Winslow Homer, Snap the Whip. oil on canvas, 1872. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Christian A. Zabriskie, 1950, 50.41
Have you ever wondered what your friends would have been like to play with as kids? Mr S likes to, but he does have long hours on the commuter trains to fill, and I think by now he’s counted all the Bigfoot shelters along the route twice.
Sometimes we imagine one of our friends as the dirty, shirtless boy who plays hard until dark, until he realized he’s actually cut you with the stick sword, and you have to go home to get the blood cleaned up.
Another one might really be into building, but likes the process more than the result. Expect frank critiques, and lots of small parts, which ends in satisfaction and cookies. Sadly, when you come back, the creation is disassembled into neatly sorted constituent parts.
There’s the one who you partner with on a science fair project: you do the three-fold display with little samples of something, captioned. Too bad that when you win second prize and ask to take the display you designed and created home, you get hit under the eye with a lunch box for your trouble.
The Children of Nathan Starr. Oil on canvas by Ambrose Andrews, 1835. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1987.404
Some friends are a little wilier: I don’t know how you get talked into licking something weird, but it can happen when you’re under ten. It’s not poisonous, but it is nasty. Sorry about that. Have some milk.
The bookish types aren’t all that safe either! Suddenly, on a windy day, you’re falling downstairs because Mary Poppins was far too convincing, and now Dad’s umbrella is ruined. Two strikes, and now your friend hears her mom calling her home? Pro tip: don’t play Wuthering Heights, Mill on the Floss, or Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Bonus note, and just trust me here: just leave the Brontes to Orson Welles.
Girl Skipping Rope. Tempera on board by Ben Shahn, 1943. MFA Boston, 1971.702
Don’t get me wrong: I enjoyed all the games and stories we made up and played when I was kid with all kinds of friends, and I enjoy everything my friends and I do today. But sometimes I see the glint in a friend’s eye, and I know we are in for something I might wish my mom wouldn’t let me do.
I managed, with sore fingers and considerable snake-eyed concentration, to get breeches and coats finished enough to send these two off to Battle Road better dressed than ever before. I’m pleased indeed with how the blue suit turned out, and planned to make a blue wool waistcoat to complete the set. Except…the Young Mr prefers some contrast in his clothing (a change from his prior preference for complete camouflage) and now wishes for white. I ask you.
Mr S is need of a new waistcoat himself, and he’s registered for a workshop with Henry Cooke to make a new waistcoat for himself. He was awfully taken with Mr B’s clothes two Saturdays ago, when he dressed as George Claghorn, the Naval contractor who supervised the building of the USS Constitution
Plush. No, really, it’s made of plush.
.
L’Hermione is coming to Boston and Newport in July, and then we have An Afternoon in 1790 planned, with What Cheer Day not far behind, so there’s plenty of need for new waistcoats in a variety of styles– 1780, 1780, 1800 each have their variations.
Why not join us May 2nd and 3rd in Providence, and make your own fabulous waistcoat? There’s still a space or two left! Register here.
When all else fails, sew. And if that fails, sew something else. After a mad rush to get the gents into their new clothes for Saturday’s Battle Road business, I found myself at loose ends Sunday morning. I toyed with sleeves on the Space Invaders gown, and stitched a shoulder seam on the coat Mr B gave me last weekend. (It does not fit his shoulders, but his guess that it might work for the Young Mr was correct: somehow, Mr B cut a man’s coat to a boy’s frame.)
Original mouse and upgraded mouse (now with whiskers!)mouse parts
The bonus of this, aside from my amazed gratitude at a lovely coat well on its way for the boy, was an upgrade to reenactor mouse. Poor reenactor mouse was made at the farm from clumps of wool and scraps of check linen. New reenactor mouse is far fancier, being made of cleaned wool batting, catnip, and a scrap of broadcloth that is probably the $65/yard mixed grey wool I think it is. Lucky kitty, no?
The pieces are simple: two mousey-shaped backs, a roughly oval pasteboard base, a strippy scrap for a tail, wool batting, and catnip. Linen thread for stotting, whipstitching, and whiskers. Stitch the backs together (I had to piece the base from a scrap, so stotted bits to look like a mouse hide. Why not?)
Whip stitch the tail to the inside of the mouse base. At this point, you’re ready to stuff the mouse. I rolled the wool batting in the catnip and stuffed the back, poured a little more straight catnip in, and then finished off with another bit of catnip-rolled batting.
This is where the little pasteboard or chipboard base comes in. You slide this in to the mouse sandwich before closing the last base seam. (It helps stabilize the mouse, so that it skitters across the floor more satisfactorily when batted.)
nearly there. full of wool & catnip.
