HOUSEHOLD DISCOVERIES

I’m halfway through my second novel, a work of historical fiction that covers two generations of a group of families that lived in rural Maine between 1820 and, roughly, 1920.

One of the hardest parts of writing historical fiction is shifting perspectives, moving back to an earlier time and looking at things the way people did back then—you can’t write convincingly about the early 1900s when you’re busy with a 2014 mindset.

          It just doesn’t work.

So I comb flea markets for things that will help me make that trip back in time; one of the greatest sources for me is books—not old, dry history books about dates and battles and land acquisitions, etc.; they’re pretty useless to me.

I look instead for books written during the time period, books my characters might read themselves. I take them home and read them, cover to cover: agricultural census books, town reports and old school textbooks; novels, newspapers; books about farm buildings, breeding and veterinary practices; cookbooks.

This one, Household Discoveries, is a gem. It was published in 1908 in New York by the Success Company, publishers of “Success Magazine,” and has more than five hundred pages of household tips, suggestions, recipes and common sense.

Here’s how to use brick dust and/or kerosene to scour knives; clean black goods (mourning clothes) with alcohol and water; how to get dirt (“matter which is out of place”) from clothes, barrels, harness and tools; how to fasten a bag for waste thread to your sewing table.

You can decorate your home—all rooms. There’s a section on lighting (only one electric lamp in the bunch); beds and mattresses and pillows; how to set up the furniture in your parlor.

Have a problem with rats? Ahh! Simply mix a dough of phosphorous paste (lard, phosphorus and alcohol) with corn meal, oatmeal of flour and sugar, add a few drops of aniseed. Place pieces of this dough in rat runways.

It’s got sections devoted to soap, washing, ironing, sewing; paints and varnishes, garden pests, metal work, cleaning of tools and harness; weights and measures, preservation of fruits and vegetables; a couple of chapters on manners, health and hygiene.

And so much more.

It sends me back to the early 1900s, all right; oftentimes, I confess, I’m glad I’m not staying. Consider this piece of advice in the chapter about hairdressing: Professional hairdressers do not advocate shampooing the hair oftener than once a month...

         

Honestly, it says that, right on page 484.

It’s enough to keep me here in 2014.

MATH QUIZ...1817

It’s one of my favorite books: The Scholar’s Arithmetic; or, Federal Accountant, by Daniel Adams, M.B., published in 1817.

          It’s hardcover, leather-bound. The corners are rounded, battered, there’s scratching in the cover leathers and stains on most of the pages, but, still, it’s one of my favorites.

         

So...arithmetic in 1817.

How tough can that be? I thought, thumbing through the chapters.

It starts out easy enough: simple addition, subtraction, multiplication and division...the first forty-odd pages I can handle with ease, but in Section II, things get tricky.

Single Rule of Three, Double Rule of Three.

Huh? I haven’t a clue.

How about something called Reduction Descending? “Multiply the highest denomination by that number which it takes of the next less to make one of that greater; so continue to do till you have brought it as low as your question requires.”

Do what? I thought; it has something to do with reducing pounds, shillings, pence, etc. into farthings.

Or changing moidores into shillings and then dollars.

And there are pages of tables:

          Table for Reducing New-England Currency to Federal Money

          Table for Reducing New-York Currency to Federal Money

          Table for Reducing the Currencies of the Several United States to Federal Money, which has columns for New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut and Virginia to New-York and North Carolina currency.

          From shillings, pence and farthings to dollars, cents and mills.

 Here’s a little quiz for you to try:

1. How many steps of 2 feet 5 inches each, will it require a man to take, travelling from Leominster to Boston, it being 43 miles?

2. A wall is 36 feet high, and a ditch before it is 27 feet wide; what is the length of a ladder, that will reach to the top of the wall from the opposite side of the ditch?

3. A man died leaving 3 sons, to whom he bequeathed his estate in the following manner, viz. to the eldest he gave 184 dollars, to the second 155 dollars, and to the third 96 dollars; but when his debts were paid, there were but 184 dollars left; What is each one’s proportion of his estate?

4. If the height of a room painted by 12ft. 4in. and the compass 84ft. 11in. How many square yards does it contain?

5. What must I give for 3Cwt. 2qrs. 13lb. of cheese at 7 cts. per lb.?

And, for you logic lovers, a question under the section called Pleasing and Diverting Questions:

A countryman having a Fox, a Goose, and a peck of corn, in his journey, came to a river, where it so happened that he could carry but one over at a time. Now as no two were to be left together that might destroy each other; so he was at his wits end how to dispose of them; for, says he, tho’ the corn can’t eat the goose, nor the goose eat the fox; yet the fox can eat the goose, and the goose eat the corn. The question is, how he must carry them over that they may not devour each other?

Hmmmm.

Definitely “diverting,” but I’m not so sure about the “pleasing” part.

