Keeping programming at Prescott Farm free. Providing virtual learning opportunities. Preserving important historic buildings along the streetscapes of Newport.
These are just a few of the activities that our dedicated Restoration Partners support with their ongoing, monthly gifts. By joining Restoration Partners, your monthly gift will provide consistent support to the work we do every day to preserve Newport’s architectural and cultural heritage.
Will you help us meet our goal of welcoming 20 new monthly donors?
In honor of Historic Preservation Month this May, we invite you to become part of this community of individuals who care deeply about protecting historic resources in Newport and beyond. As a Restoration Partner, your monthly contribution is immediately directed toward NRF’s ongoing work.
There are many advantages to joining the program. Your monthly gift is fully tax-deductible and automatically charged to your credit card or bank account. Partners receive special benefits and invitations to private events. We send a year-end tax statement outlining your cumulative giving.
Please visit our website at www.newportrestoration.org/donate to learn more about the program and to make your gift. Thank you for supporting NRF and for caring about preservation in Newport.
This Earth Day head out to Prescott Farm for Nature Bingo! Practice your observation skills and see how many items you can find in nature.
People who study things in nature are called biologists. When you study nature, you should be careful to “Leave No Trace”—be respectful and considerate of the people and wildlife you encounter, and leave whatever you find. After all, you wouldn’t want someone taking anything from your home without permission!
Find as many items as you can on your Nature Bingo sheet—five in a row means Bingo!
Nature Bingo worksheets will be available outside Hicks House on the Prescott Farm site (the red building right next to the herb garden when you enter the site), and also available to download below and print. Pencils are also available at Prescott Farm.
Don’t forget! – Take a photo of your Nature Bingo sheet and your favorite item you found, and post it to social media tagged @nptrestoration for a chance to win a pair of adult and child gardening gloves! Photos must be posted and tagged between April 17, 2021 and Monday, April 26, 2021 for entry. Winners will be notified via social media.
This April, nonprofit organizations across Rhode Island are participating in the statewide giving day known as #401Gives. Starting at 6:00 a.m. on April 1, you can visit 401Gives.org and donate to one or more of the many participating nonprofits in the Rhode Island community.
What is 401Gives?
401Gives is an initiative of United Way of Rhode Island. Its purpose is to bring a collective voice to Rhode Island’s nonprofit community and deepen the state’s culture of philanthropy.
As a local nonprofit organization, NRF is proud to participate in 401Gives as a way to educate our neighbors on the wide range of activities we engage in within our community, our state, and beyond. Many of the programs and experiences we offer are possible thanks to you – our generous neighbors and friends on Aquidneck Island – and those statewide who visit our museum properties annually.
How can you make a difference on 401Gives Day?
Whether you decide to make a gift to NRF on April 1, or another organization, we hope you will participate if you’re able.
Check out NRF’s microsite site to learn more about what we do and to make your gift.
Like and share our posts on Facebook and Instagram to spread the word to others who can join the 401Gives movement and support local nonprofits
Questions? Comments?
If you have any questions, or would like more information, please contact Development Coordinator Alicia Cipriano at 401-849-7300, Ext. 117.
Thank you in advance for your generosity, for participating in this greater community effort, and for caring about the well-being of all Rhode Islanders!
As we get ready to welcome visitors to a new season at Rough Point, we looked back to how former residents used to prepare for Doris Duke’s arrival at Rough Point for the season.
We spoke with Linda Knierim, who remembers arriving at Rough Point on a February evening as a young girl. This year marks the 50th anniversary of when she first came to Rough Point to live with her parents, who were the new caretakers of the estate, and her younger brother.
Listen as Linda shares her story.
LK: And then we came here and it just seemed like such a long drive to come up. And then that ferry – I didn’t know there was a ferry that we had to take either.
While Linda was excited about living in a grand summer cottage on Newport’s famous Bellevue Avenue, she did not expect it to be so, well, haunting.
LK: We must have got here and it was maybe five, six o’clock at nighttime, so it was dark. So all I knew [was] we were coming to a summer cottage. I had no idea what the summer cottage was like, and we were greeted by a painter [at the] back door and came in… He opened up the Dining Room door, and everything was covered in white. It was like different size ghosts greeting us. And I was like, “Oh my gosh,” because I had it in my head that we were going to see real thick carpeting [and] all this beautiful furniture, not ghosts. And then we saw each room and everything. It wasn’t until the next day when my brother and I went outside that you saw how big the house really was. Then we thought, “Hmm. I think we’re gonna like it.”
