Category Archives: History

To Make a Standard

22 Monday Apr 2019

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

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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
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.

To Philadelphia, Again

12 Friday Apr 2019

Posted by in Events, History, Living History, material culture, Museums, Research

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Pennsylvania Packet (Philadelphia), June 28, 1781

This time, unoccupied. I’ll be representing Rebecca Flower Young at the Museum of the American Revolution’s Flower’s Artificers event this coming weekend, and to get ready, I’ve been reading research material generously shared by museum staff, as well as Marla Miller’s classic Betsy Ross and the Making of America, which mentions Rebecca Young in the context of the competitive world of Continental Army contractors in 1780s Philadelphia.

Rebecca Flower Young (1739-1819) was an older sister of Benjamin Flower (1748-1781), Lieutenant Colonel in the Continental Army. Before the war, she lived in Philadelphia with her husband, William Young, a goldsmith, and their five children. The family fled Philadelphia for Lebanon, PA in September 1777 as the British Army advanced to occupy the city; it would not have been safe for them, given their ardent Whig politics and relationship to Benjamin, commissary general of military stores. After William Young’s death in February, 1778, Colonel Flower secured a house for his sister on Walnut Street, and work as a contractor providing supplies for the Continental Army.

 

Rebecca made drum cases and shirts, cap linings and cartridges, and multiple Continental standards. From the quantities she produced– 500 cap linings for light horsemen– it is possible she hired assistants in addition to her children. Her 17-year-old son William made “five hundred dozen of Priming wires and brushes” in 1780, aiding the war effort through the supply chain rather than as a foot soldier, a condition that was likely a relief, given Rebecca’s status as a widow. She also let a room in the Walnut Street house, the boarder’s rent providing a relatively steady and reliable income.

Col. Benjamin Flower, oil on canvas by Charles Willson Peale. Star-Spangled Banner House, Baltimore, MD.

We have no idea what Rebecca Young looked like, of course, though there is a portrait of her brother, Benjamin, in his uniform, as well as a portrait miniature sold at Freeman’s.

With only written sources about her work to guide me, I have waffled back and forth about Rebecca Young’s material world. In the end, I have made a much-needed new shift and cap for this weekend, as well as a gown (that, of this writing, requires only one cuff and the skirt hem). After reading Miller on Betsy Ross, I was of two minds: first, that the material world of these women was shabby and out-of-date, given the privations of the occupation and the war-driven inflation and second, that their status as contractors gave them an income that allowed them to afford new things. Still, with five children, new anything would have been a stretch, so I remain undecided and firmly ambivalent about the appropriateness of this gown. Scissors, needles, pins: those tools are much easier to understand than personal circumstances.

We approach representing the past with preconceptions that are hard to shake: the images we have in mind are dominated by representations of people at the far ends of the economic spectrum. It’s as if we had only the Saks Fifth Avenue and Old Navy websites to help us understand American clothing today. The wildly divergent economic and material situations tell us little about the people in the middle, who make up the vast majority of the population. 

Research and primary source materials on Rebecca Flower Young were provided by Matthew Skic of the Museum of the American Revolution; compiled information used by gallery educators at the MoAR was compiled and provided by Katherine Becnel of the MoAR.

A Bonnet, Universally Acknowledged

11 Monday Feb 2019

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

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Print made by James Caldwall, 1739–1819, British, A Ladies Maid Purchasing a Leek, 1772, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that if a bonnet existed in the 1770s, it was black taffeta” has long been the rule reenactors have followed, particularly those wanting to adhere to the strictest standards of well-researched impressions based on primary source documents and period material culture. Truth examined is more subtle, showing that bonnet colours, materials, and shapes varied from decade to decade—and year to year—and that these factors seem to have varied by region. What worked in Boston would not be comfortable in the Carolinas, and people adjusted accordingly.

I was asked recently about Boston-area bonnets in the first half of the 1770s. My impression of this decade is that it is one in which there is a stylistic change in women’s headwear, as the “sunshade”* and “Bath” bonnet terms fade from use, giving way to plain “bonnet” or “chip” bonnets. These appear to have been made from “bonnet paper,” seen in both blue and white** in newspaper ads, though prints and paintings show brims in both boned and paper forms.

