A bit of Delaware Upstairs, Downstairs is stirring at Rockwood Park and Museum.
Below the Stairs and In the Attics: The Servants’ Tour is a new offering at Rockwood, providing the perspective of servants who lived and worked on the estate in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Rockwood’s Director Ryan Grover says inspiration for the tour came as the museum researched over 5,000 photos in the University of Delaware Special Collection.
“We started to see that there were a lot of photographs of the people who worked at Rockwood in a lot of different capacities. So we started doing research about who they were and eventually we were able to conceive of a tour of the house that you actually never go into the owner’s portion of the house, it’s almost exclusively in service areas.”
Grover says that, while many wealthy American families of that era preferred British, French or Irish servants, Rockwood was a little different.
“A lot of different individuals from a lot of different backgrounds holding a lot of different positions across the spectrum, and everybody under one roof. We haven’t fully unpacked that - I don’t know that we can fully explain that, but it is interesting for sure.”
The Rockwood Museum’s Below the Stairs and In the Attics: The Servants’ Tour lasts 90 minutes and is available one Sunday a month this summer.
