Of Railways and Balloons

As we prepare for our program next week on Benjamin Franklin’s kite, we have been looking through the collection for Franklin-related items. One of the things we found, a facsimile of a letter written by Franklin on balloons, is interesting both for its subject matter and for the story behind the document’s owner. William K. Bixby printed 250 copies “for his friends,” presenting the letter (nicely bound along with a transcription) to Alice and William Miner as a New Year’s gift in 1924. Like William Miner, Bixby was a railroad man, though by this time he had retired to devote himself completely to collecting and philanthropy. There are a lot of similarities between the two Williams, as a matter of fact, and it’s not surprising that they became friends.

Cover (featuring a design adapted from an 18th c. toile de jouy) and title page

William Keeney Bixby was born in 1857 in Michigan. At the age of 16, he left home to work as a railway baggage handler in Texas. Here he caught the eye of H.M. Hoxie, president of the Missouri Pacific Railroad, who eventually convinced W.K. to come work with him in St. Louis. In 1883 he made what would turn out to be a wise decision, switching from railway management to railroad car manufacturing; by 1887 he was the vice president and general manager of Missouri Car and Foundry. In 1899, he led the consolidation of eighteen railway supply companies into the American Car and Foundry Company, of which he was the president. The St. Louis-based company controlled all aspects of railroad car production, from ore deposits and timber tracts to the car-building shops.

W.K. Bixby (1857-1931)

After just six years as president, at the age of 48, W.K. Bixby retired from business and turned his attention to collecting art, rare books, and manuscripts. He was a great admirer of Robert Burns, and is said to have developed such expertise that he could identify a forged Burns document from a single letter. Bixby also endowed institutions such as the St. Louis Art Museum and Washington University, and served as president of the Missouri Historical Society. Bixby produced several dozen books of facsimiles of manuscripts from his collection, which he had printed in small editions and gave to friends and fellow collectors. The reproductions themselves are collectors’ editions, with great attention being paid to illustrations, covers, and paper—for Benjamin Franklin on Balloons, Bixby used paper made by the same company that provided the paper used to make the Montgolfier brothers’ first balloon!

Charles and Robert’s first (unmanned) balloon,
which was destroyed by the residents of Gonesse

The letter itself is one written on January 16, 1784 by Benjamin Franklin, who was then United States Ambassador to France, to his friend and fellow scientist Jan Ingenhousz. Ingenhousz had evidently asked Franklin for information about the balloons that had recently been launched in Paris, with the idea that he might try to construct one himself. Franklin sent him this information along with some advice not to promote a ballon launch unless he was really sure it would work! As Franklin said, “It is a serious thing to draw out from their Affairs all the Inhabitants of a great City & its Environs, and a Disappointment makes them angry.” A would-be balloonist at Bordeaux had learned this the hard way, when the crowd tore down his house when he failed to deliver the promised spectacle.

The “Charlière” rising above the Tuileries

Franklin himself had recently attended two historic ballooning events. First, on August 27, 1783, Jacques Charles and the Robert brothers launched the first hydrogen balloon (which ultimately crashed outside Paris and was destroyed by alarmed villagers). Then, on December 1, Charles and Nicolas-Louis Robert made the first manned hydrogen balloon flight. Charles and Robert launched their balloon from the Jardin des Tuileries and ascended to about 1800 feet and traveled about 22 miles in two hours. Charles then made a second ascent to nearly 10,000 feet, but had to return to earth when he began feeling the effects of altitude. It is said that some 400,000 spectators witnessed the launch, 100 of whom had paid a crown each to help pay for the balloon’s construction and had access to a special enclosure where they got a close-up view of the takeoff. Franklin was part of this group, and presumably he and his fellow spectators felt that they got their money’s worth!

The second Montgolfier balloon

This launch came only ten days after the first manned hot-air balloon flight, during which Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier piloted a balloon designed by Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier. Thus, in January 1784, Europe seemed to be poised on the brink of a new era, when the possibility of flight would reshape geopolitics. As Franklin said to Ingenhousz, “Five Thousand Balloons capable of raising two Men each, would not cost more than Five Ships of the Line: And where is the Prince who can afford to cover his Country with Troops for its Defense, as that Ten Thousand Men descending from the Clouds, might not in many Places do an infinite deal of Mischief, before a Force could be brought together to repel them?” In fact, it would be a long time before aircraft played a significant role in warfare, but Franklin was certainly correct about its far-reaching possibilities. 

If you would like to learn more about Benjamin Franklin and the world of 18th-century science, join us at the museum on Friday, July 22 at 7:00 p.m. for “Secrets of Benjamin Franklin’s Kite.” The program is free and open to children of all ages.

