All Cleaned Up

We arrived at 8, and started cleaning at 10. We finished a little after 4, with three rooms and two light fixtures cleaned. Along the way, we learned a few things and answered some questions.

Following the advice of Hannah Glasse and Susanna Whatman, we began with the fireplace, and then started high and worked our way down. Dana pulled the logs from the formal parlor fireplace and cleaned the andirons, while I covered the sofette with a cloth and began to dust the looking glass. It soon became clear that no one had cleaned the looking glass in some time. I whisked the upholstered furniture (with reproduction fabric) while Dana polished the mahogany. These 18^th century techniques definitely worked.

Using an 18^th century cleaning solution of vinegar infused with lavender, we cleaned the glassware and china, and saw visible dirt residue on the rags we used to wipe, rinse, and dry the objects. We applied the same solution to the marble fireplace with similar success. We swept the floor with the round broom-corn brooms of the period and discovered just why the housekeeping guides suggested the use of damp sand, “thrown down hard onto the floor,” before dusting began. While we could collect piles of dust bunnies and dirt, they fled before the wind from our moving skirts and were hard to sweep up. Damp sand would have kept the dirt down and allowed us to sweep it up more easily—but that’s not how the floors Marsden Perry installed in the house were cleaned, so we used damp rags instead.

When we were finished, I noticed that although we had not swept the floors with herbs and sweet grasses, the formal parlor did have the faint odor of sweet broomcorn and lavender. The daily sweeping and cleaning a house with herbs, grasses, corn brooms and lavender would have been an excellent means of keeping the less pleasant smells of the 18^th century at bay.

About our clothing, we were asked that most-often-asked question of re-enactors, Aren’t you hot in those clothes?

No, we’re not. We wear linen shifts next to our skin, under the stays and petticoat, dress and apron, and once the shift is damp with sweat, you tend to stay cool. If you stop moving, you can feel chilled. We began the day in jeans and t-shirts, and felt much cooler once we’d changed into 5 layers of linen and cotton.  (This is true inside and out; I have certainly felt cooler on an 80+ degree day at Old Sturbridge Village in 1775 dress than I have in modern blouse and skirt.)

When I got home, I discovered that the diagonal bones in my stays had worked their way through the linen binding—another argument for using the earlier method of binding stays with leather, and not with linen. The busk, or flat wooden panel running down the front of my stays to provide separation and support, was wet and warped. I didn’t notice the twist in the wood until I had loosened the stay laces, and then the front of my stays started twisting! The back of the busk was wet, and the front smelled slightly of vinegar, which I must have spilled. Now that the busk is dry, it has pretty much regained its original shape, with a slight twist along its long axis.  Baleen might have greater staying power than oak, but I will compare the busk I have with some in the collection to see if they, too, have twists from use.

~Kirsten Hammerstrom, Director of Collections

Rhode Island Begins

Roger Williams's Compass-Sundial

In the beginning, there were Wampanoag and Narragansett people, among others. There were villages and crops, the ocean and the Bay. The Native Americans who lived in what is now Rhode Island had long-standing “customes, manners, and worships,” as Roger Williams called them in his 1643 “A Key into the Language of America.”

This is the point of departure for the joint exhibit, Customes, Manners and Worships: Rhode Island Begins  organized by the Rhode Island Historical Society and the Haffenreffer Museum at Brown University, currently on display in the museum at Manning Hall on Brown’s campus. Among the objects displayed are the compass and sundial shown here, owned by Roger Williams, but not (so far as we know) used by him to find his way to what is now Providence. The background is a waistcoat owned by Daniel Updike, who took up residence at Cocumcossuc in South County, on the site of what had been Roger Williams’s South County outpost. Updike’s waistcoat, though not displayed at the Haffenreffer, dates to about 1740; a very similar example is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Like the waistcoat, Mr. Updike’s wife Anstis Updike’s portrait (seen below) represents the later end of the show’s scope.

Anstis Updike, by Nehemiah Partridge

The Haffenreffer’s collections include finely-wrought examples of Native American artifacts, including a stone bear effigy pipe and a large wooden bowl. Seen together, the Native American and English artifacts give visitors a better sense of the equality of sophistication of the cultures who met in New England, and the ways in which they changed each other in the decades before King Philip’s War.

Admission to the Haffenreffer Museum is free. Museum hours are Tuesday through Sunday, from 10 to 4. The Museum is closed Mondays and Brown University holidays. Please call 401-863-2065 for more information.  Customes, Manners, and Worships closes Sunday, April 15, 2012. ~KNH

Night at the Movies

As you’re making your weekend plans don’t forget that the Historical Society still has two nights in our series of silent films produced in Rhode Island.

