Elisabeth Tatum • Executive Director
I moved to Red Hook in 2019 with the intention of making this town my forever home! After beginning my journey with Historic Red Hook as a social media coordinator, the board invited me to become HRH’s first official staff member in 2021 by offering me the position of part-time executive director.
I’ve been interested in history for as long as I can remember. However, studying American History has been a relatively new development for me: I initially intended to be a medievalist!
In 2016, I graduated from Middlebury College in Vermont with a History and English double major and a Theater minor. After college, I knew I wanted to work in a museum where I could either study original historical clothing or make reproductions of historical clothing. This interest led me to an internship in the historic clothing and textiles department at Plimoth Patuxet in Massachusetts (formerly Plimoth Plantation), where I learned about costumed historical interpretation (i.e. dressing up in funny clothes and teaching visitors about the past). I moved on to the Old Barracks Museum in Trenton, New Jersey where I worked for three years as a historical interpreter in an eighteenth-century military barracks. In this position, I led tours, made clothing and furnishings for the museum, and had the opportunity to teach students about the French and Indian War and the Revolutionary War, both at the museum and in elementary schools.
Through my work in the public history sector, I met my now husband, Will Tatum. As the Dutchess County Historian and a public officer of New York State, he must reside in the county he serves. I thought that New York would be the perfect state to make my home, since I was born in Schuylerville, NY, (and then grew up in Manitou Springs, Colorado, at the base of Pikes Peak). Will had been looking for a historic home to call his own and Beth Jones, then HRH Treasurer, knew of the perfect place–in Upper Red Hook as her neighbor. In one fell swoop I got a new house, a new job, and, in 2020 when I married Will in our backyard, a husband!
After taking four years off from school, I decided it was time to go back. I am currently a graduate student working towards a PhD in history at SUNY University at Albany. My research, like my other work, has a local focus: I now study the consumer and material culture of Dutchess County in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, using the documents of the Dutchess County Court of Common Pleas to study men who were imprisoned for debt. (You can take a look at an example of one of my current research projects here: "A Web of Indebtedness" Visualizing the Tangled Network of Credit & Debt in 18th-Century Dutchess County, NY)
In both my academic work as a student and my role as a public historian, I’m interested in making the past relatable. We have a tendency to look at people and objects in the past and think to ourselves “how strange” or “how odd” rather than focusing on the things that remain the same. In my experience, understanding this continuity has a grounding effect, providing context for how we understand ourselves and our place in the world.
Being relatively new to the area, I’m still working on meeting people. I’d love to meet you at any of our upcoming events– please come over and say hello!
Elisabeth Tatum can be contacted at director@historicredhook.org.