From the age of 13, Cortlandt Hull knew what he was passionate about. The son of a Hollywood-set-painter father and seamstress mother, Hull made Zenobia, his first wax movie figure, at 13, embellished by a costume stitched by his mother and jewelry from his grandmother. And the museum of horror movies was born.
Isn’t her movement wonderful? I think that’s truly the meaning of special effects!
Seeing how committed Hull was to celebrating the classic horror film, he was given and collected the tools of the trade. This “life mask” of Bella Lugosi was used for the actor’s makeup tests. Steven Spielberg didn’t realize the value of his original ET, and here it is.
And this Golem was used in the 1920 movie. Wonderful!
Carmilla, glowing in warmth (not), took us through the museum of wax figures, made by Hull throughout his life, his personal tribute to the films he loved. I’m getting in the Halloween spirit already!
Bella Lugosi as Count Dracula
The vampire skeleton, safely tucked away in the casket, unless…someone removes the stake through its heart!
The Creature from the Black Lagoon
The science experiment gone terribly awry, with “The Fly”
The original Werewolf. Hull did have some Hollywood help with the hair.
Frankenstein
‘The Beast” from the French version. This costume is sumptuous.
It’s the 1870s, and we’re on the coast of Connecticut. Mystic is a booming ship-building town. Sailors are wandering the streets, as are people ready to take their money.
I sat me down to listen to David Iler sing Four Bitters. Not sea chanties. Those were working songs with calls and responses, to help load and unload the ships. Just like on the plantations, sea chanties help with heavy lifting.
Four Bitters were sung on board. The fiddler would be at the forward-most bitter, a big tub for holding blubber. Yes, we’re talking whalers here. When not in use, which was much of the time, the four bitters made good perches for the singers and players.
David says not all the songs were rousing. Some were “pretty” like ballads, some sad, and some were warnings. Like “Get Up Jack, John Sit Down.” A ‘jolly rovin’ tar.’
See Jack would be trying to find his sea legs after 90 days sailing from Liverpool to San Francisco, with his $1 a day wages. He might have appeared drunk, as he got used to being on land again. With $90 in his pocket, and a meal priced at a nickel, Jack was plenty Jolly, and as a salior, was a Rover. Sailors were often covered with tar from their work. Jolly Rovin’ Tar.
The town was ready for the Jolly Roving Tars. Ready to take their money for drinks all around and for and by women.
Worse, a friendly face might drug the Tar with laudanum. Rob him? Sure. But Shanghai Brown would hire out the job of drugging the sailor, because the knocked-out boy would be ‘sold’ to packet ships that were short of crew, in return for the sailor’s first month’s wage.
The sailor would wake up out at sea, only to realize he was working the first month for no wage. Impressment was a common tactic for navies and merchant ships. Packets sailed on a schedule and had to have adequate crews. Shanghai’s were one risk of being on shore.
These Four Bitters could serve as warnings, but David explained from experience the mad rush to get on shore will wipe away all logic.
(David Iler on his handmade “Dulcitar”–combination dulcimer and cigar box. Sailors made use of everything.)
Sailors on the whaling ships fared no better. They divvied up 1/3 of the whale oil profits. Sounds like that could be okay. But they were charged for every meal, the tobacco they became addicted to, and the rum. They often ended up owing the ship money, which meant, yes, another term at sea.
So much for the romance of the sailing life.
Then of course, there were the storms and the shipwrecks near land. Sailors would practice the life-saving technique of using the life line.
I watched them practice at the Mystic Seaport Village Green, David participating, too.
They shoot a small rope from a canon that gets tied to the top of the mast rigging (or its stand in here). Then larger and heavier ropes follow the line to get tied on. These larger ropes can hold the weight of a sailor.
One by one, the sailors from the shipwreck climb into the Britches Buoy and slide down the life line to safety.
Winslow Homer. The Life LIne. 1884.
Imagine doing that in the middle of a dangerous storm. Winslow Homer shows us what that might have been like.
Amazing that these wooden figureheads could survive at all. Figureheads at the ship’s prow were meant to ward off evil spirits, and often represented the name of the boat, which is why many were carved as women. Some even have portrait-like qualities, like this one of Abigail. Abigail Chandler was this ship captain’s wife. Imagine her withstanding a storm.
The full-body figures like Abigail, the Seminole, and girl in white weighed so much as to be counterproductive, and figureheads were soon reduced in size and scale to the head and shoulders.
These figures are so stern looking and fierce, I’d want them protecting my ship!
The “White Girl” probably never sailed. Not only does she lack color, but that extended hand would be vulnerable at sea.
How did these figureheads survive the winds and the storms? I learned a secret about how they might have.
A quick visit to the ship’s carving shop and a look at the David Crockett figurehead told all.
The David Crockett sailed around Cape Good Horn several times, safely. No small feat. How did the figurehead survive to look so glorious today, complete with that extended rifle? It’s simple. The sailors took it down a couple of days out of harbor and put it up again before coming back to shore. Ah, very smart.
Of course, then the figurehead probably wasn’t protecting the ship, but that’s to consider another day.
The 1841 Charles W. Morgan was in service for 80 years, making 37 voyages. Look at how it dominates over the town. What fun to climb aboard!
Less than an hour from my house is the largest fair in New England, The Big E. It has all your fair stuff–fried foods, rides, the circus, farm animals, and products made locally, with a building dedicated to each state.
I loved watching the butter carving, the judging of gorgeous cows, and the elegant girl-jumper competition.
I bought myself an old milk bottle from a dairy in the town where I teach. See it? Butler’s…
Those cheese curds hit the spot, as did the fresh lemonade with no sugar.
What would any New England site be without a historic home? At the fair, I toured the 1790s farm house, large and comfortable, occupied by the farmer’s family being industrious.
My favorite moment of all was the pig races–separate for males (Kevin Bacon among the contestants) and females (J Lo Pigs was running), little pigs and big, it was hilarious fun, as you may be able to tell from these videos.
And for the political-spinning pigs…
All for the winning prize of an Oreo cookie at the finish line. If only all of life’s trials had such a sweet reward.
I’ve long wanted to go to the exquisite Roseland Cottage, but it is a bit out of the way. In the “quiet corner” of Connecticut, and on a Labor Day Saturday, it took me 90 minutes to get to Woodstock and the house. Basically, nothing in Connecticut is further away.
It is clearly worth the trip though. What a beauty this house is, with its meticulous care inside and out and its picture-perfect gardens.
Yes, the house is Gothic Revival, not something you see everyday in historic New England. And like it’s not too distant neighbors in Newport, this house was built as a summer cottage for wealthy New Yorkers. So why doesn’t Roseland look like a Newport ‘cottage’?
Asymmetrical gardens
One guide today speculated that the association of the Gothic style with cathedrals and religious piety was the driving factor. Henry Bowen, whose wealth stemmed from silk textiles before turning to insurance, was a Temperance man. No drinking or smoking for him. He even had his seven sons sign a Pledge of Temperance before going off to college that they would not only refrain from drinking and smoking, but also avoid gambling, going to the theater and opera, and somewhat peculiarly, boating. Note, no mention of the fairer sex. The boys did sign, but were, to the man, known as notorious party-ers. A bit of rebellion anyone?
Gothic arches. You can just make out the lincrusta, a textured linoleum made of linseed oil and wood pulp, on the walls. That’s not wallpaper.
Anyhow, the pointed arches of the Gothic style, for the exterior styling and interior windows and doorways, even in the servant areas, suggest that Bowen wanted to remind all householders of aspirational Christian values to inspire each to live a better life. An intriguing thought.
The stained glass looks like it’s right out of 1960s Pop, but is original to the house’s 1846 origins.
Our guide said that Bowen was an abolitionist, and I asked whether he was bothered by working in textiles and doing business with the South that clearly relied on enslaved labor. She said he stated, “my goods are for sale, not my conscience.” Hmmm. I’m not sure that addresses the issue, if he profited off of the system.
Regardless, the Civil War and the resulting Reconstruction era meant that his Southern clients were unable to pay his bills. He had to close his business and shifted his energies to insurance, where he built a billion dollar business. I’m sure that was none too clean either.
But I’m not here to debate the morals of a pious, rich man. Instead I enjoy his house.
Apparently, it’s always been pink, as you see it, with perhaps a reference to rose color, the rose being his first wife’s favorite flower. She konked after giving him 10 kids, and he married again, leading to one more son. By this time, after the Civil War, he was uber-wealthy and attracted U.S. Presidents to visit his hometown of Woodstock and stay with him at the cottage.
Roseland was known for its July 4 celebrations. Each year, the party was so huge that it spilled out from the house and into the park Bowen built for his entertainments. Voluminous amounts of bunting decorated the grounds. Forget the barbecue. You received your pretty little printed brochure listing all the lectures taking place under the tent and when you could catch the day-time fireworks–a Japanese technology. You could enjoy a pink lemonade while strolling through what the New York Times called a “fairy garden,” if you were one of the lucky 1000 or so people who began coming, along with the sitting President. Of course, there were fireworks at night, too.
President Grant, during his 1870 visit also learned a new skill. Bowling. The house features a bowling alley completely made of wood. The ball and pins were made of wood, too. Grant had never bowled before, and on his first try, he got a strike. So delighted was he that he broke out a cigar. Bowen wasn’t having it and shooed the president outside to smoke.
Even the outbuildings (ice house and privies) had Gothic styling
Also outside was a new privy, erected for a presidential visit. Since you know I’m already familiar with Connecticut’s privies, I can knowledgeably comment that these were pretty high end. A wall separated the holes, and the president could close the door for some additional, ahem, privy. These niceties were not available in Roseland’s indoor privies.
Such were the details learned on the behind-the-scenes tour. We crawled around the cellar, shining our flashlights to see early construction (and a dead mouse) and marveled at the height of the attic rafters and their intricate carpentry. We slithered down creaky staircases, imagining servants carrying tea trays. We wondered how the very heavy furniture in the attic got there, other than on the backs of servants up narrow stairways. We saw how water for baths upstairs had to be pumped up three flights from the cellar cistern. Sheesh. Forget “Downton Abbey.” Servant’s lives were impossibly hard.
