2015 Annual Meeting Preview!

In response to many requests, here are preliminary details of the annual meeting so that you can plan now to be in Williamsburg, Virginia, this coming June!

We are working to get registration information up on the conference website by mid-February. There will be no registration booklet this year but each registrant will get the final program booklet, location details, etc., when they check in. Don’t worry: there will be many announcements when the website is live, and there will be a link on the ALHFAM home page to the registration page. There will be a postcard sent to each member with information on how to register.

Housing will be at The College of William & Mary. If registrants don’t want to stay there, there are many, many hotels and motels in the area at all price points, but there will not be a block of rooms reserved for meeting attendees.

Full conference registration is $425, which includes all conference meals and site visits. Rooms at William and Mary will be $48/night single and $37/night double. There will be an additional $15 one-time linen fee. All rooms have WiFi. Housing details will be on the conference website, including what will be in each room and what you might want to bring to make your stay more comfortable.

We welcome those who offer products to the museum and living history communities, and we’re planning special ways to encourage attendees to visit you. If you are interested in being a vendor, please contact Jonathan Hallman at jhallman@cwf.org for details.

The pre-conference/professional workshops and field trips will be Friday, June 19th, with the exception of the Farmers Boot Camp, which will be Thursday and Friday, June 18-19.

Four pre-conference field trips or tours are planned. All of them will have minimums and maximums, and all will have fees in addition to the conference registration. This information will be on the conference website. Here are short descriptions of each of them:
1. Peninsula Civil War Tour that includes visits to Fort Monroe, the Mariners Museum (see the Monitor turret!) and the Battle of Williamsburg.

2. Gloucester County Architecture Archaeology Tour that includes Rosewell, Fairfield and Werowocomoco, the residence of the paramount chief Powhatan, father of Pocohontas, and center of the Powhatan chiefdom during the early 1600s. The site is owned privately and will be available to us by special arrangement.

3. Southside Virginia Rural Life Tour in Surry County that includes visits to Bacon’s Castle (the only surviving High Jacobean structure and the oldest brick dwelling in the United States), Smith’s Fort Plantation (both owned by Preservation Virginia) and Chippokes Plantation State Park, which has a great collection of agricultural equipment and agricultural machinery. The trip will include a ferry ride across the James River.

4. Behind the Scenes Tour of the Wallace Collections and Conservation Building, part of  the Bruton Heights Educational Center at Colonial Williamsburg. This will be a special tour for ALHFAM only and not one of the regular tours of the Bruton Heights complex offered for CW visitors.

The Program Committee is still working on the selection of the workshops. We anticipate making those decisions by the end of this month. However, I can tell you that we are working on a full-day workshop for administrators focusing how to make the transition from an all-volunteer organization to one that has paid staff smother, and to helping board members transition from being an operational board (that is, one that does all of the work) to a being governing board (one that sets policy, etc.). We are doing this in cooperation with the Virginia Association of Museums, who will be facilitating the workshop.

The opening reception will be at Colonial Williamsburg’s Coach and Livestock facility–you won’t want to miss it!

Brief schedule:

Saturday, June 20th: Sessions at William & Mary; annual business meeting; Town Hall meeting; evening program (TBD)

Sunday, June 21st: Colonial Williamsburg site visit day. There will be special programs, demonstrations, etc., that will be advertised only to meeting attendees but will be available to regular visitors (as we had last year in Calgary), and some that will be only for ALHFAM. The plowing match is planned for this day. Sunday evening: Auction!! Plan now to bring great stuff and to buy, buy, buy! All proceeds go to ALHFAM’s Fellowship Fund.

Monday, June 22nd: Sessions at William & Mary; Presidential Banquet & Fashion Show

Tuesday, June 23rd: Yorktown & Jamestown site visit day. We’ll spend the morning in Yorktown, with visits to the NPS Yorktown Battlefield and to the Yorktown Victory Center (soon to be the American Revolution Museum at Yorktown). We’ll travel down the Colonial Parkway to Jamestown, with box lunches at Historic Jamestowne, and special tours of the excavations, collections, etc. Mid-afternoon we’ll go to the nearby Jamestown Settlement, with visits to the museum and outdoor interpretive areas as well as Town Ball. That evening, we’ll party on the pier overlooking the James River as the sun sets!!

If you have questions, please send them to me at alhfam2015@gmail.com; I’ll be happy to answer them.

We look forward to seeing you in Williamsburg in June!

Martha Katz-Hyman
Program Chair
2015 ALHFAM Annual Meeting