You can read the complete text of Franklin’s letter here.

From Academy to Seminary to College: Women’s Education in the 19th Century

In my last post, I noted that the practice of making samplers in American schools started to die out in the 1830s, in part because of changes in attitudes toward female education. By that time, activists like Catharine Beecher, Zilpah Grant, Emma Willard, and Mary Lyon had established schools in the northeastern US that aimed to give girls an education equivalent to that available to boys. These female seminaries were also intended to train women as teachers during a period when America’s public school system was rapidly expanding. 

A book in the Alice’s collection provides a window into this pivotal moment. William Woodbridge and Emma Willard’s Universal Geography was co-authored by one of the pioneers of women’s education, and this particular copy was owned by a young lady who would later attend a pioneering institution for women’s higher education. 

Emma Hart was born in 1787 in Berlin, Connecticut to a farming family. When she was only twenty years old, she became the principal of Middlebury Female Seminary in Middlebury, Vermont, where she also met her husband John Willard. She gave up teaching after her marriage, but a few years later, with the family in difficult financial circumstances, she opened her own school with a more rigorous curriculum than the one offered at the Seminary.

Emma Hart Willard 

Willard’s experiences at Middlebury led her to become more active in the movement for female education, and in 1819 she published An Address to the Public...Proposing a Plan for Improving Female Education. While nominally addressed to the members of the New York State legislature, it was really meant for a wide audience. In it, Willard laid out what she thought were the defects in the current system of female education and made an argument for publicly-supported female seminaries. 

Although the legislature rejected her proposal, the Willards moved to New York, first to Waterford and then to Troy, where the Troy Female Seminary opened in 1821. Although she was very careful not to refer to her school as a college, Willard clearly modeled it on those elite male institutions. At Troy, girls could learn mathematics, philosophy, and science, in addition to the subjects that were traditionally thought appropriate for women (reading, writing, arithmetic, perhaps a little history and French). Willard felt that the “ornamental” branches of drawing, music, and dancing could be part of a seminary curriculum, but needlework, other than the purely useful sort, she regarded as “a waste of time.”

It's literally a Temple.

John Willard died in 1825, and thereafter Emma Willard depended upon the income from the school and her writing to support herself and her son, John Hart Willard. She was the author of a number of textbooks which were widely used in American schools, and she introduced some truly novel ways of graphically representing knowledge, such as the “Temple of Time” to depict history. The Universal Geography was really two texts packaged together—William Woodbridge’s A System of Universal Geography (which covered the modern world) and Willard’s Ancient Geography. First published in 1824, it went through at least ten editions and was still being used into the 1850s.

The copy of Universal Geography in the Alice’s collection belonged to Margaret Tufts of New Haven, Connecticut. Margaret was born in 1815, the daughter of Matthias and Matilda Tufts. Matthias Tufts was a ship carpenter and a member of the New Haven School Society (essentially the board for the city’s public schools), which suggests that he had an interest in the subject of education. We don’t know where Margaret was a student in 1833, when she acquired this textbook—she could have attended one of the half a dozen young ladies’ academies in New Haven, or been a boarding pupil at a school like Troy Female Seminary. But wherever it was, her education did not end there. In 1837, she became one of the first students at a new institution that was just opening in Massachusetts, the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary.

Mary Lyon

Mount Holyoke’s founder, Mary Lyon (1797-1849), came from a similar background to Emma Willard. Also from a New England farming family, she became a teacher as a young woman and then helped to run two female academies started by Zilpah Grant. When it came time to open her own school, she was determined to offer the best education available to women at the time. Entrance requirements were rigorous and aimed to admit “young ladies of an adult age, and mature character.” Mount Holyoke’s curriculum was modeled upon—and indeed was nearly identical to—that of nearby Amherst College. At both institutions, students were required to take courses in ancient history, astronomy, botany, chemistry, geography, geology, logic, philosophy (mental, moral, and natural), political economy, and rhetoric. Lyon also encouraged students to take Latin, classical languages and literature being the key subject that had always distinguished male education from female learning.

Despite the similarities between Amherst and Mount Holyoke, one was a college while the other was a seminary. There was simply too much resistance to the idea of admitting women to the power and prestige associated with a college education. As one historian has written, “The college world was a fraternity all its own, a time-hallowed preserve of masculine identity, masculine knowledge, masculine privilege, and masculine society, where the elite white men who regarded leadership and public power as their birthright were trained. To either admit women to that fraternity or countenance their acquiring too many of its trappings was more than undesirable; it was inconceivable.”

