Commerce and Industry: A Virtual Tour of Four National Trust Historic Sites
National Trust Historic Sites are open! We encourage you to check directly with each site for up-to-date information on available activities, ticketing, and guidelines if you are planning a visit.
Plan Your VisitNext up on our virtual tour of the National Trust’s 27 historic sites: those specifically related to Commerce and Industry.
In our first tour to Sacred Places, we recognized that defining characteristics of the United States include religious freedom and diversity. Similarly, the National Trust’s four sites related to commerce and industry represent the varied experiences of Americans in their vocational pursuits, running the spectrum from entrepreneurial endeavors to the hardship of immigrant labor.
Now an economic superpower, the United States only emerged as such a little more than 100 years ago, and the places we’ll visit contribute to telling the full story of that emergence. Below we’ll travel through time on a coast-to-coast tour, starting with Cooper Molera Adobe and the Gaylord Building.
The Cooper Molera property in Monterey, California, is a collection of sites related to the life of a New England merchant who married into a wealthy Mexican family in Monterey before California became a state. Today the adobe buildings, historic wooden barns, gardens, and a historic house are home to a shared used partnership that includes a museum, a restaurant, event space, and a bakery.
The Cooper Molera museum presents the sites' long and layered history, dating from 1827. It represents the diverse and layered history of the families who lived in and built Monterey, from its early years as the political and commercial capital of Mexican Alta California, through the development of the State of California. The Alta Bakery and Cafe, located in one of the site's original buildings, pays homage to that history.
photo by: Carol Highsmith
Long a witness to the power of early American industry, the mid-19th-century Gaylord Building in Lockport, Illinois, is located on what was once a busy Illinois & Michigan canal. A Joliet limestone warehouse and store building features grand columns and arched fenestrations, which demonstrates the national pride in civic architecture during the period of industrial expansion.
photo by: David Kafer
Today, the Gaylord Building remains a commercial enterprise and serves as a gateway to the Illinois & Michigan Canal National Heritage Corridor. Guests can explore the heritage of the region in the exhibition galleries, and dine in the renowned Public Landing Restaurant (shown here). The second-floor exhibition space is home to Gallery Seven, a fine art gallery featuring work from local, national, and international artists.
While Cooper Molera Adobe and the Gaylord Building focus on commercial enterprises, Hotel de Paris Museum and the Lower East Side Tenement Museum represent the domestic side of workers' lives. Hotel de Paris opened in response to a silver mining boom in Colorado, providing lodging and gourmet meals for miners and traveling businessmen. The Tenement Museum recreates the living conditions of New York's immigrant workers who built new lives in America; often lived in or on the edge of poverty despite full-time employment; and built a foundation for generations of Americans to come.
photo by: Don Graham/Flickr/CC BY-SA 2.0
During Colorado’s silver mining boom, the town of Georgetown prospered and a hotel named after one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities was established. Today the Hotel de Paris offers visitors a trip back in time to when the Wild West combined with Gilded Age opulence. Located on the main street and surrounded by historic houses and storefronts, the elegance and charm of this building and town remain unchanged.
photo by: Kevin Kuharic
Today, the hotel is a time capsule of the late-19th-century silver mining boomtown, featuring 5,000 objects original to the building. The hotel’s restaurant is decorated as it would have appeared in 1878, complete with square saloon tables, dining chairs by Sheboygan Manufacturing Company, large format silver gelatin prints by William Henry Jackson, and black walnut and silver maple wainscoting and tongue and groove flooring from Michigan.
photo by: Travis Roozee
Now a trendy upscale neighborhood, Manhattan’s Lower East Side was once home to working class families that came to America from countries such as Ireland, Italy, Poland, Ukraine, and China. The preserved tenements are a testament to the lives of late-19th- and early-20th-century immigrants.
photo by: Travis Roozee
The Tenement Museum’s 103 Orchard Street location chronicles the lives of three families who once lived in the building: the Epsteins, Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied Poland; the Saez Velez family, Puerto Rican migrants; and the Wongs, immigrants from China. In the Wong family section of the apartment, the girls’ 1970s bedroom is decorated with brightly colored floral bed linens.
Check out the rest of our virtual tours of National Trust Historic Sites, exploring places related to Sacred Places, Garden Glory, Architectural Traditions, Presidential Retreats, Modernism, and Southern History.
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