but that’s fine, actually. I like to get dirty. The red Virginia cloth dress is now clay-splashed, and while it was made especially for the “People of 1763” event, it may no longer work. Fine for cherry-sellers, fine for hand-bill hawkers, it will not do for a lady’s maid, and I don’t especially want to clean it. Hope I can get my stays wrangled back into shape and that my cross-barred gown fits…but if not, I’ll be a recently promoted lady’s maid.
From the back.
My other upcoming role as a maid will be at the John Brown House Museum, on October 5. This has required quite a bit of thinking and stewing about appropriate clothing and realistic background. I finally settled on a black-and-brown combination of petticoat and open robe, with the style of the open robe based on Paul Sandby drawings and extant garments, but determined by the scant three and a quarter yards of brown worsted that I was able to find.
Winter, 1795. The British Museum, 2010,7081.509
The bodice back is based on the 1795-97 cross-front gown from Museum of Costume in Bath shown in The Cut of Women’s Clothes. The front is meant to be transitional: a little bit of gathering at the neck, but not a great deal, with the edges still pinning closed. The sleeves are long and slim, and will button at the wrist once I’ve gotten the length worked out.
The skirt will pleat, with fullness centered on the back triangle and decreasing to the front. For the black petticoat, I used the double inverted box pleat of the 1790s open robe in Costume in Detail. As you might imagine or just plain hope, they work! I’ve also made a small pad to help lift the skirt in the back and create the right profile; I’m thinking of adding buttons and loops so that it can migrate from gown to gown.
Wow. Yet another learning experience up on the Hudson River this past weekend. It was as up-and-down a weekend as the rutted field in which we were camped, where walking felt more like swimming over the ground, and social calls were well nigh impossible. Also, we had considerable wind. By Sunday, Mrs P said we should feel grateful we never camp with a dining fly, because we knew it was wrong to feel smug that we hadn’t had to chase a fly down. Yes, every possible pun of “fly” got an outing.
The Coats, Grouped Around their Colors, Prepare for Action.
The coats turned out quite well, and there would have been one for the Young Mr if only I had not spent the past two weeks on a petticoat and patterning a gown for What Cheer Day at work. I have some regrets about that, just because they looked so very well in those unusual coats. They weren’t just a fashion statement, either: I know Mr Cooke answered a lot of questions about them, and I did, too (women ask women about the guys…). They’re a really good interpretive hook to talk about supplying the troops, and the differences in uniforms over time, and the kinds of documents historians and costume historians use in their work. Also, those coats are just plain handsome.
Down in the corner, in a lovely white gown, holding her hat on head, is Cassidy. The wind was hard on headwear.
The Battle, well, there was chaos on the public side of the battlefield, and it was difficult to see. The wrenching ground made visiting difficult (and we don’t have much of a parlor in our camp) so I did get to meet Cassidy in person but not much more.
Mr S, the Young Mr and I were grateful for Mr H’s excellent assistance with the fire.
My friend Mrs H and her husband, Mr H, and I walked back from the battlefield to work on dinner. I’m not sure what we’re contemplating here, but the kettle is on and we’re thinking about something (probably what to add next).
As you can see in the photo, we had no iron “s” hooks. I don’t know what box they’re in, but they weren’t in the kitchen box. Mr FC made us hooks from branches he discovered on the way back from his car. They held up well, and were even better and more authentic than the “s” hooks would have been. With this, we were all delighted and not at all smug.
After dinner and washing up, we participated in the hospital vignette for the public tours. (By ‘participate,’ I do sort of mean ‘first person bombed’ the scenario.) In working this out, the Adjutant wondered which of the men was the smallest and lightest. His first thought was the Young Mr, but Mr S and I soon disabused him of that notion, and after I said, “It’s you, Mr C,” and we determined that even skinny Mr S was 5 pounds heavier than Mr C, we had our victim: Mr C. He became the wounded captain carried up by Mr S, the Young Mr, Mr FC and Mr McC on a litter made from a tent and poles. I carried the lantern.
At the hospital tent, we demanded attention for our wounded captain, who had taken shot in the groin, ‘near the back.’ (We covered the wound with a coat.) The men and I were insistent upon the Captain receiving attention, despite the enlisted men requiring attention to their head wounds and amputations. Although he was given laudanum, and the ball removed (ba-thump, yes, we’re here all weekend, tip your waitress), the captain developed a fever. We demanded rum and water, but he vomited upon the very noisy private with a head wound, while down the line another private cried out, “Why, captain? Why did you do this to us?”
After he vomited, the captain’s delirium increased, and the doctor bled him. He called for his wife, and reached for me, though I am but the lowly woman with the army. I held his hand and stroked his head to ease his passing while he talked of his wife and his son, “with the angels now.” After he died, the men were summoned again to remove him from the hospital and they carried him away.
