Monthly Archives: November 2020

The Dance Will Go On!

There is no contest for me: my favorite Salem event has always been the Christmas Dance at Hamilton Hall: I have never missed it in all the years I’ve lived in Salem, even in the one year I had to go alone. Last year I was in terrible pain from sciatica, but I still hobbled over there and stayed for as long as possible. It’s just that important to me. Anything related to Hamilton Hall is a women’s history topic, very appropriate for my #SalemSuffrageSaturday posts, as women have worked in the Hall, danced in the Hall, held fairs and other fundraising events in the Hall for a variety of causes, and supported the Hall in myriad ways for its two+ centuries. Women continue to support the Hall through two major fundraising events which date to the period right after World War II, when the Hall was in dire need of repairs: the annual Christmas (now Holiday) Dance and Lecture Series, traditionally held on Thursday mornings in February and March. I served as President of the Hall for six years, and on its board before and after, so I know how very, very important the funds from these events are: when we received the checks from the Dance Committee (all ladies) and the Ladies’ Committee which runs the Lecture Series, we breathed a sign of relief. The Hall was built by subscription, and incorporated only in 1986: at that time it had a very small endowment, and it still does: events have always supported it, making an event-less 2020 a very precarious time. But as always has been the case, the ladies rose to the occasion: the Lecture Series will be virtual, increasing accessibility for many people as it always sold out in a week or so, as will the Holiday “Dance”, with some very special patronesses.

I’m so happy about this invitation and event! It combines two endeavors which are very important to me: the preservation of the Hall and its traditions and the showcasing of some remarkable women of Salem who have not received the attention they deserve. There’s a long tradition of naming patronesses for dances at the Hall; these hostesses ensured the success of everything from military balls to debutante assemblies. When the Christmas Dance began, patronesses (and now patrons) became as integral to its popularity as the famous bourbon punch (which I am now realizing that I’ve referred to as rum punch in posts past. What can I say? It always knocked me out). I was a patroness about ten years ago and it was not only an honor but also great fun: waiters with silver trays of champagne kept coming over and people bow and curtsy to you—what could be better? When the chair of the Dance Committee notified me that this year’s dance would go on virtually with patronesses from the past , I was thrilled: what a perfect way to recognize the Suffrage Centennial in this challenging year! I was happy to put forth some candidates, but the ladies of the Dance Committee made their choices, and it was all their idea. I’m just thrilled to see Margery, Mary, Elizabeth, Sarah (Symonds), Nancy, Louise, Clarissa and Sarah (Sherman) get their Salem due! Especially Nancy, whom I think of whenever I step inside the Hall, toiling away in the hot downstairs kitchen on the Rumford Roaster, while everyone was dancing in the ballroom upstairs.

Post-war Patronesses in a photo belonging to my friend Becky Putnam: staring directly into the camera, while in a perfect curtsy, third from the left, is her lovely mother Rosamond Putnam; Debutantes in 1969 in curtsy—-sorry for the quality but I wanted you to see the extended-front-leg curtsy which I found difficult to do when I was a patroness—they do too, although they really had to go low! My two favorite Hamilton Hall dresses: left is vintage Ceil Chapman from the late 1950s which I wore in 2004; right is from 2017. For some reason I cannot find a photo of myself as a patroness–if anyone has one, let me know! Even though there will be no dance IN the Hall this year, it is still as dressed up for Historic Salem’s virtual Christmas in Salem tour. Here is Jetsan, who belongs to current Hall president Michael Selbst, exhausted from his decorating efforts. 

Hamilton Hall Holiday Dance link: a video will be uploaded for ticket-holders on December 19 featuring the patronesses and dance history. To the Ladies!


