Plimoth Plantation plays role for PBS
A PBS television show that will premiere locally tomorrow on WGBH (Ch. 2) opens a 17th-century door on the lives of early English settlers in North America. Given the show's 1628 setting, its creators sought help from New England's resident period experts, the historians at Plimoth Plantation.
Beth Hoppe, the executive producer of "Colonial House" at Thirteen/WNET in New York, said she wanted to depict the reality of settlers carving out a life in the wilderness. Chosen from 5,000 applicants, two dozen "colonists" agreed to live from June into October last year in a period-style settlement near Machias, Maine.
They were divided into four households in accordance with the social practices of the time, with the colony's governor and his family given the highest social status. The community's main job was to grow and harvest enough food for the following year, while being supplied with distressingly accurate period food, much of it salted meat, for the summer.
Plimoth Plantation experts designed and built the set, and provided food, clothing, and other information, according to Liz Lodge, director of museum programs at the Plymouth "living history" facility. "They asked us what would they eat, how to get it, and could you provide it," Lodge said.
The museum relied on its extensive historical research and staff expertise to provide answers to the hundreds of questions that came up during the show's 4-plus months of filming last fall, Lodge said.
The program's initial four houses were similar to the thatched-roof structures built for the plantation's 1627 Pilgrim Village, with one exception, according to Lodge. They needed bigger windows, since the production crew was filming with natural light.
Timber frame buildings in the period style require prefabrication, said Stuart Bolton, the plantation artisan who was the TV project's building manager. Artisans cut the joints ahead of time, used axes to square them up, and saw them out. Clapboards were split and dressed. The finished parts were shipped to Maine and assembled on the site by a plantation crew.
Shann Young, a crew member, arrived in Machias on April 1 last year with snow on the ground but "before mud season and black fly season," he said. When Young and others returned later to train the TV colonists in house-building skills and to help raise another house, it had been raining periodically for two months and "everyone was down," Young said. The mood improved when the sun came out and good weather held for the rest of the season.
The TV colonists were supplied with salted meats and fish, peas, and other preserved foods. Some of the food was prepared at the plantation, Lodge said, and the rest came from suppliers the plantation uses for its village. Plantation staff also had to put the colony's beer and wine into barrels for transporting.
"We furnished their houses for them," Lodge said. "Furniture, ceramics, and baskets were made at the plantation by artisans."
Plantation staff developed garden schemes, grew plants, built the gardens, and planted them during the first week of June. They also trained the colonists during a two-week cram session in May about the 17th century, from current events to cooking in a clay oven. Afterward, the participants headed to Maine to begin what Hoppe said is not a reality show, but "experiential history."
In the Maine woods, history met mosquitoes. In addition to the elements and bugs, the long days of hard work, and the personal crises that sent a few participants on emergency trips home, the fledgling community "got thrown another few curves" by the producers, Young said.
Young said the TV colonists did eventually adjust to their circumstances. "It was amazing how quickly their standards of what they were willing to eat dropped off," he said. For example, they stopped washing salt off the bacon and simply cut off rotten spots on their food. They also "ate a lot of blueberries," Young noted.
The participants were resupplied with some "luxury" items during the summer, Bolton said, because "they were tired of eating peas all the time." A call also went out for warmer clothing when settlers began to realize what autumn in Maine would be like, Lodge said. The plantation made and shipped the clothes.
Trained in the plantation's first-person interpretation style (staff members assume the identities of actual Pilgrims), Bolton had to adjust to a different milieu on the "Colonial House" set. "They weren't playing the game," he said.
Bolton said some of his training rubbed off on the colony's foreman, who adopted Bolton's practice of wearing period clothes while working, as opposed to stripping down to a T-shirt or bare skin like the others.
"There was a real tension in the group," Bolton said. "Some were more immersed in the historical reality. Some were modern people in period sets."
Previous PBS "experiential history" shows, such as "Prairie House" and "1900 House," have been popular with viewers, and Lodge hopes "Colonial House" will help excite people about the world Plimoth Plantation portrays. To build on the attention, the plantation has organized a series of public programs based on the training sessions of the TV colonists. The programs begin Memorial Day weekend and will run through the summer. A new exhibition, "Setting the Scenes for 'Colonial House," opens May 29.
The eight chapters of "Colonial House" will air at 8 p.m. Monday and Tuesday for the next two weeks on WGBH, with two of the one-hour segments being broadcast each night.
Robert Knox can be reached at rc.knox@verizon.net.
