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Kitty Calash

~ Confessions of a Known Bonnet-Wearer

Kitty Calash

Search results for: Rebecca Young

The Crisis of Costuming

08 Wednesday Jul 2020

Posted by kittycalash in History, Living History, material culture, Reenacting, Research

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

difficult interpretations, history, interpretation, Research, slavery

John Potter and family. Overmantle painting ca 1740. Collection of Newport Historical Society.

There has been a lot of good work done recently as people consider the past and our relationship to it. Costumers are increasingly uncomfortable with uncontextualized depictions of historical dress and have had to come to terms with the truths of how the money that bought the pretty dresses was made. Obviously, dressing in trimmed silks and paste jewels is expensive, and in the North American colonies (and many other places) in the 18th and 19th centuries, the money that bought those goods was made on the backs of enslaved people.

Mary and Elizabeth Royall. Oil on Canvas by John Singleton Copley, about 1758. MFA Boston, Julia Knight Fox Fund, 25.49

But there’s an even harder truth waiting for us: even the ordinary clothes and everyday goods were often paid for with money made on the “free” labor of unfree men, women, and children. Not only did more people than we want to admit own other human beings, more people than we credit invested in slave trading voyages. And even if they didn’t directly invest in the voyages, they were often engaged in trade that intersected with the slave trade, or supported the plantations where captive people labored by indirectly feeding and clothing them.

The very hard truth is that it is even possible for tenant farmers in late-18th century Rhode Island to have supported and profited from slavery as the edible crops they grew were sold to feed those enslaved on rice, indigo, and cotton plantations in the south. Dairying– cheese making–was a means of making dairy protein stable and transportable, and vegetables like onions expanded diets.

John Brown’s china ca 1790. The China trade was funded by the earlier slave trade.

Chattel slavery made the world we inhabit–both now and when we put on the clothes of the past–no matter what class level we represent. Some would argue that we should no longer put on those clothes. I sit in a place of privilege as a white woman and one who has never engaged in Civil War living history or costuming, a period that is particularly fraught. But even interpreting a 1910s suffragist means you must confront the demons that are not past: racism, Jim Crow, voter suppression, and the truths of how the leaders of the women’s suffrage movement treated Black women. We are always complicit.

Elizabeth Freeman (“Mumbet”). Miniature portrait, watercolor on ivory by Susan Anne Livingston Ridley Sedgwick, 1811. Massachusetts Historical Society Artwork 03.147

But I think that means we can, and even should, continue to interpret the past through all the clothes. Telling all the stories more fully helps us move forward. All of us must own the truths of how we reached this place in American history. All of us must own who we might or might not have been. We share a history and a culture, even when many are excluded. That exclusion is part of the story. For a time it needs to be the main story, as we as a nation, as interpreters of the past, see the world anew, listen to voices that have gone unheard.

It will be a long time before any of us are able to resume the work we did before, interacting directly with the public, but that gives us a chance to rethink what we do, and how we do it. For some, abandoning the costumes of a problematic past may be the answer. For others, considering more fully the characters we represent may offer a way to carry on.

Alice, d. 1802. Engraved from an original sent from America, by Mackenzie, [London] : Pub. Jan. 1. 1803, by T. Hurst, Paternoster-Row. (1804?) The Library Company of Philadelphia

I have thought a fair bit about the 2019 Occupied Philadelphia event. Once again, I portrayed Elizabeth Weed, the widowed pharmacist with a sickly son who went on to marry Thomas Nevell, architect and builder. Elizabeth owned a business and a house, but did she own people? A visitor to that event asked me, “Did you own slaves?” and I had to think about it. It wasn’t a question I had asked myself before, and that’s a clear failure since I had done research on the nature of labor in mid-18th century Philadelphia as indentures gave way to enslavement. I don’t think Elizabeth Weed owned anyone; I can find no evidence, but I need to look again, and more deeply.

