Episode 63: Barbara Callahan (Browne House/Historic New England)
Meet Barbara Callahan! She's the Metro Boston Regional Site Administrator for Historic New England which includes overseeing the oldest house in Watertown, the Browne House on Main Street. In this conversation we talk about Barbara's own journey in managing historical houses in the area, then we dive into some of the history of the Browne family and its earliest history, and the reconstruction of the house in the early 1900s as the first well-documented restoration project in America. Barbara takes me on an audio tour of the 3 floors of the historical house and the very unique barn outside.
Released September 16th, 2025
(Click here to listen on streaming apps) (Full transcript below)
Visit the Browne House website (still a few tours left this year!)
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Transcript
Matt: 0:07
Hi there, welcome to the Little Local Conversations podcast. I'm your host, Matt Hanna. Every episode, I sit down for a conversation with someone in Watertown to discover the people, places, stories, and ideas of Watertown. This time I sat down with Barbara Callahan, who is the Metro Boston Regional Site Administrator for Historic New England and as part of that role she oversees the Browne House here in Watertown. So I’ll let her introduce herself and then we'll get into the conversation.
Barbara: 0:37
I'm Barbara Callahan. I'm the Metro Boston Regional Site Administrator for Historic New England and I oversee a few of our historic sites, including the Browne House in Watertown
Matt: 0:42
Great, that's a long title. You did a good job. So I always like to get a little background on the person before we dig into the place itself. So how did you get involved with historical administration?
Barbara: 0:55
Sure. So I was getting a masters in museum education at Tufts and working in historic house museums. So my entire museum career has been fairly house museum specific, although I've delved in a few other institutions too. And something about the really personal aspect of this type of public history really speaks to me. So I've been working in house museums and I would consider still fairly new in the role a little over a year, maybe a year and a half, in this role with Historic New England.
Matt: 1:27
Yeah, were you in the Boston area for a while?
Barbara: 1:31
Yes, so one of my other sites is the Otis House in downtown Boston, so that's right by MGH on Cambridge Street, and I've been working in that part of Boston for a number of years.
Matt: 1:43
Yeah, and was there something that got you specifically interested in houses? Was there something that led you that way?
Barbara: 1:49
You know, I think a little of it was happenstance, because there was a job open when I was just starting out as a tour guide at a historic house museum and I jumped on it. And then I just kept digging in from there. I wanted to know who was cleaning the house and how could I learn more about the objects and the history. And then I just got hooked.
Matt: 2:13
Yeah. And were you always into history as a kid, or was it a later thing?
Barbara: 2:16
You know, I have always been a little bit interested in history, not always academically, but through, you know, maybe historical fiction or historical films, so the setting has always been interesting to me. And again like that very personalized introduction into what was life like, you know, what was going on in the town, the world, etc. at the time that these people were living, and sort of taking that view of it, rather than the lists of dates and wars that are a little bit common in a more academic setting,
Matt: 2:51
Yeah, and was there a favorite item in one of your first houses you worked at that, I don't know, was really interesting?
Barbara: 2:57
That is an interesting question. I think I really liked being able to see things that were old look old. And I think in a lot of museums and still today this is a very common practice, right, to restore things to how they would have looked and that makes a lot of sense. But I kind of like seeing it look old and you can see a bit of the passage of time. And there were some textiles there that had not been replaced yet and I could really see the wear and you can imagine someone sitting there over and over and that's how the wear kind of evolves. And I think that really speaks to me a little bit more than a pristine view of a historic space.
Matt: 3:40
Yeah, kind of like the two points of view. You can see it in its time, but you can also see it in our current time, right. Yeah, that's cool, nice. So how did you get involved with Historic New England and the Browne House site? How did that come about?
Barbara: 3:54
Yeah, so I've always been aware of Historic New England. They own, you know, 37 properties throughout the region, so they've sort of been a presence as I have worked my way around different museums in the area and so I just kind of kept an eye on them. And this role was something I was interested in for a number of years. But I wanted the Boston house. I wanted to stay around the Boston area. Watertown is new for me and Waltham, my other site is in Waltham, these are sort of newer areas for me. So diving into the local history of Watertown and how the site works in that area is really interesting and eye-opening in a whole new way for me, especially with the oldest house in Watertown, I'm really going very, very far back. But I was interested in the role and I'm interested in the greater Boston area, so specifically the Metro Boston site administration role was perfect for me
Matt: 4:48
Yeah, and I guess we should say what is Historic New England?
