Resilient Americana: Continuity:
May-Stringer House, Brooksville, Florida is a Hybrid VR Painting™ by Dave Alber.
acrylic on Canson paper and panoramic VR technology
22 x 10.75 in (56 x 27 cm)
2020
It is well understood that the American New World was a land where pilgrims, immigrants, and early colonialists reinvented themselves according to the new spirit of self-determination that strengthened these early Americans with a unique sense of personal destiny. Ironically then, the American Revolutionaries’ break from the British Empire in The Declaration of Independence was felt and understood as part of England’s continuity of liberty under limited government that the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and its subsequent Bill of Rights had declared.
The American Revolutionaries, it is important to recognize, understood themselves as loyalists to the British government’s highest principles. It is our continuity of principles, ideals, history, culture, and life-ways that give us our unique character in the global supermarket of ideas and values.
The May-Stringer House in Brooksville, Florida is a Victorian mansion started in 1856. It began as a humble four-room house but, once sold to the local doctor Shelton Stringer, grew to become a four-story mansion. It now serves as a museum preserving America’s local history, cultural continuity, architecture, artifacts, and even ghost stories and oral tradition.
Linda Welker, at the Hernando Historical Museum Association told me, “The May Stringer house saw the birth of new life and the extinction of life. Some left this world too soon and refused to leave the house. They haunt the rooms to this day. The evolution of the families who lived here transformed four rooms to four stories, illuminating their legacy through the decades.”