What they apparently did so well was make the life upstairs beautiful and seemingly effortless. Perhaps pride (and the privies) were enough reason to stay with the Bowens. One servant worked for the family for over 50 years! Imagine…
Maybe the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum curators were being witty with their exhibit-portion of the 7 Deadly Sins. Seven museums are participating, and I had already enjoyed the thoughtful exhibit on Gluttony at the Bruce. I was surprisingly unamused by the Sloth exhibit at the Aldrich.
The whole show was comprised of a porch rocker and inside, three recliners in front of tv monitors playing a video of the other museums’ exhibits of the Deadly Sins. This exhibit was deadly! Come on, curators! Just because the exhibit was on sloth didn’t mean they had to be lazy. What a delicious art historical topic and certainly one for contemporary artists. A real missed opportunity.
Fortunately, I had already had a wonderful visit to the Storm King Art Center, a place that requires the opposite of sloth. More than 100 sculptures dot the landscape, over 500 acres of picturesque, upstate New York countryside. Past visits had me tromping all over the place.
Today, despite the picture-perfect weather, I slothed out. I took the tram all over the site. No, I didn’t see as much as slowly as I would have liked, but my real objective was to get to the Lynda Benglis Water Sources sculptures. Benglis has always been interested in texture and expressionistic, organic shapes, so she makes a wonderful fit as the featured artist in an environment where the sculptures play off of, complement, intrude, and create landscapes, as you can see in this slide show.
Most of the Benglis outdoor pieces are bronze and were not created site specifically for Storm King. Some elements were added to North South East West for the site. Regardless, all I could see was Bernini, especially in relationship to those columns.
Lynda Benglis North South East West 1988/2009/2014-5
Bernini, Fountain of the Four Rivers, 17th Century, Rome
See what I mean? That same earthy, crusty, twisting, Baroque sensibility. I’d love to ask Benglis if she thinks of Bernini, tooi.
You can see how her works fit in the landscape. All those verticals reaching to the sky.
Lynda Benglis, Bounty, 1983-4/2014-5
Sound is an important element for the works, so enjoy a listen in these videos.
Crescendo
Crescendo actually reminds me of the natural history museum. A primordial ooze emerging out of the water becoming a dinosaur. Do you see it, too?
Like most sculpture, you get different impressions by walking around any of these works.
This last video of Pink Ladies shows that Benglis is experimenting with materials. In addition to bronze, she uses polyurethane that she also casts and then pigments. The poly allows the pink to shimmer in the sun. It becomes translucent, too. Mesmerizing and meditative.
With these works, and the lovely day, I enjoyed a bit of slothfulness.
As a culture, are we slothful? Inside Storm King’s museum was a small exhibition of the emerging artist the museum has supported–Luke Stettner. His still untitled work demonstrates how archaeologists may look back at us: ‘Hmmm. This garbage suggests that back in the day, people valued these gizmos for a moment, before discarding them for the next thing.’
Houdini’s stone at his grave was stolen 3 times, so it’s on loan here to protect it.
Although I can’t recommend it, the quirky, magic realist film “Little Boy” put me in the mood for the Houdini Museum in Mew York. In the film, magic gives an unfortunate boy hope and the ability to believe the impossible, much like Houdini did.
The magic store Fantasma Magic, on the third floor of a nondescript building kitty corner from Madison Square Garden, houses the museum, and John was quite the guide.
He told me about the Substitution Trunk, a trick still in use today. First, the audience came up to examine the trunk, making sure it was sound. Then Houdini’s brother was handcuffed, put in a bag, and locked the trunk. Houdini stood on the trunk and raised a curtain.
When the curtain came back down, Houdini was locked in the trunk and his brother was on top the trunk.
Later Houdini’s wife took the place of his brother. Regardless, I have no idea how they did this, and John wasn’t telling.
Houdini would respond to two challenges–a punch in the gut and willingness to escape from anything. In Boston, in 1907, it was this coffin, secured with six-inch nails. In 66 minutes, the magician escaped.
How did he do it? Houdini was a locksmith by trade, so he knew little tricks and hid little lock picks. He knew the handcuffs would pop open when banged against a shin-shaped metal plate that he conveniently kept up his trouser leg.
Soon he was stripped for his tricks. The naked magician. Houdini would swallow his picks, yes, really, and regurgitate them once the trick started. I want to know how he avoided punching holes in his stomach. Ouch!
Hand from a seance, used to tap out the answer from the spirit
After his mother died, Houdini went to seances to contact her. Finding the mediums to be hoaxes, Houdini revealed their secrets and methods. He decided to conjure the spirits himself, as part of his magic act. Different from the debunked seances, his audience knew his work was illusory. No deception of the heart. Or so Houdini stated.
John didn’t know how the teakettle related to Houdini’s act, but he told me how Steve Cohen uses it now at the Waldorf. This ‘Magician to the Millionaires’ asks six people what they like to drink and then pours their preferred drink from the teakettle. Margherita, Diet Coke, a brandy, whatever. One after another. Even professional magicians like John can’t figure out how he does it. In case you want to catch his act, he’s at the Waldorf on weekends in a suite.
John doing a little magic on me
Probably anyone could figure out how John did the two tricks for me. I just laughed and laughed.
As I did with this Mickey Mouse magician from the 1950s at Disney World in Florida. Apparently the only one in existence, John remembers seeing this automaton as a child with his mother. And now he works where it’s exhibited. I couldn’t even figure out how it works, although you might be able to in this video..
So I turned to Isabella, feeding her a dollar for my fortune. Listen to what she has to say here. (You might also make out the Rena ghost in her window.)
My yes or no question turned up the disappointing response, “ask later.” Ah well. Maybe the lucky numbers she predicted for me will pay out. A little bit of hope in the impossible.
I started my Native Connecticut experience today at the Pequot Museum of the Mashantucket tribe. My first impression was, this is a lot of museum for the experience. The excess of architecture was even more exaggerated by the long walk through open space–“follow the paw prints”– to the long ramp going down to the exhibits. I was already a bit visually exhausted.
Then there were the generic exhibits on the Ice Age, the arrival of the People, tools, medicine, agriculture, you probably know the drill. And I was the only person for miles.
When I wandered into the Pequot Village, with its sounds of birds, crickets, and rushing water and the smell of the fire and cedar, everything changed.
I won’t say I suspended my disbelief enough to really immerse. After all, there’s something about fake humans that just doesn’t send me. But this experience was much livelier and more interesting, plus it’s apparently what draws visitors and puts this museum in the ‘gem’ category.
So enter into late summer of 1550, to the uninterrupted, idyllic, daily life of the Pequot.
My interest was captured by the wigwam. I liked being able to go inside one and site down to contemplate life is such a small space. I liked how the newlyweds were shown, building their new home together. How they bent saplings to create the structure, then covered it with bark, as you see here. A vertical log cabin. No windows, but the People spent very little time inside.
One to two families would share a wigwam, with the hearth at the center and sleeping platforms around the periphery. The beds were covered with pelts of red fox, mink, skunk (yes, really), and the rare black wolf. Deer skin would cover the open doorway, and when it rained, the smoke hole was covered with a piece of bark.
No space was wasted, and this wigwam had drying corn, hemp for twine and fish net, snow shoes, antlers ready to make into tools, arrow wood for the shafts of arrows, and a fish spear with a 3-pronged head.
Until Europeans arrived, there were about a dozen Pequot villages. With white people and more aggressive Native tribes (that led to the disastrous Pequot War) came fortress-like fences. At least the Europeans did some trading, bringing bronze tools, pots, and jewelry.
In the years after, we witness their lifestyle disappearing. The housing style changed, became Anglicized, as did the clothing.
I enjoyed the sense of pride of the tribe today, with several galleries devoted to its life today. The gallery-wide oral histories added a personal touch, too.
So the museum is a funny mix of oooold stuff and new museum technology. A bit curious.
I must admit to being completely puzzled by these items in the gift store. Expensive at $180, these dresses represent…what? I don’t want to speculate.
Hmmm. There’s even one in the front window. So I’m clearly missing something.
But time waits for no traveler, so I left my puzzlement behind and moved on to the next Native Connecticut adventure–an author reading in the tiny town hall of Voluntown, an event that was part of the Connecticut Authors Trail. Some people there were serious Trail groupies, traveling around the state to hear local authors speak about their work. Others, like me, were attracted to this particular reading.
This standing room only crowd knew the Tantaquidgeon family, an old Wabanaki name, and many knew Melissa’s great aunt, a revered herbalist (read Medicine Woman). They oooh’d and ahhh’d about the Tantaquidgeon Museum of “Indian traditions” in Uncasville, which darn it, I learned about too late to visit today. Thank goodness for tomorrow. This was a bit of a love fest for Melissa, which was delightful.
Here’s an important bit of hierarchy I learned. Wabanaki is the umbrella name for all the New England tribes, Pequot, Mohegan, etc. Waba means east or dawn and naki means land. So People of the Land of the Dawn. Nice, eh?
Mona Lisa (yes, really), Melissa’s main character learns about her New England native heritage through the course of the book, while also solving a cold-case murder. Way to go, Mona! The book is a chance for us to learn, too, about the woods of the ‘North Land” and the history, mysteries, and culture of these People connected by canoes and toboggans on the superhighway that is and was the Connecticut River.
So much of this is new to me, so I’m adding Wabanaki Blues to my reading list to fill in my Native New England gaps!
Ingenuity can take so many forms, and I encountered several today in my adventures in New Jersey. The Canal Day celebration in Historic Waterloo Village gave me the impetus to finally make it to the Stickley and Automaton Museums. What ingenuity all.
