This is a book about reading and writing as much as it is a book about Jane Franklin, Benjamin Franklin’s little sister. Book of Ages has been reviewed elsewhere, and Lepore wrote a really lovely piece in the New Yorker called The Prodigal Daughter that is unfortunately behind a subscription firewall, but which I have read on actual paper. If you can get hold of it, I do recommend reading it before you read Book of Ages. It makes the book all the more poignant to know something about Lepore’s process.
This is, in many ways, another book about mud and misery (see the best bits of Longbourn). Because Jane Franklin Mecom (her married name– she married at 15) left behind so little, Lepore builds much of her story out of the context of Boston and New England in the mid-18th century.
It’s not exhaustive in its detail, and that’s fine: the book is an easy, comfortable read that still provides well-researched information about the lives of women in the 18th century. I finished it over a week ago, but details still remain (and that is a testament to Lepore– these could have been supplanted in my mind by details of exterior water meters, skunk removal techniques, or indexes for early vital records). Among the details I recall: Funerary and mourning customs, from published sermons to the distribution of mourning gloves and rings; soap making and trades practiced by small holders in home workshops; Jane Franklin Mecom’s wartime flight to Rhode Island; the power and practice of extended family networks.
It also reminded me of the differences in educational methods or standards for boys and girls, which helps remind us all of the importance and significance of the ideal of free public education for all. (We had some early proponents here in Rhode Island.) What might Jane Franklin’s life have been like in other circumstances? Honestly, even if she’d been well-off and well-educated, as as woman in the 18th century, she would never have had the same chances as her brother, no matter how evenly their intellects might have been matched.
If anything, that’s reason alone to read Lepore’s book, to celebrate the life of a woman who was both ordinary and extraordinary, and to recognize how much closer to all the anonymous, disappeared women of the past we can get through this example.
The Laundry Louis-Adolphe Humbert de Molard (French, Paris 1800–1874) 1840s, Salted paper print Credit Line: Gilman Collection, Purchase, Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Gift, 2005 2005.100.1241
How many men does it take to know what kind of wood a laundry tub should be made of?
For now, one woman. Yes, I’ve got a new obsession.
It started innocently enough with an exchange about future laundry tubs and an existing tub described as large, made of pine, and badly shrunken. Somehow I found myself burning to know, What is the appropriate wood for a laundry tub made in southeastern New England between 1775 and 1785?
Luckily I work in the kind of place where you might find an answer to that kind of question. In the Miscellaneous Manuscripts Collection, I found George Dods Cooper Accounts (MSS 9001-D Box 4). Mr Dod worked as a cooper in Providence between about 1790 and 1820, so he’s later than I need for this specific application, but I’m not sure the form changes radically before 1850, so Mr Dods seemed like a good place to begin.
While I did not find the hoped-for a receipt for purchases of specific kinds of wood, I did find that Dods was coopering with both iron and wooden hoops, and that he was making barrels, tubs and buckets of unspecified kinds of wood as well as cedar tubs.
1813 Mr Holroid
Nov 19
Sating 4 iron hoops on a Poudering Tub 0=6 0
Sating 6 Wooden Do- on another – Do- 0=3 0
1810
Oct 3 Satting 3 hoops on a large cedar tub 1 firking hoop 0=1-6
Poudering or powdering tubs were used for salting meat; satting is how Mr Dods spelled setting, and the firking is a firkin. His spelling was idiosyncratic but consistent.
Enslaved Girl, 1830 America, Virginia, Arlington County Watercolor, pencil, and ink on wove paper Museum Purchase Acc. No. 2007-34,1
So, 1813: a cedar tub. But was it for laundry? I found well buckets and house buckets, ‘poudering’ tubs and pounding barrels, barrels for meat and rum and ‘flower,’ cedar tubs and a ‘tub for Cora,’ but no tub specifically described as a laundry, washing or dish tub.
Searching local library and special collections databases using the appropriate Library of Congress subject terms proved fruitless as well, though eventually I ended up at Williamsburg, where I found an 1830 watercolor drawing of an enslaved girl with a tub on her head. (They call it a tub; you and I might call it a piggin.) This at least confirmed the persistence of the tub style seen in the 1785 British Encampment drawing. I suppose that’s something.
Domestic Engineering and the Journal of Mechanical Contracting, Vol. LX No. 6, page 160. 1912
But still, questions persisted: first, what wood would be right, and secondly, what size should the tub be? There was the thought that pine might not be right, since reputable coopers are making tubs from oak and cedar. Finally did what most of us do when frustrated now: I did a very simple Google search and ended up at Google Books with Domestic Engineering and the Journal of Mechanical Contracting, Volume 60.
This journal helpfully informed me that Wooden tubs are made out of 1- 1/4 inch white pine grained or dovetailed together at the ends and held together by means of iron rods and went on to explain that Great latitude was generally allowed in the making of wooden tubs as they were usually made on the premises by the carpenter who had no standards to follow. No standards! Doesn’t that explain a lot.
Fully loaded for Saratoga
Do I have any clearer direction? Well, clear as mud, maybe. It appears that one could have a tub of unspecified wood, hooped with wood or metal, in which one could do laundry. Or one could follow Domestic Engineering, and consider the current pine tub acceptable, if perhaps in need of mending. (I have not seen it, so I do not know.) I suppose the question is really whether or not all of this business will fit into the supply wagon known as our Subaru.
Lot 194, hammer price: $22,500. Estimate:$4,000-$5,000
On November 13, Augusta Auctions held a sale in New York that included some really wonderful things, and chances are good that if you read this blog, you know about some of the items, like the British consul’s coat, some very lovely leather trousers, and my personal favorite, the Rhode Island man’s day suit.