Barbara: 4:50
Yeah, so Historic New England is the oldest, largest, most comprehensive regional history organization in the US and, in addition to the historic sites located in almost every New England state, we house a vast collection of items related to New England history in our headquarters in Haverhill.
Matt: 5:10
Awesome. So what does a site administrator do then with these locations?
Barbara: 5:14
Right. So we have 38 houses at Historic New England so there are a number of site administrators overseeing all of these various houses. For me, with Lyman, Browne, and Otis, I am primarily managing tours, including tour guides, and programming. So we had a few programs here at Browne House earlier this year, like a community day on the lawn. We also participated in Porchfest and a few other things. So I'm coordinating events like that.
Barbara: 5:44
I'm also doing some of the back-end stuff. I spend, you know, at least half my time in front of the computer. And then ideally meeting with various members of the community in various capacities. For Watertown I'm just starting out. As I mentioned, I didn't previously work in Watertown, so getting to know the folks who are already very active in this town and the arts and culture community has been really valuable for me and the reason I wanted to host a community on the lawn event to try to get Browne a little bit more involved in that way. So meeting with folks, having those conversations, and managing this sort of day to day operations of the house itself. We have other departments who are overseeing things like preservation of these old structures.
Matt: 6:28
We're sitting next to something that is in the process of being fixed up.
Barbara: 6:32
Yeah, exactly. And curatorial department, marketing department, etc. So we also meet often with those colleagues.
Matt: 6:40
Nice. And so how about when you came to Watertown and this area, is there anything historical that surprised you, that you found out about Watertown?
Barbara: 6:49
That's a good question. I don't know if anything is really sticking out to me right now for that, other than the fact that I was now helping to run the oldest house. I wasn't aware of that when I was first signing on and is a pretty fun tagline to add on. And an interesting way to kind of situate and discuss the history of Watertown. It allows us to really go backward in time more than any other site that I have, because it's such an old structure and the family owned this land for so, so long that it's an opportunity to talk about a wider span of time.
Barbara: 7:28
And I think I didn't quite expect that here, that the focus would be even before the house was built and sort of the early days of the house. Sometimes you'll have an older house but the material culture inside, the actual objects that you're looking at, are from a later time period, or there's been so many renovations that, you know, the house might be from 1804, but really you're telling a late 19th century story. But here it's early, it's really early history and actually I had not spent a lot of time in that world and that was a little surprising for me to start diving into the earliest recorded history of Watertown.
Matt: 8:03
Yeah, yeah. So let's get into it. Tell me about the Browne House. What's your opening spiel on the Browne House? We have time too, so you don't have to give me just the short spiel.
Barbara: 8:12
Yeah, yeah, we'll kind of dance around. I think of Browne House, and we talk about it now, as a tale of two stories and two time periods. One is that earliest recorded history of Watertown. The house was built around 1700. But, as I mentioned, the Browne family owned this property for much longer and they were granted land through the Massachusetts Bay Colony. And so through that history we're able to discuss indigenous use of land early, early colony government, because the Brownes were associated with the laying out of the town, the sort of day-to-day operations, and the government structure. And then we can go move forward into around 1700, the house was finally built and what was life like? We can look at this huge hearth and sort of imagine what cooking and heating and living in a space like this would be like in a day-to-day basis. And this was a farmhouse. So we also sort of have to put on a little imagination cap and imagine this pretty highly developed area as much more rural and the land around the house as being farmland and sort of discuss day-to-day aspects of that.
Matt: 9:25
How far did the farm range around the house?
Barbara: 9:27
Yeah, so we know that it would have run down to the Charles River. And the connection with the Charles River is really the draw for the area, right. So it's not just fertile land for farming but it's ease of transportation and proximity to other towns near and around the Charles.
Matt: 9:43
So it's a pretty big plot, considering we're on Main Street here, so it has to go all the way down to the river, at least that way, and then it's however wide.
Barbara: 9:50
So a large plot. Yeah, and it's a little bit outside the main colonial town of Watertown. So even back then this would have been more of a rural area. But again farmland. And then, you know, we come into the house on a tour and we can talk a bit about the earlier architecture, some of the other things we're looking at, head upstairs and see the additional floors. Sometimes people are surprised by things like the lighting, because it is very dark in here and, you know, the lighting would have been similar because you're just getting it from candles, you're just getting it from the fireplace, and from the windows. And these are actually larger windows than were expected for the time, so they're bringing in perhaps a bit more light than would have been in other structures.