That bell-shaped think is the elk shoulder bone for the hoe
I started by touring the recreated Lenni Lenape village on the same grounds as the Waterloo Village, getting a sense of their ingenuity. An elk shoulder bone becomes a hoe. Clay becomes the longhouse. If you’re looking for a gift for your mother, look no further than a long, flat stone. It makes a wonderful griddle. The Three Sisters take care of the Lenni Lenape. Beans, corn, and squash are the Three Sisters. Corn grows tall and strong, beans give a hug, and squash can go a long time without water.
Canal Day turns out to be an opportunity to see the rescue of a mostly intact historic village, left to fall to pieces. Recent state money gives this place a chance, and I have my fingers crossed.
Smith mansion needs repair
I arrived early, so didn’t have to fight any crowds at the festival, which included a pontoon boat ride on the canal. The village is at the midpoint of the 102.5 mile Morris Canal that opened in 1831 and stretched from the Hudson to the Delaware River. Great shortcut for moving goods through the early Republic, so fortunes were at the ready.
One fellow, Smith, owned the smithy, the hotel, the general store, and the grist and saw mills, so basically the entire village. He showed off his wealth by building a Victorian-style mansion, see above.
1870s chic modeled by Miss Sharon
By the Civil War and its aftermath, the town was booming. Sharon Kuechelmann told me how the Smith women would want to be seen in the latest fashions. You can see the gorgeous dress she’s wearing, advertising her seamstress skills.
I didn’t realize that Singer had been around since 1851. The better story comes with the ingenuity of Elias Howe, Jr., who patented an interlocking stitch accomplished on a machine. When he didn’t have much luck selling his invention in the US, he went to Europe, and found all kinds of patent infringement, including by Singer, upon his return. His successful suit resulted in an award of $25 for every sewing machine sold by all the makers, until the patent expired. There is some justice in the world.
Miss Sharon at her beloved White Rotary
Singer became the thing because, when sewing machines could cost $100 and the average annual wage was $500, how could anyone afford a machine? Singer initiated the installment plan, like the first credit card. Still Sharon prefers her White Rotary, less temperamental. It sews like “greased glass,” she tells me. it will sew any weight or thickness, even carpet, compared to a contemporary plastic model. The vintage works much better.
Note the pin cushion along with the Mary Potts iron
And here’s the Mary Potts iron. New to me, as I don’t believe in ironing, but the Mary Potts makes a lot of sense. She invented the removable wood handle. So now, you can heat up your four or five irons on the fire, all at the same time, and attach your cool wooden handle and work right through all the irons you got hot. Pretty clever time saver, Mary Potts! Perfect for cotton, not so great for polyester, as you can’t control the heat on a Mary Potts. Keep that in mind when you’re ironing, but still, pretty ingenious.
Gustav Stickley was clever, too. His simple craftsmen furniture answered a need after a typhoid epidemic. Turns out, the streamlined furniture was easy to keep clean. Very appealing. He had a hit on his hands, and along with clever merchandising–the catalog–he created beautiful and affordable furniture that made him a wealthy man.
Not far from Waterloo Village is the Stickley Museum, the house and 650 acres Stickley intended as a boys school–his way of giving back. There, students would get general education, yes, but also learn a craft. They’d never be without a way to earn a living. Great idea, except tuition was $1000 per student. Yes, really! Mr. Stickley was none too clever with money, as evidenced by the outrageous tuition, so he never got the school going. Instead he moved his family into the house he designed and built, while continuing to commute into Manhattan for his showroom, store, and restaurant.
The formal front entrance
Soon his working farm there was generating vegetables, fruit, eggs, and cheese for the restaurant, carted to the city seven days a week.
The house and land were meant as Stickley’s own Utopia, and he did wander in the woods each day after working in New York. He had a communal dream of a Craftsman Village. But money literally doesn’t grow on trees, or in fields, and five years after moving in, in 1916, Stickley went bankrupt. The end of the dream.
The house and land were sold for $100,000, and apparently, oppressed by that dark interior that was so Stickley, the new owners whitewashed the log walls. It took the restorers five years to remove that whitewash and resurrect Stickley’s vision of bringing the outdoors inside. Each window is framed like a picture frame, with views that change seasonally. No art adorns the walls and isn’t needed with the captured nature. The color palette of brown, gold, and green was deepened by the lighting strategy of using 20 watt bulbs to simulate candlelight. I can tell you, on this bright day, the current 60 watt bulbs still make for a dim interior.
It is evocative though of the Craftsman style that is Stickley, a man as obsessive about details as Frank Lloyd Wright. He dictated the color palette, all the furniture, and its placement in his four daughters’ bedroom they shared. But they must have tolerated it because they had their own private bathroom–a happy luxury!
I liked how each room, long and narrow, was multipurpose. One featured the library, parlor, and sitting room. The other the dining room, serving area, and the Inglenook for relaxing, all in one. The furniture was all available for sale in his catalog or the showroom. An Eastman Chair went for $58.50 in the catalog. Today? Shwew!
I liked the high-backed ‘settle’, which I guess was meant to settle into, in front of the fire, with the high back holding in the heat. The $3 per year subscription to Craftsman magazine came with a free set of blueprints for a Stickley house. Seems like a good deal to me!
It was Stickley’s shop mark Als ik Kan, or All I Can, from either the Dutch or Flemish, that spoke most to me. As good a mantra as I can imagine–to do All I Can.
Als ik Kan is completely in evidence in the Guinness Collection of Automata and music boxes at the Morris Museum. Call me enchanted. You know I love old windup toys. These are the creme de la creme.
Our demonstration started with a bit of chronology. Although music boxes had been around for centuries, only royalty could afford them. By the early 1800s, clock and watch shops got into making pipe or barrel organs, so that now a great mass of wealthy people could have music on demand.
Here you see the drum or barrel of the organ, the brass cylinder, that has pin holes meticulously drilled in by hand, generally by women. Hand cranking operates the bellows that rotates the drum over a steel-toothed comb. Got that? I can tell you, this London-made music box still sounds great, 200 years later, with its pipes, triangle, and drum. Take a listen:
The sound can be altered with the stops. So by “pulling out all the stops” (get it?), you get full sound.
Innovations continued, so that the size decreased, and elements were mass produced bringing the price down some. By the 1880s, this German disc music box cost $285 at the time. Still a lot of money.
Still using a windup start, now we have a punched metal disc. With “all the bells and whistles.” Guess who got an idea from the removable discs? Yes, Thomas Edison, and the phonograph goes a long way to putting the music box world out of business.
Not to worry. By 1900, you could get an organette, widely available by saving your soap box tops or for $3.50 in the Sears Roebuck catalog. Top of the line? $15.
The French have a different idea. They produce one-of-a-kind, competition, living dolls. Yes, automatons were popular for the elite of Paris from about 1850 to 1900, and collectors vied to get these unique pieces. The makers were from clock and watch stores, no longer competing with factory-made, music box manufacturers. Now they vied to top each other with popular motifs like street performers, magicians, animals, ‘exotic’ foreigners, royalty made into monkeys, and fairy tale figures.
Some had music, some not. But each is a work of art in and of itself. I was mesmerized by each one.
Here’s a modern automaton that shows a bit of how they work. For those of you watching “Humans” this summer, you’ll be interested in the fact that these figures, these living dolls are precursors to robots.
Which takes us to the most intricate of robotics. Here’s an 1890s trapeze artist. All the ‘energy’ runs up a rung of the ladder to the shoulder. Pretty incredible.
And the sketch artist, who turns his book to us to show us what he’s done, then proceeds to sketch you.
The tour wrapped with a look at some of the larger Fair Organs and learning how they work by peeking inside. This Limonaire Brothers organ, with 115 pipes, is only 5′ across. One in a private Connecticut home is 30′ across. Yikes. Still, you can tell how loud this one is. To work outside, the punch roller is replaced by the sturdier, thick punch card book, featuring only one song. Now electric, the organ works by feeding the book through to read the punch card. Now start thinking computer.
I know the video is dark, but hopefully you get a sense of just how fun this and all the other wonders of this day were. Ingenuity is everywhere. Als ik Kan. A call for us to do All We Can to create and bring our genius to the world!
Yes, there’s your basic snake-headed, 1820s Russian bassoon and of course, the bell in the shape of a carp. You can see those, well, just about nowhere else in the world, I imagine.
This carp-shaped bell apparently has an “ugly” sound when rattled
Who wouldn’t be enchanted by this peacock instrument from South India? You play it by sitting on the floor by the peacock, resting the long tail of the instrument on your shoulder to accompany women’s dances.
You know I love a good connection to Connecticut history. Today, we learned about the old Connecticut woodworking tradition and its intersection with woodwinds. Yes, those Colonials and early Nationals loved their fifes, flutes, and clarinets.
Here’s your instruction manual, so you can learn to play
In the 1750s, a German wood turner immigrated to New York and worked in the instrument trade. By 1800, the first ad for instruments by a professional firm appeared in a Hartford newspaper. Clockmakers, written about in this blog post, also turned their hands to instrument construction. Hopkins spent ten years from 1828 to 1838 making woodwinds as well as clocks.
Curator Susan Thompson, herself an oboist, told us that woodwinds were played at home for pleasure, to accompany socials and dances, and in military bands. The violin was the most popular home instrument, but flutes were right up there.
Elephant calling bell
The bells collection was ear-opening for me. I hadn’t really thought about this, but surely, we all need a bell to call in our elephants.
And we have the 19th-century Queen Elizabeth I bell.
Queen Elizabeth 1 bell
The anonymous figure bells are just charming, too. Here’s an English, 19th century bell. Can’t you just hear the homemaker calling in the hoards for lunch?
And this lovely little Art Nouveau bell by H. Pernot, c1900. Sweet!
My favorite was the Devil’s Bell. I’m not sure if we’re ringing to summon or repel the Devil. Hmmm.
Now to the category of gorgeous.
What about this 1702 German-made guitar by Joachim Tielke, celebrating love?
a close look at the side, with its French sayings about love
And this dreamboat of a harp from around 1850.
We called him the dreaming Prince
16th century Italian lute
1785 Lute-Guitar by Jean Charles
We got a wonderful tour of the keyboard collection from mezzo-soprano Kelly Hill, doing a multi-year internship here.
