Autumn

Now that autumn is in full swing, it’s time to do something with all the apples you’ve picked. To aid in the process, we offer this broadside advertisement from 1863 for a cast iron cider mill:

It looks like the perfect historical apparatus for some of the historical fruit over at the Beineke Library.

This particular grinder has the advantage of speed (60-70 bushels / hour), although from the description, it sounds like the assembly process (“wooding the grinder”) makes Ikea furniture instructions look simple:

Once you have your historic fruit and machinery, you’ll still need a manual: The Cider Maker’s Handbook is available online and also in the real world. In addition to a lot of practical guidance on making the best fermented cider, the book also describes cider presses like this one, a near sibling of a printing press:

Robots in Providence

The item described here answers the age-old question of what to do on a Saturday afternoon. In this case, the Saturday afternoon in question is November 19, 1796 at 3:00 PM. And the entertainment is a demonstration of a “Chinese automaton figure”.

Depicted above is a broadside from our graphics collection (Broadsides, 1796)*, which advertises the exhibition. An automaton is essentially a robot, and people have been building automata for centuries, ranging from programmable robots of the 1st century BCE, through a medieval floating robot band to automata that are still produced today (including the Chuck E Cheese animatronic animals).

In this case, the automaton performed “feats on the rope”—which, judging from the woodcut illustration, included playing a triangle on a tightrope: seemingly an impressive accomplishment for a robot even today. All this would be exciting enough in its own right, but this performance gains extra intrigue by showcasing a “Chinese” automaton. In 1796, it’s likely that the average Rhode Islander would never have seen anyone from China before. In fact, Chinese settlement in Rhode Island wouldn’t begin in earnest until late in the nineteenth century: the 1865 census reported only a single Chinese resident in the entire state.** As Lena Reynoso points out, “the first ‘foreigners’ exhibited in America often had no pulse.”***

Pieces of ephemeral advertising like this also offer a unique view into the social anxieties of their time. Note, for instance, that four separate rooms were to be provided in Mr. Thurber’s Tavern, ensuring that “Ladies or select Companies will be less incommoded” and that a police officer will be in attendance “to keep good Order.” Apparently the promoter, “Mr. Cressin”—who also toured the country with a pair of monkeys named Gibonne and Coco—was forced to relocate his show from Newburyport’s rowdy wharf area.****

And what was the cost of this entertaining afternoon? There are a number of ways to measure the relative worth of a 1796 dollar to a 2009 dollar, and they give a range of values for what that $.25 would be worth today:

• $4.20: A little less than today’s matinée movie ticket, if measured by the most literal scale, the Consumer Price Index.
• $68.99: A discount ticket to a Broadway show, if measured as a portion of the typical wage of an unskilled worker.
• $8,601.29: Buying a plasma widescreen TV and home theater sound system, if measured as a relative share of the Gross Domestic Product.

Throwing out the high value, it’s clear that a visit to the automaton exhibition would have been an expensive, if not prohibitively so, afternoon or evening of entertainment. But probably worth every penny.

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* Alden, #1506

** See Patrick T. Conley, Rhode Island Ethnic Heritage Fact Sheets. Providence: Rhode Island Publications Society, 1980. pp. 34-6.

*** Lena Reynoso, “Tourism, Bodies and Display in America 1769-1900.”  Early America Review (Winter/Spring 2008). http://www.earlyamerica.com/review/2008_winter_spring/popular-american-amusements.html. (Part of Archiving Early America, an ad-supported website)

**** Scott C. Martin, Cultural change and the market revolution in America, 1789-1860. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005.

Lincoln and Rhode Island

In the spirit of the widespread celebrations of Abraham Lincoln’s 200th birthday, we’ll be highlighting a few of the Lincoln-related items in our collections over the next week or so. (Many of the items mentioned will be on display in an exhibition of Lincolniana at the Aldrich House. Also, be sure to attend “An Evening with Lincoln” on February 12th at the First Unitarian Church. See the RIHS website for more details.)

The first item is a broadside poem titled “Lincoln Lies Sleeping” by Nathan Upham. The poem is a quite melancholy dirge (a good deal of “bewailing” and “deep gloom”) that also manages to rise to a political crescendo in which Lincoln offers a posthumous prayer for the forgiveness of John Wilkes Booth and the nation rallies for unity. The somewhat maudlin text is matched by a melody taken from Stephen Foster’s “Under the Willow She’s Sleeping,” a song in which a mother laments the death of her child.

Broadsides of the poem seem to have been quite popular: Edwin Wolf’s American Song Sheets (entry #1263) lists five separate publications; Brown University’s Lincoln Broadsides (search for “Lincoln Lies Sleeping”) provides images of three of them and another two not listed in Wolf.  This is the only variation published in Providence, and the imprint credits “Theodore B. Stayner,” whose only other publication seems to be “Wake Nicodemus,” a widely-published song. Publishing may have been a temporary occupation for Stayner: the 1900 census includes a 59 year old “Theodore B. Stayner” who listed his occupation as “advertiser.”

Lincoln’s assassination prompted national mourning, so it comes as no surprise that “Lincoln Lies Sleeping” is just one example of printed Lincoln ephemera. In addition to Nathan Upham’s poem, a Louise Upham offered “The Nation is Weeping”, which set a similar poem to the same melody.

The Providence response to the Lincoln’s assassination will be the topic of a future post, as will another broadside—one that is also among Rhode Island’s earliest imprints.

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—Additional Resources—

For background information on broadsides, see The Encyclopedia of Ephemera.

To view more early broadsides, try:

• “An American Time Capsule: Three Centuries of Broadsides and Other Printed Ephemera” (Part of the Library of Congress’ American Memory project. Includes nearly 200 Rhode Island related broadsides.)
• “Dying Speeches & Bloody Murder” (The Harvard Law School Library’s collection of over 500 crime broadsides.)
• The English Broadside Ballad Archive & The Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads