telling conversation and i think some of it is lost if we don't remind people of how important it is yet but i think half the battle is convincing people to be curious about history and for us that that mission sort of focus es on on on children and history education and school that make yesterday that is as excellent as it possibly can be so that you don't have people checking out of history at the high school level saying i hated my history classes and right loring it's just all about memorizing a bunch of dates which i think those of us who have you know whose life work isn't history says no it's not it's about these conversations with people who came before you who can tell you about their experiences it's about looking at old materials and of the house because there were some tour and a woman came out to me emma man and lo and behold he said well this is the entrance we always took as children this is that which is a totally different entrance than more  history isn't about you know certainly there's there's a place in history for learning the grand sweep of you know wars and politics and you know military and and all of the terrorism ranma and memorize which is incredibly important and i think there's a place for us to try to promote awareness of that material but where local histories have a unique angle is reminding people that history is about these very accessible stories about places that they see every day and and reminding people that th value of history isn't in opening our eyes to these narratives that are so relevant to how we operate on a day to day basis and becoming appreciative of how in another place prior history is as fundamental to them as it is that history is to us and they were running out of time so forgive me for not putting it together but my guest has been just wonderful today to tell us a little bit