Rebecca Flower Young, though, is another story. By the time she lived in Baltimore with her daughter, who made the Star-Spangled Banner now at the Smithsonian, her daughter had a 13 year old African American or African indentured servant. The young woman’s name is lost to time, but the fact of her existence and the trajectory of Young’s life make me wonder about her time in Philadelphia. As an Army contractor, she had women sewing for her, and she probably sewed herself. The labor of the indentured servant girl in Baltimore allowed Mary Pickersgill to concentrate on working for money. While the Smithsonian may describe the indentured girl as “helping Pickersgill make the flag,” chances are that her housework– tending fires, cooking meals, cleaning the house, permitted Pickersgill, her nieces, and her mother to do the sewing and cutting. Similar work was necessary to support Rebecca Young’s enterprise in 1780s Philadelphia. Who performed it? Were they paid, or unpaid?

If (when) I can once again put on the stays, petticoats, and gowns that allow me to interpret Rebecca and Elizabeth, my work must include a discussion of the labor that supported their work, and who performed that labor. I will have to challenge the public to imagine a more complete history of the United States, one that is both starker and more nuanced. The country was built and flourished on the labor of unwilling captives, which we have concealed behind myths about the founding heroes and heroines. Only when we admit those truths can we truly begin to portray the past, inhabit those clothes, and engage with the public.

About the Images:

This overmantle painting shows a wealthy Rhode Island planter family with their African slave, a rare depiction of the realities of New England life. John Potter was a wealthy South Kingstown, Rhode Island planter, notorious for his counterfeiting activities of 1742. Many of the people enslaved in Rhode Island were forced to work on the large farms in what is now Washington County.

Mary and Elizabeth Royall were daughters of Isaac Royall, who owned the largest number of enslaved people in Massachusetts. The Royall House and Slave Quarters in Medford, MA (just north of Boston), interprets the lives of the family and those they enslaved.

John Brown‘s dinner set of Chinese export porcelain in emblematic of his wealth, which was derived from many sources, including the slave trade. The China Trade decorated his brick mansion house in Providence, but war profiteering, distilling, and the slave trade built it. He was an unapologetic– indeed, an enthusiastic– defender of the slave trade as a source of revenue for the New Republic.

Elizabeth Freeman (“Mumbet”), born into enslavement in 1742, was the first enslaved African American to file and win a freedom suit in Massachusetts. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruling, in Freeman’s favor, found slavery to be inconsistent with the 1780 Massachusetts State Constitution.

Alice, known variously as Black Alice and Alice of Dunk’s Ferry, was a native of Philadelphia and a slave, born to parents who had come from Barbados. She is said to have been 116 at the time of her death in 1802. In extreme old age Alice received many visitors who enjoyed hearing stories about early Philadelphia and its famous first settlers, including William Penn and Thomas Logan. Alice was also a lifelong worshiper at Christ Church in Philadelphia. “Being a sensible intelligent woman, and having a good memory, which she retained to the last, she would often make judicious remarks on the population and improvements of the city and country; hence her conversation became peculiarly interesting, especially to the immediate descendents of the first settlers, of whose ancestors she often related acceptable anecdotes.” from Thomas, Isaiah. Eccentric biography; or, Memoirs of remarkable female characters, ancient and modern (Worcester, 1804), plate preceding p. vii. and p 9.

Further Reading:
Many of these are available in paperback; check in the university press sites as many are offering discounts right now that make them competitive with Amazon, while supporting them directly. Inter-library Loan is also an excellent and often free option; check with your local library.

Anderson, Jennifer L. Mahogany: The Costs of Luxury in Early America. Boston: Harvard University Press, 2012.

Dunbar, Erica Armstrong. Never Caught:The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge. New York: Simn and Schuster, 2017.

Clark-Pujara, Christy Mikel. Slavery, emancipation and Black freedom in Rhode Island, 1652-1842. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Iowa, 2009

Clark-Pujara, Christy. Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island. New York: NYU Press, 2016

Gagnon, Jeffrey Charles. (Re)creating Social Life Out of Social Death : cross-cultural alliances in the circum- Atlantic, 1760-1815. Ph.D. Thesis, University of California San Diego, 2012.

Gigantino, James G. II. The Ragged Road to Abolition: Slavery and Freedom in New Jersey, 1775-1865. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.

Hartigan-O’Connor, Eleanor. The Ties That Buy: Women and Commerce in Revolutionary America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.