The Mayflower Magazine

Happy Thanksgiving! Those of you who have followed the blog for a while know that I’m a big fan of graphic design and typography, especially from the earlier part of the last century. I love fonts from the entire era of print actually, and script as well now that I think about it, and paper: so when it all comes together in an integrated design, I’m pretty impressed. It’s been such a weighty few months, with the pandemic, and the election, and hours and hours of writing for me everyday: I think I’m going to get a bit lighter for the next month or so, to lift my spirits and yours! I’m beginning with this very festive magazine/catalogue from the late nineteenth and early 20th centuries, titled The Mayflower. It has nothing to do with the ship Mayflower, or Plymouth, or the Pilgrims: it’s all about flowers—and the most robust lettering and chromolithography I have ever seen.

The covers might be somewhat sedate (except for this last one above), but as soon as you delve inside: wow! color—so vibrant you need sunglasses. The magazine was an advertisement for the big botanical business of John Lewis Childs, one of several garden entrepreneurs of this era and the first to establish a mail-order seed business. He created an entire town on Long Island named for his product: Floral Park. The Mayflower was published from 1885 to 1906, offering gardening tips and seed packets to an international audience as well as 2 or 3 colored plates in each issue. Childs also issued seasonal seed catalogs with the same combination of flourishing lettering and vibrant plates of perfect plants, or perhaps I should say too-perfect plants.

The Mayflower magazine covers from Magazineart.org (a great website!); many more Childs seed catalogs at the Smithsonian.


Fair Ladies

Columbus is persona non grata these days, of course, but a hundred years ago and more his day was big in Salem and elsewhere, and the Columbian Exposition of 1893 was even bigger. The Essex Institute was charged with furnishing an entire room in the Massachusetts State building, a first-floor reception room no less, and so a committee was formed (led by two women, Mrs. Grace A. Oliver and Mrs. H.M. Brooks) to choose the Salem items which would go to Chicago: the complete catalogue of their choices is here. (How cool would it be to reproduce this room? I bet it would be a classic expression of Colonial Revivalism.) While I as looking through it (for probably the 100th time!), I noticed that Salem items were included in other exhibits as well, including the Education, Transportation, Liberal Arts, Fine Arts, Government, and Justice buildings, and the “Woman’s Building” of which I had never heard! So I read all about it.

Prints and Postcards of the Woman’s Building, Smithsonian and University of Maryland Digital Collections.

After the organizers of the Exposition agreed to a separate woman’s building (and not to an African-American one), a Board of Lady Managers was created to choose its design, content and programs. Bertha Palmer, the president of said board, insisted that the building be designed by a female architect, and Sophia Hayden, a new graduate of MIT’s pioneering architectural program, was chosen, based on the conformity of her design to the overall aesthetics of the  “White City”. Poor Miss Hayden: this would turn out to be her first and last commission, as she experienced some sort of mental breakdown during the accelerated construction process. The official program lists the exhibits, which follow the general fair’s lead in their mix of handicraft and fine arts, but were made exclusively by women. Large murals were commissioned for the interior “Gallery of Honor”, including Mary Cassatt’s “Modern Women” triptych which was destroyed at some point in the deconstruction of the fair, and thus only exists in photographs. Lucia Fairchild Fuller’s Women of Plymouth, seen below in a photograph by Amanda Brewster Sewall, has survived, fortunately: it was “lost” for a century or so, but “discovered” on the walls of the Blow Me Down Grange Hall & The Attic Antique Shoppe in Plainfield, New Hampshire, where Fuller and her family lived.

Lost Cassatt and “found” Fuller: from the Blow Me Down Grange Hall and Attic Antique Shoppe facebook page.

Somewhere in that cavernous Gallery of Honor were the three works of Salem artist Harriet Frances Osborne (1846-1913), including her etching of Chestnut Street, below. I zoomed in on as many photos as I could find and could not find them. She also had a portrait of Nathaniel Hawthorne in the Massachusetts Building, making her one of the most exhibited Salem artists in Chicago—-I think only Ross Turner had more. I’ve been meaning to get to Harriet’s diaries in the Phillips Library for a while, but the pandemic and the book have made that impossible. So I don’t have much to tell you other than that she was an art teacher at Miss Cleveland’s School in the famed “Studio” on lower Chestnut Street: on the right in her etching. This must have been a major highlight in her life, and I wish I could say more to illustrate or confirm that hypothesis, but I’m at a loss for now: Harriet, part II in 2021, I promise! I’m not even sure if she made it to Chicago, but I hope she did.

