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

ON THE SECOND DAY AFTER IRENE — ALL IS WELL (AND DRY) IN THE RIHS LIBRARY

As we enter Hurricane Season in Providence we count ourselves lucky to have seen Hurricane  IRENE pass by without causing much more damage other than trees down and power outages.  A look back in time to September 21, 1938 and we can begin to understand better what few people remember—the destruction and human suffering that came with the Hurricane on that date.

Front page of the Providence Journal Sept. 22, 1938

Our Library Newspaper Collection helps us understand the story of the Great Hurricane of 1938.  The Library is the repository for the Rhode Island Newspaper Project and houses a microfilm collection of almost every Rhode Island newspaper ever published.  To find out what newspaper titles exist for a particular time and place for Rhode Island and beyond search  Library of Congress Chronicling America  Historic American Newspapers.

A glance at the headlines in the Providence Journal  of Tuesday September 20, 1938, the day before the tragedy, shows how unprepared Rhode Island was for the approach of  the storm that was making its way towards Florida before heading up the East Coast.

 “FLORIDA CLEARS DECKS TO FACE HURRICANE WHICH MAY NOT COME, Weather Bureau Reports Severe Storm Sweeping Toward Coast with 75 Mile-an-Hour Winds Has Changed Its Course” –Providence Journal 20 Sept 1938

The next day, September 21, 1938, the front page of the Providence Journal announced what all the readers in the area already knew – nature can be overpowering and human life fragile in the path of a hurricane.

This extra edition of the Providence Journal was printed on the presses of a rival paper, The Woonsocket Call, because of the flooding and power outage in the City of Providence.

To research other monster storms in Rhode Island’s history, The Great Hurricane of 1815,  CAROL 31 August 1954 and BOB 19 August 1991, visit the RIHS Library to find newspapers, photographs, books, oral histories and film on your topic.  The image below is from a book in the Library’s Print Collection titled  The Complete Historical Record of New England’s Stricken Area September 21, 1938  published by The Woonsocket Call (Providence, RI, 1938).

Images from The Woonsocket Call photo essay of 1938

The 1938 photo caption reads as follows: [left] “EAST PROVIDENCE, R.I. The storm took heavy toll of shipping as it piled up scores of ships like the Standard Oil Tanker shown here which lies battered and broken on the rocky Rhode Island shores – Providence Journal”  [right] “WARREN, RI. The ship “G. H. Church” snuggled between a gas tank and a telegraph poll. Note warning to boil water before using. –Providence Journal.”

NEXT WEEK  the Collections Blog will have details on Hannah Farber’s upcoming talk about Rhode Island’s maritime insurance industry—  COMMERCE, THE NATION AND THE ATLANTIC: American Marine Insurers in the Napoleonic  Era –  at 6:30 pm on 21 Sept 2011 at the RIHS Library, 121 Hope Street., Providence, RI.

– KPC

The Elephant

Unfortunately, this post just missed Elephant Appreciation Day, but better late than never.

“The Elephant”* is a broadside advertising the display in Providence of “the most respectable Animal in the World,” a friendly (but paper-of-consequence-stealing) elephant on its way from Philadelphia to celebrate the Harvard Commencement. Displays like this one were certainly nothing new in an Age of Wonder like the late eighteenth-century: Providence residents had been entertained by an automaton the previous November. And many aspects of the November performance are in place here: once again children get half-price on the $.25 admission, and every effort has been made not to offend the “genteel Company”.

A place was apparently “fitted up” for the elephant in a store behind the Coffee House, which was located where the RISD Auditorium now stands. This also happened to be the location of the publishers of the broadside, John Carter and William Wilkinson, and the broadside offers an interesting example of the goings-on of a print shop of the time. A variant of the broadside depicted here also exists**, but in place of the woodcut illustration of the elephant is a line of type decorations, and the text describing the duration of the elephant’s stay (“till the 8th of July only”) reads simply, “where he will remain a few Days only….”

Thanks to a 1951 article by George G. Goodwin, we also know a lot more about the elephant itself: Her name (Old Bet)***, the fact that she was a two-year-old elephant brought from India and that she was the first elephant ever brought to America. We have Nathaniel Hawthorne’s father to thank, in part, for the account of Bet’s journey to America, as he was a passenger on the ship that made the months-long voyage, and he recorded the experience in a journal.