The Rival Milleners. Mezzotint after John Collet, 1772. Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1955-125

Brim shape and bonnet material— fabric and colour–  vary by period (and region). So let’s look at Boston in the first years of the 1770s. One tricky bit is that there are fewer indentured servants and enslaved people in Boston than elsewhere in the American Colonies in this period, so runaway ads are scarce, giving us fewer clues than we get in Pennsylvania and points south. Still, there are plenty of ads to help guide us.

As early as 1769, we see color variations, with the mention of “black, blue, green, white, and crimson bonnets” in Caleb Blanchard’s store. The year before, Joshua Gardner and Company advertised “black, pink, blue & crimson sattin hats and bonnets.” That means that on the streets of Boston and environs, by 1775, you’d see half-worn black, blue, green, white, crimson and pink satin bonnets.

The best statistics around for bonnets are currently tabulated for Pennsylvania, and definitely show the preponderance of bonnets are black (52 of 75 tabulated, or 69%). So don’t give up on black silk bonnets! They are the most common color. If we extrapolate these statistics, for a Pennsylvania event in the 1770s, of every 10 bonnets, seven should be black, one should be white, one should be green, and one should be blue. In larger groups, we’d also see red and brown bonnets, but again, just one in 20 or 30.

The Boston Gazette, April 4, 1774. Benjamin Franklin’s sister advertises “Sattins of the newest Fashion… for Bonnets.”

“A few sarsnet taffety bonnets,” in the Boston Evening Post, September 28, 1772.

For Massachusetts, statistics are more difficult to compile, given the dearth of runaway ads and the fact that I haven’t yet dived into inventory and probate records. Merchants’ ads give us some clues as to materials, and one thing I find is that “sattin” shows up, as well as “sarsnet taffety” or pelong. Sarsnet or sarcenet was a “think transparent silk of plain weave,” according to Textiles in America. Thicker than Persian, sarcenet was woven both plain and twill, and could be plain or changeable. Pelong is a kind of silk satin, again according to Textiles in America, and in The Dictionary of Fashion History, described as a kind of “thin silk satin,” but I have also seen it described as a ribbed silk. Joshua Blanchard advertised “Pelong sattins of all colours” in 1768. Where does that leave us with materials? Probably with the need for more bonnets to be made of silk satin than of silk taffeta, though the proportions are difficult to calculate yet.

Miss Theophila Palmer (1757-1848), oil on canvas, attributed to Sir Joshua Reynolds ca 1770.

What about shape? For those dressing a la mode, we are past the deep-brimmed, small-cauled “lampshade” of the 1760s, and into a smaller, tighter bonnet with a larger caul and more trimming. In the portrait of Miss Palmer, we see how the brim stands away from the face, and the caul or crown poufs up. “A Lady’s Maid Purchasing a Leek” and “The Rival Milleners” (aee above) both depict women in similarly tight-brimmed and round-crowned bonnets trimmed with bows. These are shapes that I am confident appeared almost universally (with variations) in the American colonies in the first years of the 1770s. Now, there are different shapes to be sure, but these seem to predominate. I do think we need to see more brims that wrap around the head, as seen in the 1774 mezzotint of George Whitefield (Anglo-America’s most popular preacher) and his followers.

Detail, A Call to the Converted. Publish’d April 15, 1774, by W. Humphry . Lewis Walpole Library, 774.04.15.01+

So what’s the take away, if we are looking specifically at Boston and environs in the first half of the 1770s?

  1. Most bonnets (70%) were black, but a few white, green, crimson, and blue were seen.
  2. Most bonnets were made of silk satin, with others of taffeta or sarsnet (sometimes twilled silk).
  3. Most bonnets would have a shorter, higher brim that curves across the face just above eye level, with a high, rounded crown/caul and bow trims.
  4. Bonnet brims would vary between bonnet (paste) board and boned

Each place has a local style– which, if you think about it, is still true today. When I stand on the Metro platform in the red wool coat I bought in Providence, these folks know I’m not from here. The way we dress for the past should reflect the place and the time we are representing as best we can. And that means we need accessories to match those times and places, as well as clothes.