She explained that keyboards make sound from either pipes or strings.
She then demonstrated how this Chamber Organ works. You either pump the pedal or have an able, likely child, assistant pull on a leather strap on the side to activate the bellows that project the notes. You can also change the tone of the sound by shifting from “diapaison” or organ sound to “flauta” or flute. Kelly wasn’t able to demonstrate that, but you can see how it works clearly below
Kelly pulls on the strap to depress the pedal, which operates the bellows
To change the tone
She then took us through the development of the stringed keyboards, from the relatively simple clavichord to the much more complex harpsichord.
The clavichord was home or rehearsal-type instrument, because its sound is muted. Kelly asked us to imagine Bach with his household full of children. He could play the clavichord without upsetting sleep patterns. And it was the flirtatious instrument, as the gentleman caller would have to sit quite close to the lady playing in order to hear properly.
Kelly pulled out pieces from this ornate and intricate harpsichord, with its double keyboards that generate more sound. We then examined these pieces, including a plucker made from a crow’s quill. See it here?
Plucked stringed instruments first gained popularity because of the love of French and Italian lute music. The development of the harpsichord then opened up concert-level performances.
By the way, the regular keys are black and the minor keys are in white on many of these early instruments. Why? Well, you start with your wood key, and yes, this could warp, which would mess with your playing. Then you covered it with either ebony or ivory. If ebony was less expensive, then you used it for the majority of the keys. Makes sense. Early on, the number of keys and the color of the keys were not standardized. What was important was the ’emotion’ of the sound.
When pianos came in, particularly in Vienna, you get early experiments with the upright piano. What about this gorgeous swan-headed pyramid?
There are many treasures in this collection, so you’ll have to visit in person or go to the informative website to learn more. I’ll leave you with my favorite — this 1591 Flemish, ‘mother-and-child’ Virginal.
The oldest instrument in the collection
The keyboard on the left can actually slide out, to play elsewhere or to stack on top of the keyboard on the right for double-keyboard playing. The mother-and-child keyboards also invite duets.
The decoration is adorable. Kelly explained that for artists, decorating an instrument was not a top drawer commission, and the painters remained anonymous. So often the makers of the instrument would find buddies in the tavern to come work on the decoration in their spare time. Many hands might decorate one instrument. Still this one comes together and tells a fun musical story.
The satyr Pan challenges Apollo to a musical duel. Pan was known for his flute playing, but Apollo was the chief musician of the gods. This was some challenge. They needed a fair and wise judge and chose Tmolis, the god of mountains, since mountains were the ultimate of wisdom.
Well, birds sang when Pan played, but ladies swooned with Apollo. King Midas sides with Pan as the better performer. Not so wise, as Apollo gave him donkey ears, which you may be able to make out alongside his crown.
Who won the contest? That hardly matters. We all do when the music plays on!
Imagine living in a one room house with several small children, over your general store in the basement. Oh, and it’s 1795. Yes, the Revolutionary War is over, and Connecticut is building its way to new prosperity.
You are certainly not poor. Your house has a fireplace and wide wood planked floors. You have a decent herb garden for medicinals and grow apples for cider, hang them to dry and have plenty left over for cold storage where they’ll last six months or more. Apples are an important part of your diet. But you can also afford to buy produce from neighbor-farmers. Life’s pretty nice. Just a bit crowded.
That’s where Thankful Arnold found herself early in her marriage, living right across the street from the busy Haddam courthouse and just a few steps from the Connecticut River, the source of economic vitality for the region.
Thankful had 12 children, with all seven sons making it to adulthood, a real rarity. Two daughters, Nancy and Sarah Elizabeth, did, too. She and her husband could afford to expand the house, and all was going well, until her husband died.
Even though he was a businessman, he didn’t leave a will. In Connecticut, an estate left intestate had major implications for the widow. Thankful was entitled to live by law in 1/3 of the house. She had to sell 2/3 to afford to stay there. Think about it. She had six small children and faced the prospect of living in 1/3 of her house while strangers moved into the rest. Best case, the children would be sent to live with other relatives. Many widows faced this fate.
Thankful Arnold as a widow
Fortunately for Thankful, her grown son Isaac bought the other 2/3, and the family home stayed intact. Thankful took in boarders to help pay the bills and was aided by her daughters who never married. Thankful lived to age 73, longer as a widow than wife, so the house was known as the Widow Arnold House and now as the Thankful Arnold House, on the historic trail of the Connecticut Women’s Hall of Fame.
A note on her name. Thankful was not a Quaker, as I guessed, but instead was a Congregationalist. A hot baby naming trend for your average Colonial was to name your child for a virtue. A man might happily be named Wealthy, Prosper, Consider, and certainly Freelove! But oh, to be a woman and be named Submit, Obedience, Relief, Mindwell, or Silence. I didn’t know these as names, maybe because these women fell into obscurity. Not hard to wonder why.
Mercy did not, famously as Mercy Otis Warren, Revolutionary War heroine, and Prudence of Prudence Crandall fame, written about in this blog, made her mark, too. Puritans indeed would name their daughters Patience, Increase, but Desire? How in the world did that young lady stand a chance of preserving her reputation?
Thankful’s daughters were good girls. Sarah Elizabeth acted as the family nursemaid, going to live with various relatives to care for the sick and elderly. Nancy helped in the boardinghouse and educated her nieces on how to run a household, through their ‘apprenticeship’ at the family home with its boarders. Miss Nancy lived in the house until age 84 in 1884. One of her niece’s Sabra came to live in the house as a widow until the 1920s. Her son Charlie Ingersoll lived here until 1962.
Charlie was a house painter, and he and his wife supplemented their income with a local hot spot–The Red House Tea Room. Being right across the street from the courthouse insured street and foot traffic, and New England roads were quickly becoming tourist havens for road trippers in newly affordable automobiles. Who doesn’t like a scenic drive with a refresh stop at a tea room? I covet that Cheese Dream, which LIsa, the Director, told me was likely an open-faced grilled cheese sandwich. I could dream of more…
The Old Red House Tea Room menu
When the house was vacated in 1962, the timing coincided with Haddam’s tercentenary. A cousin bought the house and donated it to the Historic Society. Not, unfortunately, until all the goods and furnishings were already sold. Happily, an inventory from 1823, conducted when Thankful became a widow, led to furnishing and interpreting it to her period.
Note the ‘tin kitchen’ rotisserie on the hearth
We can see the 1823 kitchen, with its hanging, drying herbs and cod. The original fireplace was revealed when a wall was opened up. The old bake oven is there, too. The hearth was used as a stove top. Pull coals out of the fire to the hearth, then place your spider (frying pan with legs) on top. No more leaning over dangerous open fires. This hearth also comes complete with a ‘reflected over’ or ‘tin kitchen’ which works like a rotisserie for your meat.
I climbed carefully up steep, narrow steps to the dark attic. Yes, there are two finished bedrooms each with a tiny fireplace off the central chimney, where boarders likely lived. But the children–they slept under the eaves, catch what space they could around the typical attic storage stuff. Pretty cold in the winter, too.
So Thankful had a lot to be grateful for, as all worked out for her family and her house in the long run. Me? I’m thankful for central heat and a gas stove cooktop!
On a blustery spring day, I visited the charming Colonial town of Essex, CT. I started at the delightful Connecticut River Museum, celebrating all things about that river. I had always heard it was terrific. No understatement!
While I’ll share my favorite part in a moment, the American history that touched the riverbank at Essex makes the museum worth a visit. In the Revolutionary War, Connecticut’s war ship (all 13 colonies were asked to build one), the Oliver Cromwell, was built here in 1776. An 1814 skirmish with the British, part of the War of 1812, was likened to Pearl Harbor for its surprise and devastation. At the unmanned fort, 27 ships were burned, and the town’s economy was blasted apart.
Artist rendition of how the Turtle worked
But, oh boy! The best part was climbing into a replica of the first submarine, called the American Turtle. Now this thing is small. I can tell you because I smacked my head on it getting in. Ouch!
The idea was to take a bomb in the submarine and hook it to the bottom of a British war ship, and bye bye ship. Well the submarine worked – the propeller was a huge innovation. The bomb was ready. But drilling through the submarine to attach the bomb to the warship hull, not so much. So even though Yale graduate David Bushnell made a great case to Benjamin Franklin and made three attempts, the submarine was scuttled and the original eventually lost.
Two replicas at the museum were built off detailed plans that survive. Climbing inside — it’s worth the price of admission.
I also really enjoyed the special exhibit on Connecticut artists working under the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s. The pieces are small enough that maybe they served as studies for the ultimately larger works, like murals in post offices and schools.
You know I want to know all about women artists and women’s lifestyles. Here’s a glimpse from this exhibit.
Cornelia Vetter, Haddam, Looking East, n.d.
At nearby Haddam, Cornelia Vetter began working for the government arts project after her husband died in 1933. She did 18 paintings for the Federal Arts Project.
Harold Barbour, Grading the Tobacco, 1938
Harold Barbour painted a series of watercolors, on work in the tobacco barns. Here, woman work in the sorting shop. After the tobacco leaves cure in the hanging shed, the leaves are sorted into grades. During the Depression, sorting and transplanting, as seen below, proved to be great jobs for women.
Harold Barbour, Transplanting, 1938
Look at this beautiful charcoal.
Beatrice Cuming, Tuna Boat, n.d.
So many women artists to discover and enjoy.
Then I strolled down the street, from the gem of the little museum to the country’s oldest, continually operating inn, open 239 years. The 33-room Griswold Inn was build in 1776, a busy year in busy Essex.
Inns were central to Colonial and early Federal life, and the Boston Post Road was essential for information flow between New York and Boston. How did information flow? Over the communal tables at inns like the Griswold. We all sat around one such table to hear the owner Geoff Paul tell great stories about the art collection in the inn.
Owner Geoff Paul, an enthusiastic speaker
Geoff spoke about the origins of the steam-powered ship in Connecticut, long before Robert Fulton, and the intricacies of ship portraits, that owners were pickier about than paintings of their wives.