That suit! I’ve heard about that suit from a couple of people, but I’ve never seen it in person. I’ve made a jacket from a pattern taken from the coat, but until the photos turned up on the auction site, I didn’t know what the original looked like. It’s not flashy. You think, it’s a plain brown linen suit, no big deal, until you start to look at the simple, direct construction methods (which I have seen in other Rhode Island garments), and the rather elegant lines. This seems, from the distance at which I have to observe it, very like the boy’s jacket at Connecticut Historical Society. They share similar lines, are similar in color, and probably represent the most common everyday wear of the middling sorts of southeastern New England.
Historians and curators increasingly recognize the importance of the “common everyday” people and their material world, whether it’s Jill Lepore on Jane Franklin Mecom or whoever bought this suit. There are and were more of the 99% than the 1%, and to really understand the past, we have to collect what we can to document the daily lives of the majority of the people.
So of course I wanted this suit very badly. I looked up previous auction results, I poked around in other museum’s catalogs, and looked at our own collections. I prepared a case statement and took it to the Board committee that oversees Collections– when we spend large sums, we have to get approval. The Board committee authorized me to bid, but set a limit based on our acquisitions budget, which is funded from prior sales of duplicate or unrelated material in our collection. (Things like 20th century oriental rugs and mid-Atlantic corner cupboards– we can’t use them, they weren’t made or used in Rhode Island, but were acquired to furnish our house museum, until it was over-furnished. Then we went through a lengthy and formal deaccession process.)
Watching the online bidding, I could tell the sale was hot: there were folks with deep, deep pockets bidding, and I knew early on I would not get the suit. By the time it was all over, the hammer price was $22,500 (it’ll be $27,000 with the buyer’s premium) for a suit with a $4,000 – $5,000 estimate. I should say that it did rawther well, considering, but even in a different budget year, I would not in my wildest dreams have gone as high as the winning bidder did. Every result in this sale felt new, and dangerous, the way the Betty Ring sampler sale prices felt new and dangerous.
These prices feel dangerous because they skew the market and the past in a curious way: when the objects of the everyday become this valuable, this expensive, how can a museum with a mission to interpret the past of a specific people ever hope to compete? I can’t, not even with a concerted effort to develop a donor base that would support an acquisition at more than four times an estimate. What does that do to the market? It puts it squarely in the realm of the 1%.
That 1% is not just oil barons, it’s museums with enormous endowments and revenue streams, like the Met. I’ve posted before about the difference in museum revenue streams and endowments, and how a place like the Met can gross over a billion dollars in revenue in a fiscal year. With money like that, $22,500 is nothing. Museums like the Met and the MFA and the PEM and LACMA can out-bid smaller museums, vacuum up collections, and amass great hoards of material. What the little people have to do is to build relationships, and hope that they can get some of the material before it ever gets to auction. I didn’t have that chance, but it’s the only one I’ll ever have in what seems to be a new market for old things.
This sale also made me think that the museum world is increasingly a winner-take-all world much like politics or business, or even education. There are the haves, with large endowments and major gifts, attracting more gifts and endowments, and then there are the have-nots, with very limited funds and volunteer staffs. Those of us in the middle are feeling the same squeeze that the ever-smaller middle class is feeling, with similar income erosion as what our endowments earn buys us less, and as grant funds are ever harder to get. Programs are more competitive, and there’s less money for the big national endowments (NEA, NEH, IMLS) to give away.
Capitalism and market forces are at work, changing collections and changing how museums can and will operate. We have to radically and rapidly rethink how museums function both in acquiring collections (if we can continue to acquire them at all– there’s a cost not only to acquiring but to keeping) and in making them accessible. The smaller museums have to make better cases for mattering more to their audiences, or culture will be increasingly sequestered in larger, richer places.
Jacob Issacs by Ralph Earl, 1788. Dayton Art Institute
No, I still haven’t written to the museum in Sweden– I had fabric shopping to do. Well, not had to, but when someone offers to take you to a new den of iniquitycrack house fabric store you haven’t seen before, you go.
Reader, I scored. Mr S will have a new fabulous and toasty waistcoat thanks to a 5/8 of a yard remnant of the coziest Italian double faced wool I have ever petted. It should be a kitten! Mr Isaacs here has a lovely black waistcoat and while I cannot achieve that fabulousness without a new pattern (sigh) and I think that waistcoat is silk, you get the general green-and-black idea. Mr S totally has that hat.
Coat, French, 1790s. MMA 1999.105.2
But in thinking about the Spencer issue (and yes, I scored some on-sale broadcloth so I can make another one on the way to cutting into that K&P wool), I asked Mr Cooke about clasps, since the Spencers I’m interested in are so very clearly grounded in menswear generally, and uniforms particularly. The answer was what I’d expected: buttons and buttonholes or braid loops on dragoons’ and hussars’ coats, hooks and eyes sandwiched between shell and lining on center-front closing uniform coats.
So I went back to look at menswear, because somewhere the phrase “miniature frock coat” rattled in my head, and I knew I wanted to re-draft the pattern for the front anyway, to get closer to the high stand and fall collar of the Swedish original.
I’ve already started to crib a new two-part sleeve pattern from a frock coat pattern, so now I think the next step to getting the look I want is to crib from the LACMA banyan pattern. It’s earlier than the Spencer by some 30 years or more, but the neckline looks like a better place to start.
And, bonus, along the way I’ll learn more about menswear to the ultimate benefit of those guys I sew for.
Kirsten Hammerstrom 
You must be logged in to post a comment.