Powell Cotton Museum

This chapter is a practitioner based description of interaction between groups and individuals in front of and with room sized diorama at the Powell-Cotton Museum. Over the past five years performance and storytelling have been a method through which audiences are engaged through multiple intelligences. Different types of performance: Traditional storytelling, storytelling from the displays, and natural history storytelling are described along with the learning objectives that they are intended to elicit. This is very much storytelling with a purpose. The purpose can be many fold and adapted both to the intended messages and audiences.

The West Battery, later renamed Castle Clinton, was constructed off the tip of Manhattan, New York, between 1808 and 1811. Following Paul J. F. Schumacher (1955) and John L. Cotter (1962), William D. Hershey conducted excavations inside the castle for the National Park Service (NPS) reconstruction efforts in 1963 (Hershey 1963). His excavations revealed several discrepancies between the fortifications that were planned and those that were built. These modifications to the original design were never satisfactorily explained. In the early 1960s, the archives of Col. Jonathan Williams, the architect of the West Battery, were discovered, transcribed, and compiled by NPS historian Thomas Pitkin (1963). This paper attempts to reconcile the design changes in the construction of Castle Clinton with the archives of its architect and builder Col. Williams. This reconciliation provides additional information concerning the construction of fortifications in New York Harbor, the flexibility accorded the early engineers, and the politics of the early 19th century military.