Like a good art historian, Geoff taught us what makes a great marine painting. Flags show the wind, so create movement; the more flags the merrier (and more expensive). Angling a boat toward the viewer enhances that sense of power. Geoff favors works made at the time the ship sailed, not nostalgic works painted later. Paintings of the moment often are celebrations of American ingenuity and prowess and could be coupled with the Brooklyn Bridge or highlight new installations of electricity–other technological marvels that allowed ‘man’ to get the sense of ‘triumphing over nature’.
Antonio Jacobsen, The Connecticut, n.d. c 1880s
And steamships, Geoff pointed out, represented the birth of the cruise ship industry, providing pleasure outings for the Connecticut middle class. Board the City of Hartford steamer in that city, steam overnight, spend the day in New York, before returning with another overnight ride.
Once, when a steamer hit a part of a bridge that wasn’t made to open en route, maritime law changed, requiring all bridges to have red lights as markers, distinct from lights on shore. No one was hurt, so the happy ending was that the passengers got to spend the night nearby and see a show at the Goodspeed Opera House, also written about in this blog. Plenty of other steamer accidents were deadly, borne of races and other mishaps, leading to the founding of the Coast Guard for monitoring and rescue.
Who wouldn’t love the mural that, when the switch is flipped, rocks like the waves on the Connecticut River? Apparently drunks, that’s who. They’re not too fond of a suddenly rolling room. It’s a really ingenious feature that came with this 1960s mural.
Yes, this mural actually rocks back and forth, like waves
You can probably make out the wake at the center. This perspective puts us on the back of a steamer, viewing our own trailing wake in the wide river. What fun this whole experience is!
The Inn also has a fragrant, evocative taproom–a busy place on Sunday afternoon. And then, there’s this room.
It’s another Wow, in a day full of them. Hung truly salon style, the paintings and ephemera jam every inch of wall and ceiling space of the Bridge Room. My most favorite were the posters of the women fighting for Temperance. Starting in the 1820s, women advocated against the reckless drinking that was notoriously tearing up families in the young country. Recognizing that total abstinence could be difficult when both religion and medicines used alcohol, the petitioners sought moderation.
The women marched. The inn keepers agreed. Men signed the pledge to take care of their families and stop drinking to excess. If a man signed his name with a T, then he pledged total abstinence, or to become a T-totaller. I always thought it was tea-totaller, as in being a tea v alcohol drinker. Geoff tells otherwise.
Of course, these women went on to fight slavery and advocate for the vote. Get this. As late as 1969, women could not stand at a bar in Connecticut. Yes, really. So a woman, yet another protester, came in demanding to be served. In cahoots with the innkeepers, she demanded her arrest. The case went to the Connecticut Supreme Court in Griswold Inn v State of Connecticut, and the Inn won!
Geoff made clear that the Inn relies on drinking for its sustenance. And Prohibition didn’t stand in the way. It is located right on the river. Sailors knew how to navigate in the dark. The inn did just fine during those years. About fifteen years ago, when renovations were being done in the library, Geoff finally learned where at least some of that rum was hidden. In the ceiling of the library was an 8′ long copper container. In the ceiling!
Don’t ever be shy about looking up in historic places. Who knows what you’ll find?
Looking up at a beautiful fan window on Main Street in Essex
With two exhibits and an entire museum, I’ve been thinking a lot about carousels. Yes, the Wadsworth Atheneum has its Coney Island exhibit mounted, the same one I worked on 15 months ago. And the Yale School of Art has the “Side Show” exhibit, as a literal side show about the freaky side of the carnival. In the Reginald Marsh painting from the Wadsworth, the women seem be deadly serious about racing to the finish line, beating out the man in the red bowler. No simple up and down ride for them.
I learned at the New England Carousel Museum in Bristol, CT that carousels didn’t even go up and down until 1907. In fact, carousels started as a training tool for knights. Um, yes, medieval knights. They would practice spearing rings with lances.
Maybe you’ve ridden a carousel where you tried to snare a ring. In the Golden Age of carousels, that is the 19th century, that’s where we got the idea of “grabbing the brass ring.” A winner on the carousel, and in life, grabs the brass ring. But liability put a stop to that. Now we have to be content riding up and down. No killer scenes like Marsh gives us.
Who knew there are different styles of carousel horses? The first permanent park carousel was in Philadelphia, and the Phily style is oh so graceful. Moreso than the solid and chunky Country Fair style. And then there’s the Coney Island style, showy and pretty.
The menagerie animals are great fun. Hard to believe they fell out of favor for the more popular horse carousel. Who wouldn’t want to ride a rooster, a giraffe (who’s eyes follow you no matter where you move), a tiger, a hare, or a camel? If not a horse, then why not a zebra or a seahorse?
The horses are completely wonderful, too. I’ve never seen a three-dimensional carved flower on a carousel horse before. Tres elegant!
Or what about a bulldog or a leprachaun, hidden under the saddle?
The museum shows how the animals are constructed form wood and in pieces, even if they appear whole. Also the animals get smaller closer in to the center pole, an attempt aso the most elaborate carving is saved for the outside ring. Notice that when you next ride a carousel. Or maybe, you want to go to Bristol and ride one there!
This slide show will further introduce you to its glories…
P.T. Barnum was an elected Representative to the Connecticut state legislature, so perhaps it’s no surprise that the refined, Federal style Old State House has a Museum of Curiosities, inaugurated in 1797. Now, this exhibit certainly doesn’t attain the level of the bizarre that Barnum promoted. But how often do you get to see a two-headed calf?
In this, the first capitol building in Connecticut, where the no-doubt somber, initial trials of the Amistad’s rebellious captives took place, before moving to New Haven; where representatives from around New England gathered to decide whether to secede from the U.S. in 1814, in displeasure over the war with England; in this august hall with its Gilbert Stuart painting of George Washington…
…you can bet that people flocked instead to see giant tarantulas, an alligator, a whale bone, a shrunken hand, and yes, even a two-headed pig. How did this come to be?
First, Charles Willson Peale had already done something similar at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. The Peale Museum was the nation’s purported first museum. Here, at Connecticut’s State House, portrait painter Joseph Steward was given the right to have his painting studio in the building. There, he could capture the likenesses of the important political dignitaries working below.
He also had quite the collection of oddities and whatnots from his world-wide travels. And his museum was born. He advertised in the Connecticut Courant newspaper an inventory of just what you could see if you visited, and the exhibit remained in place until 1810.
One advertisement, click to enlarge and read
Why did such a popular exhibit close? Think about it. The two-headed pig wasn’t preserved, and it disintegrated. Ewww. Same with the other organic specimens. So it took restoration of the building in the 1990s for the museum to be recreated. The only original items are the portraits that Steward painted, including of the ubiquitous George Washington, as you can see in the photo above.
Now the challenge. How do you find a two-headed calf, or for that matter a two-headed pig? The curators checked auction lots. No luck. So a little known farm fact came to bear. Apparently, two-headed-farm-animal births are not all that rare, and in the midwest, a still born, two-headed calf became the museum’s highlight, this time appropriately preserved.
This isn’t fake. It’s not a Barnum & Bailey manipulated display. Stuff happens.
At least I spared you a picture of the two-headed pig fetus in a jar. Ewww.
If it all becomes just too much for you, you can always take a seat at one of the original Legislators’ desks, catch your breath, and reflect on just how good you’ve got it!
And I thought the Connecticut witch history was spooky. How about this? While Massachusetts and Connecticut used witchery to explain the unknown, Rhode Island was into vampires. Well, Rhode Island is right next door, and vampirism spilled into eastern Connecticut, too.
Vampirism explained a lot for 19th-century rural dwellers, who didn’t understand why their families were plagued by the “wasting sickness.” A family member would start getting weaker and then coughing up blood. Another would get sick. Many would die. In fact, tuberculosis was the leading cause of death in the 1800s in the Northeast.
This is just what happened to the unfortunate Ray family of Jewett City, CT. Farmer Henry and his wife Lucy had five children who survived the typical childhood diseases. Then, between 1845 and 1851, their adult sons Lemuel and Elijah were struck with the wasting disease, and Henry, too, succumbed. When Henry Nelson Ray, another son, was afflicted in 1854, “vampire panic” inflamed Jewett City.
The belief? The dead family members had come back to life as vampires and were feeding upon their family to sustain their undeadness. As Henry Nelson became weaker, he led a charge in May 1854, to dig up the corpses of his three dead relatives. They were burned in the graveyard, one known cure to stop the vampire rampage. The other was to cut out and burn the heart (the recently buried would still have blood in their heart, especially if it was winter, a sure sign of a vampire feeding on the living). The lore goes that the corpses had blood drooling from their mouths, which could very well have happened with recently deceased TB victims. Ewww.
Tombstones of the unfortunate Ray family
But I get it. Not knowing how the disease spread, the belief helped people understand the senselessness of consumption, and the act offered a sense of control over the terrors of the disease.
Henry Nelson? He died anyway, in the same year according to his headstone.
Vampire history in Connecticut doesn’t stop there. Just two miles away and almost 150 years later, another occurrence spooks us out. In 1990 in Griswold, a newly-dug gravel pit became a play spot for some local boys. They discovered two skulls. The resulting archeological dig unveiled 29 graves, and clearly the most curious was JB-55.
JB had been beheaded and the skeleton bones moved. The skull, dated to the 1790s, was located in the chest cavity, and the femur bones were placed in an x under the skull. There it is: skull and crossbones.
Study of JB suggests the cause of death was TB. Terrified neighbors apparently dug up the body, perhaps burned the heart, and rearranged the bones, so that the vampire couldn’t escape the coffin and feed on those still alive.
Tomb Detectives: Vampire Graves; click to watch the Smithsonian video
We don’t know anything else about poor JB. What a way to go down in history.
