New Exhibit Incoming!

By Amaya Eckersley, Director

This spring and summer, we will be welcoming a brand new permanent exhibit at the Hoover-Minthorn House Museum – a 19th century kitchen and apothecary garden!

This garden will be situated at the approximate site that it would have been when Herbert Hoover lived in the home. This site is beside the well, just outside of the kitchen and shed. The location provided both easy access for watering and for kitchen usage. In his youth, watering the garden was one of Bertie’s household chores, though the garden was otherwise considered part of the woman’s domain, along with the kitchen, as was typical for 19th century families. While most of the space in the garden is committed to crops for the family, part of the garden will be dedicated to medicinal herbs to highlight Doctor Minthorn’s medical education and practice. You see, while there was a small pharmacy in Newberg at the time, much of Doctor Minthorn’s medical education focused on natural medicine in herbs and minerals, and in many cases herbal medicine would have been a more affordable option for the poor families in the area. Additionally, it was not unheard of for households to, in some ways, grow their own medicinal treatments, utilizing pharmacies and doctors only once illness got out of hand.

Previous Hoover-Minthorn House Museum Garden. The garden fell out of use several years ago due to COVID-19 struggles and long-term museum closures.

Sample four-square garden, courtesy of Ellen Ecker Ogden, ellenogden.com.

The style of this garden will be a small but typical “four-square” garden. These geometric layouts, usually created from four raised garden beds with paths in between them, were thought to be efficient and made crop rotation easy. These four-square gardens typically had some sort of flowering plant in the very center for decoration, and the perimeter was often lined with hedges, particularly with pleasant-smelling bushes like rosemary, lavender, roses, and more. These hedges provided decoration as well as potential pest-repellant, as deer and many bugs are deterred by strong scents of certain plants. Families would often use these hedges to lay out sheets and clothing to dry, infusing them with a pleasant scent for a long-lasting clean feeling. The Hoover-Minthorn House Garden will have some pleasant bushes at one edge, namely a rose bush and a rosemary bush, but instead of using the hedges as walls we will instead use a more modern hog wire and wood fence by necessity – there are many friendly deer in this area that would love to pay our garden a visit.

We will be updating our website and social media with pictures of the brand new garden-in-progress next week, so stay tuned for updates! Planting will begin in late April or early May, and the exhibit is expected to be completely finished with interpretive panels by August, but the garden will be viewable before then as well.