The end of Bet’s story in America is uncertain, but there is the possibility she was shot by a boy (possibly in Rhode Island) and killed. Whatever the case, Bet’s story is parallel in many ways to a much earlier travelling celebrity pachyderm:

 

Like Bet, the rhinoceros that was the basis for Durer’s famous illustration made a lengthy water voyage, in this case travelling from India to Spain in 1515. The rhinoceros became an international sensation, and for those who couldn’t travel to see it in person, Durer’s impressive (if not entirely accurate) woodcut illustration conveyed a sense of its strength and power. (Perhaps our elephant broadside filled a similar purpose in addition to its advertising role.) While on its way to the Pope, the ship carrying the Rhinoceros wrecked, and the rhinoceros was killed. (Listen to the full story in one of the BBC’s “A History of the World in 100 Objects” podcasts: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00tn9vp .)

Shipwrecks, gunshots and a host of other maladies have been the unfortunate side-effect of human interaction with astonishing  and impressive members of the animal world. Among many such cases is the story of the elephant whose difficulties were “heightened by the great quantity of ale the spectators continually gave it”:****

UPDATE: We should have mentioned this great documentary film project to tell “the story of what happens when elephants and Rhode Islanders meet”.

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* Broadsides, 1797. Alden #1532.

 

** Alden #1531.

*** Although the broadside refers to the elephant as male.

**** “An Antiquary of the Last Century,” Littell’s Living Age, 6th ser., vol. 2 (14 April 1894): 94-106.

Providence Vaudeville

“Spring of ’17“, an online resource created by Micah Salkind, recreates the topography of Providence theaters in the early twentieth century. The site offers six walking tours (use the historic images and online map for a virtual tour or print out one of the Google Maps and hit the streets) and a downloadable audio tour.

Definitely worth a visit.

Providence WaterFire, 1784

According to the website for Providence’s WaterFire, the summer event requires “hundreds of volunteers” devoting “thousands of hours”. But for residents of Providence in 1784, all they had to do was walk out to the river.

“Observations on the Luminous appearance of the River Water at Providence on the Night following the 16 of Sept. AD 1784″* is the title Thomas Truman gave to his brief account of that unusual night. He opens the story as follows:**

On the last evening I attended the philosophical lecture of the celebrated Dr. Moyers in which he discoursed on the nature and properties of phosphorous natural and artificial and among other matters he endeavored to account for the luminous appearance of the sea at certain times as noticed by mariners, particularly in times of boisterous weather.

Certainly conveniently coincidental timing. Truman continues his introduction by offering the Dr.’s opinion on the cause of the luminous appearance:

It was his opinion that this appearance was occasioned by putrid substances in the sea water.

Truman was a doctor (as well as a dentist, bookseller, scrivener and general merchant***), and on the night in question he was on his way home from a patient and discussing Dr. Moyers’s hypothesis with a fellow medical professional named Dr. Bowen. Not long after parting from his friend, he was called back by Bowen’s “young man,” who was sent to retrieve Truman:

When I came I observed a white luminous [streak on] the water extending from the bridge…

… it was so light as to shine through the bridge as much as though several candles had been under it.

At which point the experimenting began. Truman and Bowen first went to the steps beside the Market House and stirred the water with their canes, verifying that disturbing the water increased the brightness of the light. Phase two of the research:

We now got a basin and took up some of the water [and] upon stirring it with our hand it appeared full of small round particles of fire and gave considerable light [and] some of the firey particles adhered to the hand and remained unextinguished for several seconds.

The basin was then used to pour water out on the ground and then to splash it on the walls of the Market House (still standing after 235 years of abuse). But back to the central question: Is Dr. Moyers on the right track?

Suspecting that this appearance might be occasioned by some scum or filth mixed with or floating upon the water we got a light and found teh water perfectly transparent and colorless.

Worrying that their sample was too limited, the doctors next hired someone with a boat to bring back a dish from out on the water, which turned out to be just as clear.

The next stage of experimentation:

We took [a basin of the luminous water] to a pump of fresh water and filled the basin. This so far from extinguishing the fire seemed to increase it. The particles indeed were smaller but more numerous and were visible for more than a minute.

Onsite investigation having been exhausted, it was time to return to the lab:

We now procured some clear white vials, holding each about eight ounces, and filled two of them at the Market House steps, two at Mr. Chace’s Wharf, and one was sent to the lower end of the town to be filled there…. The vial sent down town was not returned.

