A place as richly historic as the LSU Rural Life Museum requires not just antiques, but people skilled in their preservation.
Enter the museum’s docent program. The museum’s fifty or so docent volunteers act as tour guides, demonstrate old artisanal lifeways, and help maintain the various historic buildings. They connect the museum’s artifacts and visitors, creating a living historical experience.
Elaine Ellis has been a docent at the LSU Rural Life Museum for forty-five years and knew Steele Burden personally. “He was a fascinating person, and a real artist,” Ellis said. “Every day when I would go out there to work, he was back in his little corner in the old barn, making his figures out of clay. Those figurines are very sought after now.”
For thirty-five of her docent years, Ellis has been in charge of the hottest place on the property: the open-hearth kitchen. She and her team of docents churn out fire-cooked game, pain perdu, corn fritters, and historically accurate seasonal vegetables. She sources most of the fish and game herself.
“I beg for it,” she laughs. “Squirrels, rabbit, duck, whatever I can get. I have a lake in my backyard, so someone catches me a fish every now and then for fish-on-a-plank.”
Ellis uses real antique cookware—lots of hundred-year-old cast-iron, because “it never wears out, she explained —and many pieces were collected over years during Burden’s weekend drives along River Road. The kitchen performs exactly as it would have in the 1800s, and the museum is deeply committed to the bit: there’s no air conditioning or refrigeration, so the cooks must prepare exactly what will be consumed that day.”
“Back in those days, they had to start fresh every day,” she explained. “If they killed a pig or a cow, they had to smoke it to make it last longer.”
“It’s all about making people understand what happened.”
—Stan Guedry, docent at the LSU Rural Life Museum
It’s all part of the learning experience for visitors, many of whom are children on field trips. Classes of fourth- and eighth graders learning Louisiana history often tour the property, and Ellis enjoys showing them how their ancestors cooked. Several cruise lines also bring in national and international visitors, and the cultural exchange can be illuminating for guests and docents alike.
“I had a couple come in from Holland, and I was telling them about Dutch ovens,” Ellis said. “The gentleman asked me why we call them Dutch ovens, because they don’t have them in Holland.” The term and the pot, as it turns out, are English inventions; the type of mold used to make them is the Dutch contribution. “We all learned something that day,” she added.
Photo courtesy of LSU Rural Life Museum
Docents Stan and Patti Guedry
According to Stan Guedry, a docent and gift shop artisan at the LSU Rural Life Museum for nearly a decade, those far-flung visitors also tend to have skewed notions of slavery. Correcting the narrative is important, he says, but it’s much more effective when you can physically stand in a building that enslaved people lived in.
“It’s all about making people understand what happened,” Guedry added.
Ellis agreed. “You can't imagine a slave cabin or the kitchen…unless you walk into it and see how people really lived."
Call in the Kids
Museum program specialist and docent coordinator Christina Brown recently reopened the museum’s sixth-through-twelfth grade Junior Docent program, which was paused during COVID. Prior to its closure, the roster had a whopping fifty to seventy-five junior docents, all of whom received a head start on learning nineteenth-century lifeways and helped the museum during group visits and events. The rebooted program currently has eight junior docents — small but mighty, Brown says.
“They get to learn from the artisans and professionals on how to make candles and blacksmithing, woodworking, spinning—all kinds of skills,” Brown said.
As for adults, there are several upcoming docent training sessions for folks who are curious. At the LSU Rural Life Museum, you’ll find docents who’ve been at it for decades and are eager to teach initiates everything they know. Want to learn more? The next docent orientation is Saturday, October 24 at 9 am, followed by another on Tuesday, November 10 at 9 am. November. Email rlm@lsu.edu for more information.
Experience living history by taking a tour of the LSU Rural Life Museum. Or, become part of that history yourself as a LSU Rural Life Museum docent.