Miss Osborne’s Chestnut Street, courtesy Historic New England; Maud Howe Elliott’s Art and Handicraft in the Woman’s Building (1894) from its Alice Morse Earle-esque cover, really conveys the “spirit” of the Woman’s Building; a few more recent books on the Woman’s Building.


Mother Harriet Maxwell

This entire year of posts exploring the experiences and achievements of Salem women on #SalemSuffrageSaturdays has not featured a single immigrant: a big slight given the important role of immigration in our nation’s, and city’s history. It certainly wasn’t deliberate: I’ve been working with the sources available to me and so far no émigré has emerged from them. But today, finally, I am spotlighting an amazing woman of Irish origin and, at the same time, opening up a window into turn-of-the century race relations: what one life, or even one episode in one life, can tell us! Mrs. Harriet Maxwell was born in Ireland in 1849 and lived in England for a decade or so following her marriage to James R. Maxwell, a sergeant in the Scots Fusilier Guards. After her husband’s death in service she emigrated to the United States in 1879, and to Salem: I’m not sure what the precise draw was. In 1886 she graduated from the Salem Hospital’s training school for nurses, and she worked in private service and at the hospital until the spring of 1898, when the call went out for nurses for the quarantine camps established during and after the Spanish-American War, the first war in which the U.S. Army relied on contract nurses in addition to those from the Red Cross and religious orders. Mrs. Maxwell immediately resigned her position at Salem Hospital and signed up: she was sent to the “city of tents” at Montauk, Long Island: Camp Wickoff, where over 21,000 soldiers were sent for quarantine to lessen the spread of yellow fever and malaria in the wake of the war.

Scenes from Camp Wikoff, Long Island, August and September 1898: the arrival of the 24th infantry, the “city of tents”, men of the 71st infantry regiment,Teddy Roosevelt in camp, camp “street” and nurses, Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard Libraries and  Library of Congress.

Far more soldiers died from disease, principally yellow fever, malaria, and typhoid, than combat during and after the Spanish American War, including Salem’s own William Huntingdon Sanders. The American military seemed unprepared for the biological threat, both during and after the war. Camp Wikoff, named for the first American casualty of the war, was hastily constructed and insufficiently prepared or “manned”, in terms of medical staff, for the onslaught of troops which began arriving in August of 1898, including Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders. Following a succession of deaths (there would be 340 in all), and the outbreak of fever in the camp and surrounding community, Wikoff became the focus of sharp criticism in the national newspapers: the finger was pointed at Secretary of War Russell Alger in particular, and by extension, President William McKinley, who visited the camp in September. Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel’s son and father of John, a soldier in the 71st Infantry whom he and his wife found emaciated when they visited the camp, expressed an opinion that seems to have been shared by many in the early fall of 1898:

From the great portfolio of contemporary Camp Wikoff texts and images by Jeff Heatley at Art and Architecture Quarterly.

So this is the situation Harriet Maxwell of Salem found herself in when she arrived at Camp Wikoff in August. She was not assigned to nurse the famous Rough Riders but rather one of the “colored” regiments in residence in the camp, in segregated quarters of course: the 10th U.S. Cavalry which had fought right alongside Roosevelt’s troops at the Battle of San Juan Hill. Many of its members were fevered when they arrived at Wikoff, and Mrs. Maxwell nursed them continually, forming the close relationships that were captured in an article first published in the Boston Globe and then in regional newspapers: the story of how she became a “mother” to these troops, a lasting designation that also ended up in her 1931 obituary in the Globe: 

The Boston Globe, 4 December 1898; the 10th U.S. Cavalry at Camp Wikoff, US National Archives.

