John James Audubon Center at Mill Grove

 Wednesday, October 5, 2022

Hi Blog!

Last Friday we had the chance to bike the Perkiomen Trail near Audubon, PA. Part of our trail took us around the Audubon Nature Center.  The 175-acre estate is under the daily management of the National Audubon Society. A haven for birds and wildlife, the property boasts more than seven miles of trails and stunning views of the Perkiomen Creek.   Most importantly, however, it boasts the original home of John James Audubon and a new, 18,000 square foot, $13,000,000 museum explaining his life and work.

We stopped in briefly to pick up a brochure, but wanted to wait to tour the facility when we had more time. Well, after enduring five straight days of rain, courtesy of Hurricane Ian, we finally made it back to the John James Audubon Center at Mill Grove.

We arrived around noon to give us time to watch the video on the life and work of John James Audubon and to explore the numerous exhibits. We signed up for the 1:00 p.m. docent tour of the Mill Grove Estate House, where Mr. Audubon spent the years in which he met his wife and developed his methods for painting birds.

Dave was kind enough to add scale to this exhibit.

We found the various nest to be marvels of engineering.

By far, this nest won the largest nest building competition.

The National Audubon Society is an American non-profit environmental organization dedicated to conservation of birds and their habitats. However, when John James Audubon first started documenting the Birds of America, he often captured, killed and posed the birds he described.

It is difficult to describe the impact Mr. Audubon had. For example, this is what we see when we find a blue heron.

This is what Mr. Audubon painted. Sometimes, a photograph doesn't tell the whole story.

John James Audubon labored over his life’s masterwork, “The Birds of America,” from 1827 to 1838. He created about 200 copies of the 3-foot-tall, four-volume set, each featuring 435 hand-colored prints of 1,037 birds. Today only 120 complete sets remain, and, luckily, only 13 are in private hands, meaning that the vast majority of the copies are available to the public and researchers. A recent auction placed that value of a complete four volume set at $9.5 million dollars. It is no wonder this copy, on loan to the Audubon Center, is under bulletproof glass!

Mr. Audubon inspired a number of artists in various media. We watched a short video on the works of Grainger McKoy. His wood and metal works look like they could almost fly away.

Mill Grove, where the Audubon Center is located and Audubon spent those formative years, was the site of a grist mill and mines.  

 

Lead and copper were the chief metals mined on the property. The first discovery of lead was by James Morgan, during construction of the first grist mill.  After Audubon's time at the property the Wetherill family expanded the mines to supply more lead to use in the manufacture of paint. Even further expansion occurred in the 19th century when copper was discovered. The mining operations eventually grew to include two companies: the Perkiomen Mining Association and Ecton Consolidated Mining Co., and would employ close to 300 miners whose shacks dotted the land on both sides of Egypt road, extending up to the town of Shannonville. All that remains is this old smoke stack.

The barn presently on the property is clearly of early origin, but no one knows for sure when it was constructed. It may have been built sometime in the 19th century (1800s). Perhaps the current barn envelopes an earlier barn structure. The current barn appears in photographs taken of the site by the Wetherills about 1900. The circular portion was apparently added as a garage in the early 20th-century. The Audubon Center was using this space as an event center.

The house itself, whose front porch overlooks Perkiomen Creek, was built in 1762 for James Morgan.  In 1764, an addition was constructed and was subsequently used as a kitchen wing and possibly as a tavern for river travelers. It wasn't until 1789 that Captain Jean Audubon, the artist's seafaring father, purchased the property as an investment. A Quaker family named Thomas served as tenants, managers and farmers for the property during his ownership.

In 1803, a 17 yr.-old John James Audubon came to live at Mill Grove with the Thomases. Attempts were made to mine the lead and copper deposits. While at Mill Grove, Audubon made three major discoveries: 1) he achieved the first bird-banding experiment in America; 2) he invented a method of wiring dead birds in order to paint them in natural, lifelike poses; 3) and he met and fell in love with the girl next door, Lucy Bakewell. He married Lucy in 1808, sold his stake in Mill Grove, and he and Lucy set off for Kentucky to establish a hardware store serving settlers who were moving West.

Today, the house looks much as it did originally:

Perkiomen Creek still flows below the front of the house --

-- which still boasts a large porch on which rocking chairs provide visitors a chance to relax and watch the river roll by.

The old house once contained the Center's museum, but most of the exhibits were transferred to the new building shown in a prior photo when it was completed in 2019.  Still, when one walks through the old house, all but one of the rooms appear to be just as they were when the exhibits were last housed here; not much work has been done yet to restore the house to what it might have been like when Audubon lived here.

 

The one key exception to this is John James Audubon's bedroom, which is decorated much as it was described in letters between family members.

When the center was opened back in 1951, George Harding was commissioned to create murals of Audubon's life. The murals still line the hallways of the old house.

Audubon never struck it rich. In fact, the copper plates used to make the pages of Birds of America were sold as scrap and almost destroyed. However, the impact of his work still resonates today. There are 23 state-sponsored Audubon programs, 41 different Audubon Centers and 450 local chapters of the Audubon Society.

 

We came away from our tour with a much deeper appreciation of John James Audubon as a person and as an artist and ornithologist.  Even this wasn't entirely complete, because the Museum has posted signs explaining that, as great as his work was Audubon was not a paragon of morality.  He owned slaves and apparently supported the idea of slave ownership.  The Museum is promising to expand its exhibits to include this darker side of an admittedly complex character of American history and art.

 

Yet, for all his defects, it is impossible not to marvel at and admire the exquisite detail, charm and accuracy of his works.  Still today, and to those of us who frequently see the birds in the wild, his pictures of birds portray not only their appearance but their spirit more vividly than anything else we have seen.  Gazing at his depiction of our favorite birds, we find ourselves inspired to look again more carefully and deeply at these wonderful, enchanting creatures.