This Saturday’s features (7-8:30 PM at the Aldrich House) are My Lady of the Lilacs, Church with an Overshot Wheel and Inspiration. On March 12th we’ll be showing Diamonds and The Minister.

Here’s a clip from Diamonds to get a sense of what to expect. (Although the clip is silent here, there will be live piano accompaniment by Peter Freisinger at the shows.)

Trails of Memory

We had such a great turnout and so much interest in last Wednesday’s program that we wanted to post some additional information here for anyone who wasn’t able to attend or who would like further information. The title of the lecture was Trails of Memory in “The Narragansett Country”: Native and Settler Place-Traditions in Rhode Island after King Philip’s War (1675-78), and the author—NERFC fellow Christine M. DeLucia—was kind enough to provide a summary of her talk with some images of the Great Swamp area and suggestions for further reading:

Trails of Memory in “The Narragansett Country”: Native and Settler Place-Traditions in Rhode Island after King Philip’s War (1675-78)

King Philip’s War (1675-78) devastated Algonquian Indian peoples and English settlements in New England.  In its aftermath, “the Narragansett Country,” as the lands west of Narragansett Bay were then known, became contested ground as Rhode Island colonists and surviving Native peoples grappled for control of territory and stories.  This talk examined how Rhode Islanders and Narragansett tribal members have remembered and marked—or forgotten and erased—the area’s violent colonial past.  It stressed that these memories have responded to very local circumstances rather than to more abstract notions of “American” or “Indian” identities.

In the immediate aftermath of the war, surviving Narragansetts confronted dire conditions of servitude and slavery, diaspora, diminished territories, and restrictions on where they could walk, live, and participate in traditional subsistence and cultural practices.  Rhode Island colonists expanded their settlements into the newly “vacated” lands west of the Bay, and began to spin romantic legends and hauntings about certain places connected to the events of 1675-76.  They often visited and mentioned these places, particularly the grounds of King Philip’s seat at Mount Hope (Bristol) and the Great Swamp Fight/Massacre (South Kingstown).

During the Colonial Revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, antiquarians sought to re-mark the land in ways that narrated settler victory and sacrifice, and the permanent defeat and even disappearance of the Narragansetts.  Providence-born Zachariah Allen (1795-1882) was one of the most active proponents of these colonial place-claims.  Besides being a prominent textile entrepreneur and President of the Rhode Island Historical Society, Allen wrote extensively on King Philip’s War, escorted local historical enthusiasts out to the conflict’s important “spots,” and enthusiastically supported the installation of monuments on these grounds.  In the same period nativist Yankee Rhode Islanders tended to disparage living Narragansetts, critiquing them as “mixed-bloods” and denying their claims to lands in South County.  Political pressures culminated when the State passed the Detribalization Act (1880) and dismantled reservation lands.

Despite these constraints, Narragansett peoples continued to articulate their own senses of geography and history, which can be read today in publications like the tribal magazine The Narragansett Dawn of the 1930s.  The tribe and allies continued to gather annually at the Great Swamp site, making it a place of protest, remembrance, and regeneration throughout the twentieth century.  Today memory remains contested in this area.  An ethically important project is unfolding at Nipsachuck (North Smithfield), where multiple tribes, local historians, and state offices are collaborating to re-interpret and preserve a battlefield from King Philip’s War.  The Narragansetts, formally recognized as a tribe since 1983, are active contributors to this work.  The regional “memoryscape” will evolve so long as its many inhabitants feel strongly, and even sharply disagree, about the meanings and ongoing effects of seventeenth-century violence.

Reading Suggestions:

 

• Allen, Zachariah.  “The Rhode Island System of Treatment of the Indians, and of Establishing Civil and Religious Liberty” (1876).
• Brown, John, III, and Paul Robinson.  “‘The 368 Years’ War’: The Conditions of Discourse in Narragansett Country.”  In Cross-Cultural Collaboration: Native Peoples and Archaeology in the Northeastern United States, ed. Jordan E. Kerber (2006), 59-75.
• Herndon, Ruth Wallis and Ella Wilcox Sekatau (The Narragansett Tribe).  “The Right to a Name: Narragansett People and Rhode Island Officials in the Revolutionary Era,” Ethnohistory 44:3 (Summer 1997), 433-62.
• Mandell, Daniel.  Tribe, Race, History: Native Americans in Southern New England, 1780–1880 (2007).
• O’Brien, Jean. Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England (2010).
• Rubertone, Patricia.  Grave Undertakings: An Archaeology of Roger Williams and the Narragansett Indians (2001); and “Memorializing the Narragansett: Place-Making and Memory-Keeping in the Aftermath of Detribalization.” In Archaeologies of Placemaking: Monuments, Memories and Engagement in Native North America (2008).
• Simmons, William. Spirit of the New England Tribes: Indian History and Folklore, 1620-1984 (1986).
• The Narragansett Dawn tribal magazine (1930s).  RIHS E99.N16  D39.

