The Story of a House

Posted on December 20, 2014 by admin

For a house that started off as two rooms in 1728, the Bush-Holley House has had a remarkable history since. You know that I’m now a docent at the Florence Griswold House and Museum, which tells the story of the Lyme Art Colony. Well, this house shows off a concurrent art colony, also of American Impressionists, who gathered in the Cos Cob section of Greenwich, only one hour by train from Manhattan.

But the house tells quite a story before then. The original Bush who bought the house didn’t live in it. His son David moved in around 1755 with his wife Sarah. She died in 1776, while the British were running raids in Cos Cob and all around the Bush House. Most of the settlement was burned, but not this Saltbox house.

You’ve probably guessed why. Yep, David Bush was a suspected Loyalist and was imprisoned as such. After all, his trade with the New York Colony centered on imported goods. The wallpaper in his house was even imported, demonstrating his wealth. During restoration, the stamp was uncovered. Paper goods were stamped when the taxes were paid, a result of the reviled Stamp Act that so angered the rebellious colonists.

Bush’s political troubles didn’t stop from marrying another Sarah, and together, they combined a household with 11 children from previous marriages. Then they added 5 more of their own. This was one crowded house.

Crowded with slaves, too. To run the farm, Bush had slaves who lived in the barn and more that lived above the kitchen. Convenient, perhaps warm, but clearly spartan. This is a curator’s best guess of how the slaves lived. Like so many others, their stories are lost to memory.

Greenwich was sometimes part of the New York Colony, the last northern colony to abolish slavery, and sometimes part of Connecticut. The Connecticut colony had a complex legislative history around slavery. In 1788, the slave trade was abolished in Connecticut, just after the 1784 Gradual Emancipation Act. Slaves born after 1784 would be emancipated when they turned 25, later lowered to 21. Born in 1783, you’re out of luck. In 1825, Greenwich recorded its last slave.

The Bush family took their slaves to church, and religious beliefs may have informed the decision to emancipate their slaves and support them in buying property. Yet the 1799 will of David Bush listed the slave property and their worth. Connecticut had about 2650 slaves and 2175 free blacks. What a complex of scenarios.

By 1848, bad business decisions forced the Bush descendants to sell the house. Two families attempted to run a boardinghouse in this convenient location, only two blocks from the New York train. It must have been tough-going, because the Holley’s rented the house from the bank, later purchasing it.

Fortunately, they valued the heritage in the house and preserved its Colonial quirks.

MacRae paints his family

They also managed to make a successful boarding house for artists, just like Florence Griswold further up the Connecticut coast. See Elmer McCrae, artist, married a Holley daughter, Constant. He brings the friends, she becomes the gracious hostess and flower arranger extraordinaire. Look at the kind of table she set for the holidays. Nothing like the spartan accommodations of Flo Gris.

Childe Hassam, The Mantle Piece, 1912; in the Best Room, supposedly painted on a cigar box lid

Childe Hassam summered at, and starred at, both boarding houses. He got the “Best Room” at the Bush-Holley House, paying a handsome $20 per week for room and board, compared to $4-8 for the other rooms and $7 at the Flo Gris. The house is full of paintings and etchings he made while staying in the house, of the house and the Best Room.

Alec shows me the Best Room

Childe Hassam, Clarissa (one of the twins) 1912, painted in the entry way of the house

Elmer MacRae, Constance Feeding the Ducks, 1912; exhibited at the Armory Show, 1913

But it’s MacRae’s work that charms many of the walls. His twin daughters, born in 1904, were the frequent subject. After helping organize the 1913 Armory Show, which brought European contemporary art to New York, his style started to change.

MacRae’s changing style

Without the commercial success of a Hassam, who was remunerated for repeatedly painting familiar scenes, MacRae had more freedom to experiment.

He worked in pastel and oil, carved wood screens, and the house has a piece of furniture he painted that I wanted to take home.

The Colonial kitchen

Willa Cather and other literary elites from New York stayed at the house, too. Cather wrote the Cos Cob section of Song of the Lark, based on her time here.

The Holley family remained in the house until it was turned over to the Greenwich Historical Society in the 1950s, which is why its delights are so intact. With a history like this, it’s really a must-see among the bounty of evocative historic homes in Connecticut.

As pretty as a picture, out the studio window

MacRae’s studio upstairs

Commerce, Cassino, and Loo

Posted on December 8, 2014 by admin

No, that’s not the name of a new rock band. Commerce, Cassino, and Loo are all popular card games from Jane Austen’s time. In celebration of her birthday today, we Janeites in Connecticut gathered for tea to celebrate her and the role of card games in her life and works. What a hoot!

As you’ve no doubt noticed, the names of the card games are most evocative, and Austen used the inherent characteristics of the games to say something about the characters who were attracted to each. A metaphor in the cards.

First, she acknowledges that not everyone was a game player (all levels of interpretation meant). There were two spheres. No. not the Public and Private Spheres that divided men and women. But those who sat down to play and the “outsiders” who did not. Of course, those outsiders might prefer a dance or two in the Assembly Room, versus heading to the Card Room at any ball or social gathering. They weren’t necessarily stick-in-the-muds.

https://i0.wp.com/www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/phiz/pickwick/29.jpg?resize=513%2C588

The Card-room at Bath, by Phiz (Hablot K. Browne), April 1837, Steel Engraving, Dickens’s Pickwick Papers

So there were those who played games, ahem, and those who didn’t. Anne Elliott from Persuasion declines to play cards in Bath, although Captain Wentworth reminds her it wasn’t always so. Ahem. Mary Crawford of Mansfield Park enjoys Speculation, a game that can be played by many. Ahem.

Mr. Woodhouse from Emma definitely prefers Pique, because it can be played by only 2. Much less change of spreading germs that way, you know. Pride and Prejudice‘s Lady Catherine de Bourgh dominates the old-fashioned game of Quadrille, while reckless Lydia adored Lottery Tickets, a game of pure chance requiring no thought or strategy whatsoever. When Elizabeth and Wickham play with her, Lizzie gets all the facts about Darcy wrong. See the significance of a card game?

Then there’s class. Lizzie opts out of playing Loo at Netherfield, when suggested by snobby Mr. Hurst. She says she prefers to read, which kicks off a stream of hilarious digs all around. But the real reason she declines is she can’t afford the high stakes of their play. Austen herself avoided playing Commerce, when she couldn’t afford the 3 pence stake.

Instead Austen preferred Speculation, a gambling game. She even wrote a poem about it, but sadly it was no longer played by the end of the 1800s. She also enjoyed the board game Cribbage and a card game called Brag.

Fun facts. Card games were played all over Europe, of course, but the same games might have different rules. After all, a deck of cards wasn’t static. The English played with 52 cards, but the Italians used only 40 and Russians 30. In Spain, games were played with 48 cards. There were no 10s.

Women, who had no other means of support, might convert their homes into card houses for games of chance. Typically, they played Faro, named for Pharaoh, a game of chance where, for a change, the player has the best odds, not the House. In the Western U.S. Faro houses were wildly popular, although apparently, there wasn’t a single “honest bank,” meaning you just couldn’t win against the House.

Two-penny Whist by James Gillray

Several of the games were precursors to popular games now. Commerce and Brag for poker. And there was a version of blackjack, known as 21. Quadrille was so complicated that it phased out in popularity, and whist took over, morphing over time into today’s bridge. Whist means quick, silent, and attentive, sharing a root with ‘wistful.’ This game requires thought and strategy to be played well, a wistful pursuit.

Others are quirky. Named for a lullaby Lanterloo, Loo, which I found to be a bit silly and overly simple, involves playing with ivory-carved fish as the chits or counting pieces. Special Loo tables were designed with fishponds (troughs) on all four sides, for holding your fish as you win them. Loo was the most popular card game in England and was also the easiest game for cheating. Trollope writes of a club member who cheats and when found out, gets away with it because the others were too gentlemanly to call him out. Poor manners. So if you plan to slip a card up your sleeve or palm another, do it in an English club. They’d rather be cheated than rude.

Here we are, trying to make sense of Commerce

Maybe you want to learn more, or get at the rules of these games. My favorite was Cassino, and the rules are so complicated, you will definitely need a book. Check out Helpful Sports for Young Ladies, where you’ll also learn more about other past-times. Perhaps you already enjoy the athleticism of the seesaw and swinging outdoors. Great forms of exercise for any one!

The Regency line-up

Spooky

Posted on October 31, 2014 by admin

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; Smithsonian

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.

At a minimum, wear a skull mask!

Freedom from Want

Posted on October 25, 2014 by admin

As you know, my argument is that we’re in another economic depression now, and my day in New York made the comparisons to the 1930s striking.

Thomas Hart Benton
Instruments of Power
America Today mural series
1930-1

America Today

I started at the Met, where I finally got to see America Today, the murals by Thomas Hart Benton that have been re-homed from the New School. Over the years there, students had rammed chairs into the murals, and they were otherwise degrading. Now revitalized in glorious color, made richer through the darkened exhibition space, the murals tell the story of America in a moment–1930-1, when the Great Depression was just sucking away the country’s vitality.

Reginald Marsh
The Bowery
1930 an artist also known for pulsating energy

Benton celebrates though. America’s pulse, its chaos and determination, its strengths and its smarts.

Certainly compared with Reginald Marsh’s nearby The Bowery from the same year, 1930, the murals are propagandistically optimistic. The glory of work, the ingenuity of technology, the voice of entertainment, all punctuated with clarifying red.

Benton loved red.

America Today

America Today

Pieter Coecke van Aelst
Conversion of St. Paul
1563
Look at that red and those gestures!

While the curators draw connection to Baroque painting as an influence on Benton’s energetic compositions, I was also taken by the drama of the Renaissance tapestries, a newly opened, scintillating exhibition at the Met. Surely Benton was influenced by the Renaissance body and borrowed from religious ecstasy for his modern passions.

Jackson Pollack
Pasiphae
1943

Detail America Today

And where would Jackson Pollack be if he hadn’t been under the influence of his teacher’s, Benton’s, quivering, pulsating storytelling? And Benton was completely modern, as you can see here.

But the art historian digresses.

Back on point, we, too, today crave celebrity entertainment and the refuge of technological wizardry to forget our troubles with work and the sour economy. We like to think of America’s strength, even as evidence shows the contrary.

From the Met, I walked over to the newly-open-for-tours Roosevelt House. After Sara Roosevelt’s death, in 1942, Hunter College bought the house and has been using it for classrooms. Just about the only thing left from the quiet wealth of the Roosevelts is the staircase bannister. I ran my hand up the rail where Eleanor may have, too. I haven’t washed my hand since!

I joined a tour/lecture, led by a history doctoral student. As he told us about FDR’s and Eleanor’s accomplishments, I was most taken by the Four Freedoms speech, so relevant today. Only the names have changed. Have we progressed at all?