Lin, Rachel Chernos. “The Rhode Island Slave-Traders: Butchers, Bakers, and Candlestick-Makers.” Slavery and Abolition 23:3, 21-38. (2002)

Rapplye, Charles. Sons of Providence: The Brown Brothers, the Slave Trade, and the American Revolution. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006.

Salinger, Sharon V. “Artisans, Journeymen, and the Transformation of Labor in Late Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia.” The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 40, No. 1, 62-84. (January 1983)

Smith, Billy G. “Poverty and Economic Marginality in Eighteenth-Century America.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 132, No. 1, 85-118 (March 1988)

Smith, Billy G. “The Family Lives of Laboring Philadelphians during the Late Eighteenth Century.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 133, No. 2, Symposium on the Demographic History of the Philadelphia Region, 1600-1860, 328-332 (June 1989)

The Tracing Center: Resources for Interpreting Slavery.

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What Being in History Teaches Us

10 Friday Apr 2020

Posted by kittycalash in Living History, personal

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

change, covid-19, disaster, history, living history, personal

It took four weeks, but I finally lost it.

I’m sitting in my kitchen with a Reverse Manhattan and the New Yorker, weeping after reading the Wheaton College newsletter. Four weeks ago, I was desperate to get my son home to Virginia from college in New England, afraid travel restrictions might strand him on a closed campus in a state with a higher rate of infection. Now, I’m terrifically nostalgic for before, when my friends had jobs, I could go to the fabric store, and had an overbooked calendar.

Rebecca Young at the Museum of the American Revolution. Always a good experience.

That calendar included portraying Rebecca Flower Young, a military contractor in Philadelphia ca. 1780, and, eventually (still?) in the fall, Elizabeth Weed, a pharmacist in occupied Philadelphia, 1777. I think about those women when I get frustrated, tired of being home and just craving normal. More than anything, I want the absence of fear. It’s not something I think about consciously, this fear of the RNA strand, it’s something I experience after I’ve been to the grocery store or the pharmacy. Most of my life has shifted online, but t’s not a huge change. I worked from home already two to four days a week, and lots of my commerce was online.

It’s scary because I know not everyone is behaving the way I am: wearing a mask when I run errands, for example. Because my friends are getting laid off in increasingly large numbers (the last straw came today when a friend posted about joining the 17 million unemployed). I’m frustrated by my lack of control, lack of agency, inability to protect or really help the people I care about beyond my tiny circle of two at home. I can’t even do much for my mother in PA or my father in FL except keep myself safe. And while that impotence could fill me with rage and tears, I am practiced enough at sublimation to recognize an opportunity to understand.

A moment of calm for Elizabeth Weed

How did Elizabeth Weed feel in 1777? She had a son to care for, who was often unwell. She needed to sell remedies to keep paying for food, firewood, and other necessities. She would have had no choice but to stay put and trade with the enemy. Did she feel trapped? Did she walk down the street wondering about each person she saw? What could she get at the market? Where *did* the neighbor get that butter? Those onions?

I sat at my table trying to schedule a grocery delivery or pickup in the next two weeks and thought about how the miserable onions and contraband butter of 1777 are today’s last bag of flour and package of toilet paper. It’s funny, in a way, but it’s also a pointed reminder of what the people we portray felt.

Right now, that’s the best meaning I can offer you: insight into how you might have behaved under British Occupation in 1777 Philadelphia, or in rationed 1944 upstate New York. What creative solutions might you have found? How would you have flexed? How would you have comforted your children when they caught you crying in the kitchen?

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2020 Vision

01 Wednesday Jan 2020

Posted by kittycalash in Clothing, Fail, Living History, Making Things, personal, Philosophy

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

2019, daily life, domestic adventures, domestic life, kickstarter, Museums, New Year, personal, work

Rebecca Young at the Museum of the American Revolution. Always a good experience.