Send your answers by posting a comment – I’ll let you know how you fare!

And, by the way, good luck.

THREE-PIECE SUIT, 1906

Here he is, looking like the Man of the Year.

He’s just out of high school – the public high school in Newton, Massachusetts – and is about to start his engineering course at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

          This was my father’s favorite photograph of his father, Gardner Sabin Gould, who, as a little boy, apparently spent lots of time at the fire station just down the street. Tom was the lead horse that hauled one of the Newton Fire Department’s water tankers, and my grandfather was entranced. He had a hobby horse – a horse head on a broom stick – and he spent hours nickering and neighing and trotting all around the back yard of the house on Boylston Street, pretending to be Tom, the horse.

          The nickname stuck; my grandfather was known as “Tom” all his life to family and friends (except for my grandmother, who called him nothing but Gardner).

          At any rate, here he is.

          Three-piece suit (notice the rounded bottom of his vest – not the notched, pointed style); stiff collar, cuffs (and cufflinks, of course); necktie.  The vest has a watch pocket – but there’s no watch yet: that came at his MIT graduation in 1910.

I love the haircut: the central part, the tufts over his ears, slight curls at his temples. He’s clean-shaven (I can see the cleft in his chin). And is that a tin wall in the background, or is it some kind of wall covering or drape? Chickering Studios in Boston...

One of his most memorable jobs as a civil engineer was the building and installation of the portico that sits over Plymouth Rock – I have a framed certificate that his crew presented to him – sixty-odd signatures beneath a hand-written citation.

And he was a masterful cribbage player! He taught us all to play (I think it was the first card game I ever learned); I remember family gatherings involving cribbage games: single-elimination, multi-generational tournaments that went on for hours after dinner; much laughter and cheering, lots of encouragement. My mother played every time, even though she hadn’t the faintest idea how to play the game – my grandfather said he admired her for her willingness to participate in such a long-standing tradition!

But those suits!

The real deal, indeed.

CHING...CHING...CHING!

We’ve just had another storm up here in New England – a Thursday night/Friday morning whopper that blasted up from the south and dropped nine or so inches on coastal Maine.  The plows were out in force; salt and sand trucks lumbered along my street all night long, clearing snow as fast as it came down.

Back in the 1800s and early 1900s, they didn’t plow at all. Instead, they rolled the streets in town – used gigantic wooden rollers pulled by double teams of horses – to pack the snow down on the streets so sleighs could glide more easily on the surface.

Some people had a wheeled vehicle for the spring, summer and fall months, and a sleigh for the winter. Others, especially farmers in rural New England, lifted the wagon bodies from the wheels and axles and deposited them on bobs and runners, eliminating the need for two complete vehicles.

          There’s ingenuity, eh?

But there was a problem: sleighs were silent, swift; horses hooves were muffled in the snow; pedestrians and other drivers were oftentimes unaware of oncoming traffic, especially from the side streets or, interestingly, at night, in an era when there were no streetlights.

          They needed some kind of warning system – and that’s why they had sleigh bells! Some cities and towns actually passed safety ordinances requiring bells; the noise at “rush hour” must have been something!

The bells at the top are all that’s left of a set that belonged to my great-grandfather – one of a pair of simple shaft bells that attached to the shafts of the sleigh. Others were loose bells, body strap bells, riveted to harness leather; there were different tones and weights. Catalogues listed nickel plated steel gong shaft chimes; harmonized Swiss pole chimes; six-bell graduated chimes, etc. Some strap bells wrapped around the horse, some were mounted around the neck or over the shoulders, others attached to the shafts or collars.

Swiss shafts, Swiss poles, Swedish straps, Mikado chimes, King Henry bells, Russian saddle chimes...

...music to our ears.

DUET...

“...a concentrating pianist, an enthusiastic observer...” Alan wrote beneath his weekly prompt.

          Goodness, I thought I’ve got that covered!

I immediately went on my Sepia Search: up the stairs, into the big storage space under the eaves, hauling cardboard boxes out into the light and pawing through them like a madwoman, looking for this specific photo – funny how we Sepians know exactly what we’re looking for sometimes!

This is a cyanotype of my grandfather, Gardner S. Gould (1886) and his youngest sibling, Margaret (1899) in the living room at the family home on Boylston Street, just outside Boston. They were the oldest and youngest of six children, a thirteen-year spread between them; this was taken in 1903 or 1904, I’m guessing.

I love the big bow in her hair, the look of fascination on her face.

And I like the detail here: his sweater and belt, the fact that he’s wearing a necktie, his white collar, the slight blur of his right hand over the keys. And how she’s tucked up against his chest, safe and secure; her lovely, lovely profile.

I have a vague recollection of the mirror over the mantel (it might have been in my grandparents’ home when I was young) and the tilt-top table to the left of the fireplace, but I have no idea whatever happened to the piano, the stool, the rest of the rather imposing artwork, the other stuff in the room.

