American Heritage Society Tours

Because of the American Heritage Society tours, which began this year, we are now happily receiving a whole new class of mail, and of a very rare and old-fashioned variety: thank-you letters. Our travellers clearly enjoyed what one, a teacher, called her “fantastic week of history.” It left her “a bit overwhelmed and saturated but also impressed and satisfied.” A rarebook dealer who joined in the same adventure writes that “From the Hudson to the Mohawk, Sunnyside to Fort Ontario, and the WaldorfAstoria to Le Moyne Manor, the New York tour last week was continuous pleasure to me.” Clearly, one of the main joys for our travellers was “getting behind the curtain”—avoiding the crowds, seeing things quietly, getting into interesting private homes, and being received as guests by curators, owners, even governors, all of them custodians in one way or another of the visible past. This month our second round of tours is underway in various parts of the country.