Tag Archives: Rhode Island

History Dress-Tease

06 Saturday Oct 2012

Posted by in Clothing, Events, Making Things, Museums

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , ,

What Cheer! Day is a week away, and exactly a week from now, at 6:30 AM, I will get into my B&G guy’s truck and head into the site. We’ll measure and tape out camp sites, fire pit sites, and safety lines, bring wood and gear out from the woodshed and basement. We’ll put out the handicapped parking only sign in the parking lot, drop the orange cones (I love the thick flexible plastic of a traffic cone), and drink some coffee. I haven’t decided at what point I’ll start to fret in earnest that day, but the trick to not fretting will probably be to get dressed in 18th century clothes as soon as we are done carrying items upstairs, because then I will have to take off my watch. Watches lead to fretting: there’s administrator time, and re-enactor time, which is more like artists’ time. Better to take off the watch and get closer to the past.

Half-pleated skirt, sleeves in progress

At the School of Instruction, I thought the “People of the Brigade” program worked well; at OSV, I really appreciated  the Military Fashion Show (I did not make it to Runaway Runway). Using these models, and knowing about the School of Instruction’s Women’s Dress program, I thought we’d combine these ideas. I don’t have a good name for the program yet, but the reason I’m going so nuts about the dress from 1774 is that I plan a “History Dress-Tease:” starting in shift, stays, stockings and shoes, I’ll demonstrate all the layers my runaway wore: 2 petticoats, pockets, dress, stomacher, apron, cap, bonnet.

Any soldiers I can convince to get down to small clothes and layer up with waistcoat, coat or frock, canteen, cartridge box, bayonet scabbard, haversack, knapsack, hat and musket, will demonstrate the gear they carried. I thought about a weigh-in, to record how much it all weighs, but my scale is a pathological liar, and varies by 4 pounds from one side of the room to another.

All this work has an educational, and not merely sartorial, purpose. Now, if only the public will come…

What Table Manners?

16 Sunday Sep 2012

Posted by in Events, Food, History, Reenacting

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

, , , , ,

When you think of 18th century dining, which image comes to mind, tea on the left, or the sea captains to the right?

While I did not carouse with sea captains this weekend, at dinner today, I found myself deeply envious of someone’s skill in eating from a knife. I shoveled food onto my spoon yesterday with abandon. I coveted the last three pieces of quince tart today despite knowing that one of those pieces was for my husband. And I am not ashamed. Ok, not too ashamed.

The best part of living history is always what you learn, and I feel a separate blog post should deal with “the public, god love ’em.” What I learned this weekend was less about quilting and more about living old school. Ok, and maybe more about the public’s…breadth….than depth…

The most instructive thing was about being hungry and thirsty. Thirsty as in my lips are dry and I know I need to drink, which means being past thirsty and at dehydrated. Yesterday I went all day without peeing and that’s not right. Both yesterday and today I left the farm hungry, not because there was not food but because I ate mindful of leaving enough for those eating after me. The goose pie was delicious and seriously worth eating standing up in the kitchen. I’d fight for that pie.

Eating boiled dinner (ham, parsnips, carrots and turnips) along with a pudding, with 18th century utensils was challenging. Two-tine forks have great sticking ability but not much carrying ability.  Spoons are your friend. Knives may be better as trowels than cutting implements. No one really cares about your manners, they are too hungry to notice. Boiled pudding is this season’s smash hit.

Coggeshall Farm uses Amelia Simmon’s American Cookery, which I started reading last week. It is full of useful receipts based on American ingredients and I recommend it. Here is the receipt for the fantastic, sliceable pudding we had today:

A boiled Flour Pudding_.
One quart milk, 9 eggs, 7 spoons flour, a little salt, put into a
strong cloth and boiled three quarters of an hour.

There were hot words about those “7 spoons” from the kitchen staff and to be honest, I did not quiz them fully on the size of the spoons they used. But whatever magic they worked, it was truly delicious with and without the molasses cream sauce. Sliced and eaten with spoon or fingers (I snitched some later in the kitchen), it a consistency of solidity like the best parts of a Swedish rice pudding, though smooth.