We made it: another turn around the sun, another year, a time of resolutions and reflection. 2019 was the year I had three jobs, invented a job, and qualified for Medicaid. It was a year I spent wondering who I was, and what my experience meant, if anything. I developed a new chronic condition (can you have too many?) and continued struggling to manage the old ones. I applied to, was waitlisted by, and ultimately rejected by a prestigious graduate program. I applied and interviewed for five jobs and got two. The one I have now, though a short-term contract, uses all the skills I honed over three decades working in museums. I expanded the repertoire of 18th-century women I represent, learned about flag making, and increased the number and accuracy of remedies in my medical box. I even journeyed further back in time to represent a Lost Colonist of Roanoke.

Together in multiple centuries, despite the bumps. Photo by Aaron Walker

Still, six months of working all weekend every weekend at job number two put me so far from my friends and habits that despite the pleasure of representing Rebecca Young and Elizabeth Weed, I still feel uncomfortable with living history and costuming. Those months certainly strained my relationship with Drunk Tailor, and with my own identity. Twenty nineteen is year I would revisit only in select details.

Mrs. Wainwright, Miss White and Miss Baker going into the Supreme Court to hear the decision on the Ohio ratification of the suffrage amendment, 1920.

For this coming year, I know only a few things. My contract expires at the end of March. I still love things and order, but I don’t know if I want to work full-time in a museum again. In a bit of perfection, I’m working as the de facto collections and project manager to transfer the library, archival, and object collections of the National Woman’s Party (NWP)  to the Library of Congress and the National Park Service, effectively closing the NWP as a cultural organization (the house is now preserved as a national monument).

I took this contract before my Kickstarter succeeded and admit I am ambivalent about it. Kitty Calash as a business is a little too small to sustain me with a kid in college, but museum work, aside from the work of establishing ownership and provenance, remains difficult for me. I wonder about the accumulations of objects, their meaning, and relevance for the future. I was a curator for a long time, but now I wonder what my role will be, in the evidence locker of history.

Like “curator,” “reenactor” no longer feels like it fits, even though I love history and clothes and dressing up. Perhaps this is too many weeks where dressing up was not an option, too many events missed, the habit lost. Perhaps it’s fear of succeeding, of striking out on my own and doing well, and instead of jumping, hesitating at precisely the wrong moment. Suddenly, it all seems so silly in the face of elections, climate change, and the instability of the gig economy.

Purveying ideas and goods as a milliner is a lot like being a curator.

I wrestled with this in 2017 and 2013,  winters when things seemed hopeless for reasons large and small. Three years ago, I found my refuge in art. Even a year ago, art and aesthetics felt like solace. This year, the New York Times’ Culture Therapist addressed a reader’s question, or problem, that echoed with my own sense of perturbation.

The core of the issue was this: “What happens when we no longer fit our own context?” The answers were varied, and to me, seemed like long shots (too many uncontrollable factors) but this struck me: It will require risking compassion to create an expanded and possibly destabilizing relationship to visual culture.

In 2019, I learned the key to most successful endeavors is vulnerability. I spent a lifetime building walls to protect myself that now box me in. Razing those walls is what I think of when I read “risking compassion,” though it’s hard to say exactly what a destabilizing relationship to visual culture (or history, or costume, or fashion) might be. It may be understanding how little one knows about the past, accepting new aesthetics, or trying something completely new. Even as I contemplate a possible grant-funded costumed interpretation program, clothes from 1919 don’t feel “new” enough to me; they are not different enough. I don’t know what will be, but I do know that unless I’m emotionally uncomfortable, I’m not learning.

On the way home
On the way home
the view can be amazing
the view can be amazing

For all the angst and tears and anger of 2019, all the feelings I do not want to feel again, this year taught me to trust myself, to try, to fail, and to succeed. We learn as much from our failures as our successes, and while some of us more easily recall painful memories, it is worth remembering they can lead to our happiest moments. For this coming year, I will try to hold onto hope, that thing with feathers, and plan to learn new skills, improve the ones I have, and continue to find joy in the everyday.

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Women in Business

20 Tuesday Aug 2019

Posted by kittycalash in Living History, personal, Philosophy, Reenacting

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

interpretation, kickstarter, personal, Philadelphia, women's work

 

One of things I’ve struggled with in living history is reconciling my own life as a 21st century working woman and feminist with interpreting the lives of 18th century women.

