Gemeinschaft: Lessons from German Immigration and Integration

Summer Exhibit 2025 - June 1 to September 30

When German immigrants first arrived in Appleton and other communities across Northeastern Wisconsin, they faced horrible discrimination. Their meager connections to their former homes - their food, drink, religion, customs, even their names - were deemed to be utterly foreign by those already living here.

Yet within a few generations, what seemed so foreign became fundamental to who we are as communities. Today, those exact things - brats and beer, Lutheranism and Catholicism, and even German surnames - are threads woven into our social fabric and are what make our part of the state so wonderfully unique.

Gemeinschaft is the German word for “community.” But its meaning is much deeper than that. It refers to people who live and work closely, who have strong personal relationships and shared morals and values, and who put the needs of the community ahead of the desires of the individual.

This describes precisely what is best about our communities.

Gemeinschaft: Lessons from German Immigration and Integration comprises a series of exhibits, events, and special tours that will tell the story of this evolution, its impact on Hearthstone, and its wider significance. It will provide reminders of what we have learned together and apply those lessons to our communities today.

Tickets for special tours and events continue on sale until September 28. Gemeinschaft exhibits in the Lower Level will be included in every tour of Hearthstone.

Victorian Death and Mourning

OCTOBER 2 - November 2

Last half of the 1800s brought widespread changes to Victorian life.  Rapid industrialization and urbanization resulted in fast-paced, constant change which, in turn, fostered a spectrum of social and economic problems that permeated every aspect of Victorian life.  Among these were deplorable working conditions, poverty, alcoholism, rise of crime, widespread disease.   There was one constant in Victorian life:  Death.

In London during the middle of the 19th century, the average lifespan for the middle to upper class males was only 44 years, for tradesmen 25 years, for laborers a mere 22 years as conditions such as quality of life, quality of health care, difficulty of work diminished proportionally with a descent in economic class.  The grime toll was even higher on children.  A staggering three out of every five children born to working class families died by the age of 5, mostly from childhood diseases like typhoid, measles, diphtheria, scarlet fever, and rubella.

Death was so commonplace that it permeated every aspect of Victorian life and lead to a morbid fascination with the macabre and elaborate rituals to commemorate the dead. In many ways, coping with death became an art form.

Hearthstone explores Victorian ideas on death and mourning has part of its month-long Haunted Hearthstone event with the entire house decorated according to Victorian norms (draped windows and mirrors, stopped clocks, overturned photos, and a casket in the parlor) and exhibits of Victorian memento mori (items made to remind the living of the dead) including jewelry made from the departed loved one’s hair as well funereal items. Mourning clothing, which was highly regimented, is also on display.

Haunted Hearthstone: Victorian Death and Mourning is included on all regular daytime tours of Hearthstone and serves as a backdrop for special daytime tours Horrors of the Household and evening theatrical performances of Sequential Killers of the Victorian Age - Part V (please refer to the events section for details).

Lewis Latimer: Self-Made Renaissance Man

Permanent Exhibit

An inventive genius who worked along side some of the most famous names in American history - Alexander Graham Bell, Hiram Maxim, Thomas Edison - before gaining his own fame as an inventor and educator, Lewis Latimer is the subject of a new permanent exhibit at Hearthstone.

The exhibit, initially a part of Hearthstone’s celebration of Black History Month and now on permanent display, covers Latimer’s life and his most important inventions. The exhibit features artifacts and video presentations covering Lewis Latimer but also his parents’ fight for freedom from slavery. Their struggle was a cause celebre, championed by giants of abolitionism including Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, that outraged New England society ten years before the Dred Scott decision.

Lewis Latimer: Self-Made Renaissance Man exhibit is included in every tour of Hearthstone.