And yes, full disclosure, I sell researched bonnets on Etsy. If you want a bonnet for a particular time and place, that’s what I make.

* Known on this blog as “lampshade”
** Nope, don’t know what that means yet, haven’t looked into it

The Colour of Things to Come

28 Monday Jan 2019

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

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I have a thing for hats– well, for bonnets, really. I know I made stays and a shift before I made anything else for the 18th century, but I might have made a bonnet before I made a proper gown. It’s a condition I inherited from my grandmother, and a great aunt who was a milliner, so there’s little to be done about it– except to dive in deeper.

Miss Theophila Palmer (1757-1848), oil on canvas, attributed to Sir Joshua Reynolds ca 1770. Pretty sure that’s a white “whalebone” or “skeleton” bonnet.

As people do more research and generously share it with me, I’ve come to realize that I need to synthesize what we are seeing. It’s a tricky thing, what with that single (known) extant bonnet at Colonial Williamsburg and only prints and images to go on. What I’ve done to compile a stack of references from newspaper ads (primarily Mid-Atlantic and New England colonies at the moment) and interfiled them with images. This has given me a much better sense of  the change in shapes and construction over time, as well as the range of colours– yes, colours, available and popular.

It’s not just that wool bonnets are a thing– there’s the ““a reddish coloured worsted bonnet” in the April 8, 1776 Pennsylvania Packet an ad for runaway Margaret Collands, and the “black durant” recommended in Instructions for Cutting Out Apparel for the Poor– but close reading shows that the colors are more varied than we’ve accept lately, but they vary by region and time period.

The Misses Waldegrave. Are blue bonnets *only* for children? Maybe.

There’s been a rule that “all bonnets are black silk,” which is too broad a statement. Most bonnets are black, that’s true. But in 1768, in Boston, a place where folks would have you think that black is the only colour bonnet you can ever have, you can have “Black, pink, blue and crimson sattin hatts and bonnets” (Joshua Gardner and Com. ad, Boston News-Letter, November 24, 1768).

Heck, if you shopped at Caleb Blanchard, you could have a green bonnet, too! Blanchard advertised “black, blue, green, white and crimson Sattin bonnets” in the Boston Gazette on December 18, 1769.

What does this mean? My SWAG is that roughly 60-70% of bonnets should be black. After that, blue, white, red and green would make up the balance. In Philadelphia, green bonnets– and green flowered bonnets– last longer in the ads. Philadelphia is also where I see more white bonnets, a brown silk bonnet, a diaper bonnet, a “queen’s grey” bonnet, and, in Trenton, a “lye coloured” bonnet. In Rhode Island, there’s a blue stuff bonnet. So yes, bonnets should mostly be black. But they can also be other colours.

Entr’acte

24 Wednesday Oct 2018

Posted by in History, Living History, Research

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I: Mr B. Finds Pamela Writing. Joseph Highmore, oil on canvas (Part of four scenes of Richardson’s Pamela). Tate Britain, N03573

Entr’acte: an intermission.

Note: In this series, I describe the process I used to arrive at my conclusions and assemble the materials for my impression of pharmacist Elizabeth Weed. I strive to explicate a process of research, questioning, and reasoning that may be applied to any impression. Here’s a guide to what I’ve written thus far, and what I plan to write.

Part One: Been employed these several years past provides an introduction to the project

Part Two: may depend on being supplied explores some of the primary and secondary sources I used and questions I asked of those sources

Part Three: shop medicines, ointments, and salves examines some of the sources for 18th century remedies, and the material culture of pharmacies and healing practioners

Part Four: The Material World of Widow Weed looks at the pieces I assembled: the clothing and the choices I made for gown, hat, mantelet, apron and accessories, as well choices I made for the remedies and their presentation.

Part Five: The Widow will See You Now looks at the implementation, that is, how I chose to interact with the public, what I learned as I talked to 1200-1500 people over the course of two days, and how Drunk Tailor and I used the Anarchist’s Guide principles to inform our interactions.

Part Six will look at how these same principles and processes can be used to inform any impression you take up, with the hope that it will inspire the reader to look for new ways to add depth to living history. The fun isn’t only in the making or the performance, it’s also in the rehearsal of the research, and in assembling these scraps from the past into a living, breathing whole.