Mrs. James Smith (Elizabeth Murray)
John Singleton Copley (American, 1738–1815) 1769

It takes a while– and a bunch of reading– to get past the notion that these women lack agency in their own lives. Sure, there are notable exceptions: Abigail Adams, Mercy Otis Warren, and Elizabeth Murray, but those wealthy Boston women aren’t the kinds of women I’m interested in portraying. What about more everyday women? What about the women more like me? They’ve proven harder to find, but not unfindable–though even they, by dint of being findable, are more exceptional than the vast majority of 18th century colonial American women.

Elizabeth Weed carried on her husband’s business as a pharmacist, noting that she “had been employed these several years past in preparing [his receipts] herself,” and was therefore well-equipped and trustworthy to carry on in his business. Rebecca Young advertised as a flag maker, and as a contractor, made flags, drum cases, cartridges and shirts for the Continental Army, thanks to her brother Benjamin Flower’s position as a Lieutenant Colonel.

In researching Elizabeth Weed, I read about other women running businesses in Philadelphia, and practicing as “doctoresses” in nearby New Jersey, demonstrating that Mrs. Weed operated in a context of other successful women, including some practicing medicine, or at least “medicinal arts.” What I would really like is to track down the records of a mantua maker or milliner in 18th century America, and not only because I make and sell gowns and bonnets, but because in doing so, I’m carrying on with the kind of work that my grandmother and great aunts did.

Elsa, Studio Portait ca 1935

For fifty years, my grandmother ran a dress shop in western New York state, dressing the women of Jamestown and the surrounding counties in fashionable and flattering clothes. My aunts made hats and accessories in their own shops, completing the look. I come from a family of makers (including a great-grandmother who made her own shoes), who care deeply about fit and helping people look and feel their best. My grandmother ran a successful shop for fifty years, until she sold it in the mid-1970s. I have many fond memories of sorting costume jewelry upstairs, and gift-wrapping boxes in the basement, with a rack of ribbons in all colors handy on the wall.

She was exceptional in her own way, though you will be hard-pressed to find much (if anything) about her on the interwebs, but maintaining a business through the Depression and World War II was challenging. She gave back, as a member of the YWCA and Women’s Hospital boards, recognizing the importance of sustaining the community you’re part of. When I portray Elizabeth Weed or Rebecca Young, or the Hawthorns of Salem, I think about my grandmother. Maybe it’s a step too far to say the living history work I do or the business I’ve started honors her and the other working women of my family, but I like to think that it helps make visible women who, though now forgotten, were as important to their own communities as she was.

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To Make a Standard

22 Monday Apr 2019

Posted by kittycalash in History, Literature, material culture, Museums, Research

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

flags, Flower's Artificers, material culture, Museum of the American Revolution, Rebecca Flower Young, Research, sewing

British wool bunting flag said to have been given to Tecumseh. NMAI Catalog number 23/730.

When I set out to “be” Rebecca Young, I thought I knew how flags were made in the 18th century– after all, I’ve made and seen a wide range of 18th and early 19th century items. But I was surprised when I got a look at a War of 1812 flag in the collection of the National Museum of the American Indian. (This was the closest, fastest option for getting a close-up look at an original, near-period flag in wool bunting, thanks to an inside connection.)

The questions I had were:

What materials were used? (My guesses were correct: wool bunting and unbleached linen thread)
What seam techniques were used? (See below)
How was a flag assembled? (Sequence of parts; see below)

The conservator shared the flag’s condition and treatment report with me in advance, and it was helpful:

My sketch of the Tecumseh flag

“Based on notes written by Phyllis Dillon, 1977(?): The flag is constructed of 9″
wide panels of plain weave wool bunting (24 threads/inch) sewn together with french seams (approx. 1/4″ wide) using beige (white/red) and brown (blue/white; blue/blue) 2-ply S linen threads in a running stitch. The canton is constructed similarly using strips of white and red bunting with similar thread count. The hoist (approximately 1 1/4″ wide) is made from a plain weave, coarse, undyed linen folded over the raw edges of the seamed rows of bunting and stitched with a beige (undyed) linen thread; there are three hand-stitched grommets/eyelets at the corners and the center of the hoist which appear to use the same type of linen thread as the hoist stitching. (See analysis section for fiber ID). The blue bunting at the lower and upper edges of the flag are selvage edges, the fly edge is folded over and stitched with a 1/2″ wide hem.”