Barbara: 10:33
But we see it as sort of a darker space. You might think of it as smaller, especially when we go into kind of how the family grew. But like any structure that's been around this long, a lot of things have changed. The house expanded, there are additional parts of the house that are now a tenant residence and the museum aspect that people actually come in to visit is a smaller portion and the oldest portion of the house.
Barbara: 10:54
But I think of the house as two time periods, right. So one is that earliest time period and the next is in the 19-teens and 1920s when the founder of Historic New England, which was then called SPNEA, or the Society of Preservation of New England Antiquities. So you thought my title was long. William Sumner Appleton is the founder of that and he is the reason we have Browne House, because it was fairly dilapidated by that time. He purchases it and, through a lot of his own money, decides to reconstruct it. So it's known as the first, you know, well-documented restoration project in America. And so it's through that sort of colonial lens in the early period and then the colonial revival lens of the restoration period of the house that we tell the story.
Matt: 11:38
Yeah, what is the process of restoring a property like this?
Barbara: 11:43
Yeah, so a hundred years ago when they were doing it, it was then sort of the state-of-the-art process. You know, over time layers of new construction are often built over top the old construction, and so it's sort of a peeling away and uncovering of that history. There are a few examples in this house. The big one for this house are the windows. I already mentioned they were a little bit surprising, but a really great example of the window was found in between this oldest part of the house and a newer part of the house. It had been preserved between those two walls, and so we were able to understand exactly what the window looked like in order to reconstruct it in the various locations. So it's sort of this mystery project, right, of uncovering what's going on, also doing your research and what other houses looked like in the area, what architecture was like, what the building practices were and the tools that were used, and sort of grasping a more holistic understanding of what's going on.
Matt: 12:41
Maybe before we look around, though, maybe is there anything else to know about the Browne family that's interesting?
Barbara: 12:47
Yeah, what's interesting to me is that the first number of generations, as I mentioned, were involved in the early colonial politics. And so they were town surveyors and sort of laying out the land, you know, determining where roads are going, where other farmhouses are going, etc. And they were selectsmen in the town government.
Barbara: 13:13
Selectsmen is a position I think reelected every year or so, and they're involved with controlling and recording goings-on in the government. And so we can see the Brown name through some of those earliest records, which is always fun to kind of dig through early records.
Matt: 13:26
Probably makes your job a little easier too,
Barbara: 13:28
And yes, it does. And Browne is kind of easy script to point out, even though it can get a little tricky. And the Watertown Library has been just an incredible resource for us here, as well as the Watertown Historical Society. They have some of these documents or have already dug into these histories over time. I would also be happy to set you up with David, who has worked here for a number of years and is very, very knowledgeable about the history of the house and the family in the area. I'm working with him to revise the tour and hopefully redo the next floor.
Matt: 14:08
Well, this is also kind of like a teaser episode to give people the basics and then if they want to find more they come for a tour .
Barbara: 14:13
And learn more about the family and the house and the neighborhood.
Matt: 14:19
Yeah, but why don't we take a look around, since we're in the space. And I know this is audio, but we can still explain a little bit for the listeners, the space we're in and some of the interesting stuff to give them an idea to maybe want to come in for a tour themselves. So we just came in through the back door and we're sitting in, what would you call this room?
Barbara: 14:35
You know, it is the room of the house. So you can call it a few different things. Some people call it something like a great room. But it's a multifunctional space and it houses the best bed. So this nice bed in the corner would have been for the parents, maybe young children, and it would have been the best one. Upstairs is additional living space and those might have been more casual bedrolls or things like that. So this best bed is here.
Barbara: 15:04
We have a dining room table, we have the hearth. So it's really the kitchen, the living room, the dining room, the bedroom all rolled into one. We also have some storage over here and behind me, a little bit more elaborate as time went on, but starting off very simple and humble, with large chests with a top hinging door and everything is just sort of stored in those locations. You can see some of them have locks for keys to help secure belongings in the area. So a multifunctional space.
Matt: 15:34
And how many people would be in this room typically?
