NEWSROOM

TRUST ANNOUNCES APPOINTMENT OF DIRECTOR OF STEVENS-SMITH HISTORIC SITE
May 8, 2007

Gail Tomlinson’s connections to our community begin with the community into which she was born and raised along with four brothers, in the Germantown section of Philadelphia. She has often been heard to comment that the year she turned eight, key events occurred that would reverberate throughout her personal and, later, professional life. In May of her eighth year she accompanied her mother on a tour of the historic houses of Germantown and began what would become a life-long love of history and the preservation of those places that speak to us of the past. In June as the public schools closed she realized she like school so much she didn’t want it to end, even for the summer; so she set up a summer school for the younger children in the neighborhood so they could improve their skills in reading and math. And, in the fall of the year, on the way to purchase ballet slippers in downtown Philadelphia, she had to take a detour and sit quietly while her community activist mother argued a neighborhood complaint before the City’s Zoning Board of Adjustment. Sitting quietly had its advantages. Gail learned that day that citizens were the government but one had to stand up to be heard.

With these lessons as her foundation Gail began her preparation for adult life. With her parents’ support, she volunteered time as tour guide and special events staff in historic structures such as the Ebenezer Maxwell Mansion and the Germantown Arts Center (269 Walnut Lane). During this same time her formal education at Temple University in Philadelphia provided her with both Bachelor of Science and Master’s degrees in Education. Over the next ten years she was a classroom teacher for both regular elementary and special education students in schools in Germantown. Because she worked in the community in which she had been raised and where her students lived, she was able to develop curriculum that used the rich and varied resources of historic Germantown; from battlefield at Cliveden to the Mennonite Meetinghouse to the Rittenhouse papermill.

The trips with her students to help them discover that history was the lives of real people in real places helped Gail to rediscover her own love for historic sites. She took her skills as a classroom teacher and expanded them to develop programs for students and adults alike to encourage visitation at more than 35 sites within the City of Philadelphia. Gail’s work with Historic Germantown Preserved, a consortium of 13 historic sites in Germantown, led to her invitation to one of only 20 openings in a six-week course, The Historic Administration Seminar, offered yearly by the American Association of Museums and Historic Williamsburg, Inc., in Williamsburg, Virginia. Her particular area of interest was the role of African Americans in the growth of Germantown and how the consortium could best tell that story.

Gail’s work with the Germantown houses led to an offer to fill a slightly expanded role with 23 of the historic sites scattered throughout Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park. As Director of the Fairmount Park Council for Historic Sites, Gail had to look both outward and inward. Programs such as Tea for Two Cultures, brought many new visitors to the sites; in this particular program, to specifically understand eastern and western approaches to the ceremonial use of tea. But the sites themselves, functioning as a consortium for less than three years, were still learning the operational standards of building preservation, site interpretation and marketing their programs.
During this time, Gail also began to actively pursue the civics lessons she had been taught on her visit to that first Zoning Board hearing. Gail was elected to serve first as Zoning Chair and later President of her local civic association. She was asked to serve as a coordinator of a local coalition of civic associations who were beginning to deal with the incursion of institutional uses into the residential and commercial base of Germantown.

And her ties to the City’s historic and cultural communities continued. She served as chair of the Education Committee of Museum Council of Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley, board member and later President of the Maxwell Mansion, Inc. She even returned to the Fairmount Park Council in later years as their President of the Board.

Philadelphia in the early 1990s was calling for the reform of public education in the City and throughout the Commonwealth. Gail returned to her education roots, though not as a classroom teacher. Citizens Committee on Public Education in Philadelphia, better known as CCPEP, was an education advocacy group founded in 1880 to push for child labor laws and mandatory school attendance. Over their more than 100-year existence, they had often pressed for reforms in the City’s public schools. They were seen by teachers, administrators, unions and politicians as honest brokers whose unofficial motto might well have been, “no permanent enemies, no permanent friends.” Their sole focus was what was good for children and their education.

Under Gail’s leadership, CCPEP conducted reviews of the School district’s budgets, developed trial programs to encourage greater parental involvement in low-performing schools, and offered a citizen’s voice to the on-going legal case regarding desegregation and Philadelphia schools. A persuasive spokesperson for the organization, especially on the latter issues, Gail was asked by the judges in both Philadelphia’s and St. Louis’s desegregation cases to serve on court appointed advisory panels.
In 1999, after 119 years of service to education and serving as midwife to a number of new parent and advocacy groups, CCPEP closed its doors.

Gail had little time to contemplate endings, however, because a unique beginning, seeming to need all of her skills, presented itself to her. After 15 years of incremental progress, the Philadelphia Water Department had decided the time had come to focus on the conversion of one of their earliest pumping stations into an education and interpretive center for the public. Obtaining six million dollars in funding for and the construction of the historic Fairmount Water Works were Gail’s first assignments. Over the next 5 years, despite fire and flood, construction was completed, unique exhibits designed that could be submerged, raised, or removed from annual Schuylkill River floods and the Fairmount Water Works Interpretive Center opened. The lessons regarding the protection of drinking water sources, beginning with the exhibits themselves, were offered to the more than 70,000 people who visited in the first two years.

Now Gail has accepted the position of Director of the Stevens-Smith Historic Site, a project of the Historic Preservation Trust of Lancaster County. Like the Water Works, the Stevens-Smith project has important messages to bring to the public. She sees in this project the opportunity to preserve an important gateway to history, the buildings themselves. Yet this gateway will also lead its visitors to an understanding that freedom and equality in this country are a vision of the founders that we must still meet. Most importantly, the site will challenge the visitor to be an active participant in achieving that goal.

The lessons, challenges and goals of that eight year old girl in Philadelphia have an opportunity to be met in Lancaster. At least she hopes so.