I was interested in the speech’s afterlife. Norman Rockwell had a hard time getting support to make his monumental paintings of the same name. Finally, the Saturday Evening Post printed the series, which became phenomenally popular, driven by a Bentonesque vision of America. Then the war bonds office came up with a program. For an $18.75 war bond purchase, you would receive a set of the four posters. And the rest is history.

Or is it? How much do we tolerate freedom of religion post 9/11? In light of a string of natural disasters and Ebola, how free from fear are we? In an era of political correctness, changing mores, and lax gun laws, are we really free to speak our minds?

And freedom from want? That issue was actually secondary in “Grand Concourse,” now at Playwrights. Yes, it takes place in the Bronx today in a soup kitchen. Yes, one of the four characters is a homeless man who teeters on the ability to get and hold a job and function well, but I think playwright Heidi Schrek uses her setting as a metaphor, a rumination on the nature of giving and how generosity of spirit can get twisted. People younger than I am, though, may see the play through different eyes. Check it out, and see what you think.

Regardless, may you be free from want this harvest season, on all levels of body and being.

Leaf Fall Season

Posted on October 16, 2014 by admin

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.

[Show picture list]

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.

Sauntering in the Footsteps

Posted on October 13, 2014 by admin

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?

Photos of the day:

There’s no day when the Flatiron fails to please…

Flatiron, 10-12-14

From the Flatiron to irony:

New York City, 10-12-14

Halloweed dress-up comes early

Posted on October 6, 2014 by admin

Although it’s early October, everyone seems to be dressing up already. As faeries especially.

Take the Florence Griswold Museum, where I am a new docent. This month, all over the 11 acre grounds of the museum, are tiny installations by artists on the theme of Steampunk’d Alice in Wonderland. Yesterday, about 600 little faeries came to visit the 25 or so miniature futuristic-Victorian worlds that make up Wee Faerie Village.

Okay, but the day wasn’t just about ‘wee’ faeries. Everywhere you look, adults are dressed up, too, at the huge, semi-annual Connecticut Renaissance Faire this month.

I definitely felt like I was entering another world, thank you very much, m’lady.

Except when I didn’t. More about that in a moment.

Who wouldn’t enjoy a rowdy joust?

I came in at the tail end (all puns intended) of one joust, in which the victor was a woman! But the man just couldn’t take it and challenged her again (for 2 hours later), so she riled up her backers.

Well, I couldn’t wait around. I had people to see, like the Executioner, who was in a jolly mood. He told me two jokes. I laughed, because who would want to be on his bad side?

So, how about the cook who tried to poison his master? He was given a choice of how to die–by the stake or the chop.

And the tailor who cheated his customers? It all came out, off the rack. You get it.

So what could I do? I immediately headed over to the stocks, where I wanted to help this poor ogre. Not to worry, With the aid of his companion, he made his escape.

I especially enjoyed the music–madrigals…

…and something a little rowdier, which I enjoyed with my Bee Sting, a mischievous, refreshing drink combination of hard cider and mead (a light honey wine). Delicious!

Bee Sting with my new carved gourd

Here’s a snippet of the promised rowdy music, perfect for dancing.

You may have noticed the 21st century technology invading this low tech space. Yes, that was everywhere, too.

Still for children who only know technology, this is the kind of day where they can dress up in a little bit of magic and try their hand at something other than a keyboard.

History and the quandary of why?

Posted on September 21, 2014 by admin

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

The theater of quirky mansions and living history

Posted on September 1, 2014 by admin

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.

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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.

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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 teh table with hidden cat potties...

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 swithc, which looks like railroad pulls

Love the light switch, which looks like railroad pulls

Industrial Revelation

Posted on August 19, 2014 by admin

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 Whistler birthplace home and museum

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.

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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.

Whistler's father 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?

Yankee Doodle Girl

Posted on August 19, 2014 by admin

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 from RI Black Heritage Society 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.

2014-08-17 12.59.33 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.

Wedded to Art

Posted on July 20, 2014 by admin

Carolyn Choate was married to attorney and ambassador Joe Choate, but she wore a wedding band engraved “Wedded to Art.” Right on, sister!

But her art forays seemed to be subsumed, like so many other women artists, by the rigors of her daily life. Now, let us not be confused. Although she and her husband started out fairly modestly, with his lion-like courtroom successes, they soon amassed enough money to buy this cottage in the Berkshires. Naumkeag is the Native American word for the town where Salem, MA is now, the home territory for Choates, before making it large in Manhattan.

See the turret? That makes for some weird and funny spaces inside this mish-mosh-styled house (Norman and Colonial Revival and New England Shingle), albeit one designed by McKim, Mead, and White in 1886. I particularly like the round closet fitted inside the turret.

You can probably just make out the round corner, by its lonesome, in the corner of this parlor. Weird and funny. No sense of Carolyn in this masculine world, except for a charcoal drawing hung near her studio and a botanical watercolor upstairs. Both quite facile and lovely.

While summering at Naumkeag, Carolyn hired a tutor for her children for eight hours of art instruction daily. Really. She didn’t want them to get lazy. Admittedly, a music lesson and some swimming might have gotten thrown in there, too.

Meanwhile, was Carolyn making art, too? Somehow, the house guide, who slipped me beyond roped-off areas and up back stairs to the servant’s quarters and into Carolyn’s studio, doubted it.