Truman brought his vials home and retired to “a room so dark that nothing could be perceived” and proceeded to his tests. First he determined that shaking three vials made more light than shaking a single vial. The second discovery was one of the typical moments of scientific serendipity:

One thing I observed which was a little curious: there was in the dark room a bunch of asparagus hung up for the flies to light upon****, which were very numerous upon the vials [and] being shaken, so much light was produced that the flies took wing and made that humming noise which they usually do upon a candle being brought suddenly into the room where they are at rest.

Dr. Truman’s experimentations continued until 1:15.

The nineteenth century would see much more research and clarification of the type of  bioluminescence Truman observed that night. And it was curiosity like his that would make it possible.

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* Truman Papers, Rhode Island Historical Society, MSS 762.

** Spelling and punctuation have been modernized.

*** Providence Gazette, 22 December 1781 and in 1784.

**** ?

Westminster Stories

According to Florence Simister*, Westminster Street in Providence was named by residents of the street who eventually hoped to set up a town of the same name, separate from the “tyrannous rule of the men in the old part of Providence” on the other side of the river.

Needless to say, that plan didn’t work out, and this weekend you can find out more about the street at The Museum of Westminster Street outdoor exhibition between Dorrance and Union Streets on Westminster. Its creators describe it as “a diorama telling stories of people and buildings on two blocks of Westminster Street.”

And if the exhibition inspires an interest in digging deeper into the history of the street, the Library offers a number of great opportunities for that as well. In addition to plenty of images and maps that feature the street in its evolution through the years, you’ll also find collections documenting life on Westminster Street, including:

• William Oscar Cooke , who was a lumber dealer. When he started out in Providence sometime around 1850, Westminster Street was known as High Street.
• The sign of the “Bunch of Grapes” hung at 291 Westminster from 1891 to 1972 and advertised the Gladding’s department store.
• The Franklin Lyceum met at 62 Westminster, where members debated topics of moment and heard orations from the likes of Edgar Allen Poe and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Find more Westminster connections through our online catalog or our website.

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* Florence Parker Simister, Streets of the City: An Anecdotal History of Providence. Providence: Mowbray, 1968. Pages 127-8.

Christ Church Records

With this post we’re beginning what will hopefully become a regular feature, our collection of the month, and our first collection to be featured is the records of Christ Church (MSS 9001-C).

Formed in the late 1830s*, the congregation of Christ Church Episcopal in Providence is notable as the first African-American congregation to be admitted to the Episcopal diocese.

Early on the congregation struggled with debt assumed in the process of constructing the church building in 1842. By the early 1850s it had ceased to operate and most of the members had transitioned to St. Stephen’s Church.

One of the most important early pastors of the church was Eli Worthington Stokes, who led the church from 1846-49. Stokes left Christ Church and Providence to be a pastor in Liberia, where he died in 1867, as the following excerpt from The African Repository** indicates:

The image above is taken from the “Record Book” of the church, which comprises our collection of their materials. The page depicted covers the period from 17-29 May 1842, which includes the climactic moment of the Dorr Rebellion,*** the attempt to capture the state arsenal in Providence. The event is noted in the first entry at the top of the page. Only a few days later, on May 24th, the record book records a fire at the church, set “by some person or persons” and causing $500 in damages.

Much of the existing second-hand knowledge of the congregation’s history derives from the diary of Bishop John Prentiss Kewley Henshaw, which is found in another of the Historical Society’s collections (MSS 1133). Entries relating to Christ Church begin in 1843 and continue through to the church’s dissolution. Henshaw’s materials arrived at the Historical Society separately from the Christ Church materials, providing an example of how items from across the Historical Society’s holdings can work in tandem to illuminate a historical moment.

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* A limited account of the church is available in George F. Bragg’s History of the Afro-American Group of the Episcopal Church (1922), available online at http://docsouth.unc.edu/church/bragg/bragg.html#bragg102 .

 

** Vol. 44, no. 7 (July, 1867).

*** A forthcoming issue of Rhode Island History will include an article on the Dorr War.

Diamonds

The Historical Society is pleased to announce that thanks to a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation, we’ll be preserving an important example of early Rhode Island film making.

In 1915 the Eastern Film Company of Providence created a feature crime drama called Diamonds. It is one of the many films that Eastern Film Company made between 1914 and 1917, but one of the few that survive and one of only 14 films owned by the RIHS that were created by Eastern.  The exact plot for the film is not clear due to the unstable condition of the film, but we do know it includes a scene at the Narragansett Pier, an iconic locale in southern Rhode Island.  In addition to providing documentary evidence of Rhode Island at the time, Diamonds is also important in the history of film making as an example of an early film created before California became the dominant location for the film industry.