Modeling a paper mache skull mask at the downtown New Haven pop-up shop
So tonight, when you’re out “trick-or-treat”ing or tomorrow at your Day-of-the-Dead parties, keep an eye out for that telltale sign of the vampire–blood dripping off the lips. Now you know exactly what to do.
This autumn is proving to be startlingly colorful, and what better way to celebrate than with a drive. So a group from the Florence Griswold Museum ventured first to the Smith College Museum of Art and then to Historic Deerfield. But first, some trivia. Did you know that the seasonal term ‘fall’ comes from the old phrase ‘leaf fall time’? The leaf fall was our backdrop as we set off on our journey back in time.
Our current exhibition of three Connecticut women artists includes Mary Rogers Williams, who taught under a dominant male artist presence, at Smith College for over 20 years in the 1880s and 1890s. When she asked for recognition for her teaching service with a promotion to Assistant Professor, she was basically fired. Even a woman’s college might not be so enlightened back in the day.
But it was fun to see her teaching domain and hear a sophomore talk about her research on Williams. Of course, her source was the same as the exhibit’s–Eve Kahn‘s research through Williams’ papers and a trove of paintings found in a Connecticut boathouse. I’m not kidding. The paintings were ‘stored’ there and kept by the descendants of an artist friend Henry C. White, who inherited the works from Williams’ also unmarried sister. Had he not safeguarded, in his way, those works and her letters, well, like so many others, Williams would have been basically forgotten.
Although we had a tour of the museum with a women artist theme, including a lackluster Lilly Martin Spencer, I was much more attracted to other women artists displayed there.
Florine Stettheimer Henry McBride, Art Critic, 1922
Florine Stettheimer doesn’t show up in too many museum collections, outside of the Met and PAFA, but one surprised me here. Her style is unmistakeable, and I’m always delighted by her sense of color and her take-no-prisoners attitude about art and being a professional and living her life her own way. Right on, sister!
I sought out the works of Smith alums. Just loved the monumental jelly doughnuts by Emily Eveleth.
Betye Saar, Ancestral Spirit Chair, 1992
This particular Betye Saar work just makes me happy. The back story is she was slated to speak at Smith, but that inner-flea-market- dumpster-diver took hold of her, and she went off to explore for treasure. She bought a whole bunch of salt shakers, seen at these branch ends, like a different season’s leaf. She was also two hours late for her talk. What was Smith to do, except acquire the work.
Saar typically captures some folkloric, cultural, or puns on African American stereotypical content in her work. Here the shakers stand in for a rural Southern tradition of putting bottles in tree branches to capture spirits. The docent in the gallery said she thinks of this as a chair we can sit in and dial our ancestors. I would have loved to have a sit in this spiritual phone booth and dial out.
Not to be missed are the “artist-designed” bathrooms. Here’s a slide show to give you a sense of how it looks.
Historic Deerfield didn’t have a compable “historically-designed” bathroom, but its designs are equally inspiring. I hadn’t really thought through that there were two waves of Colonial Revivalism. One spurted off as a reaction to industrialization in the late 1800s through the 1920s or so, spinning off the Arts and Crafts Movement, Art Nouveau, and Art Deco.
In the 1940s, a second wave exploded, in response to the Cold War. Interesting. Moguls wanting to leave their legacy in the latest fashion built historic villages, with the Rockefellers
The docent told me that this door frame is “bogus”–too ornate for the 1734 home of a minister.
reconstructing a Disneyfied Colonial Williamsburg and the Flints making their own mistakes with existing structures in Deerfield.
What’s fun is on “The Street” are the actual buildings for the post office, school, and two working farms as they existed in the 1700s. Probate records and dendrology (using tree rings to date wood and hence structures) have helped more recent historians correct earlier mistakes, like stuffing rooms full of things, more like a gallery than someone’s Puritan home.
Probate records indicated that 360 panes of glass were bought for this house, and at 9 over 9 panes, we know there was glass for 20 windows.
The Deerfield houses have these double doors seen above, because originally the houses all had a center hall chimney. You wouldn’t have room to swing open a single door, so double doors became the style, as well as the practical solution. Even later, when center halls were valued for entertaining and the chimneys were moved to the sides of houses, the double door style can still be seen.
Besides small gardens associated with each house, several farmers shared acreage in a common field, where they could grown various grains. These were used to feed the really money maker for Deerfield–stall-fed oxen. You gotta love this oxen toy shown in the museum.
Who wouldn’t love this Colonial form of marketing? It’s all in the unrelievedly blue paint. Every bit of this facade–the dentils, the eyebrows, the pilasters–are all painted this robin egg blue. Paint was very expensive. Most of the houses left the cedar bare to weather. The 1747 house has been painted this blue since 1801. Why? If you went into the tavern to get help resolving a dispute, you would ask for a lawyer. The tavern keeper could then direct you to the blue house. Unmistakable bill-boarding. Like the leaves that fall every year, some things never change.
This has been a weekend of sauntering–through luscious Stitches East, where those who knit, crochet, and weave are in paradise, to the creative paradise of City-Wide Open Studios at New Haven’s Armory to the cultural paradise of New York City, whose heart was captured momentarily by Oscar Wilde.
Stitches East is the huge show that takes place somewhere in the western US and for the eastern half in Hartford. It’s a place where everyone is your friend, and the textural stimulation and color palettes can be pleasurably exhausting. I went home with yummy cashmere to work up.
Site-specific installation at the Armory
Julie and I tasted a different kind of yummy at the Armory. Rather than try to see it all, we lingered with just a few artists to hear their stories. Wonderful museum educator Jaime Ursic also makes enchanting prints. Hearing her talk about her work makes the abstraction come alive with narrative. We sauntered along with Jaime on the streets of Florence and the beach and…
Jaime Ursic Santa Monica Mountains 2010
Jeanne Criscola makes family recipes as way to connect to her family stories and identity. Love how she shot a close-up video of the recipes being cooked and blew up those grainy photos of our childhoods. She told us how many people and experiments were needed to get an Italian sugar cookie just right. Just like my grandmother’s humantashen, although no one has ever captured it. Jeanne’s cookie was dime-sized and melted on my tongue.
Jeanne Criscola & Joan Fitzsimmons Oral History: A Recipe for Memory, Food, video, online database
She calls the work an oral history project, but that’s really more for the future, as she and her art partner Joan Fitzsimmons grow the project to include all of us interactively, with photos, recipes, and stories. Too delicious.
Current art in Madison Square
Oscar Wilde sauntered his aesthetic way through New York City, and we followed in his footsteps through Madison Square, Gramercy, Union Square, and the West Village. Along the way, we met Washington Irving and lingered by Pete’s Tavern, where O’Henry wrote “Gift of the Magi.”
Perfect framing of the Chrysler Building, in Gramercy Park
Edwin Booth in Gramercy Park
But Wilde was our focus. That ‘Midwife of Modernity.’ Only intending to stay for a few months, his lecture tour was such a smash that he stayed a year, in 1892, spreading the aesthetic of the aesthete. His long hair and smooth cheek were avant garde in bearded Gilded Age New York. The trip was sponsored by D’oyly Carte, promoting their new show Patience and its aesthete character.
Wilde cultivated his look and image, basically inventing the modern celebrity–famous simply for being famous. On his trip to NYC, he had a series of 30 photos made by Napoleon Sarony. Thievery of those photos for ads for cigarettes and clothing and postcards in shop windows, all capitalizing on Wilde’s fame, led Sarony to sue. This wasn’t the first time for such piracy of Sarony’s works, but Wilde’s fame helped his cause. When the Supreme Court found in his favor, copyright protection for creative works was born.
Although he had only self-published a book of poetry at this point, Wilde’s lectures sold out. Although we undereducated Americans apparently couldn’t understand his lecture on the English Renaissance and how aesthetics affect all forms of art. I don’t think he cared much, although he did deliver a dumbed down version. At $1 admission each, and an audience size of a thousand, Wilde got rich.
Newspapers tracked his movements and published his poetry and selections from his talks. Cartoons made fun of his effete manner. At the male bastion Century Club, he was called a charlatan, a slur as a Charlotte Ann.
Yet he dined at the most fashionable houses, a man with “simple taste in food, satisfied by the very best.” Bessie Marbury became his literary agent, and first woman agent, who also had what Henry James called a Boston marriage with interior designer Elsie DeWolfe. So another literary connection, as the latter was launched by Edith Wharton’s wildly popular book, The Decoration of Houses. New York is so tiny.
Mark Venaglia, Pastures
Wilde made the lily and sunflower the emblems of the aesthetes. What fun to meet artist Mark Venaglia on the tour. He’s famous for his sunflower paintings, selling to Julia Roberts and Wall Street types. Today’s aesthete?
What I love about history is that the more you study, read, and consider, the more of what we think we know becomes unclear, unknown, and unsatisfactory. The myths and one-sided explanations just don’t cut it anymore.
You never know when you’ll run across a Colonial in CT
My friend Mary was visiting, spurred initially by the genealogy she’s been researching. She’s been tracking three branches of her family back into the 1600s, and she stops before crossing the pond to the “old country” of Wales, Scotland, or England. I was fascinated. As she told me the migration patterns and professions, I started to ask a lot of questions. I wanted to know why. I could easily fill in the blanks with all kinds of stories and suppositions. Mary just answered, “I don’t know.”
So when she and I went on a walking tour of the wonderfully preserved Colonial town of Norwich, CT with a particular focus on Benedict Arnold, we both hung on every word. We wanted to know why.
Here was a person well recorded, in all his faults. Perhaps the most hated American ever (maybe next to McCarthy after the fact), Arnold was known to have betrayed his mentor George Washington, and hence his country. Indeed, the good people of Norwich dug up the headstones of all the Benedict Arnolds and tossed them into the Niantic River.
Yes, all the Benedict Arnolds. Our Arnold was the 5th. He had an older brother who died before him, with the name Benedict Arnold. That boy and his father were buried in the graveyard when the headstones were flung out after our Arnold’s disgrace. Our Arnold’s name was changed to Benedict after his brother died. So imagine what it may have been like in the 1740s to have a long line of ancestors, with a burden of a ‘name’ to carry.