Barbara: 15:39
So in a farmhouse, especially not in the winter, a fair amount of people are spending a fair amount of time outside. So when we think about this smaller room that we're in, we can think about a lot of hustle and bustle in here, but really a lot of the life would have been happening outside. And so the soundscape that we hear with the cars passing by today would have been quite a bit different with farm animals and workers around the property. So that's one of the ways to kind of think about use of the space. But in here would have been a family of it could be five to ten. Possibly additional workers could have been housed up on the third floor. But inside here and kind of doing some of the labor on the outside, the woman of the house would have been spending a fair amount of time cooking, preparing meals right here.
Matt: 16:30
Yeah, and we have a table that can fit maybe six chairs here and the best bed has kind of those drapes hanging down that you would imagine, like the Downton Abbey beds, right, a little smaller.
Barbara: 16:42
Yeah, and much older and much older.
Matt: 16:45
Yeah, then, like said, we have some of those chests and like a bigger armoire type thing, and then the hearth is pretty sizable. It's bigger than the table in terms of length there. Looks like there's multiple things to hold fire, so would they be able to be cooking multiple pots at once over the fire?
Barbara: 17:02
Yeah, the main idea is to heat coals and then move those heated coals where you need them in the hearth. So you can see a lot of cooking pots that have legs or stands where you would put a pot that has legs and the coals would go right under there. And so you're kind of moving them around as needed. In addition to the main structure, a farmhouse like this would have had numerous additional structures like barns, etc. But we believe at the time the house was built there was also an additional kind of outside oven that was accessed around the edge of the house and that could have been used probably more for baking needs. We don't necessarily see a baking element in this hearth and we think that that's why, is that it was an external piece.
Matt: 17:45
Gotcha, they had outdoor ovens before it was trendy. Was there anything else in this space you want to talk about before maybe we moved on to another space?
Barbara: 17:54
When I talk about the two time periods of the house, we go into that earliest history and, you know, how this space would have been used by the Browne family and how similar spaces might have been used throughout town by other families. But when we fast forward to the teens and 20s, 19, teens and 20s, then we can also get an understanding of that time period and since it was over 100 years ago, it's a piece of our history too. And that tells a story of how this museum came together, right.
Barbara: 18:24
So not just how the building was preserved and restored, but how these objects made their way into the house. None of them were left over from the Browne family itself, and, you know, at Historic New England we have a number of different stories of how these various houses get together. But for a colonial home, something that old, there's almost no way you're keeping remnants from that time period in the same structure looking the same way for hundreds of years. You know, people are always updating their spaces and this house was no exception. So we had to strip away those newer layers, right, and then add these historic objects. And so they're from the time period that we're talking about, the early 1700s, and they are donated from folks who had them in their collection. And so we can think about, you know, what was the idea behind furnishing this house and preserving it? And actually there were a few different ideas over the course of the 1910s and 20s and 30s and as we get on to today, and museum practices and historic preservation practices, they all evolve.
Barbara: 19:28
And for this house, one of the early uses of it was actually as a tea room. And I might have pictures, not that listeners can see them, but you can Google it. There were little tables set up in here and a caretaker who would live in the adjacent space and serve tea and treats in here. And this could be a stop on a journey. You know, a nice little lunch place to go to. But it's also a way to preserve the location and bring people in to see it. So today we do that as a museum, but in the 20s they did it as a tea house. In this space, I also think about that time period.
Matt: 20:07
Yeah, and then when you're talking about, like, how do you furnish a place from the late 1600s or early 1700s? How do you pull out that information? Is it just from diaries? Like, how do you? There's three chests in here. How did you make that decision? You know, like, how does that come up?
Barbara: 20:21
Yeah, so these decisions for this house in particular were made so long ago that we think about them again kind of as this study in history. But we can talk about them, you know, through our contemporary lens, and each object has its own story behind it. For example, the chests. There's this whole evolution of storing our items, particularly linens and clothing etc., from chests to drawers and sort of how that evolved over time. For example, there's this chest and, very common, there were drawers underneath. And so there is a layer of drawers under here. There was a drawer under here historically. And then from there comes a little bit later evolutions of adding more and more drawers as we realize they are very convenient. And so we have this style here with the one drawer, because that was most common during this time period. And so it's sort of this, you know, tracking things over time.
Barbara: 21:17
There are, of course, a number of resources in where to look for this type of information. And then there's the tracking to make sure it's not a reproduction. In other historic New England houses. We do have reproductions for a wide variety of reasons. One example might be so someone could sit on a piece of furniture, something that we don't have to preserve forever and ever and ever. But in this house it is mostly antiques, except the reproduction of the bed. You know, we knew that pewter was a very common metal used during this time period more for wealthier colonial families, between pewter and wood, and so we have examples of both of those things on the dining room table.