After all, Carolyn used their fortune for other kinds of good. She started Barnard, since girls were excluded from college education, and then Teacher’s College. She was one of the founders of the Met Museum in the 1870s, giving a priceless Impressionist collection to the new institution. She amassed books to form New York Public Library. She was pretty busy making a great city out of ramshackle, post-Civil War New York.

And Carolyn didn’t stop there. Maybe she wasn’t making art, but she was instrumental in its promotion. She worked with her friend John Singer Sargent to put on art fairs. Sargent made charcoal drawings of Joe Choate and their daughter Mabel in 1911.

As remarkable as she was, try looking Carolyn up, and you won’t find much, except a mention on Joe’s Wikipedia page. The fate of so many outstanding women. Of course, not Emily Dickinson, who in her quiet way was also wedded to her art.

Emily at about 16, daguerreotype

But did you realize she only published a few poems during her lifetime, mostly in the local paper and most of those as Anonymous? Only after her death were her poems assembled and published, and not until those first editors took the capital letters out of the middle of her phrases and corrected her spelling. They picked words they liked when Dickinson had still been unsure which to use. I think today, we would consider such editing disrespectful.

Entrance to the front of the Emily Dickinson Museum One of the juicy stories told on the tour at her house, where she lived most of her life and wrote virtually all of her poems, concerns that first set of publications. Her brother Ned lived in the house right next door, a wedding present from their father intended to keep his son close. Edward and Susan seemed happy enough, although he apparently loved her, while she “loved him well enough to marry him.” Get the picture?

Susan was one of Emily’s friends from the Amherst Academy, a prep school for Amherst College, both of which were started by Dickinson’s grandfather. Like the Choates, the Dickinsons put their money into broader education, including for girls. And it was that money that afforded Dickinson the ability to live the life she did–never marrying, becoming increasingly reclusive, and living in comfort.

Dickinson sent Susan many of her poems, which Susan kept, and only later did the poet start to make copies of poems that might have been written on the back of a chocolate wrapper or any scrap of paper, compiling them into her own little fascicles, or booklets. Living basically as a recluse in the Amherst house, not even venturing next door to visit family, she penned some 2000 poems.

Dickinson children
Emily on left, Ned, Lavinia on right
Otis Bullard, c1840

After Dickinson’s death, Susan attempted to get the poems published. After two years, when she didn’t have success, Emily’s sister Lavinia (also unmarried, who stayed in the same family house with Emily and at one point, 11 cats–no I’m not kidding). gave the poems to Mabel Loomis Todd. Todd was well connected and had started the Amherst Historical Society and Amherst Women’s Club. She, along with Dickinson’s long-time friend, and sometime critic, Thomas Higginson were the editors who amended the poems and got them published, four years after the Dickinson’s death in 1886. The poetry was an instant success, and Dickinson became posthumously famous.

Behind this official story, is a bit of drama. That first publication did not include the poems Emily wrote to Susan, who kept them locked away until her own death. Then Susan’s daughter Martha, a writer of potboilers, took over care and publishing of Emily’s works. So why did Susan hoard away these poems, when the rest were published?

Turns out, Mabel Loomis Todd was having a long-term affair with Susan’s husband, Emily’s and Lavinia’s brother, Edward. Oh my. So the family split. Lavinia had taken the poems to Todd and sided with her brother, wishing for his happiness. Susan’s and Ned’s children sided with their mother. Sigh. Family dynamics are never dull, are they?

As with so much, Emily remains a mystery on the subject.

Amherst mural with Emily Dickinson framed by trees

Regardless, like Carolyn Choate with her paintings, Emily Dickinson created for her own pleasure. They were contemporaries, one living in more freewheeling New York, the other in more staid New England. But both had a loud voice, and both would make long-lasting creations–Choate’s very public works, Emily’s very private ruminations brought out into the sunlight.

We are the beneficiaries.

In Emily’s words,

There is no Frigate like a Book

To take us Lands away

I would only add the ‘frigate of art’ and nod at both these women, so wedded to their art which bring us so much pleasure today.

Courtney at Emily Dickinson’s grave
Buried with her family, as she lived her life
Remembered by many, including us, leaving stones, pennies, shells, pencils, notes, and even a book

Mum Bet

Posted on July 6, 2014 by admin

Next time you’re wandering in the Berkshires, I recommend a stop at the Ashley House in Sheffield, MA. It’s an interesting house for its period–a mansion for 1735–and the blending of British and Dutch cultures in the Western Massachusetts/Connecticut region. Colonel Ashley, a Brit, made his fortune producing cannon balls. Well somebody had to. Hannah, his Dutch wife, took a much harsher approach with their slaves, including the seven year old her parents gave her. Now the story gets really interesting.

Mum Bet grew up in Ashley House, which at the time, wasn’t the worst way of life for a slave. She had her own room off the kitchen. Nearness was a necessity, as Mum Bet tended the only fire in the two-story house. But this also meant she had a nice warm room. No sleeping in the stable for her. She also cared for whatever infant needed her, in the adjacent alcove.

Here’s what her bed on the floor might have been like, in the plain room, but nice and toasty.

Mum Bet, who later took the name Elizabeth Freeman, was inspired to claim her freedom after a pivotal event with Hannah, and then with the Colonel. Hannah severely burned Mum Bet, when she was trying to protect her daughter from punishment.

Then in 1773, a meeting was held in the upstairs good room. No women, except Mum Bet, were allowed, and she listened and absorbed. There the men drafted up the Sheffield Declaration, with Ashley, Ethan Allen, and Tapping Reed, who started the first law school in the colonies, in nearby Litchfield, CT, among others.