It’s an endearing story, if a bit “matriarchal” and all too illustrative of the perceived boundaries of the time. Mrs. Maxwell’s time at Wikoff was brief but impactful, as everyone’s seems to have been. She went off to another fever hotspot, Ft. Monroe in Virginian, and then back to Salem, where she continued her practice and became a highly-respected member of the U.S. Spanish-American Veterans group and the namesake of its auxiliary. Mrs. Maxwell died in September of 1931, and her obituary (September 22 Boston Globe) notes that her two grandfathers were at the Battle of Waterloo. Two uncles were fatally wounded at the Crimean War. Again, what a life-span.


Abigail, Abigail & Susan

I was hopefully thinking about transitions and inaugurations and first ladies and somehow I ended up admiring Abigail Adams’ yellow kid slippers in the Smithsonian. I can’t really retrace my steps as I was kind of in an election coverage daze. But here are the slippers, which were donated by Miss Susan Elizabeth Osgood of Salem. They prompted a #SalemSuffrageSaturday post, as I’m trying to look at Salem women’s history with the widest possible lens, as well as every possible filter. It’s been clear to me for some time that the collection (in both its active and preservation meanings) and curation of Americana is an important Salem topic, and one in which women played many key roles.

Abigail Adams’ Slippers!

The First Ladies collection at the Smithsonian was conceived by two Washington society ladies, Cassie Mason Myers Julian-James and Rose Governeur Hoes, a great-granddaughter of President James Monroe, in 1912-1913; their gallery of items collected from presidential families opened to the public on February 1, 1914. Their emphasis was on “costume” but the collection expanded in scope and scale over the next century and is one of the Smithsonian’s most popular exhibits. An absolutely great source, the successive Reports on the Progress and Condition of the U.S. National Museum for 1913-1914, gave me the Salem story: in the latter year, the Report reported that “Mrs. Julian James and Mrs. R.R. Hoes continued, with their customary zeal, their self-appointed task of securing materials for the period costume collection, and during most of the year they were closely occupied in arranging the interesting fabrics and other articles which had been received. The results of their labors, successful and most brilliant in effect, have already been described, and there only remains to be accounted for in this connection the many and valuable contributions of the year. Of costumes of ladies of the White House, forming the central and most prominent feature of the exhibition and including some accessories, six were received, [including] a dress, kid slippers, and fan and pearl beads, worn by Mrs. John Adams, received from Miss Susan E. Osgood, of Salem, Mass.”

The items which once belonged to Abigail Adams which were donated to the Smithsonian Institution in 1913 by Salem’s Susan Elizabeth Osgood: the dress is navy blue, and shown by itself and in “company” (far right); the “pearl beads” are actually glass—so Mrs. Adams was well ahead of Jackie Kennedy and Barbara Bush with her faux pearls!

It took me a while to figure out how Susan Osgood came to be in the possession of these items: there was no readily apparent connection to Abigail Adams and I am no genealogical researcher! Miss Osgood was one of those maiden ladies from established Salem families who seldom shows up in the newspapers: the rule was birth, marriage and death only and since she was unmarried that left a large gap (especially as she lived a long life, from 1832-1920). The only time she really “appears” in public is in reference to her famous garden at 314 Essex Street. I chased down a few family connections and finally found the link: her uncle, the Salem historian Joseph Felt, was married to Abigail Adams’ niece, Abigail Adams Shaw, the daughter of her younger sister, Elizabeth Shaw Peabody. As Mr. and Mrs. Felt had no children, I’m guessing that the Adams items were passed down to their niece, Susan, after their respective deaths and were stored in Susan’s Salem house until the Mrs. Julian-James and Hoes put the word out. There are a few references to Salem sculptress Louise Lander playing an intermediary role in this story, but I couldn’t really substantiate them: she was living in Washington at the time, however. If my explanation of the Abigail-Abigail-Susan connection is accurate, that means that Mrs. Adams is connected to Salem through both of her sisters. Her older sister, Mary Smith Cranch, and her husband Richard lived in Salem for a time, during which both Abigail and John Adams visited occasionally. I presume (again) that the Adamses were introduced to the work of Salem artist Benjamin Blythe on one of those occasions, and commissioned their famous pastel portraits from him.

