Hearthstone Historic House Museum

Tour Tools and Materials

Below please find links to all of our revised docent materials as well as a host of supporting articles. Some materials will be added the week before or immediately after the scheduled session.

Regular Daytime Tour

• NEW Self-guided audio tour of Hearthstone in English (Code is 1882. The tour does not yet include changes for 2025.)

• Note Cards for 2025 Tour (changes are in red)

School Tours

• Grade K-3 Basics of Electricity

• Grade 4-6 Hydroelectricity and the Inventions of Hearthstone

• Grade 7-8 Hearthstone and Its Place in History

• Adult Group Tour

Specialty tours

• Horrors of the Household (October tour on all of the things that could kill you in a typical Victorian household - good family fun!). In 2025 we will also be doing a separate tour entitled Victorian Bad Ideas that cover a host of other ways that Victorian practices were really, really bad ideas.

• How Victorians Invented Christmas (December tour on how the secular Christmas traditions that are followed today started in the Victorian Era)

Greeter Duties

• Greeter Basics

Worksheets for Tracking Your Shifts

Please use Volgistics to sign up for shifts, which will be the official record of who worked when and for shift count. However, please feel free to download and use the following worksheets to independently track your completed shifts at the museum.

• Docents

• Greeters

Additional supporting information

The following are links to general reference materials that docents, and aspiring docents, may find useful or simply interesting. Please note: Some of the older materials below are at variance with new research. When this is the case, the new materials are to be followed - No exceptions.

• “Among the Heaviest of Capitalists: Appleton’s Unsung Paper Barons of the Gilded Age,” Voyageur Magazine - Northeast Wisconsin’s Historical Review, Winter/Spring 2022, Volume 38, Number 2.

• Victorian and Edwardian Homes of Prospect Avenue 1849-1919 Walking Tour. The link goes to the Hearthstone website which provides general information on the museum’s walking tours as well as a link to the tour itself.

• Kitty’s Wedding: You’re Invited - the 130th Anniversary of Kitty Rogers’ Wedding

• Nomination of William M. Van Nortwick, John S. Van Nortwick, and Henry J. Rogers to the Paper Industry International Hall of Fame

• Docent Guide 2019 (for reference only)

• Self-guided audio tour of Hearthstone in English (code is 1882 and for reference only). This is based on the 2019 Docent Guide.

• The people who made Hearthstone

  • The Henry James Rogers Family and More on the Rogers Family

  • William Van Stratum (the wood-carver)

  • William Waters (the architect)

  • J. Frank Waldo (the muralist and painter)

  • Fredericka Crane (the artist and mentor)

  • The Rogers Servants

    • Mary Deimer (the cook)

    • Theresa Moder (the lady’s maid)

    • Weinsing sisters (the parlor maids)

    • Elizabeth Sexton (the parlor maid)

    • Adel MacArthur (the chamber maid)

    • Albert Gouldemans (the coachman)

• Decorative Ceilings

• Etiquette of Calling Cards

• Meskwaki Nation History

• Dining Room and More Dining Room

• Home Life in the 1880s

• Servants’ Areas

• Servants Rooms Generally

• Victorian Bedrooms

• Victorian Bathrooms