It is hard to countenance how hungry people must have been much of the time in the past. More than the extreme hunger of the soldiers (like Greenman and Plumb Martin), I think common people experienced days of lacking, and accepted them, with the seasons. Food was not constant, but in flux, and even at harvest, I think, or hope, that one was mindful of the needs of others.

For more on seasonality and 18th century ways of thinking or seeing, read Circles and Lines: The Shape of Life in Early America. That’s what I’m going to pretend to do while I fall asleep.

Mourning Embroideries

11 Tuesday Sep 2012

Posted by in History, Museums

≈ Comments Off on Mourning Embroideries

Tags

, ,

As a rule, I dislike samplers. Sacrilege, I know, but the rows of letters and numbers and tidy stitches seem to me like running in place, instead of running to get somewhere.

But I do like pictorial embroideries, and on this day, posting about a frothy bonnet in a painting in a Sotheby’s catalog seemed…well, too trivial. So instead, here’s a fantastic mourning picture from the Met. By Charlotte Brown, of Rhode Island, it memorializes Salome Brown and her husband Moses Brown, though not the Moses Brown.

Just because I’m not a fan doesn’t mean I don’t recognize types. In a google image search, I found this item, and knew immediately it was Rhode Island. Made in 1808, it lives at RISD, and a textile designer has done wonderful things based on it. Both RISD’s and the Met’s have the weeping woman, the weeping willow, the urn/cenotaph feature, the pastoral landscape.

But wait…the provenance of the Met’s picture is minimal: “Once property of the late Florence Maine, antiques dealer of Ridgefield and Wilton Connecticut. (Advertisement of embroidery in August 1953 Antiques magazine.)” So I started searching for Moses Brown and Salome Brown in the Rhode Island Historical Cemeteries Database, and I came up empty.

Yes, there are Moses Browns. There is no Salome Brown. But I can’t find a Moses with these dates. That doesn’t mean he didn’t exist, or that this isn’t a Rhode Island sampler; not every cemetery has been transcribed and not every headstone survived.  There is one Charlotte Brown with a date worth considering, and she is the daughter of Thomas and Rebecca Brown, and would have been 7 when this was made. Not impossible, but I’m not fully sold yet. I now have more questions about the one at the Met, and about the people memorialized. Those questions may well be answered in an accession file at the Met, but sitting on the public side of the catalog record, I have questions that only research can answer, and that I hope will one day be done as part of the Sampler Archive Project. 

For now, I think I’ll enjoy a sense of visual literacy in Rhode Island imagery, the lasting beauty of these memorials, and let it go at that.

Shake Your Tail Feathers

08 Friday Jun 2012

Posted by in Clothing, Events

≈ Comments Off on Shake Your Tail Feathers

Tags

, , ,

Men’s 18th century coats amaze and delight me. On some of the earlier fine suits, the pleats are exuberant but controlled, layers of fabric tucked together in the skirt.

You could argue they’re feminizing, and somewhere I read that men’s suits have evolved in cut and design to make the male body less threatening. You could argue that they have the formal appeal and function of a peacock’s tail, signaling financial health and status.

This is perhaps most true of the tails on court coats, fancy and fine yet restrained, conservative, and non-threatening. After all, you cannot exceed your rank.

Fortunately for me, I need only construct a simple linen coat by tomorrow. The back seam was sewn this morning, and I started on the pleats. The pattern lines did not clearly mark the peaks and valleys, so I’ve played with it four times.

This evening, Costume Close Up will be my guide, and with any luck, a coat will be “done enough” for an event twelve hours from how. The coat may not be lined in 12 hours, but it will be wearable enough for an evening march that recreates part of the Gaspee incident of 240 years ago tomorrow.  I’ve only known since Wednesday night that I was needed, but with any luck, some of the Second Helping Regiment will come and help.