Abigail Adams by Benajmin Blyth, circa 1766. Massachusetts Historical Society.

 


Deviation, Discovery and Donors: my Last Word on the PEM’s Phillips Library

A big week—was there an election?—as the official judgement from the Massachusetts Judicial Court came down regarding the movement of the Phillips Library to a remote Collection Center by the Peabody Essex Museum in response to the latter’s petition for approval to deviate from the geographical restriction in one of its charter documents. Deviation is the legal term, as you can see in the judgement below:

JUDGMENT: “This matter came before the Court, Gaziano, J., on a Complaint pursuant to G.L. Ch. 214, §§ 1 and 10B, filed by the Peabody Essex Museum, (“Plaintiff” or the “Museum”), seeking approval of a deviation from a charitable restriction. The Museum asserts that relocation of the Phillips Library collections to the Museum’s collection center (the “Collection Center”), in Rowley, Massachusetts including materials originally held by the Essex Institute, is consistent with equitable deviation from the terms of the founding statutes establishing the Essex Institute, and is necessary to achieve the charitable purposes of those statutes. The Attorney General, an interested party, has filed her Assent. There are no issues in dispute, and this Court makes the following findings:

Pursuant to G.L. Ch. 214, §§ 1 and 10B and the court’s equity powers, the Court determines that the relocation of the Phillips Library collections to the Collection Center in Rowley, including materials originally held by the Essex Institute, is consistent with equitable deviation from the terms of the founding statutes establishing the Essex Institute (the “Founding Statutes”), and is necessary to achieve the charitable purposes of those statutes, because of the steps the Museum has taken to provide better long-term preservation of the Library collections, to increase Phillips Library storage capacity, and to ensure continued public access to the Phillips Library collections at the Collection Center in Rowley, and because of the commitments that the Museum is making in Salem, as set forth in the Complaint in Equity. Accordingly, it is hereby ORDERED that the Museum is permitted to deviate from the terms of the Founding Statutes by relocating the Phillips Library collections to the Collections Center in Rowley. So ordered.

So the Phillips Library, constituting the primary archive of Salem’s history, is enabled legally to remain in Rowley, thus ending a process and a preoccupation (for me anyway) which began back in 2017 when the PEM announced the move at a meeting of Salem’s Historic Commission. This judgement did not came as a surprise to me: in order to make her recommendation (of assent), Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey convened a meeting of interested parties in the summer of 2019: she heard us out, and attorneys from her office regularly followed up, but I could see the writing on the wall. There was never any official objection by the City of Salem.

Even though I was not surprised by this ruling, it still saddens me. So I took advantage of the long election night as well as the anxious day after to focus on a distractive strategy of trying to isolate the precise reasons why. The Peabody Essex Museum does seem like a very different institution than that which made this move three years ago: much more focused on its community and its foundations. There is a new director, Brian Kennedy, who signaled both his community and historical consciousness by returning the storied anchor which sat in front of East India Marine Hall for a century or so very shortly after his arrival. There is much more Salem stuff on display in the expanded museum, in both permanent galleries and special exhibitions. But still, we are at their mercy, are we not? The PEM decides what to show Salem about its own history, when, and how. The powers of historical discovery, revelation and interpretation are in their hands, not ours. Let me illustrate my point with the words of two Directors: Mr. Kennedy and his predecessor Dan Monroe. The blog post previewing the current exhibition Salem Stories by curator Karina Corrigan opens with a quote by Mr. Kennedy: “Wouldn’t it be great if people could learn more about Salem’s and PEM’s history within our own galleries?” which seems like a very sharp contrast to the sentiments of Mr. Monroe, when asked by the Boston Globe to explain the hastiness of the Phillips Library removal. I can’t resist one last opportunity to showcase these words:

One statement is community-minded, the other not so much, but both express the now-confirmed fact that the Peabody Essex Museum owns Salem’s history: it is not ours, it is theirs, to do with what they want as long as they preserve it—and no one has ever cast doubt on their excellent stewardship, certainly not me. Preservation was always the chief rationale for the removal of the Library from Salem and it remains so: it’s right there in the judgement. But in this case, preservation not only trumps but also precludes access for the community: it is simply going to be difficult for Salem’s residents— students, retirees, just plain old history buffs— to experience the pure joy of making historical discoveries for themselves. Instead, their history will be handed to them, or “packaged” for them. I’m probably over-sentimental on this point: I just love local historical societies and want one for Salem desperately but the Phillips Library is quite a bit more than that. Within its collections, however, there are so many community resources: family papers, record books of all sorts of Salem societies, memorials of little local events which might not catch a professional researcher’s eye but are nonetheless fragments of the fabric of a society long gone. I still don’t understand why a suitable—and much more accessible—site for the “Collection or Collections Center” (both terms are used interchangeably, as in the above judgement) could not have been found in Salem, and that makes me sad, as does the emptiness of the beautifully-preserved buildings of the former Phillips Library on Essex Street.

So that’s one source of my lingering sadness; the other is the issue of donor intent. This is the question that I asked at the well-attended forum in January of 2018 at the PEM after its intent to remove the Library  was finally disclosed. Mr. Monroe waved me off and indicated that all was well on that front, but that is not what I have heard here. Several donors have commented on my Phillips Library posts, and I’ve received emails from others, all indicating that either they or their family members believed that they were contributing to a Salem repository and to Salem history. Such sentiments are also expressed in the Annual Reports of the Essex Institute over the years, and even when they are not expressed explicitly, you can infer the intent. For example, look at these large memorial funds from 1966:

Eleanor Hassam, who you can read more about here, came from a very wealthy Boston family, but had deep Salem roots and made bequests with clear geographical and institutional purpose: the Essex Institute received “a handsome and varied bequest” from Miss Hassam, including a legacy of $10,000, many personal and family items, and one-half interest in the the residue of her estate in 1941. The Annual Report from that year announced the bequest with reference to the keen interest in local history and genealogy of both Miss Hassam and her father. Miss Jenny Brooks, a Salem embroidery entrepreneur, established a memorial fund for her father Henry Mason Brooks with the generous sum of $40,000 in 1899: Mr. Brooks served as Secretary of the Essex Institute and was a prolific local historian and author of the Olden Time series. Another generous Salem daughter, Anna Pingree Wheatland Phillips, established an endowment in memorial to her father, Stephen Goodhue Wheatland, who served as Mayor of Salem during the Civil War. Ira Vaughan was a successful Salem inventor, manufacturer, and salesman of tanning machinery. Robert S. Rantoul, esteemed lawyer, politician, and officer of the Essex Institute, was memorialized as a “great student of Salem history” in his 1922 Boston Daily Globe obituary, and by his children with an endowment. Thomas Franklin Hunt was the author of the popular Visitors Guide to Salem and Pocket Guide to Salem issued by the Institute, and yet another prolific local historian. Like many of these memorialized men, Francis Henry Lee (I assume there is a typo in the above report) was actively engaged in Salem institutions and the collection and recording of his own Salem experience: his papers in the Phillips Library are among the most valuable sources of the city’s nineteenth-century history. I can’t speak for the dead, but both the donors and the namesakes of these endowments were all focused intently on Salem with an apparent pride of place, and I can’t imagine they would be pleased with this “equitable” deviation. I’m sorry we couldn’t bring the Phillips Library home for them, and for everyone who is interested in the history of this heritage-stripped city.

One of the PEM Collection Masks from the PEM’s shop, based on a fan donated by Eleanor Hassam; unfortunately it is sold out, as is one featuring the “Witch over Salem”. 


%d bloggers like this: