Come sew with me! Well, you’ll be sewing with Henry Cooke, but I’ll be there, too.
Check the Newport Historical Society’s website for more information about workshops and conversations this winter designed to for anyone with an interest in early American history who wants to expand their understanding of material culture interpretation.
Yesterday, I went to visit another collection, this time at the University of Rhode Island. I don’t have thoughts about replicating coats- they didn’t ask me any hard questions about making coats, they just let me work– but I did see a lot of amazing garments.
I’m focused primarily on men’s clothing at the moment, largely because I’m stumbling towards an exhibit or a paper or maybe a better blog post, and because thus far I have not found any examples of women’s garments made from locallly-woven checks or stripes in local collections.*
What I concentrated on at URI were two very lovely examples of the kinds of clothing worn by everyday people in Rhode Island and Southeastern Connecticut, both collected by a woman who lived in the village of Lafayette on the Victory Highway. Mrs Muriel Buckley was born in Exeter, RI in 1884, and started collecting clothing of all kinds in 1900, when she married; by the mid-1950s, she was known as a “one woman historical society,” according to a Providence Journal article, and hosted parties where she and her guests dressed up in the clothes and cooked colonial recipes in early ironware. **
As my late landlady’s husband used to say, “Cut the cackle, let’s eat some grub.”***
Blue and white striped linen fall-front trousers ca. 1830, URI 1967.13.16
These are pretty interesting, with about a dozen patches of various sizes and fabrics. The main fabric is a blue and white stripe linen of 42 threads per inch. The fall-fronts have pockets built into the bearers, with a welt cut on the grain but set on the bias for a snazzy little graphic moment. The button holes appear to be slightly rounded at the ends in a way that siuggests intent and helps confirm the date. The buttons are not all the same design, but are all four-holed bone buttons. The trousers have a 31″ waistband, a 19.5″ rise, and a 26″ inseam.
The other truly fabulous piece I saw was a coat in a blue, white and orange check “Stonington Plaid” ca. 1800, URI 1967.13.17.
This is a double-breasted, self-faced tail coat with self-covered buttons and notch collar lapels, false pocket flaps on coat body and pockets in the tails and left breast. The unlined, folded-back cuffs are tacked to the sleeve and may have been shortened. The overall length at CB is 36″, sleeve length is 25.5″ and the chest is about 34″.
When I opened this coat and looked at the seams, I was struck by the construction method, not because it was different, but because it was so typical. (I also peeked inside two wool broadcloth coats in the cupboard: same construction as the woolen coats I’d seen before.) It;’s nice to see conventions in action, and recognize what you’re seeing.
The collar on this coat has some little anomalies suggesting a less-experienced hand, or perhaps a foray into a new type of collar; judging by the pad stitching, I’m more inclined to guess less experienced hand, though not home manufacture. Someday I’ll track down the South County and eastern CT tailor’s books…
In the meantime, what amazing clothes and fabulous fabrics! The past looks nothing like what we imagine unless we can look past fashion plate elegance to the riot of stripes and checks and prints that must have existed in almost every village and town in Rhode Island.
*With the exception of a pocket at Mystic Seaport and a gown at the Smithsonian: accessory in the first case and very not local in the second case, making in hard to study in a day trip.
**Having palpitations yet? Your heart will really race if I can track down the photos to prove all this. In other news, I know a couple of gentlemen who are currently “one person historical societies.” The collecting instinct in wired into some folks.
***Jack and Harriet: she survived the 1938 Hurricane, and their overweight black-and-white polydactyl cat, Bonnie, followed them around the corner to church every Sunday.
What Cheer Day preparations must begin in earnest now, no matter how distracting I might find orderly books or silk shoes (not in my size, alas: no last can be found). I already have clothes enough for a housekeeper, though I still crave a broadcloth Spencer and am working on a petticoat. I’ll hardly go outside that day, so why am I thinking bonnets– especially when I have a known bonnet problem?
One of my favorite resources for Federal era Providence is Julia Bowen’s diary. Born December 1, 1779, Julia’s diary records her life in Providence in 1799, when she was 19. She records the daily activities of the second set of Providence women– daughters not of the most elite merchants, like John Brown and John Innes Clark, but the Bowens, Powers, Howells, and Whipples. Distinguished, but not super-elite. Many of the entries are as prosaic and superficial as you’d expect from a young woman in late adolescence, and thank goodness they are, or we’d never be able to imagine life in such fine detail.
Julia got me thinking about bonnets with her entry of April 12:
found the Major & Citizen Sarah & C. Angell altering their cold scoops into Rosina hats, so busily were they employed that the Major could not go a visiting, which deprived me at once of the greatest pleasure I anticipated in my visit.
(She used code names for her friends; some we can decode, and some we cannot.)
I haven’t been able to decipher what “Rosina hats” were, but cold scoops I could handle: coal scoops.
That colloquialism fits not just fashion plates but extant coal scoops and buckets.
You just have to imagine them turned over.
I went for cold scoop, with a pasteboard brim and olive green taffeta brim and caul. The mannequin is a 3-D sketch, if you will, of what the housekeeper plans to wear this autumn. At least until she can figure out what a Rosina hat is.
Here’s the British Museum’s description of this print: “Two young women dressed in fine clothes in a room with decorated wallpaper, one sitting in front of the window looking onto the street, with a pet squirrel on her lap, turning to smile towards the viewer and pointing at herself, while the other stands behind her chair on the right. 12 May 1794.” It’s good to get the pet squirrel question out of the way.
This is another print that’s hard for us to read completely: you might wonder why they’re called the Frail sisters. Is Frail a proper noun, an adjective, or something else? It’s probably code: frail here may well refer to the strength of their morals rather than their biceps.
There’s another Frail Sisters drawing, also 18th century, probably late 1780s-early 1790s. This is appears to be a ‘straight’ drawing, but I don’t know: it could be an artist’s portrait of three prostitutes at play. Or it could be actresses (they weren’t so very far from prostitutes and courtesans).
Mrs Frail appears in William Congreve’s Love for Love; do these images also reference characters first seen in Restoration comedies? This is stuff I haven’t thought about in a long time, so I can’t yet unpack how the title and meaning of the print relate to what the women are wearing. And I might be over-thinking things a bit, so let’s step back and just look.
What is the standing sister wearing?
A half-robe, indoors. Time of day, indeterminate, but perhaps morning.
A somewhat easier image to read is the print after George Morland’s The Farmer’s Door, from 1790. This genre painting presents the romanticized vision of humble life, with the farmer’s wife and her children (note the blue stays on the seated child).
Is the farmer’s wife wearing a half-robe over a quilted petticoat and apron? The quality of the images I can find is poor, and the coloring questionable.
In another version here, the kerchief is clearer and seems to go over a long-sleeved garment with a short skirt.
In Selling Carrots, there is another short-skirted garment with long sleeves worn over a petticoat and with a kerchief.
Without getting overly distracted by titles and meaning, I think there are clues to how these half-robes or jackets are worn by women of different classes, aspirations, and locations. For rural women who are not gentry, these appear to be comfortable working clothes worn all day. For urban women, they seem to be worn early in the day, and sometimes out of doors, perhaps even to the lending library.
Kirsten Hammerstrom 
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