In Germantown, thousands of dresses — and their rich history — could crumble, thanks to Trump’s cuts to the arts

When Kaila Temple arrived at the Germantown Historical Society in September to curate its 5,000-piece costume collection, she planned to introduce the centuries-old garments to the neighborhood through a series of summer pop-ups.

She’d spend her workdays cataloging and organizing the fashion treasures — the oldest of which was worn by 18th century Quakers and English colonists. She looked forward to reshaping chapeaus and inspecting the beaded costume jewelry.

GHS had never embarked on a collections project of this magnitude, and given next year’s Semiquincentennial — America’s 250th birthday party — it was right on time.

Temple’s curation of GHS’s jaw-dropping stomacher gowns, stiff-brimmed bonnets, Victorian mourning dresses, and 19th century top hats would speak to Germantown’s place in the founding of the Republic — and beyond.

“I was excited,” said Temple, Germantown Historical Society’s curator of collections. “We were ready to enter a new era and bring the collection up to best practices and standards.”

Her excitement was short-lived.

Shortly after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the Department of Government Efficiency’s cuts to the National Endowment for the Humanities eliminated a $150,000 matching grant GHS was awarded in 2023. The money was earmarked to upgrade the nearly 230-year-old building’s electrical wiring and replace its broken heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning system. Temperature control is key to the conservation and preservation of fragile textiles and archival materials. Without it, the delicate materials can become heat-damaged, get mildewed, and disintegrate.

Temple applied for a $25,000 Institute of Museum and Library Services grant to aid in inventory, and she had designs on getting into IMLS’s Museum Assessment Program to work with master appraisers and conservators in getting the vintage apparel exhibition ready. With the future of IMLS up in the air, she’s no longer banking on those opportunities. The summer pop-ups were canceled.

“The excitement I once had about taking over the collection has been dampened with worry,” Temple said.

In the wake of Trump’s attack on the arts, Temple is among the growing number of museum and historical society curators worried for the future of their collections. The severe defunding of the National Endowment for the Arts, NEH, and IMLS begs the question: How is Trump making America great again when his executive orders are putting some of our nation’s most precious artifacts in jeopardy?

“There is a serious cognitive dissonance in this moment,” Temple said. “How is this administration putting so much focus on America’s past, but ignoring preservation? Preservation should be a nonpartisan issue.”

Small museums and historical societies don’t have endowed chairs and million-dollar budgets so they rely on a combination of federal grants and generous donors for staff salaries, building upkeep, community engagement, and exhibits.

At small museums like GHS, donors prefer to sponsor high profile exhibits and community engagement projects. So GHS depends on federal funding for building projects and its conservation and preservation needs. It’s hard, tedious, and invisible work, but without it, it’s impossible to put on a good show.

“These programs fund historic sites and collections across the country in small towns, rural communities, and big cities,” said Tuomi Forrest, executive director of Historic Germantown. “We are talking about a broad tapestry of American culture that’s being undermined.”

This is a critical time for GHS’s costume collection. The nonprofit has been amassing Germantown residents’ clothing since its founding in 1901. Although the collection has been digitized, the catalog information varies. Some of the details were taken from aged file cards and notebooks. For some objects there is no information at all. With each passing year, the building gets older and the collection more vulnerable.

“We have a historic collection that needs care,” Temple said. “The conditions in our building are creating a potentially harmful environment for our collections.”

President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act into law in 1965, establishing the NEA and NEH. (IMLS was added under this umbrella in 1996.) The prevailing thought was government should support the arts in a well-rounded, educated society.

President Ronald Reagan, a former actor, wanted to slash NEA and NEH’s funding during his first term in office back in 1981. Congress — and Reagan’s Hollywood friends, including Charlton Heston — argued against it. He didn’t end up eliminating the NEA, but the arts sector suffered major cuts.

The Religious Right joined forces with fiscally conservative Republicans in 1989, demanding Congress defund NEA after Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano used their grants to make art many considered obscene and sacrilegious. The fight lasted until 1994 when President Bill Clinton threatened to veto any budget that eliminated the NEA.

When in his 2017 budget Trump proposed to eliminate the NEA and NEH, Congress rejected the proposal. The arts were spared and received a slight increase in support.

Exhibits and programming are a fraction of the NEH, NEA, and IMLS’s combined $708 million budget. However, Trump — targeting the history and art that centers women, people of color, and the LGBTQI community — bypassed Congress earlier this year and severed arts funding through a series of executive orders and DOGE mandates.