The words they wrote: “Resolved, That mankind in a state of nature are equal, free and independent to each other, and have a right to the undisturbed enjoyment of their lives, their liberty and property.” Sound familiar?

It was adopted in Sheffield, then Boston, before moving to Philadelphia. And so we get Thomas Jefferson’s version: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” an apparent direct descendant of the Sheffield Resolves.

Mum Bet heard all this and demanded her freedom. The Colonel, more liberal than his wife, stated that as a woman she had no rights, so along with a male slave, she sued for her freedom. A jury of all white, male farmers in Great Barrington granted it to her in 1780. Hannah said no, but when another slave was emancipated, Mum Bet couldn’t be denied.

Elizabeth Freeman resolved the issue of where to go as a newly freed person by becoming a nanny for the Sedgewick family in Stockbridge, supplementing her income by working as a midwife.

Mum Bet, age 69 or 70. Miniature portrait, watercolor on ivory by Susan Anne Livingston Ridley Sedgwick, 1811.

One other story shows Mum Bet’s feistiness. Shay’s Rebellion was a rowdy tax revolt by area farmers in the 1780s. Mum Bet, hearing the men were coming to the Sedgwick house, hid the silver, replacing it with pewter. Then she served the men wine that had turned to vinegar. So disgusted were they by the wealthy ways of the Sedgwick’s, that they left. Mum Bet saved the day. Or so the story goes.

And the story was told by the Sedgwick daughter Catherine, who was raised by Mum Bet and later became a novelist of “domestic fiction.” The account of Mum Bet appeared in Sedgwick’s essay “Slavery in New England” in Bentley’s Miscellany from 1853. Pretty cool, eh?

Mum Bet lived to be 87 years old and is a new inspiration for me as I learn about historic, bold women who go after their passion, and their rights. So glad to have met her!

Fun tidbit:

This tiny iron was used to teach children to iron (hmmm) and for ironing the lace in men’s cravats, cuffs, etc. I think I believe the latter before the former.

Good eyes will pick out the press mold for making cookies on the left. The mold depicts a boy on a chamber pot. Not terribly appealing as a cookie. Colonial humor is apparently no less scatalogical than today’s.

Mash-ups

Posted on June 29, 2014 by admin

Today, I’m living juxtapositions. My day started at the Bellamy-Ferraday House, where the Connecticut Chapter of JASNA had its annual Box Hill Picnic. First, we had a private tour of the house. What really stood out for me are the ironies.

The land was bought from the Indians in the 1720s, and the first English families came in the 1730s. Well, in the winter, it was too far to go the seven miles into town for the Congregationalist Church. So now a newly minted parish, the farming area got its own minister, a very young Yale grad named Bellamy. This house was pretty fancy for the era and the isolated location near Bethlehem (ahem, Connecticut).

Mr. Bellamy made money from his sermons and pamphlets, but what I found so hilarious is that he wrote a best seller, True Religion Delineated, which according to our tour guide is completely unreadable today, even for ministry students. Bellamy made enough of a splash with the book that it became popular in England, too. Positively an 18th-century Stephen King!

His wealth came from such an unlikely source, when in the Colonies, fortunes were usually the way from trade. Bellamy lived really well, as did his descendants. So it took the last owner of the house to appear the most big-hearted and service-oriented. Again defying expectations, Caroline Ferraday ventured forward as an actress, with a glamor shot showing her to be a gorgeous lady. She contributed to the Victorian appearance and additions to the house. Living the good life.

But I think she’s remarkable for taking the global lead on helping the Jewish women who were experimented on at Dachau concentration camp, when literally no one else would. The details are too graphic and disturbing to include here. Suffice it to say, she made a difference and even became friends with some of the survivors.

The minister seemed to savor his money; the actress used hers to help others. Ironic.

Not being too far way, I then jumped on the Northwest Connecticut Arts Council Open Your Eyes artist studio tour. I had a wonderful conversation with Anne Delaney. For the tour, she luscious studies for works she may paint based on the particular tour setting. Instead of in her New York studio, this tour brought people to the Harwinton Community Hall, which also houses a jail. Delaney did graphite works of John Brown and other more abstracted figures along this theme.

I picked up this little painting from her Family Car series, loving the back-of-the-head invitation into the painting.

She also told me about a friend who has made a documentary film on the Baroque artist Artemesia Genileschi, juxtaposing the artist’s story with her effect on women today, including the filmmaker.

Here’s the trailer from the film “A Woman Like That.” It’s on the film festival and university circuit, so keep you eyes open for it.

Judith Bird makes these lovely mash-ups of Mexican-style retablos and the fanciful color and magic realism of an artist like Florine Stettheimer. Bird loves using birds in her work, as they touch both heaven and earth, soar and are grounded. I love that!

You can see the artist’s sweetness in Wild Wood Bird.” The painting definitely has the devotional feel of the folk art retablo with her own eponymous bird symbol.

The funniest mash-ups of the day came from 84-year-old artist Salvatore Gulino. Sal was really why I went on the tour, and we talked for almost an hour about his work and his life. He is extremely modest about his work and that I would go ga ga over it. But really, what art historian wouldn’t?

Forget Modigiliani, I”m turning over in my grave.

A classical portrait of Giovanna Tornabuoni by Ghirlandaio juxtaposed on a classic screen-shot.

For my 50s modern house, I couldn’t resist this mash-up from the Art Wheels Series. Nefertiti never had it so good!

And neither will you, when you come to visit!

