Rethinking Whitehorne Community Open Houses

NRF’s Whitehorne House Museum has been a fixture of Lower Thames Street for almost 45 years, and it’s time for some change! Come help us think about how our renowned collection of 18th-century Newport furniture might better serve the interests and needs of 21st-century visitors.

While Whitehorne House Museum has been closed in the last year, NRF staff and peers from other Newport organizations have been thinking about more compelling ways to present the collection and how better to tell the story of Newport’s famed eighteenth-century furniture making and other craft traditions. And we’re ready to hear what the community thinks of our ideas. Please join us for our upcoming open houses and let us know what you think!

We’ll have several hands-on activities to help you think about more engaging ways to show the furniture and decorative arts so lovingly collected by Doris Duke for the Newport Restoration Foundation and for the benefit of the Newport community. Should we emphasize the stories of the Townsend and Goddard families? Look at the global connections of colonial Newport in the design, materials, and use of a single, simple tea table? Would you like to know how to cut a dovetailed joint? Or see Target’s new line of “Newport” furniture? We invite you to come have look; tell us what else you’d like to know about and how you’d like to see the collection presented in the future.