In June, as part of its contentious birthright citizenship ruling, the Supreme Court limited the ability of federal judges to issue nationwide injunctions against executive orders. The ruling stripped away the power of federal judges when it came to Trump’s executive orders, forcing those impacted to file individual lawsuits; resulting in the seeming end of federal funding of the arts.

“In going after DEI, everyone is getting hurt,” Temple said, as she wondered if the administration understood government’s pivotal role in preservation.

There are 20 house museums and landmarks in Historic Germantown including Cliveden, the site of the Revolutionary War’s Battle of Germantown and Historic Fair Hill, a 300-year-old Quaker burial ground and resting place of abolitionist Lucretia Mott.

“We are scrappy organizations,” Forrest said. “But whatever your interest is in the foundation of American history, you can find it with us.“

Many of these historic sites are feeling the impacts of cuts to preservations funds.

Stenton, home of Philadelphia’s 14th mayor, prominent Quaker and enslaver James Logan, received a $300,000 NEH grant to upgrade its HVAC system, refurbish its bathrooms, and get started on an education wing.

The grant was rescinded this spring.

“It was very sudden and surprising,” said Dennis Pickeral, Stenton’s executive director.

Johnson House’s executive director Cornelia Swinson is disappointed DOGE snatched back a $30,000 NEA grant for its 2025 Juneteenth celebration. But she’s even more concerned about her building’s foundation.

In 2023, Johnson House — a 257-year-old historic landmark and Underground Railroad stop — was awarded a $333,000 grant from the state to restore the Wissahickon schist, the metamorphic rock the Johnson House sits on. Cuts on the federal level impact state budgets, she says. Without the restoration, her building is in danger of caving in.

“We have ciphering books the Johnson children used in school,” Swinson said. “We have Bibles, reports from the antislavery society, we even have a letter Sarah Wheeler Johnson wrote to a friend about the death of George Washington in her own handwriting.”

GHS’s costume collection represents the full spectrum of American history starting with the Colonial and Revolutionary eras, bleeding into the time when free Black people and Quakers were conductors on the Underground Railroad.

During the second Industrial Revolution, Germantown was a fashion destination and bustled with upscale stores like Allen’s Department — at the corner of Chelten Avenue and Greene Street — and C.A. Rowell’s — America’s first Black-owned department store.

The collection speaks to white flight, gentrification, and the pandemic.

An ankle-length brown silk dress that belonged to Lucretia Mott is tucked in acid-free paper in a tiny third floor room surrounded by men’s, women’s, and children’s Quaker attire. A window exposed the dresses to sunlight and pests, a recipe for damage. But luckily it was caught in time and fixed.

Scores of archival boxes filled with wedding gowns sit in the hallway: Some are simply “Sunday best shirtwaists.” Others are post-Victorian era white or ecru confections yellowed with time. Across the hall is a plethora of antebellum crinolines, corseted Gilded Age gowns, and velvet drop waist flapper frocks.

“At first I thought, ‘This was so much work for me,’” Temple said. “And then I got excited. … This is so much great stuff.”

GHS is waiting to receive a $200,000 grant from the city to help transform its first floor lobby into one of the welcome centers across the city for the Semiquincentennial. The plan is to use some of that cash to upgrade the HVAC and the electrical system. This, Temple said, is the worst-case scenario.

“That money was meant for outward facing projects to boost next year’s celebration,” Temple said.

Temple, a 29-year-old graduate of Winterthur Museum’s master’s degree program in American material culture, watched many of her contemporaries lose jobs to DOGE cuts. Grants that once funded entry level positions were cut, threatening the next generation of preservationists, curators, and museum professionals.

Those left must change their approach to fundraising and collection upkeep. Earlier this year, the Colonial Dames gave GHS a $7,500 grant toward a vintage hat exhibit. Temple will use the money to stage the show and pay an intern to sort through and catalog the hats.

She’s working on a plan to ask GHS donors to fund a Quaker clothing exhibit. It’s not just about paying for the usual exhibition materials — hangers for the clothing, mannequins, and exhibition labels. She must now factor in the basics: cataloging, preservation, and building the object list.

“[What’s happening is] an upending of the structure of how small museums operate, plan, get our projects funded, and ultimately teach American history,” Temple said.