Tag: common people

The Authenticity Challenge

On By kittycalashIn Clothing, Events3 Comments

We’re going up to Minute Man on August 24, or at least that’s the plan. We have hostages to exchange (one ends up with other folks’ spoons and bowls when one does the dishes) and drilling to do for the September 28 event in Boston.

Immediately after Sturbridge, the authenticity question blossomed on the interwebs, as there was an unusually fine crop of bodices on view in the village that weekend. (To be clear, I am pro-authenticity and anti-bodice, but I am still working over my thoughts on authenticity, which veered into hermeneutics, and are therefore not really germane to the conversation.)

Authenticity and standards are in the ether, and for this year’s event, all participants are asked to provide documentation, not just the people taking part in the challenge. I plan attend but not to partake of the challenge, as I have no desire to relive my childhood of never-even-third-place, thank you. Instead, I’m merely queasy and scrambling, as the only person in our household who seems really documented to me is the Young Mr, with his snuff-colored trousers  currently under construction, and two jackets from which he may be able to choose (presuming I get all buttonhole inspired). So he’s good. Run away!

I’ve been working on a ‘secret’ gown that’s not totally secret, but don’t feel I can adequately document it for this event. I have examples of the fabric advertised for sale, and a period print. But so far, the only gowns of this fabric type described in runaway ads have dark grounds. Granted, servants might tend to wear darker, more dirt-hiding colors, but I don’t feel that one print and some wrong-ground ads are enough. Next!

Anne Carrowle is Philadelphia, not New England: she’s passable for Monmouth and other Mid-Atlantic events. Chintz jackets: also fine for those runaway Dutch servants in NY and Philadelphia. Next!

Brown wool seemed too heavy for August, but the way the weather has been of late, maybe not. Well, anyway, it could get hotter. Next!

1772 red pompadoreThat leaves me with the New Favorite Gown, which I like, but which is based on an earlier British watercolor, so must be slightly altered at the sleeve or cuff as well as documented. At first I could find nothing to suggest that the color and fabric were within the realm of documentary possibility. Eventually I did find an ad in the Newport Mercury for what might be a likely candidate.

“Ran away on Sunday the 19th instant, from the subscriber at Newport, an Irish indented maid servant, named Elioner Clievland, pretty tall, who is very corpulent, with a red complexion, brown hair, and has a scar and a large dent in one of her arms, had on a red pompadore gown, and light broadcloth cloak: ” Newport Mercury, 8-10-1772

claret poplinTwo years later, “ a likely tall Negro Woman, known by the name of Violet Shaw, about 25 years old; has a Blemish in one Eye, carried away with her a white Calico Riding Dress, a strip’d Calico Gown, a claret colour’d Poplin Gown, a strip’d blue and white Holland Gown, a Bengal Gown, and many other value Articles…” Boston Evening Post, 8-1-1774

Well, I’m tall, and far from 25, but thankfully, I am not corpulent. But here are two wool or wool-blend, gowns, in reddish colors, in the right time period and place. Unfortunately, I have not yet found striped, or striped linsey, petticoats in Rhode Island, Connecticut or Massachusetts in 1772-1775—plenty in Philadelphia, where there are more servants running away—so what to do? I’ll look a damn fool without a petticoat.
brown petticoat newport

ShortGown There’s the brown petticoat solution. There is one in Boston (Weston), in August, 1774, and another in Newport, in January, 1773. I like the “brown camblet skirt;” I don’t have camblet, but at least the drape of the lightweight wool and cotton will be closer to camblet than to wool. I can agonize over the suitability of fabrics (and the vagaries of style) in some other post.

I made the gown intending to wear it with a blue and yellow striped as-yet-unmade petticoat (to look like the watercolor), but have some brown wool I can make up instead. Better documented than not (or nude).

Apprehending Chicken

On By kittycalashIn Events, Food, Living History, Reenacting, Research4 Comments
Living History Chickens. Don’t mess with them.