 

 

–Be sure to check out our Events Calendar for more information about RIHS events.

 

The Moment is at Hand

The Historical Society’s book sale starts this evening at 5:00 (and runs to 8:00). Tomorrow’s hours are 10:00 am to 4:00 pm. Don’t miss the chance to pick up some fun books.

40%, As Long As It Isn’t a Toy

If you’ve ever wondered what the import tariff on tallow candles, tamarind juice, or any number of other goods (including those not beginning with the letter ‘T’) in 1923 was, you’ll want to pick up a copy of Vandegrift’s United States Tariff, 1922 at the RIHS Booksale on December 3rd and 4th. It’s a great place to learn that it would have cost you an extra 30% to get a toy tambourine into the country.

How To Become an Inventor

(Hint: It seems to involve model trains.)

How to Become an Inventor offers a series of experiments like “The Magnetic Swan” (the would-be inventor can move it around on the water with a magnet-tipped wand) that introduce the reader to the most likely fields for future discoveries (such as magnetism).

Anyone looking to jump-start their career as an inventor will want to look for this on sale at the Historical Society Book Sale on December 3rd and 4th.

Guides to the Past on Sale

Time-travelling visitors to Boston or Providence shouldn’t miss the Historical Society’s upcoming booksale on December 3rd and 4th. Here are two items that will make finding your way around 1880s Providence and 1920s Boston a lot easier:

King’s Pocketbook of Providence (1882) is laid out in an alphabetized directory fashion, with entries on Providence buildings, societies and events of the time as well as longer entries offering capsule overviews of aspects of the city like is school system or the local geology.

 

Boston, A Guide Book, by Edwin M. Bacon (1928) follows the more familiar pattern of guidebooks from Baedeckers to Rick Steves. It includes some nice maps and images of Boston at the time.

Both books would be useful not only to time-travelling tourists but also anyone working on a historical novel or just doing research on the cities in question.

Instructive Alphabet

Here’s the first post highlighting one of the items we’ll have available at the upcoming RIHS booksale:

The Instructive Alphabet, New York: Samuel S. Wood, Baltimore, 1818.

A small book for teaching children their alphabet, this little book features numerous wood engravings like the ones above. Included at the end is William Cowper’s anti-slavery poem The Negro’s Complaint.

RIHS Booksale

The Rhode Island Historical Society will hold a book sale on Friday, December 3 from 5 pm to 8 pm and Saturday, December 4, 2010 from 10 am to 5 pm at the Aldrich House, 110 Benevolent Street, in Providence.  Holiday gifts and historical treasures will be on sale to benefit the Society’s Library collections.

The Library will make available fine examples of the history of Rhode Island and other New England states in printed form, including genealogies, local histories, biographies, and an eclectic mix of rare and unusual printed materials. We’ll be highlighting a few examples here on the blog in the upcoming weeks.

The Society’s Library at 121 Hope Street, Providence, has been gathering books for almost 200 years.  Its collections of printed, manuscript, and graphics materials have been built over time through donations, bequests and purchases and that process is ongoing. Like all Library collections, these are continuously updated to maintain a vibrant, relevant, and effective collection.  Outdated books are regularly weeded to make room for new acquisitions.  As original historical materials comprise a large part of the collections, the Historical Society has a different definition of “outdated” than many institutions, but selling duplicates of books, and books whose scholarship has been superseded by newer research, helps the Society continue to buy unique Rhode Island materials and make them available to the  public. Other book sale items include donated materials that are outside the scope of the Society’s mission to collect, preserve, and share the history of the Ocean State.

It may seem ironic to sell old books to purchase “new” old books, but it is essential for any historical library to have a fund to acquire historic books, documents and objects that come on the market, such as the recently acquired photograph of late 19^th century Rhode Island African-American opera singer Sissieretta Jones, also known as the Black Patti, as well as materials that reflect new scholarship such as Tomas Avila’s Rhode Island Latino political empowerment (Milenio Publishing: 2007 ).

RIHS has the largest and most important historical collection documenting Rhode Island history, including manuscripts, printed items, photographs, maps, and film available for public viewing.

To help fund the acquisition and preservation of RIHS Collections, donate: https://secure.groundspring.org/dn/index.php?aid=21764