Stitch the final seam. Make sure the seams are sturdy, as they’ll be going up against claws. I like to thread doubled linen thread through a large-eye needle to make whiskers; be sure to knot on both sides of the mouse’s nose.
All you need to do now is hand the mouse over and back away. Kitty requests some privacy with her new mouse. There’s a flickr album if you want to see the progress photos of a quick and silly project and make your own Wooly Mouse for Progressive Pussy Cats.
I wrestle a lot with myself, which sounds much sexier and more athletic than it is, when it’s your patience and conscience. It’s a constant fight with my own brain and animal nature, like Snowy pondering a bone.
It’s hard to keep sewing for an ever-taller young man who refuses almost all attempts at fitting. (Especially when your calloused fingertips and split thumb keep catching on the silk buttonhole twist.)
It’s hard to have program ideas and then realize you will end up as the maid, serving a meal to a group including some people you might not like. (Don’t you think that must be a fairly authentic emotion, historically?)
It’s hard to put aside plans for your first pretty silk dress because someone doesn’t want to go where you want to go.
It’s hard to embrace the importance and meaning of interpreting the ordinary in a culture that celebrates the unique.
I come to that and stop: mission.
Watercolor by Thomas Rowlandson, 1785? Lewis Walpole LibraryDrawings R79 no. 7
You can take anything too far, of course, and an occasional silk gown and turn around a dance floor might make being the maid a little easier, but in the end I know that what’s important to me is representing the people who have been forgotten.
That same impulse may be part of what drives the splintering into ever-smaller groups with every-different coats, but walking the cat back also leads me to think that lace, tape, and shiny buttons may be part of the equation, too. Are those uniforms the gents’ equivalent to cross-barr’d silk sacques? As in any culture, it is easier to have your cake and eat it, too if you’re a guy.
For most of us women inhabiting the past, if we’re not baking cake, we’re serving it.
Playing the game at quadrille : from an original painting in Vauxhall Gardens. London : Robert Sayer, ca. 1750. Lewis Walpole Library, 750.00.00.14
It’s a funny thing to want a break from work you find important, but as with anything, variety and perspective are important.
She looks wistful, doesn’t she? The others are whist-full.
In a world of individualists, each trying to stand out, quotidian celebrities– cast a skeptical glance at your social media feed and tell me I’m wrong–our impulse may not be to inhabit the background. But most of us are the background. We’re large only in our own minds, stars of the movies of our lives that flicker past our eyelids. And that’s ok: that’s noble, even, to live a small, thoughtful life.
Silver Pocket Watch of Meriwether Lewis, 1936.30.5
Once upon a time, when I worked in Missouri, I was fortunate enough to spend a lot of quality time with some amazing artifacts.
Meriwether Lewis’s refracting telescope.
William Clark’s compass.
Meriwether Lewis’s pocket watch.
William Clark’s Account with John Griffin for thread, cloth and other articles including a hat for George and shoes for Mary. (July 1820, William Clark Papers, B13/F5, MHS)
Account of expenses in “horse keeping,” 1829- 1831. Request to Clark to pay to Mrs. Ingram, with request to serve as receipt. On same document: ADS Dashney to Major Graham, 26 June 1826. Order to pay William C. Wiggins. (1831 Dec 13, William Clark Papers, B14/F2, MHS).
There are letters to one of Clark’s sons, trying to get him to stay at West Point. There are bills for bolts and iron work for Clark’s house. Yes: there are amazing things in the collection as well, and historians of all kinds can do amazing work in the papers.
But they are ordinary. They are daily life played out in the first third of the nineteenth century in St. Louis, bills and accounts punctuated by letters from famous people and news of wars and explorers. But after processing the family’s collection, what struck me more than anything was how ordinary they were, how quotidian.
Meriwether Lewis in Indian dress. engraving after St. Memin, 1807.
Lewis was fabulous, interesting and mysterious. I don’t know what really happened on the Natchez Trace, but I know what happened in St. Louis. William Clark kept living, paying his bills and stumbling sometimes, refusing a role as territorial governor before accepting it. He got boring. And for that, I love him more than Lewis.
There’s real value in interpreting the everyday, ordinary people, in bringing work and working people to life in the past. I don’t always love repressing my ego, but I know that a nostalgic view of the past can be dangerous. I meant backwardly aspirational when I first wrote it, and I mean it now: most of us would not have been merchants wearing silks and velvets and superfine wools.
After wrestling with my ego and silk dress disappointment most of this afternoon*, I’ve found satisfaction in the thought of expanding my understanding of working class women. If really digging into interpreting the world of the marginal makes me uncomfortable, it must be worth doing, and doing well.
*Thankfully whilst performing useful tasks like running errands and thus wasting little real time on this nonsense.
Kirsten Hammerstrom 
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