Linda also recounts what it was like to prepare for Doris’s arrival each year.
LK: Well, I think my mom was busy, I guess probably like in March, getting the house ready, taking some of the cloths off and putting things away, folding them up. But then my dad was busy outside getting the gardens ready and then my brother and I had kind of like control of the house, like on this side [the public spaces in the house beyond the servant spaces] and then, then everything was so different in June when Miss Duke came.
Today, we still continue the tradition of covering furnishings and putting away decorative objects during the winter months.
And Linda’s first impressions of Doris Duke did not meet her expectations of a grand, stylish, larger-than-life woman.
LK: I know she came up in May. It was because Duke Farms called and said the lady of the house will be coming, and just to keep the front gate open. And they didn’t know what time she was coming, so my brother and I went to friends’ houses. I couldn’t wait to get home to find out what kind of car she came in, how she was dressed. My mom said she just came in an old car, and she didn’t have that fur coat on or those gold jewels or anything. She just had on jeans and a t-shirt.
Linda does have some lasting impressions from her time at Rough Point.
LK: The crash of the water against the rocks and the smells of geraniums. My father had those real tall geraniums in the Solarium. They were in big pots and they were almost as tall as I am. So the smells of geraniums always bring [it] up… [Also] when I see those little oyster crackers because [the kitchen] stove had big long shelves always filled with them.
While we no longer have oyster crackers in the Kitchen, you can still experience the sound of the waves breaking dramatically on the rocks and enjoy the scent of the geraniums in the Solarium.
We hope you will visit us this upcoming season and discover (or re-discover) Rough Point for yourself.
On January 3rd, 2021, the museums of NRF completed their 2020 season, and the museum staff closed Rough Point to the public until our reopening in early spring of 2021. Because I am a tad superstitious, I have held off on writing about the success (and challenges) of the season. However, now that it is well and fully over, and thankfully with no reported cases of COVID-19 from any of our visitors or front-line staff during the season, I can finally take the rabbit’s foot out of my pocket, the horseshoe off my doorway, stop asking the Magic 8 Ball for predictions about the future, and share a little bit about how it all turned out.
As with so many industries, the challenges posed to the museum field by the spread of COVID-19 have proven daunting. For example, as some readers of NRF’s blogs may know, my previous position was at a museum in Los Angeles. I know from conversations with my former colleagues that, at the time that I am writing this piece, not a single museum in Los Angeles County has opened its doors to the public since the closures in Mid-March of 2020. This sad reality has resulted in countless layoffs, financial uncertainty for institutions and individuals alike, and numerous careers delayed or destroyed.
At the outset of the pandemic, there was no reason to think that what has happened in California’s museums wouldn’t happen in Newport as well. Thankfully, at Rhode Island’s museums in general, and Newport’s museums in particular, things progressed differently. Our state government has done a very fine job of trying to help businesses open safely and as soon as possible. Based on the guidance of the state, most of Newport’s cultural institutions were able to open to the public by July (sometimes sooner) provided they developed and adhered to a detailed safety plan that integrated reduced attendance based on a venue’s square footage, enforced social distancing and mask wearing, added additional cleanings of surfaces, created greater circulation of fresh air, and gathered attendee data in case the state needed it for contact tracing.
NRF’s museum staff began work on our plans well in advance of the Governor’s announcements. Shortly after the March shutdowns, we suspended all public programming and our staff began to create a wonderfully diverse, creative, and robust collection of online programs to share safely a piece of the museum experience with the broader public and to provide opportunities to virtually attend some of the events we had hoped to hold in person throughout our season. If you have not seen these programs yet, I encourage you to visit our YouTube channel by clicking here. There’s something for everyone, including yoga classes, community spotlights (our Second Sunday series), a two-part jazz concert in the Great Hall at Rough Point, a four part scholarly symposium, and some really wonderful educational pieces on the life of our founder Doris Duke as well as closer looks at our exceptional collection of 18th-century Newport furniture at the Whitehorne House Museum.
