Correction to the reference in my last post to that NY Times article
Suzanne Levy pointed out!  I searched the Times's archive for "Carter's
Grove," and clicked without noticing the date on the most recent
article--which turned out to be a rather upbeat report from September
2000 lauding, among other things, Williamsburg's commitment to "social
history."

I should have done the search Suzanne suggested, on "Colonial
Williamsburg."  That of course turns up the right article, the December
31 account that is thoroughly depressing:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/31/us/31preserve.html.

Notice, though, that the article--like Colonial Williamsburg,
apparently?--sees the entire issue of Carter's Grove in terms of the
predicament of "house museums."

Carter's Grove should not be a "house museum."  It should be a
plantation historical site that educates the public about the social,
cultural, and economic foundations of eighteenth-century Williamsburg,
colonial Virginia, and the nation--a site that happens to have an
architecturally notable house on it.

Carter's Grove, the house, is all but irrelevant to the history
represented at Colonial Williamsburg.  Carter's Grove, the plantation,
opens the complex historical understanding without which Colonial
Williamsburg is nothing more than an ahistorical consumer fantasy.

--Jurretta J. Heckscher

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