How one responds to that burden says something about character. Franklin Roosevelt banked on his name, but also revered his fifth cousin Theodore, who served as his political model (as we all learned in the excellent Ken Burns, exhaustive documentary this past week). Eleanor Roosevelt initially responded differently to family and societal pressures, with fear, until, through her own adversity, found her voice and began enacting the Roosevelt values of serving the greater good. They are one stellar family.
But our Arnold’s father responded to life’s mountains and valleys by becoming a drunk.
The Lathrop brothers took in Benedict Arnold (the 5th) and his sister Hannah, after their parents die. They are second cousins. BA apprentices to learn the apothecary trade (1756-1760) and is treated like a son.
As we learned on our walking tour, several taverns for “tobacco and news … and rum” lined the Norwich Green. And as a young boy, our Arnold went into the relevant tavern to drag his profligate father home. Our Arnold became a lifelong teetotaler.
So a man with that type of steady conviction annihilates the heroic stereotype by waffling on a key issue. Where did his loyalty lie? Or was that choice quite so simple? The war could have gone either way, for quite awhile. The colonies were brutally split in their attitudes toward king and country.
Our Arnold’s second wife was a Loyalist, and she palled around with an officer in the British Army. Her ambition and ability to fed upon our Arnold’s insecurities are one common source pointed to for his betrayal. “Surely, dear, you would do better under the British. These rebels keep passing you over for promotion to General. And you’ve been wounded twice for their hapless cause!” I can hear her saying. “Life in London would be divine.” Except when it wasn’t, as was the case for the Arnold’s.
But again is the story just that simple? The nagging wife, the unfed ego? As Mary would say quite forthrightly, “I don’t know.”
Gravestone for Hannah, Benedict’s sister; all headstones with the name Benedict Arnold (his father and older brother who predeceased him) were removed from the cemetery and tossed in the Niantic River, but the bones remain
What fun to be welcomed into Eagle’s Nest, the Vanderbilt mansion on Long Island, by Coco Chanel. Her heavily accented English was a bit hard to understand, but there’s no doubting her pride in appearances. She was very straightforward in advising, “the best pearl is the one that looks good on you.” William Vanderbilt insisted all his women wear pearls, and you should see the size and number of strands in the necklace his wife Rosamund wore swimming!
Given the chance, I would have engaged Coco on her belief that “a woman who does not wear perfume has no future.” But alas, I was one of a large group of 1932 donors to the Huntington Hospital Fund. Vanderbilt promised us all a personal tour in exchange for our generosity, then promptly rushed off the New York. I think he was avoiding us.
So he foisted his tour on Coco, his Irish cook Delia O’Rourke, Ellin Berlin (Irving’s wife), his brother Harold Stirling Vanderbilt, and his crisply cold mother-in-law Agnes Lancaster.
I met Coco (2nd left), the mother-in-law (seated center), brother Harold (back center in red bow tie), dear Ellin (in red necklace, outfit by Coco), and Delia (middle row, 2nd right)
They managed to show us about the house, while also telling stories about themselves. Harold is darn proud of winning the America’s Cup. He and his brother are into cars and boats. William has 10 yachts and was attracted to this Long Island site because of the deep water harbor for his boats. Naturally.
He is credited with bringing the first automobile to the U.S. from France. This roadster is from 1904, and he won a race in it by going 92 mph. Whoa!
Things were pretty calm among the various guides, except for Coco and Delia, the cook, who had a ‘lively’ discussion about dinner. Delia took it like a champ, before sighing she’d get a bucket and go dig up some clams. Coco ducked off for her meeting with Vogue.
Delia told us about all the meals she had to plan–3 a day each for the nursery, 28 staff, and family and guests. Each had a different menu. It takes three hours to plan the meals with Mrs. Vanderbilt, and great project management! All the food has to be top drawer, and she said the staff are her biggest critcs. “Morale is high when the food is good” is the motto of the house staff. She typically works from 5:30 a.m. to 11 p.m. No wonder, she values the precious key to the wine cellar, saying this is where she likes to end her day.
She seemed to have the most knowledge of the house, which Vanderbilt designed and built. It reflects his eclectic, offbeat taste, as a Spanish style mansion, filled with stuff he bought from around the world. Yes, there’s your whale shark, mummy, and shrunken heads.
But also he swept up monastery furnishings. Seems a bit like the DuPont/Winterthur aesthetic. Buy it all, buy it now. Choir benches, a refectory table for the dining room table, the sacristy cabinet intended for monks’ robes holding linens, the alms counter, with its slots for coin donations, serving as a sideboard.
Ellin showed us some furnishings and art, which he collected for their appearance, not their meaning. Medieval works in the hall–just like how they look. Don’t care about religion.
She was my favorite, because she’s “saucy but amusing,” and I liked hearing her stories about her marriage. Did you know that Irving wrote “Always” for her? But even better, he signed over the royalties for the song to her (he did likewise for “God Bless America,” benefiting Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts). That set her up for life. Although we didn’t get to stay, Irving was to play the 1270-pipe organ that night, with 6 p.m. cocktails. I’m not much of a fan of organ music, but hearing Berlin play Berlin…that would have been fun!
Nice view
Mrs. Lancaster arrived six weeks after the honeymoon and never left. You can see why.
She is a very proper lady, with her hat (indoors) and gloves. I did appreciate her showing us her daughter’s dressing room, which with mirrors on 3 sides, meant that Rosamund didn’t have to strain to see herself from all sides. She designed her own closet, and it was functionally clever. Her rose marble bath was, well, over the top.
But even with the Biltmore fortune, the place has some noticeable need of repair.
Maybe not as decrepit looking as Gillette Castle, designed to look like a craggy Romantic ruin. Its Romantic setting, looming over the Connecticut River, just begins to tell the story.
Nice view
William Gillette was a theater guy who made his fortune, yes, in the theater. Yes, really. Pre-Hollywood, he did quite well acting, playwriting, and patenting set design innovations.
You’re wondering, how could that make him a fortune? Probably, it came from his most famous role–Sherlock Holmes. He worked with Conan Doyle to make Holmes more theater friendly. Gillette gave the character the deerstalker hat and pipe. “Elementary, my dear Watson” was his, too, apparently. Soon Gillette, who played the role some 1300 times, was so identified with the character, that people thought Holmes was real. His castle became known as ‘Sherlock’s Castle’.
After 60+ years in the theater, Gillette decided to retire to Connecticut. Like Vanderbilt, he designed and built his home, which took over 4 years, completing it in 1919. He filled it with more of his inventions and designs with plucky Holmesian ingenuity.
Like the Vanderbuilts, he dabbled in railroads, building a track, bridges, and tunnels around his castle. Plus his own Grand Central station. Just for fun.
View from Grand Central
Inside and out, the castle is constructed of local limestone, giving that massive appearance of a medieval castle.
For the inside, he hired master carpenters to carve wood wall paneling, ceilings, and more throughout the three story structure, all based on his designs. Each door is unique, and he designed the clever window locks and lights, too. He scaled the stair rails to be short so he would look even taller than his 6′ 4″.
From the balcony, where Gillette could spy on his guests via strategically placed mirrors, you also get a view of the table with hidden cat potties…
Gillette adored cats and had lots of them. Weirdly, he designed this table for the 1500 sf Great Hall, to hide cat toilets inside. Hmmm. Not every idea was a winner.
You gotta love the trick cabinet for the bar, with a locking mechanism useful during Prohibition, since when closed, the bar looks like part of the wall. He loved to fool his guests, too. Since the trick involved no simple lock, but a series of levers and secret parts that had to be pressed just right, his guests struggled to get inside it. Gillette could enjoy their frustration from the “surveillance” mirrors he placed strategically under windows, effectively hiding them.
Here in the stairway, the hidden door is right in the center, not the open door. It is very hard to see.
After all that, the third floor art gallery, just as he left it, was a bit of a let down. Long live the quirk!
The study
Love the light switch, which looks like railroad pulls
Alice and I adventured to Lowell, MA on Saturday. I had recently read The Daring Ladies of Lowell by Kate Alcott. Whereas the author succumbed to romance-novel tropes, I loved her description of the daily life of the mill girls. I wanted to see for myself, and Alice was game to visit the National Park Service site there.
We started at the beginning, with the building of the power canal. This picturesque trolleyman, Thomas Tucker, took us along the railroad tracks to our boat.
There we got our first glimpse at the managed waterway.
Clever businessmen, wanting to harvest timber for ship building in Newburyport, figured out how to maneuver a 32′ drop in the Merrimack River, turning it into a highway for the transport of goods. Through a series of locks.
In 1796, farmers sold part of their land and then provided the labor to dig through the massive rock layers and open up trenches for the canals. Lock chambers were constructed to manage the rise and drop of water levels that ranged from 2′ to 17′. Our own lock experience: a 5′ water level change, after a particularly heavy rain, when it would normally be about 2-3′.
Headed toward the lock chamber. See the lock keepers on top? They will manually open the lock for us.
Butt power opens the lock
You might get a kick out of the import rates on the canal. Manure cost 50 cents per boatload. Uh huh. Manure was imported into Lowell, not the other way around. Some clever experimenter found out that a chemical in manure set dyes to prevent fading. Imagine that smell!
click to enlarge
Perhaps you’d rather import white oak pipe staves. 100 cents per M.
We bumped our way through the lock system, away from the mills toward the open river.
This portrait of Mr. Francis hangs in the nearby Whistler birthplace home and museum
We learned about the Chief of Police of Water, James Francis. This clever engineer invented a flood gate system (you’ve heard “opening the flood gates”) to protect the town during wild weather. He was given a parade and a tea set when he saved the town from flooded catastrophe in 1848, with the first use of the 4 1/2 ton, wood gates.
The other side. A marvel of the wide canal and nature!
In 1816, the original canal system was expanded from the initial 10′ width, opening up the waterway to larger boats and more traffic. The timing was perfect for Mr. Lowell, who, in 1810, traveled to England, well into its own Industrial Revolution, to study its mill system. Returning in 1817, he began to invent Lowell as a mill town, but more importantly as an “industrial laboratory.”