Our virtual presence notwithstanding, it was always our hope to reopen our museums to the public as safely and as soon as possible. By early April, members of my staff and I met weekly to create a COVID-19 plan long before the announcement of any state mandates. While our concerns were broad-ranging, one particular worry was how to protect our front-line staff, by which I mean the guides, greeters, and other visitor experience staff who typically interact with our visitors in ways that, today, most of us would find risky. Naturally, we shared similar concerns about our visitors, but our front-line staff, who spend hours at a time encountering the public, would undoubtedly face the most significant health risk if we got any of our planning wrong.
With those risks in mind, we created a wide-reaching COVID plan that included, among other things, required online ticketing, moving our registration process outside at Rough Point (until November when the weather proved too cold), and the suspension of guided tours, creating instead a singular path through our museums with guides stationed throughout. Once we had everything in place, and the state permitted us to do so, we opened our doors to the public. The Rough Point Grounds opened in late June, Rough Point itself in early July, and the Whitehorne House Museum ten days after that. On the whole the plan worked well, and its success and adherence to state guidelines was reconfirmed by a surprise visit to Rough Point from the Rhode Island Department of Health in August.
During the season we took feedback from staff and visitors to see if they felt safe and comfortable, and while we received the occasional visitor complaint about our necessary changes and our insistence on mask wearing, I am happy to say that on the whole our staff felt safe and most of our visitors enjoyed their time with us while also commenting positively on the ways in which we had worked to ensure their safety.
Our museums were a respite for our visitors during these difficult times. Anecdotally, I know that many of our visitors were deeply appreciative that we could provide a pleasant and safe distraction from the difficulties of our new normal and the never-ending stream of bad news. At the Whitehorne House Museum, we provided an opportunity for our visitors to get away from the crowds of people on lower Thames Street so that they could spend a quiet hour safely enjoying our exceptional furniture collection and learning about Newport’s past from our talented guides. At Rough Point, sales of our grounds passes grew exponentially, and many visitors would spend hours outside enjoying the boundless seascape, our exceptionally beautiful gardens, and the Fredrick Law Olmstead designed grounds. On my evening drive home, I would pass Prescott Farm, and see the parking lot filled with minivans and kids and parents feeding the ducks in the pond. I suppose that none of these activities can replace the concerts, weddings, trips to visit distant friends and relatives, and other plans that so many of us wound up cancelling in 2020. Still, I am extremely pleased to know that we offered a pleasant, if somewhat less hoped for, alternative form of entertainment. And I am most pleased to note that we achieved all of this without a single reported case of COVID-19 from any of our staff or visitors.
Indeed, that last point, the absence of a COVID case, is the thing that I am most pleased about this past season and, likely, the thing that we are least responsible for achieving. For while I would like to think that our success was the result of exceptional planning, skillfully executed by a devoted and brilliant staff (which in some sense it was), I still can’t help but think that part of our success was sheer luck. Nevertheless, the thing that I most want our readers to know is that the NRF museum staff took the COVID-19 threat seriously every day (we still do), and every day they brought their energy, creativity, and brilliance to our museums to ensure the best and safest museum experience possible for our visitors. They did so because we care about each other’s safety and about the health and safety of our potential visitors, something we will continue to do now and in the years to come.
We look forward to demonstrating that care and creativity to all of you in the 2021 season, which begins in late March and runs until just before Thanksgiving followed by weekend programming until the new year. We will continue to take everyone’s health and safety quite seriously while simultaneously planning to create new opportunities to reach people remotely and to engage people in person as the world becomes a little safer and we can all congregate together a little more. You have my promise that (as with the season just past) the entire NRF museum staff will do everything that they can to keep you safe, educated, and entertained, and if you just want to be left alone to spend a few hours on our the grounds at Rough Point, you can do that too. We’ll see you in Newport!
By Dr. Erik Greenberg, Director of Museums, Newport Restoration Foundation
According to former staff, when Doris Duke particularly enjoyed a recipe she would have it faxed to her other homes so that the cooks in each house could learn how to make the dish.
Here are some recipes from Doris Duke’s personal recipe collection. These particular recipes were the work of three Rough Point cooks: Hattie, Annie, and Hulda Goudie.
Try one (or two) and let us know what you think! Click the images below to get a closer look.
And we’d love to see your special holiday recipes! Share with us @nptrestoration #DorisDukeDishes #RoughPoinsettias #roughpoint or at visit@newportrestoration.org.