Alice Paul

Posted on June 27, 2014 by admin

Ever since volunteering at the Sewall-Belmont House in DC, I’ve been interested in the Women’s Suffrage movement. Which in its second wave, means Alice Paul–the last living suffragette by the 1970s resurgence of the ERA that she authored fifty years earlier.

This past week, I started a two-part session on the history of feminism at the New Haven Free Public Library called “Abigail’s Revenge: How the Women’s Movement Shook Up America.” So the timing was certainly right to head to the Hartford Public Library to hear Z.D. Zahniser talk about her new biography of Alice Paul up to 1920, the year of the suffrage amendment’s passage.

I was fortunate because Bambi from the Connecticut Women’s Hall of Fame, the sponsor of the event, invited me to join her and Jill Zahniser for dinner after the talk. Our conversation was a rousing review of our careers, in light of the pioneers like Paul who went before us. I know I don’t have the courage Paul had or could make the choices she did.

Paul, raised as an unassuming Quaker (not a radical like Susan B. Anthony), first became politicized through Jane Addams’ Hull House, spurring the settlement house movement that put respectable women to work in social activism. These women realized legislative action was needed for real social change. Paul then attended graduate school focusing on political science in the early 1900s and went to England for further study.

There she met the Fighting Pankhursts, gradually becoming involved in their demonstrations for women’s suffrage and learning tactics she would bring back for the American movement. In 1909, she was arrested for the first time for her politics and went on a hunger strike, before being force fed in prison. Ghandi attended meetings of this group and approved of their tactics until they turned more violent – rock throwing, arson, etc. Interesting that Ghandi and Paul were both inspired to make change from the same group.

Upon Paul’s return to the U.S., she was a celebrity. She thought the suffrage movement was just too nice in the U.S. and started the ‘bad girl’ National Women’s Party. The NWP, with 50,000 members, was far more radicalized than the moderate, existing suffrage movement, numbering one million. But NWP made waves. In 1913, Paul organized the first successful “March on Washington,” setting a standard still in use today. Only imagine. Then a woman walking down the street was often confused with street walking.

An amendment to the Constitution was key, Paul believed, and her party was willing to do what it took to upset the President and Congress to make it happen. Paul and her followers were considered traitors for picketing the White House, and she was convicted with a seven month sentence.

Prison conditions were atrocious, the food inedible, and Paul became very weak, was again force fed, and became the lynchpin in the public outcry about how these women were being treated like hardened criminals, rather than as political prisoners. President Wilson finally called for habeas corpus to release Paul and the other suffragettes, and six weeks later, removed his opposition to women’s suffrage.

This is just the cream from the top of the story. Read the biography to learn more. The main lesson, in politics: don’t be nice. Be bad girls. They may not have more fun, but they get the job done.

Arts & Ideas

Posted on June 22, 2014 by admin

Every year, New Haven explodes with every form of art and generation of ideas for the two week International Festival of Arts & Ideas. I’ve not been able to jump in until now, but my menu selections range from contemporary dance to walking tours to unusual therapy to performance theater works to aesthetic acrobatics.

“Arguendo,” performed by Elevator Repair Service, arguably has an audience-pleasing premise: the Supreme Court’s weighs in on whether nude dancers, as in adult entertainers, are protected by the First Amendment. Lifted from transcripts of the actual proceedings and montaged in a quasi dance-performance piece, the structure seemed promising. But other than a manic five minutes (in which the attorney defending the dancers’ First Amendment rights argues his points in the nude, while justices toss papers gleefully overhead, all talking at once), I found the production surprisingly dull. There’s a reason I’m not an attorney.

Celebrating a gloriously pleasant Friday afternoon with members of the Hamden Walks meet-up group and about 100 other people, my first walking tour strolled along classy St. Ronan Street with an architectural historian from The New Haven Preservation Trust. Built mostly during the Industrial Golden Age for New Haven between 1890 and 1920, there’s nothing cookie cutter about the grandeur. Each house is quirkily different, gently breaking architectural style rules. The street has a coherence though. A repeated motif of diamond-shaped windows, regular set-backs from the street, and consistent distance between each neighbor creates a pleasing harmony and peaceable splendor.

St. Ronan refers to a well or spring in a Sir Walter Scott poem, and the Hillhouse family who developed the street from their farm and estate referenced that Romantic work with the picturesque homes. You have your 1903 12,000 foot cottage, not so different from not so far away Newport.

And next door is this storybook house a third the size. The house originally belonged to the women’s rights activist Agusta Troup, who along with her wealthy husband, was also a union activist. Ironic advocacy for the uber wealthy.

Keep walking to see this gambrel-intense home of a “traveling salesman.” Yes, a Willy Loman type lives here now. Hmmm.

Notice the funny mix of window styles, the emphatic asymmetry. Very playful and fun.

2014-06-20 18.18.45

And what street would be complete without its mid-century modern? Here it belongs to the widow of a former Yale President.

2014-06-20 18.51.38

The houses and stories go on and on, but like me, you are probably ready to pause and refresh. You might want to head to the festival of food trucks in Hamden town center. I did! Along with the throngs mobbing about 25 different food vendors in the park adjacent to the library. Two cupcake trucks had long lines. This menu board might explain why.

A whole new day, and more adventures with Arts & Ideas. It’s summer, officially, and the longest day of the year! So an eleven hour day of activity began with a hike up East Rock, that odd geological monument that serves as a marker and icon of New Haven. East Rock and West Rock are volcanic cliffs caused by plate shifts and molten lava that cooled on the exposed face. Weird vertical thrusts from the gentle hills of the area.