Matt: 22:00
Gotcha. Yeah, we have some pewter plates and tankards and some wood ones too. Nice. Anything else in this room before we take a trip upstairs?
Barbara: 22:09
You know, there's probably plenty about the beams and the architecture, but I will say that's not my specialty.
Matt: 22:16
Fair enough, I'm sure that was its own. That was probably one of the biggest things in the renovation that they did a hundred years ago, I'm assuming, was trying to make it stand up again.
Barbara: 22:26
Yes, and actually we're still working on that, because it turns out houses go through a lot as the years go on. So this stairway sort of runs adjacent to the main room, but you can see the edge of the fireplace that's running up against it.
Matt: 22:45
So we just went up some steep spiral stairs next to the hearth.
Barbara: 22:49
And on the second floor. So up here we think of as additional living space. Certainly we have a nice large fireplace, but it's not the cooking hearth like there is on the first floor. Up here you could imagine some other storage furniture like we saw down below, and, of course, sleeping quarters for the family. There's a hook here that would have been used for hanging net over the bed. And this is that window I was referring to that was sort of tucked between the walls and uncovered. And there is a replica of the window, because it was sort of this big discovery in colonial architecture at the time for us to find this window, and a few of these reproductions were made, one of them belonging to the men.
Matt: 23:38
Gotcha. Yeah, when I came here for the day on the lawn, my family was debating whether that was like for the fireplace to like keep it. It's windows have been brought down on the floor as like an artifact.
Barbara: 23:43
Yeah, exactly, and this one is touchable. So there's that.
Matt: 23:47
Very cool, yeah, so it's interesting to find, as you go through the rubble, the pieces, and it helps you piece the puzzle together.
Barbara: 23:54
Exactly. There's also this, what is now this sort of antique exhibition. And it is reviewing how they did piece the house together, as you're saying. And it's a nice photographic exploration of before and after the restoration of the house. Installing new images up here is one of my goals over the next year, for a few reasons. You know, we will obviously hold on to this. This is now an interesting and important piece of our archives. But I would love to bring in larger, higher quality images to help tell the rest of our story up here as well. It is a little bit of a blank slate with our white walls and wooden floor, and so we can play around a little bit. What stories are we sharing here and how are we telling those stories?
Barbara: 24:41
So last year and this year we're sort of exploring that by working on the interpretation during the tour, discussing a bit more about the day-to-day life, a little less about the architecture, unless people ask, and then asking them questions about what they want to hear more about and sort of responding in that way. It takes a little bit of time to do the responding, since we are diving into the records and materials that we have in order to do that. But I'm excited for all of the changes happening at Browne. One change is, like I mentioned, updating our tour material to be a little bit more of what people said they wanted, which is the day-to-day. We also this year opened up our barn, which is a late19th century barn on the property, but is a space for us to gather and is an interesting piece of architecture and history all on its own. And then we'll continue to kind of update the way that folks experience the house in reinstalling the experience up here.
Matt: 25:42
Yeah, so right now on the second floor it's kind of just an empty room, except for these pictures on the wall with some of the historical stories of the renovation and then our old window. Yeah, so it seems like you have some options for what you can do with this space. That's cool. And then there's a third floor too.
Barbara: 25:57
Yes, there is a third floor and we can certainly head up there, but we always give the warning before heading up there and I didn't warn you before we headed up these stairs, but it's pretty steep stairs. You know, the safety measures were not quite in place in 1700 that we have today.
Matt: 26:13
Sure, they didn't have ADA.
Barbara: 26:14
They did not. And on the third floor there are nails coming out. You know, very uneven floorboards and, as you noticed again when we walked in, it's very dark. So these are the sort of things that we let visitors know.
Barbara: 26:25
There are a lot of ways to kind of bump your head into things in the house so there are a lot of warnings folks get when they come on tours here. And the interesting parts of that to me are the kind of historical accuracy of having a dark space with lower.
Matt: 26:41
So nighttime tours.
Barbara: 26:42
No nighttime tours. Yeah, I think we would all have to have our own little candles for that, which honestly would be pretty cool
Matt: 26:51
Yeah. So checking out the third floor. Was this like a big house for the day, with having three floors?
