Alexandria Association Lecture: Emilie Johnson: Boarding in Late-Eighteenth Century America

EMILIE JOHNSON

“Mrs. House has the most commodious Rooms: The Experience of Boarding in Late-Eighteenth Century America”

Travelers in early America faced daunting challenges: poor roads, storms at sea, long distances between towns and settlements, and, not least of all, uncertain lodgings. Options for accommodation included taverns, inns, and boarding houses. A traveler often would not know how many people were expected to share a room, if the sheets would be clean, or what they would be served for dinner until arrival. Some experiences were pleasant. Others, not so much.

Unlike purpose-built taverns and inns, boarding houses usually started as homes. As businesses situated in domestic, often feminine, environments, boarding houses were dynamic, complicated, volatile little worlds. Their physical spaces, the objects that filled them, and the ways that people engaged with them were closely tied to gender and enslavement and adapted as business grew or shrank. Using boarding houses Thomas Jefferson patronized in Philadelphia and Newport in the 1780s and 1790s as case studies, this talk explores the physical spaces of boarding, the furniture and material culture that made for successful (or unsuccessful) boarding experiences, and the activities that took place within the confines of a house transformed into a business.
Emilie Johnson is the Curator of Arts and History at Monticello. Current projects include the restoration and reinstallation of the Tea Room at Monticello and exhibitions that explore Jefferson’s political activities and personal life in the heady but uncertain months of 1776. She holds a Ph.D. in Art and Architectural History from the University of Virginia. Her scholarship, lectures, and publications focus on American art, architecture, and material culture of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries.
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