The Olde & the Newe

It has long been the practice of wealthy U.S. museums and collectors to buy historic European buildings, then transport them beam and brick across the Atlantic. Last week the process was somewhat reversed; in Great Britain an American museum was open near the Regency resort town of Bath. Its purpose: to show the British just how their cousins lived from the landing of the Mayflower to the beginning of the present century.

Bath's American Museum is a project born of pique. For years the museum's founders--British-born Antique Dealer John Judkyn and Manhattan Psychiatrist Dallas Pratt--have been spending summers in Britain, and each year found the British as dense about the U.S. as the year before. In 1956 Pratt set up the Halcyon Foundation to endow a museum, and Judkyn found the site. It was Bath's Claverton Manor, designed by George IV's architect, Sir Jeffry Wyatville.

Once inside the museum, the visitor leaves Olde England behind and steps into the Newe. From Wrentham, Mass., the museum brought a 17th century "keeping room," with furniture owned by Peregrine White, who was born on the Mayflower. Beyond that room is an 18th century staircase with its handy "valuables bag"-a homespun linen sack into which valuables could be thrown and, in case of fire, hurled out the window. Next come two connecting rooms from a house in Lee, N.H.--a kitchen-living room and a "borning" or "measles" room with a tiny cradle. From then on, the Americans began to indulge themselves. An 1825 Greek Revival room from Manhattan is as elegant as Claverton Manor itself. On the other hand, the museum offers a country store with period posters ("SOCIAL DANCE," "AUCTION! !") and gingerbread.

To keep shop. Founders Judkyn and Pratt picked Ian McCallum, then executive editor of Britain's Architectural Review, and debonair Briton who is fascinated by American architecture both good and bad. Says Curator McCallum: "There is a quite amazing ignorance which exists in Britain of America's cultural past--and present, for that matter." He thinks that the museum, by putting "history into the fourth dimension in a way that films and even books can't do," may shed some light.

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