Used to be farm land. Now mill after mill, powered by the canal generated lock system. A small lock here.
Ironically, with the farmers looking for short-term cash, they in essence brought their way of life to an end. In less than 30 years, the farms were gone. The pastoral was replaced with the industrial.
By the 1830s, Lowell was a showplace of industrial prowess. And a new labor force was created–the daughters of those nearby farmers. Now, the girls and young women could become financially useful to their families by working for wages and living by the “clock and bell,” instead of the sun.
Boott Cotton Mill
First bell, 4 a.m. Work at 4:30 a.m. The girls would take a 35 minute break for breakfast, and later, their other meals. They would rush from the mill back to their boardinghouse, shared with 25-40 other girls.
A typical mill owned some 70 boardinghouse blocks, some reserved for men, who performed the awful tasks of carding the wool–a lung-killing job. After the Civil War, mill owners were less “paternalistic” and workers could live wherever they chose in the city. But initially, it was a factory town system.
Boarding house dining room
Part of worker wages were garnished to pay the “Keeper,” who could then skimp or over-indulge as she pleased. One daughter complained about her mother who couldn’t make ends meet as a Keeper, being too generous in her portions. Some made up the difference, breaking the rules by serving non-mill residents. Tension over pay spilled beyond the disgruntled mill girls, who in 1847, made $2 per week, after room and board was deducted.
Still $2 was enough for financial autonomy. After sending money home, they still had some left for themselves and became instrumental in creating a consumer economy of readymade products geared toward women. Inexpensive jewelry, hat decorations, even a book, all became desirable treats after working their 73 hour work week. 13 hours Monday through Friday, 8 hours on Saturday. In their free time, they might ride the trolley to the end of the line for the amusement park (which encouraged the trolley use on non-work days; always thinking how to make a $).
Spinning Jenny, 2nd generation technology to speed up the spinning process
One child who was hired to “doff the bobbins” (taking the empty bobbins to the spinners and full bobbins to the weaving floor) said that, at first, the job seemed like play. But after doing the same thing over and over, all week long, well…
And the noise. Perhaps the most evocative part of the day was hearing just a few weaving machines running at Boott Cotton Mill. Incessant bang, bam, bang, bam, bang, bam. Really Loud. You’ll notice in this video, that the “mill girl” is wearing ear plugs.
Not so back in the day. No surprise, the girls only lasted 3-4 years on average. The job was a path to independence or marriage or … illness. This is one aspect the Alcott novel explores pretty well, as does Elizabeth Gaskell’s amazing North and South.
The size of the room. Imagine if all the machines were running. The cloth made here is sold in the gift shop.
With such efficient production, supply soon exceeded demand, and the manufacturers wanted to cut wages. After all, the mill girls were making more than teachers. The workforce started to shift to immigrants, desperate for the work even at lower wages. Irish, Greeks, French Canadians, Jews, and more took over from the moral “mill girl,” and Lowell began its slow descent.
The mills lost money during the Civil War, and the genteel boarding houses for the mill girls were replaced by tenements.
While the first protests were conducted by the mill girls, in 1912, a wage reduction led to a massive union strike. Continuing financial strain prevented investing in the latest technology, too. After World War I, “Spindle City” couldn’t compete with the mills in the South. Some moved, others were abandoned, many torn down. Some became artist lofts.
After the river was cleaned up. Lowell had grade D water according to the 1972 Clean Air and Water Act. The canal water would turn bright yellow or hot red, depending on the dyes dumped in it. Now, the water is a B. Technically, you can fish and swim. Hmmm.
By 1960, it was basically over. Some who volunteer in the museum mill, worked for the real deal in the 1980s. But that was a last and dying breath. For a town that prided itself on a motto like “Art is the Handmaid of Human Good,” Lowell “sacrificed its workers for dividends” and its fresh, clean environment for expediency. “Sounds familiar,” Alice mused, referring to today’s repetition of history.
James McNeil Whistler may have hailed from Lowell, but he saw fit to lie about it, claiming Baltimore or England as his birthplace. But the house is in Lowell, and the Art Association is working very hard to restore it. We were given a private, detailed tour by the director, before looking around at its small, nice art collection on our own. After all, where else could you see Whistler’s father?
I’ve never been in a parade before. And Sunday, I not only marched, but carried a flag! I joined the Road to Freedom Walk in Dobbs Ferry, up the Hudson in New York. You can’t imagine how thrilled I was to be asked to carry a flag! This only after asking everyone around me, and they had run out of children. I was the only female flag bearer. Woo hoo!
And what a flag it was! The “Join or Die” logo came from a political cartoon created by Benjamin Franklin in 1754. It shows a snake cut into 9 parts, each labeled with a colony, except for the four New England colonies, simply labeled N.E. Maybe there wasn’t room in the cartoon to name each colony. I don’t know.
But it became a famous symbol of the need for the colonies to unite, instead of act in their own interests, despite failing as a rallying mantra for the French and Indian War. It was resuscitated for the Revolutionary War and stuck.
The pine tree would be co-opted in 1913 for the Armory Show, as a symbol of freedom for the artists involved
The other flags included the 1775 Commander in Chief flag, the Bunker Hill flag shown here, with its pine tree coming to symbolize liberty in New England, and a prototypical “Betsy Ross” flag with 13 stars in a circle.
But the purpose of this march was to commemorate the August 19, 1781 route taken by the Continental Army, as it began its 400 mile march to Virginia to encounter Cornwallis.
We marched about 1 mile. Multiply that times 400, and it might not have been as much fun. But like any good march, there was mud. There was a fife and drum setting the mood to move. I found it really easy to walk to the beat, as you might can pick out from this video.
What’s important is the men I’m marching behind. They are the 1st Rhode Island, a majority African American regiment who formed in the summer of 1778, fought at Saratoga, and made the long march to Virginia.
I pushed up with my flag to march right behind them. They marched in all seriousness. I had a silly, delighted grin on my face. Policemen stopped traffic and saluted. It was good.
During our breaks, as the soldiers wiped their brows (it was hot for them in their uniforms, even as they were a bit tattered providing natural ventilation), they argued over rum rations and whether rum was the “devil’s drink” or a “likeable thing” and how sugar was tied to slavery. “You don’t like that, do you?” They teased one of the cohort for being from Dela-where? I interjected that I liked Delaware. “That makes two of you,” another shot back.
As we marched on, the fife picked out tunes the soldiers knew, and they sang along. They changed the lyrics of “Yankee Doodle” to say something about George Washington being one in a million. Maybe that’s how the lyrics went before George Cohan et al.
We paused in a cemetery where Revolutionary and Civil War veterans are buried. The soldiers fired their muskets in salute, as you can see in these videos.
What is clear is how much slower battle would have been and the need for two lines of soldiers. You can make out how tedious it was to load from the second video.
The fife and drum led us right through the historic town center and into the woods, following an aqueduct. We marched over rocks and stumps, but mostly on a nice sandy path. The temperature, already pleasant, dropped with the shade. We soldiered on, up hills, up and up, until we reached the launching point, coinciding with the end of the aqueduct.
Our hard work earned us lemonade and cookies. As I furled up the flag, I tried the cranberry drink, mixed with tea. So good. Then one of the soldiers and I sat under a tree, while a commemoration took place.
He took an offered slice of watermelon, lamenting he had no beer to go with it. “Sounds awful…sweet and bitter!” He just grinned. I asked about the holes in his trousers. “I earned these through the march,” he explained. “Not as bad as some others.”
I knew just what he meant. There I was in a “you were there” moment.
Seeing how committed Hull was to celebrating the classic horror film, he was given and collected the tools of the trade. This “life mask” of Bella Lugosi was used for the actor’s makeup tests. Steven Spielberg didn’t realize the value of his original ET, and here it is.
These figures are so stern looking and fierce, I’d want them protecting my ship!
It is clearly worth the trip though. What a beauty this house is, with its meticulous care inside and out and its picture-perfect gardens.
Maybe the 
Mashantucket tribe. My first impression was, this is a lot of museum for the experience. The excess of architecture was even more exaggerated by the long walk through open space–“follow the paw prints”– to the long ramp going down to the exhibits. I was already a bit visually exhausted.
Wabanaki Tribal member
seasonally. No art adorns the walls and isn’t needed with the captured nature. The color palette of brown, gold, and green was deepened by the lighting strategy of using 20 watt bulbs to simulate candlelight. I can tell you, on this bright day, the current 60 watt bulbs still make for a dim interior.
The furniture was all available for sale in his catalog or the showroom. An Eastman Chair went for $58.50 in the catalog. Today? Shwew!
Thankful had 12 children, with all seven sons making it to adulthood, a real rarity. Two daughters, Nancy and Sarah Elizabeth, did, too. She and her husband could afford to expand the house, and all was going well, until her husband died.
![Reginald Marsh, "Wooden Horses" [detail], 1936, tempera on board; 24 x 40 inches, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, The Dorothy Clark Archibald and Thomas L. Archibald Fund, The Krieble Family Fund for American Art, The American Paintings Purchase Fund, and The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, 2013.1.1. "Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008"](https://i0.wp.com/4eg99614zvx21of7ql3apu8c.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/coney-island_header-image_web.jpg?resize=584%2C195 "Reginald Marsh, \"Wooden Horses\" [detail], 1936, tempera on board; 24 x 40 inches, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, 2013.1.1")
And the noise. Perhaps the most evocative part of the day was hearing just a few weaving machines running at 
James McNeil Whistler
made the long march to Virginia.
During our breaks, as the soldiers wiped their brows (it was hot for them in their uniforms, even as they were a bit tattered providing natural ventilation), they argued over rum rations and whether rum was the “devil’s drink” or a “likeable thing” and how sugar was tied to slavery. “You don’t like that, do you?” They teased one of the cohort for being from Dela-where? I interjected that I liked Delaware. “That makes two of you,” another shot back.