The date of the notes (42 years ago?) concerned me, and I wondered about the french seams. Most of what we see in the period are felled seams, so it seemed possible there was some confusion about the terminology. I’m confused about it after looking at tutorials and descriptions online, but perhaps that’s just me– in any case, the only way to answer this was to go and look.

What did I find?

Mistress V shows visitors our modern wool bunting flag

Materials
Wool bunting and silk were the most common materials used to make flags, colo(u)rs, and standards in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Colours, as advertised by Rebecca Young, likely referred to regimental colours, though a naval “colour” could mean a national flag flown by the ship. During the Revolutionary War, there were state navies in addition to a Continental Navy, further complicating the issue. (This complication also existed in the army. There are parallels today in the state National Guard units, which operate under a state or commonwealth governor, unless called into federal service. It’s your state national guard that comes to dig you out of your car in a major blizzard, but they can also be called to serve in wars, as you may recall from such debacles as Abu Ghraib.) Bunting came from Sudbury, England, and was woven in narrow strips. The strips on the Tecumseh flag are about 9 ½” seamed, suggesting that the width was about 10” including selvedges. Narrow strips are more flexible for assembly, and allow extensive use of selvedges to make seams narrower and stronger, because they’re less likely to fray.

Techniques
The running stitches in the Tecumseh flag threw me, because I’d expected back stitches, or combination stitch at least, but when I started working with the bunting, I understood. The loose weave of the bunting will pull and distort if you apply too much tension, so a backstitch would, in the end, be less useful than a running stitch. I doubt this is true of silk flags, though; silk, being more tightly woven, would better withstand a backstitch.

Wrong Side
Wrong Side
Right Side
Right Side

Because the Tecumseh flag is mounted and framed in a plexiglas case, I couldn’t touch the seams, or see the backs, and the conservators don’t seem to have photographed both sides when the flag was being treated– or at least images were not available to me. This leaves open the question of exactly how the seams were done, but my best guess based on areas of loss is that the strips were stitched together with a slight offset, like a felled seam, and then the overlap was tucked under and stitched down with a running stitch.

women sewing

This is less efficient: one person assembling an entire flag alone.

Assembly
This was probably the most delightful part of the research: figuring out how all the pieces went together. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it: flags were assembled in component parts, which were then assembled into wholes. Once we were working on the flag at the museum, the reason became clear: it’s so much quicker and easier to have multiple people working on parts, with one person assembling these parts, than to have one person per flag. This is proto-assembly line work, and it existed in 18th century workshops from tailors to cabinetmakers. Specialization equals speed, and the key to making money as a contractor supplying the army was quantity.

 

Canton components: A, B, C, D , E and F are assembled; AEB and CFD are sewn together to make two long rectangles, which are then sewn to the long sides of G.

In the case of the Tecumseh flag, there are three main components: the lower three strips, the upper three strips, and the canton, which is comprised of 7 parts. Each was assembled individually; then the canton and the three shorter strips were joined, and sewn to the long lower piece. After that, the hoist was attached and the far edge of the fly hemmed. Only then was the flag finished and ready for delivery.

Describing how strip(es) were assembled to become the Fort Mifflin flag.

The Fort Mifflin flag, 13 stripes of red, white and blue bunting, ending in red, would have been assembled in strips of two and then three, and then grouped and assembled. Working with Mistress V, the greater efficiency of assembling components became clearer. This hand-on quasi-experiment clarified some questions about how military contractors worked in the 18th century– at least the ones sewing. The system had to include multiple hands, working together in a shop or doing piecework at home for assembly elsewhere. There was just no other way to efficiently make the quantities of goods– 500 linen liners for light horse caps; 293 shirts; multiple standards and colours– at the speed the army required. The quantities also suggest that Rebecca Young was not just a widow-turned-contractor, but that she had working and organizing experience before she was widowed, along with a network of contacts who, along with some of her children, helped produce these goods.

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