I have written in the past about the Living History Chicken, ripped and delicious, and the joys of making such a creature fit into a cast-iron pot. While “chicken ripper” might be the appellation you desire, it’s not what I want to be known for.

Last time, I dissed the modern ham as an item ill-suited to camp cooking (tasty, but it doesn’t look right). I have also seen hams on a spit cooked slowly (too high above) a fire, and heard a rumour about a very authentic ham-dining experience with a very authentic digestive result. That’s taking things farther than I care to take any regiment, so what to do?

Continental Army rations included, among other things, a pound of flour and a pound of beef a day per man. In Rhode Island at least, that beef might also have been fish, and I have seen chicken listed, too, as it is, technically, meat. Not wanting to inflict our fishy Ocean State customs on all comers, I think I’ll spare the regiments a pound of fish a day. But chicken? What to do? Hope to cook it?

Or maybe we should eat more fruit.The Afternoon Meal by Luis Meléndez, ca. 1772. MMA, 1982.60.39

One option is to rip the carcass apart (see above) and boil it. That would get the job done, for a bone-in chicken stew. However, I am thinking of string roasting chicken (or cornish game hens, since modern grocery store chickens are awfully large).

To be quite technically correct, I could only cook chicken for the Second Helping Regiment. They had a documented poultry thief among their number, one John Smith, who apprehended poultry if it failed to give the correct countersign when challenged. However a chicken is prepared, it will be a messy business, as we have no forks. It’s fingers, knives and spoons for us, as we have no forks. That does increase the appeal of boiling, since the meat would come off the bone more easily.

Fog on the Hudson

On By kittycalashIn Museums1 Comment

20130421-072045.jpg Up on the Hudson, it gets foggy. We drove through fog, which was probably a cloud, and remarked on how very different from home it is here. And once again, I demonstrated an inability to navigate through anything but a conventional New England rotary: I have over-adapted.

We went to the West Point Museum (far too warm, folks; artifacts and visitors alike will cook at 72+ F) and enjoyed the artifacts and dioramas. It’s a classical museum, chronological and linear as you would expect it to be. I don’t object to this format at all: it supports limited labeling, which I consider a blessing, really, and allows the objects to speak for themselves and leaves room for the visitor to wonder, find a label, and read more. I did take photographs, but forgot the adapter for downloading the camera.

From there we visited Fort Montgomery, which may well be the site of future shivering.
Here, I did not take photos, especially after I was warned off touching the glass by the curator or site superintendent (honest, I didn’t leave a smudge).

The last stop on Friday was at Boscobel, which I knew of from a book at work. The house is as lovely as you would expect from a place furnished by the former curator of American Decorative Arts at the Met, and funded by Lila Wallace’s fortune. It’s a guided house tour, with an audio tour for the grounds. We lasted through the guided tour (there were only the three of us) and a portion of the grounds.

I’m really glad I lifted the no photography rule at work. Boscobel has some lovely objects. I was interested in several for which there are no catalog images online, no postcards, and no images in their books. I couldn’t capture the sense of place in the house, or the room the way I saw it, and I find that archaic and frustrating.

The tour itself was everything you’d expect a tour given by retired women of means to be: genteel, focused on furniture, and docile. To their credit, they do a good job with photographs to explain how the commodes work, and by the second floor our guide had loosened up a little bit in her blue blazer. But there was little about the family and their lives, nothing about the servants, and some basic misapprehensions about how a house of that size worked. (The cast iron cylinder in a water or tea urn was never heated in the parlor fire, and never by the mistress; sparks! fire! mess on mahogany! Nope, it all happened in the kitchen.)

In the end, Boscobel was lovely and I am envious of the decor and some of the objects and details, but as the tour guide noted, I most liked the “imperfect rooms” (the pantry, the kitchen, the bathing area and the servant’s bedroom).

Huzzah for imperfections! Time to dress for the last day of the common, imperfect soldier before we tear off for home.