A Stevie Wolf Testimonial – George W. Boudreau

I knew of Stephanie Grauman Wolf years before I knew her. When I started graduate school at Indiana University in 1987, I was fascinated by town studies and what they revealed about early American life and communities. I scooped up everything I could read in the field, going from New England town to town. But one day I came across a reference to a non-New England village: Germantown, Pennsylvania. I had little idea where Germantown was, except that my undergraduate alma mater had its Church of the Brethren roots there. I wanted to read Wolf’s Urban Village. Indeed, I wanted to own a copy. At the time, special ordering books was a much bigger deal than today, when all that’s required is an Amazon app on an iPhone. In the late eighties, we had neither mobile phones nor apps. So I made a trip to the IU bookstore, poured over the massive Books in Print volume, and ordered the paperback. I distinctly remember the day I picked it up at the store.

I knew Stevie’s words before I knew her.

Figure 1. A photograph of the Germantown Historical Society in Philadelphia. Historic Germantown PA.

Stevie’s words were important. Among the many things that her dissertation into book taught us was that early America was vast (long before anyone started using that phrasing). In an era when “colonial” meant New England or the plantation Chesapeake she took us into the complex lives of German and English settlers on an outpost of the Quaker colony in the mid-Atlantic. In both North and South, homogeneity seems to rule, but Stevie’s settlers were dealing with barriers of language and religion in a little town that most Americans had never heard of.

Another lesson of Urban Village was that local is good, and just because local is nearby doesn’t mean it is somehow less. Stevie and her beloved Ted had already moved to Northwest Philadelphia to the house where she welcomed so many of us so many times when she began to dig into the records maintained by the Germantown Historical Society. She told me once that, as a graduate student and young mother, the archivist of the time would allow her to check out primary-source account books to take home and interpret (a story I recently told to the young archivist at Historic Germantown, who shuddered at the thought). Stevie’s work about and in Germantown helped lay the foundations for a thriving community of preservation and interpretation that continues today.

As my own career advanced, Stevie Wolf’s continued to set an example I followed. On a research trip to Philadelphia in 1993, I found her book As Various As Their Land on the new books display at the downtown Border’s Book Store on Walnut Street. She had taken a radical step in that volume, writing for a popular audience with accessible prose about the complexity of early American daily life. Many colleagues will note the book’s value for undergraduate audiences, but many more of us know what a valuable resource it was and is for the interpretation of historic sites. A few months later, I made the courageous step to look up Wolf’s phone number in the phone book (which still existed back then) and called her home to ask her to chair a panel on early American children at a conference I was organizing. She seemed to know who I was, which surprised me. Only later did I learn that she was on the committee that selected me to win the Philadelphia Center (McNeil Center) fellowship soon thereafter. And soon after that, the icon who I had followed became friend and colleague.

Figure 2. Stevie Wolf’s book “As Various as Their Land,” published in 2000. Amazon.

Stevie liked to use the phrase “generous scholar,” and she embodied it. Her boisterous voice could grow very quiet when she took someone aside to carefully share insights into sources, texts, good books or articles to read. She delighted in material culture and positively glowed when she would explain an object or a space.

Her generosity seemed to know no bounds, at times.

Figure 3. Stevie Wolf attending a conference at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies in 2007. Photo courtesy of George W. Boudreau.

Philadelphia is now dotted with rooms and things named after the Wolfs, as the two of them adopted projects and good works that will continue to influence the region for eras to come. I will always remember one event, when something was being named in their honor, when she said to her assembled friends “I want people to know I didn’t marry a rich boy. We worked hard.” I also remember the night the McNeil Center dedicated its main meeting room to her. She told me she was glad to see her late father’s name on the space.

Stevie Wolf was a too-rare commodity in the historical profession. Smart, witty, funny, brutally honest at times, deeply committed to her friends and to the field, always looking for a place she could help. Loving, in her blunt way. Open to everyone she met. My memories of her range to seeing her tangle with famous scholars to sitting on my sofa talking with my mom.

Personally, Stevie taught me that public history was just as important as academic history, and the work done in historic houses and societies was as vital as what was done in classrooms. I write this sitting in my office at a Germantown historic site. Looking back, I can see today that my path here began when I picked up my copy of her book at the IU bookstore, almost thirty-five years ago.

But when a friend called to tell me Stevie had died, public history came second to my mind. Immediately, I thought of our mutual love of dogs. Whenever a new dog entered my life, Stevie would come visit and give her approval. She told me once “For me, heaven will be a place where all of my dogs come to greet me.” I envisioned a loving, rowdy pack of standard poodles greeting their mommy the day Germantown lost our Dr. Wolf. May her memory, and all the memories she preserved and interpreted, be for a blessing.

George W. Boudreau

George W. Boudreau…