Barbara: 26:59
Yes, yeah. This was actually considered a larger house for the day. Sometimes it's referred to as a mansion house, although it's not quite what we might consider a mansion today. So this top floor actually is presumed to look this way for a variety of reasons, but it was in such poor condition that we don't know exactly if this was the pitch of the roof, etc. So the details in here are a little bit less clear than the details down below, just based off of what was found by Appleton and workers when they were restoring the property.
Matt: 27:34
Yeah, so we're on the top floor, so we kind of have the A shape and we have some exposed beans with these enormous stakes or joinery kind of holding them together. Anything interesting about this floor?
Barbara: 27:44
Yeah, so architecturally, you know, we don't know too much about it. You know, up here it wasn't uncommon for a farming family to also employ other workers and so potentially other workers could have lived up here. But we don't have direct records of it. Going back into the earliest histories can be pretty tricky in trying to track people down and track down the actual stories. But what we do know is, you know, thanks to resources, not just in Historic New England's collection, but primarily in Watertown collection through the library, the Historical Society, etc. And so it's really that community who has preserved the history of the Browne House and early Watertown.
Matt: 28:25
Yeah, I mean, I think it's amazing that you can even figure out like what a chest looked like 400 years ago. That's impressive to me. So yeah, cool.
Barbara: 28:34
It's also the warmest part of the house, as you can tell.
Matt: 28:36
Yes, that makes sense. They don't have a fireplace up here. I don't think slinkies would work on these stairs for those kids?
Barbara: 28:50
No, not unless they have a hard left turn. I can point out that there is a mantle here, which, you know, when I was briefly describing the evolution of chests, there's also an evolution of mantles, fireplaces and mantles. And having an actual mantle here was only one of a few found from this time period. So this is one of the things that makes us think this is sort of a nicer household and you know, a little bit more state-of-the-art is things like, do they have mantles? What is the hardware like? For example, we have an original hinge on the back of the door to this very, very large metal piece we have. You know, some of the details that seem fairly innocuous when you're up here, can get pointed out to you on the tour and you're like, oh wow, neat. I didn't know, looking at a mantle could have an interesting story behind it. Or the mechanism for opening the door has its own history.
Matt: 29:44
Right, we're back on, for listeners, we're back on the second floor looking at that. Any other space or was there anything to talk about in the barn?
Barbara: 29:52
I mean, I'm happy to pop in there.
Matt: 29:53
Yeah. Check that out.
Barbara: 30:01
Yeah, so I mean just looking at the outside of the house, it was the three floors and probably an attic or some cold storage and additional structures. But the way that you see it today, we have additions that were added onto the house. So you can see how the house has sort of changed and grown over time, and through the pictures that are viewed on the tour you get a sense of that too. And the barn.
Matt: 30:26
So we're walking over to this enormous barn now.
Barbara: 30:30
Yeah, is it larger? I think it's probably larger than the original part of the house. It's huge. So late 19th century, many years later. And it is part of that story, of the second part of our history with the house that I was talking about, when William Sumner Appleton and early historic New England are restoring the property and figuring out what to do with it. So, you know, it became a tea room, et cetera.
Barbara: 30:57
This area became a, not just storage location for architectural remnants, but a display space. So it became a pseudo-museum and so you can see elements that don't quite belong in here. For example, this architectural remnant is installed onto the historic barn and it's a piece from a house that was not going to be preserved. The window on the back, same story. No barn has a window like this. It was a window taken from a house and it was not going to be preserved in some other way and so it was installed here as a piece of the barn. So we have an interior staircase from a house that is installed here and many other what we call architectural remnants. So windows, there's a servant bell, call bell system over there, some signage, pillars, doors. We even have a whole entry portico area.
Matt: 32:02
Very much a historical grab bag here.
Barbara: 32:05
And formal front door, yes, exactly. So they used this, I think, as sort of a way to highlight the importance of historic preservation. Also a study space so people could actually go see these items. And I believe they had some offices in this area.
Matt: 32:19
Gotcha. Yeah, there's no traditional like hay bale window on either side or anything like that. So yeah, it's an interesting barn.
Barbara: 32:28
Yeah, it's a funky space. And so it goes into that colonial revival time period that I keep vaguely mentioning.
Matt: 32:35
Cool. Well, thanks for giving us the audio tour of the space. If people want to come check out the space themselves, how can they come see the space? How often do you guys open, and all that stuff.