They had a special relationship, these two.

Not too many years after this photo was taken, Margaret, in her nightgown, ventured too near this same living room fireplace; her gown caught fire, and she was quite badly burned on her legs. Skin grafting was quite new then, but my grandfather was willing: doctors took strips of skin from his thighs, grafted them onto hers.

All went well; the grafts took, and she was home in about two weeks.

Every time I look at this photograph, I smile; I can almost hear the music!

To see what other Sepians have found, visit:

http://www.sepiasaturday.blogspot.com

A LOVE KNOT...

This small trunk – the precursor of a suitcase, if you will – belonged to Miss Rebecca Gay, born in 1789, daughter of Calvin and Joanna Kingsbury Gay of Walpole, Massachusetts.

          It’s a gorgeous old thing (it’s slightly more than two hundred years old now) and it lives in my downstairs guest room. It has a rounded top, hobnailed decoration on the lid, including the initials RG; the whole thing is just over two feet long, a foot wide and ten inches deep, and it’s full of old letters, diaries, photographs and other odds and ends.

         

Rebecca lined the interior of her trunk with newspaper – there are cuttings from the Dedham, MA Norfolk Repository, a weekly publication in the early 1800s.

          Inside the lid, there’s a “programme” of “Exercises of Exhibition” from Day’s Academy, Wrentham, MA from September 15, 1809; Rebecca’s younger brother Ebenezer appears in two of these exercises: The Weathercock, a Dialogue with seven of his male classmates, and, at the very end of the exhibition, another – Mrs. Wiggins, a Dialogue with the same cast and crew.

          Riveting, I’m sure.

          Ebenezer ended up at Harvard; he became a minister, a real Bible-thumper, my grandfather said. Somewhere I’ve got a cabinet photo of him, taken in the 1880s when he was in his 90s; he’s the stuff of nightmares – long, stringy white beard, dangly mustaches, and straggly hair that droops over his shoulders.

The other piece of artwork pasted on the inside of the lid is a Love Knot. It’s a complicated, interwoven pattern (for a quilt, maybe) and has romantic notions written throughout: true love is a precious treasure reads one; entwining arms sharing kisses true love blisses proclaims another.

At the bottom, she signed her name – Rebecca Gay – in the lower right she wrote Drawn July 12, 1809.

          She drew the knot, papered and prepared her traveling trunk when she was just twenty years old; the following year, this scrawling notation appears in the Walpole town records:

This may certify that these subscribers have marriede...Major John A. Gould to Rebeccah Gay both of Walpole May 29, 1810

John and Rebecca were my fourth great-grandparents; in the bottom of this trunk is a photograph of their Massachusetts homestead and his original diary.

MAY I SEE YOU HOME...

I’ve got an old trunk in my guestroom. It's small -- a trunk for a lady -- and it belonged to an ancestor of mine; it’s come to me through six generations.

It’s a small traveling trunk, hobnailed on the top (initials RG) and lined with flowered paper; it’s full of old letters, handbills, diaries, letters and photographs, etc. from both sides of my family.

Buried in this ladies’ trunk is a tiny envelope, stuffed with calling cards, all saved by Roxanna Adams, my great-great grandmother, who lived in Ashburnham, MA before the Civil War.

          

She was born on July 25, 1832, the daughter of Milton and Esther Gibson Adams. She had a rough start: her mother died when she was a year old; her father, being a “man of spirits” (now there’s a euphemism for you), unceremoniously dumped her off at the poor farm. She was, happily, retrieved by neighbors, Prescott Wilder and his wife, who took her in and raised her as their own.

By the time she was fifteen, she had added Wilder as her middle name; we’ve had Prescotts and Wilders in our family in every generation since!

These friendship calling cards were very popular among the younger set in the early- to mid-1800s. They were etched, printed in great quantity (one company was Dickson in Boston); young men and women purchased them in lots or individually.

One of Roxanna’s diaries mentions “card parties,” where young people spent an afternoon or evening around somebody’s dining table, hand-coloring their cards (watercolors, mostly); they gave them to each other as remembrance cards. Some were of a more congratulatory nature, others were exchanged as tokens of friendship; still others were intended to show romantic interest.

I’ve got cards from Melinda Willard and James M. Harris, both of Fitchburg; Nelson Whitney, Frances Maria Partridge, and a particular Lucius Henry Sabin, of Ashburnham.

 

One of my favorites is this last one: “May I See You Home!” This card was usually presented to a young lady by a gentleman with romantic  intentions; at some point during an evening, he would hand this card to her.

I don’t know who this gentleman was, but on the back of the card he presented to Roxanna, he wrote: “William the Conqueror.”

Such cheek!

Whoever he was, he didn’t conquer Roxanna – she was escorted home by Lucius Henry Sabin instead; they married in 1851.