Proclamation of Thanksgiving, Stephen Hopkins, 1763. RIHS G1157 Broadsides 1763 No.7
It’s the cheater’s way out, but here you are: the Rhode Island Proclamation of Thanksgiving celebrated at the end of the Seven Year’s or French & Indian War, in August, 1763.
And the transcription, in case the long form ‘s’ gives you trouble. You’ll note that Hopkins does “strictly forbid and prohibit all servile Labor, and All Sports and Pastimes to be used or practiced on said Day,” so that lets some of us out of football games, if not the servile labor of cooking a meal.
We’re not ones for shopping (truly, my heart sank when the Young Mr reported the urgent need of long-sleeved shirts, as this is the time of year when I frequent only the victualers), so this weekend will find us tidying up the house and arranging our gear.
We’re thankful for all the usual things, like jobs and family and friends, and for all the places we’ve been and have yet to go. May you have much to be thankful for, too. The regularly scheduled festivities will return tomorrow or the next day, depending on the progress we make on the house cleaning and on a bottle of sherry.
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.
James Malton, 1761-1803, A Military Encampment in Hyde Park, 1785, Watercolor with pen in black ink, with traces of graphite on moderately thick, moderately textured, beige, laid paper, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection
I’ve been thinking about laundry, and not just because I did wash yesterday, but also because I’m committed now to learning more about the women of the 10th Massachusetts (dude, it’s on paper). Since I won’t be able to get up to the Mass Archives or MHS until the holiday break, one place I can start is with the material culture of army women’s lives. This is also helpful as I am thinking about asking for a laundry tub for Christmas. (I had an aunt who got a toilet seat for Mother’s Day, and my husband once gave his siblings fire extinguishers for Christmas, so you cannot deny that we have a proud history of gift-giving.)
There’s a lot to love in the detail above, and while there are some things I don’t think you’d find in the 10th Mass camp — from red coats to chairs, even broken–we can still find useful information. After all, if your chair is broken, you have more of a leg to stand on for having a chair.
The buckets and washtubs have wooden hoops: that’s a fine detail, and one I appreciate, with my very particular bucket. That means, though, that the washtubs I have in mind might not work, as they have metal bands. My bucket man took a long time to get my bucket right, and he doesn’t make washtubs…but maybe the local man would consider trying a smaller tub. Hard to know, but size will be an issue. It appears there may be two sizes of tub in the image above: a larger tub on the makeshift table at left, and a smaller one on the broken chair.
Detail, James Malton, 1761-1803, A Military Encampment in Hyde Park, 1785, Watercolor with pen in black ink, with traces of graphite on moderately thick, moderately textured, beige, laid paper, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection
The improvised clothesline is a reassuring detail, being pretty much what I have in mind for our camps, pending some riverbank logging. These taller sticks would then join our kettle or musket-rack sticks as part of the permanent equipage carried by the Subaru baggage train.
We’d been talking about doing a cold wash at work, where a friend was advocating NOT digging a pit and boiling laundry on the lawn, so these washing women intrigued me: none of them are boiling clothes. In fact, there’s no fire to be seen! But look again at where those kettles are. In the detail above and again at left, note a large kettle adjacent to every washtub. Could it be that water was boiled in a larger (enormous) kettle, and dipped into these smaller kettles? The other thing to note is that this seems to be family-based washing and not regimental-scale washing. Given that I’d probably only have two shifts and four shirts to wash on a good day (they’re wearing their shirts, you see), could this model work?
None of the reenactments we see achieve anything like the scale of the events or activities we’re trying to recreate. Very few of us can cook with five pounds of flour, and there are never enough guys to make up a full brigade in the field. Those truths don’t mean we should skimp or cut corners, but they do mean that we should cut our coat to our cloth. Smaller scale washing could still convey the hassle, necessity, and gender division of the work.
Kirsten Hammerstrom 
You must be logged in to post a comment.