Diamonds is part of the Gordon Collection at the RIHS, a large collection of nitrate films found in a warehouse in Providence in the 1940s and donated in the 1970s.  No documentation on any of these films survives, apart from what little was written about them in the contemporary press.

Diamonds currently exists only as a negative on cellulose nitrate film.  Nitrate was the first plastic used as the base for photographic negatives and is very unstable and quite flammable (see the video below).  Small rolls of film deemed unusable would sometimes be sold by film companies to kids who would light one end like a fuse and watch the film go up like flashpaper.  Nitrate film burns fast and bright.  The replacement of nitrate plastic with the more stable acetate plastic, aka “safety” film, happened slowly starting in 1908 with the production of the first safety film for still cameras.  The production and use of nitrate plastic for use in photography didn’t end completely until the 1960s.*.

In addition to this inherent flaw, Diamonds is also showing signs of decomposition, thanks to poor storage conditions earlier in its life. So for these reasons—and also in the hope of making the film more accessible—we’ll soon be working with Cinema Arts, a Pennsylvania film restorer to create preservation copies of the film**. We’ll also be creating a DVD copy to make the film easier to use for researchers, and we hope to screen a copy of the movie during an event next year.

Through a similar collaborative process, the Historical Society has already preserved a number of important early films, including My Lady of the Lilacs, an image from which appears below.

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*National Park Service. Museum Handbook, Part I, Appendix M, Management of Cellulose Nitrate and Cellulose Ester Film, 1999. http://www.nps.gov/museum/publications/MHI/AppendM.pdf

** Tech Specs: One 35mm fine grain master(wet gate from original nitrate negative), one 35mm duplicate negative, one 35mm black and white projection print, and one Beta SP video master.

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.

Odd Fellows Indeed

Secret societies have an enduring appeal and they’ve prompted speculation about their motivations and influence for a long time. Why are they secretive? What powerful people are members, and how does their membership affect their decisions? Popular fiction and movies frequently base their plots on groups like the Freemasons or Illuminati or other shadowy organizations.

But secret societies aren’t entirely serious all the time. The item depicted above* is a compilation of three separate pieces of printed ephemera dealing with TRIAEOAOF: The Rhode Island Association of Economical and Odd Fellows (also known to detractors as The Rascally and Ignorant Abominable Officious Evil Arrogant Odd Fellows).

The top item is a brief (but typographically fascinating) announcement of a Saturday evening meeting in 1826. It employs backward type, upside-down type, and type of varying sizes to express either chaotic whimsy or a parody of secretive encrypted messages:

It is attached to the second item, a “circular” providing more details about the event, which must have been an interesting affair if it followed the description here:

The final item is a ticket to the meeting, filled out for Pardon Miller. The 1826 Providence city directory lists Miller as a watchmaker located at 47 Cheapside**. The directory also lists a John Wilder, who is described as an inn-keeper at 18 Market Square, which is presumably where the event was held.

According to a memoir of the period, TRIAEOAOF was founded as a debating society in 1825 and took upon itself the mission of properly celebrating historical anniversaries such as Washington’s birthday.*** Apparently the group’s members were drawn from Providence’s most important and powerful citizens, and the group was able to exert real influence in state politics.

Although similarly named, TRIAEOAOF apparently bore no relation to the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, which also later operated in Providence. The Odd Fellows Directory**** of 1845 offers a brief history of the organization, which wasn’t founded in Providence until 1829, three years later than the item discussed here. Outlining the founding of the Rhode Island IOOF—a much more serious and religiously-focused organization than TRIAEOAOF, to gauge by the Directory—the author describes “a strong prejudice which was felt toward all secret societies”, and the IOOF was forced to close between 1832 (only three years after their founding) and 1843.

RIHS collections include much more material related to organizations like these, including the papers of the Rhode Island branch of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows.

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* Broadsides-G1157, 1826

** He is also listed in James Gibbs’ “Horologic Rhode Island Visited.”  Bulletin of the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors 14 (1970): 807. His brief biography includes mention of his being a first lieutenant in the Militia.

***Almon Danforth Hodges, Almon Danforth Hodges and his neighbors: An autobiographical sketch of a typical old New Englander. [T.R. Marvin & Son, Printers], 1909. Pages 153-6 detail the founding of TRIAEOAOF and its activities.

**** B. F. Moore, The Odd Fellows Directory. Providence: B. F. Moore, 1845. HS 969 .R4 O3 1845.