That geological phenomena created a sheer face of trap, or basalt volcanic rock. The trap is so hard it has served as a building block, as seen on this house on St. Ronan Street. Unlike the also local brownstone, which is soft and subject to erosion, trap is used in asphalt for durable support for intense weights or for building for the ages.

East Rock Park was designed from 1882 to 1895 by Donald Grant Mitchell, a 19th-century pop literature author who took up scientific farming and landscape design. Interesting combination. This natural arch occurs right by a manmade bridge designed by Mitchell. He also created the paths, walkways, trails, and planting schema.

No matter what you see here, the earliest paintings of East Rock showed bare rock with no trees, so that the sandstone strata at the base was visible. We just don’t use as much wood as they did for 19th-century fireplaces, so now New England is forested in a way it wasn’t then.

Diane Reeves, with the New Haven Symphony Orchestra, performed on the Green, closing off a great day. But the real highlight for me was Bibliotherapy.

Bibliotherapy (for adults) is the brainchild of Susan Elderkin, who has moved from England to Hamden, my home town. In her book The Novel Cure and the workshop today, she explained how we can be healed by a book, instead of with drugs. Right on, sister!

To get started, she and her best friend and co-author Ella Berthoud parked a vintage ambulance in a field in Suffolk, England and put out a blackboard with appointment times. Then they started dispensing prescriptions of books to read.

They had developed the practice on each other, addressing wallowing and romantic problems and I-hate-men moods, etc. Susan explained that fiction doesn’t tell us what to do, but instead shows up by example (or dis-example), leaving us to decide how to proceed on our own. She said, we could read self-help which tells us what to do–Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway— or read To Kill a Mockingbird. You get the idea.

You know that feeling of being transported by a book. Well, Susan studied how the brain works, so that being transported leads to transformation. She articulated that when we read, we hear a narrative voice that displaces our own. We “cease to be,” we “become the story.” Reading is similar to actually doing something about the issue. It is an “alternative form of living” that creates a vivid, shared intimacy with the book. The book and its world keeps us from being alone with our issue, even if the plot line is wildly different from our own.

Susan says that recommending a book is “almost as good as writing it.” She called for us to read so we can “give the gift of recommending,” which brought tears to my eyes. When she called for a volunteer, guess who forced her way onstage? Yep.

Through a prescribed set of questions, Susan got to know my reading habits and preferences. Then I stated my issue simply. Even though I’m “following my bliss,” “doing what I love,” I’m still waiting for the “money to follow.” Susan tenderly probed, and then she filled out a literal prescription for me to read: Stoner by John Williams and to re-read Bel Canto by Ann Patchett and Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow. I can hardly wait to see how my world might change through this focused reading.

But first, there’s more Arts & Ideas. Tomorrow brings a rose garden, a Split Knuckle Theatre performance piece called “Endurance” that is a mash-up of office politics and the Shackleton voyage-disaster, and a tour of a 100 year old shul. And then there’s more and more as the week progresses…not a dull art or idea in sight!

Knish

Posted on June 11, 2014 by admin

“If Those Knishes Could Talk” is a new documentary about the history and future of New York accents. It’s a bit diffused and wanders off the point, but it’s still a loving look at the way the New York accent developed and continues to morph.

The film raises a debate: is the accent about the boroughs or does it differ by ethnic group? I like the arguments that went for the latter–the Irish, the Italian, the Jewish, the Puerto Rican, the German New York accent. Some compelling evidence abounds. The Korean man who sounds just like the Italians he grew up around on Staten Island. The Bangladeshi girl who fits in just fine with her Latina girlfriends. Great stuff.

My favorite insight? The deaf sign in accents. And the New York accents vary according to the debate above. There are particular signs for New York slang and distinctive signs for neighborhoods.

And then there’s Twitter. Linguistics are now studying language patterns among the Twitter feed. Dat sux!

So look out for it. It’s not a perfect film, but the nostalgia and stories are a lot of fun. Plus you’ll get a kick hearing from the literary and filmmaker celebrities. Here’s a taste for you:

Riches

Posted on June 7, 2014 by admin

Sometimes the riches are obvious, sometimes not.

In the Puritan era of Connecticut history, riches were to be made by merchants, trading down the riverways to the open ocean and world beyond. In the 1600s, picturesque Wethersfield grew up around the Connecticut River. Unassuming-seeming merchants amassed great fortune through the sugar and slave trades.

Over time, the family houses grew larger, yet not necessarily more ostentatious. A Yalie Silas Deane made his fortune and built his Georgian style home in the 1760s, before he became a political star before and during the Revolution. Yes, there are formal parlors and Portland (CT) brownstone, but as you can see here, the house isn’t over the top.

Silas Deane House Southeast Parlor

They did have a lot of chairs, over 70, I think, when most homes might not have even one. Chairs were definitely a luxury item. Most of us might have made do with a bench, if we were fortunate.

The oldest house on this site dates back to 1752 and Joseph Webb. But it got a Colonial Revival makeover in the early 20th century, complete with painted murals. Definitely not Colonial!

NE Parlor Webb House

Any wealthy Colonist would have opted for wallpaper, as you can see in the restored, rather restarined Isaac Stevens parlor.

Isaac Stevens Parlor

Together, these three houses, as guided by the wonderful docent Jay, tell a story of Colonial life among the wealthy. You can track how kitchen technologies changed, see the kinds of toys and picture books the children had, and witness how servants lived, including slaves who bought their freedom and built separate cabins on the same property as their employers.

Together, the occupants of the houses tell the story of how Connecticut blended the New York Dutch sensibility and Massachusetts Puritanism to form a hybrid culture of tolerance and staid conservatism, liberal values and the tendency toward inbred hysteria (as with the Connecticut history of witchcraft).

Trivia tidbit: Colonists liked to paint the back of their houses red. Why red? While not definitive, several possibilities abound. Red warded off the devil. Hmmm. Red was available from red iron oxide and when mixed with skimmed milk and lime, made a hard, durable coat. Okay. Red absorbs the sunshine, so makes the house warmer with the winter sun. Plausible, and may explain why by the 1700s, the red barn became ubiquitous. Here’s the garden view of the handsome backs of the three Colonial homes in Wethersfield.

From the rear
Wethersfield, CT, 6-4-14

While Frances Osborne Kellogg’s Homestead is much more modest than the three houses in Wethersfield, her life was plenty rich, as was her fortune. Her Osborne father bought the 1840 Smith farm near Oxford, CT in 1911. His fortune was made in the manufacture of wire corsets and hoop skirts. Let me catch my breath.

When her father passed away, Frances, now married to an architect husband Kellogg, ran the factories and subsequently sat on the boards of a bank, hospital, and church, and continued her father’s interest in funding the local library. She was a remarkable business woman, at a time when just being a woman in business was remarkable.

She married at 43, when her husband was 49. It was a first marriage for both, and they had no children. They devoted creative energy according to their passions.

Her husband became interested in breeding Holstein cows, and Ivanhoe here was one of the top bull sires, making the Osborne Homestead famous. He was a founding father of a different variety–not of a nation, but of a breed.

So with cows on the brain, I ventured up hill and down dale and through the woods to Rich’s Ice Cream. The ice cream is made from the milk from the dairy right there. I had Purple Cow, a creamy raspberry with chocolate chunks. Don’t think about it too hard. I will say, though, it topped off my day of riches.

Rich’s Ice Cream, Oxford, CT

So much in common

Posted on May 29, 2014 by admin

Going to Newport, RI means excess, so no wonder I found myself most attracted to The Elms.

The little cottage just like mine

After all, I have the most in common with Miss Julia Berwind. She and I both worked on our houses. Now, Julia did spend $1.4 million in 1901, which makes me feel better about what I’ve spent in 2014. And she only stayed there a couple of months a year there. My house is a bargain!

The Elms is considered “quiet and sophisticated” compared to the over-the-top opulence of The Breakers, etc. Certainly my turquoise cabinets and multi- colored counters would also be considered quiet in comparison to the gold and pink marble and molded plaster of Marble House.

And as a woman after my own heart, Julia loved mah jongg! She regularly played it in her “real summer home for a real family.”

Alas, that’s where the similarities end. The Elms was a “machine for entertaining,”

Welcoming you at the entrance

representing efficient, Industrial Age America. Of course, it was also Gilded Age America. So Julia had 43 servants, who worked 14 hour days.

Julia never saw “the dirt and grime” of the construction process or the parlor maids who, along with the dirt, were kept invisible. Only male servants were acceptable to see.

My favorite ballroom of the five mansions I visited was also at The Elms. It opened on all sides, so that the length of the house was accessible and visible end to end.

For the Housewarming Ball, the quadrilles started after midnight, allowing participants to show off the complex moves which could last two hours per dance. One of the 400 guests remarked he had so much fun that he never wanted to leave.

Such fun took great planning, and Julia conducted her business, like other Newport hostesses, right from her bedroom. This social life took great planning. Julia managed a $300,000 budget for the season and had to plan time well, too. She’d get mail by the sackful (and we complain about email) and had an elegant pre-printed, pre-stamped rejection letter at the ready.

For all the remaining yeses, not only did any one day require 4 to 7 clothing changes, but strict schedules had to be adhered to–one must always arrive exactly on time for any function. Too early and one embarrasses one’s hostess; too late, and one throws a kink in the works.

So please. When you are next invited to a Newport do, be on time, and don’t put your knife in your mouth! Rest assured though, when you break a dish or spill your wine, Julia will merely smile. And she will keep such meticulous records that you will not be seated next to the same dinner companion twice in a season.

Oh, and she will not call you on the telephone. How rude! The telephone is only for communicating with the servants. She will write you a note. Please respond in kind.

Chances are you won’t spend the night at The Elms. Julia only has 7 bedrooms. Don’t worry, she has 3 guest cottages nearby.

Giovanni Boldini portrait of Elizabeth Drexel Lehr, Paris, 1905

Julia and her peers didn’t have the vote and were expected to behave.

Take this story. Elizabeth Drexel Lehr was told by Harry, her husband, on her wedding night, that not only did he not love her, but that he was repulsed by her. He married her for her money, and she must avoid him everywhere but in public. They remained married for 28 years.

So as much as I like and admire Julia (and her friend Elizabeth), I’ll keep my for real cottage versus lust after her Newport one.

Rena Tobey

Lively Mind

Category Archives: History

The Story of a House

Commerce, Cassino, and Loo

Spooky

Freedom from Want

Leaf Fall Season

Sauntering in the Footsteps

Halloweed dress-up comes early

History and the quandary of why?

The theater of quirky mansions and living history

Industrial Revelation

Yankee Doodle Girl

Wedded to Art

Mum Bet

Mash-ups

Alice Paul

Arts & Ideas

Knish

Riches

So much in common

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