Barbara: 32:45
So the best way is to look us up online. So if you go to the Browne House website, you can go to tickets and see which days that we're open. We're open for a number of days throughout the year. It's usually Saturdays, sometimes Sundays. And, like I mentioned, I have less tours during peak summer because there is no air conditioning and I want people to be at least a little bit comfortable here. But in the spring and fall we have most of our tour dates. We'll also list any programs that we have coming up and that will be viewable on that site. We also have a Facebook. Historic New England has an Instagram, but Browne House has a Facebook and our open days and upcoming programming et cetera can be found on there too. And you can purchase a ticket online or you can show up to a tour and purchase the ticket that day. Historic New England members tour free, but for other folks it's just $10.
Matt: 33:36
Gotcha. And are there any other ways that you're trying to engage the Watertown community going forward?
Barbara: 33:41
Yeah, so I mentioned that I am trying to connect more with the already very vibrant arts and culture community here. And they're doing such great work that I'm excited to partner with them in whatever ways make sense. I would love to participate in PorchFest again next year. It was such a blast this year. I also want to hold our community on the lawn day again, a great way to bring these arts and culture resources together in one place and have people stroll through the house for free. And I'm also keeping an eye on some of the other ways that we can be involved. You know, maybe we can have a table at various community programming that's going on.
Barbara: 34:22
I would eventually love to host additional programs here, whether it's in the barn that we just opened this year, or if it's a specialty tour of the house. Or another partnership with the Watertown Historical Society, where we open the two oldest houses in Watertown at the same day, which we did just last month. I'm very open to other ideas too and just sort of having these conversations with folks, what do they want to see out of the Browne House? And a lot of them don't know about it and haven't been yet. So I'm starting off with that and then we'll see where it goes. But hopefully we'll continue to see Watertown folks coming in and checking out the space that is in their town.
Matt: 35:00
Yeah, cool. Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts and stories and allowing me to explore the space.
Barbara: 35:06
Yeah, thank you so much for this. It's been really nice chatting with you.
Matt: 35:09
So that's it for my conversation with Barbara. You can find more information about Browne House where she mentioned, also put links in the show notes. If you'd like to hear more conversations with people in the community, you can listen to all the podcast episodes over at littlelocalconversations.com. I also have information on upcoming events. You can also sign up for my weekly newsletter to stay up to date on everything going on. It's all over at LittleLocalConversations.com.
Matt: 35:32
This Friday, if you listen to this, the week comes out, there is the very first Watertown's Open podcast event over at the Get Lively Health and Fitness Studio and that's going to be on Friday, September 19th, from noon to 2 pm. It's going to be a live podcast event so you can come listen to the conversation, be part of the Q&A part, and it's a panel on how small businesses here in Watertown are collaborating, even ones that you might think of as competitors. Panel includes Doug Orifice, the co-president of the Watertown Business Coalition, Erin Rathe, senior planner for economic development for the city of Watertown, Jan Taylor, who's the owner of Get Lively, Liz Padula, owner of Artemis Yoga, Ariel Nathanson, owner of Finances for Feminists, and Liz Ganno, who is a Precision Nutrition Certified Coach. Again, that's this Friday, September 19th noon to 2 pm. Come join us. There'll be some refreshments and lots of good conversation. There'll be links in the show notes for that as well.
Matt: 36:24
All right, and to wrap up here, I want to give a few shout outs. First one goes to podcast sponsor Arsenal Financial, which is a financial planning business here in Watertown that is owned by Doug Orifice, who is a very committed community member. And his business helps busy families, people close to retirement, and small businesses. So if you need help with any of those, reach out to Doug and his team at arsenalfinancial.com. Also want to give a thank you to the Watertown Cultural Council, who have given me a grant this year to help support the podcast, so I want to give them the appropriate credit, which is, this program is supported in part by a grant from the Watertown Cultural Council, a local agency, which is supported by the Mass Cultural Council, a state agency. You can find out more about them at watertownculturalcouncil.org and massculturalcouncil.org.
Matt: 37:04
And a couple more shout-outs to promotional partners. First one goes to the Watertown Business Coalition, they’re a nonprofit organization here in Watertown that's bringing businesses and people together to help strengthen the community. You can find out more about them at watertownbusinesscoalition.com. And lastly, promotional partner Watertown News, which is an online newspaper focused purely on Watertown, run by Charlie Breitrose here in town. It's a great way to stay up to date with everything going on. You can check that out at watertownmanews.com. So that's it. Until next time, take care.