Ready to leave with the entire kitchen on my back and in my hands.
The captain’s story may have been too quiet and subtle for the public to see in the dark, but around us nurses and doctors were busy and patients were yelling, and the scene presented was one of chaos and misery (and some humor). I’ll have to analyze it more later, because there’s a strand for the reenactors and another for the public and it’s hard, sometimes, to know if they combine satisfactorily for all. I know we were pleased with our dying captain, and the boundaries it pushed for those of us newer to the first person world.
On Sunday–well, less said the better, perhaps–some of us failed to eat or drink enough and felt quite ill until mid-morning and a second cup of coffee. It’s a lesson in having protein bars stashed in pockets and haversacks, and in how wretched the soldiers and women must have felt, and how limited their decision-making capacities. That’s the argument for officers getting better food and accommodations: they make the decisions, so they need fuel and rest for their brains. The rest of us just go where we’re told.
Not quite what our camp will look like, but one can hope.
Baking nearly done, Mr S has gone to draw fresh meat and flour.
We’ll be packing as light as we can except for the kid’s supremely heavy biology textbook, but at least he’s game for a weekend of reenacting mixed with homework. Mr S looks forward to sporting his new coat, and I’m looking forward to camp cooking and meeting people In Real Life.
Fingers crossed for the lightest of traffic and rain…
Ruth’s seat is for a side chair. But there’s value in them thar seats. MMA 50.228.3
Sarah Brown had a sister, Ruth Smith. Ruth was good with a needle, and there is an extant chair seat made by Ruth. I’d always thought, in a fuzzy, not-thinking-too-hard kind of way, that Ruth had made the chair seat for her sister and brother-in-law because they were family, and how else would a lady spend her time but with her needle?
My thinking sharpened radically late last week when a colleague said, “Didn’t Ruth make shirts for John and James [Brown]?”
Yes, she did. In Ruth Smith’s 1785 daybook there are two entries, though the pages are lined for more.
The first records 5 shirts made for John Brown February; against this, in March, Ruth received a pair of shoes, and a pound of Hyson tea.
In April, she made 4 shirts for John Brown’s son, James; in May, she received 9 yards of lutestring from James.
The values didn’t seem to quite line up, so I’ll have to pull the day book again, but what seemed most important was Ruth’s trading shirts for shoes, silk, and tea. In “Dress of the People,” John Styles writes about servants drawing goods from merchants on their masters’ credit; did this transactional relationship allow Ruth wider access to the world of goods than her means might otherwise allow?
Shirt, ca. 1780. MMA 2009.300.62
And if Ruth makes shirts for John and James, are there other, less-well-off relations doing other work for the Browns? There are records of servants or slaves of African descent working in the house on Power Street, but we can only find evidence of three, one dedicated to the horses. That’s not nearly enough people to run a house with a dozen fireplaces and a kitchen, and six or seven occupants. It seems unfathomable that the Browns tended their fireplaces, hauled their water and cooked all their food themselves. John Brown writes to a daughter of “your Marr baking pies,” but it seems radically unlikely that Mrs John Brown, wife of the wealthiest man in Providence, would handle the heavy round of chores required to keep a household and its visitors fed, clothed, cleaned, and entertained.
Direct it, yes. Do it all herself, no.
Could we be missing the maids? Could we be overlooking evidence of work being done by extended family members “visiting” or “come to stay?” Could the poor and widowed and never married women of the Brown and Smith families be the people we should be looking for along with the servants or slaves of African descent? (By 1790 and later, it is not clear if the Browns’ slaves are working in the Power Street house, or if they are at the farm at Spring Green or Bristol, Rhode Island. Many records remain in private hands and others remain badly processed and arranged. I have referred herein to collections publicly held and well-processed.)
What this means, as always, is more research and more looking. It also means that the relationships between Mrs Brown and her ‘maids’ might be more complicated and more interesting. She knows these women, and their families, and how they fit into her world and her family. Could one be a distant cousin, a daughter of a mother no longer living, whose father is abroad, perhaps on a boat owned by John Brown or his companies? Might a young, unmarried woman in her twenties exchange work for room and board and credit with Brown & Francis? Perhaps.
Mourning Embroidery by Ann Barton, 1800. RIHS 1840.1.14
That takes care of one or two of us–I’m looking for a widowed niece, with a son gone to sea on a Brown ship to India. Mr S will have to tell me which battle he wants to widow me in, as he has rejected “lost at sea” and “frozen to death on the Oswego expedition” as possibilities. Actually, at my advanced age, I might have been widowed twice already. You’d think I would have done better with it.
Kirsten Hammerstrom 
You must be logged in to post a comment.