Over the next few decades, some of that resistance would be chipped away, and true colleges for women, offering bachelor’s degrees, would be founded. Mount Holyoke Female Seminary would become a college in 1888. However, neither Mary Lyon nor Margaret Tufts lived to see that happen. Margaret became a teacher in New Haven after graduating from Mount Holyoke in 1840. In 1842, she married Sherman Booth, a noted abolitionist, and in 1848 they moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, so he could establish the abolitionist newspaper that came to be known as the Wisconsin Free Democrat. The Booths had three children who died in infancy, and Margaret herself died in 1849 shortly before her 34th birthday.

Many thanks to my grad school colleague and dear friend Caroline Hasenyager, for patiently answering my questions about early-19th century women’s education, and allowing me to quote from her dissertation, “Peopling the Cloister: Women’s Colleges and the Worlds We’ve Made of Them.”

If you are interested in learning more about the history of women’s education, here are a few good books:

Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (1976)

Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women's Colleges from Their Nineteenth Century Beginnings to the 1930s (2nd ed., 1993)

Mary Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic (2006)

San Francisco In Ruins: Photographs of the 1906 Earthquake and Fire

“The historians of modern or ancient times have never recorded such a maelstrom of terrified, horror and panic-stricken human beings as awoke to the realization of the master seismic tremblor, in the City of San Francisco at 5:13 on the morning of April 18th, 1906. The initial quake, being followed by many of less severity, tumbled chimneys, large and small buildings of poor or faulty construction, broke water mains and ruptured electric light and power conductors, causing many conflagrations in a few moments. Then followed a catastrophe unparalleled in modern times, a disaster beside which, for property losses, the Chicago fire the Johnstown flood, the Galveston tidal wave, the Mont Pelee eruption, Vesuvius’ spouting and the Baltimore fire, fade into infinitesimal disturbances on the records of Father Time.”

This is how author A.M. Allison described the devastating earthquake and fire that struck San Francisco and the surrounding area in the introduction to San Francisco In Ruins: A Pictorial History of Eight Score Photo-Views of the Earthquake Effects, Flames’ Havoc, Ruins Everywhere, Relief Camps. I recently came across this book while reorganizing the Alice’s book collection, and since we are less than two weeks away from the 110th anniversary of the earthquake, it seemed like a good time to take a closer look at it, along with some related items in the museum archives.

“Citizens Rendezvousing on the Vacant Places
When the Fire Was Raging in the 
Mission District,” J. D. Givens

The photographs in San Francisco in Ruins are the work of James D. Givens (1863-1939). Givens moved to San Francisco in 1899 and established his home and studio at the Presidio, a U.S. Army base on the peninsula. He became the post photographer and recorded the personnel and daily activities of the post. He also went to the Philippines in 1900 to document the Philippine-American War and to Mexico with General John J. Pershing during his pursuit of Pancho Villa in 1915. Givens was just one of many photographers, professional and amateur, who produced images during and after the disaster. The San Francisco earthquake is probably the first natural disaster to be thoroughly photographed, as it occurred at a time when inexpensive, portable cameras had become available to a large portion of the population, who used photography to document their experiences, create insurance records, and produce souvenirs for sale.

As we saw in a previous post, William Miner took up photography as a hobby in the late 1880s, and brought his camera along on his frequent business travels. William frequently traveled to California, first as an employee of the Hutchins Refrigerator Car Company and its subsidiary the California Fruit Transportation Company, and later representing his own company. He visited San Francisco in 1906, at a time when the destruction caused by the earthquake and fire was still very much in evidence, and recorded what he saw in a set of photos now in the Alice’s archives. Here are some of his photographs.

In the distance is the Fairmont Hotel, which was still under construction
at the time of the earthquake

Grace Church, California Street

In the background are the Call newspaper building and the Mutual Bank building.

Another view of the same street.

It is estimated that between 3,000 and 5,000 people died in the earthquake and subsequent fire, and about three-quarters of the city was damaged. Two years later, people were still living in refugee camps. However, political and business leaders downplayed the effects of the earthquake, fearing loss of outside investment which was desperately needed to rebuild. Reconstruction plans were quickly developed, and less than ten years later, the city hosted the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915. (This world’s fair is also important because it started a fashion for Spanish colonial architecture, which likely influenced the design of Chazy Central Rural School.) But the thousands of photographs in archives, libraries, and personal collections today remain as documents of the events of April 1906.

You can look at a copy of San Francisco in Ruins at the Internet Archive—or come see Alice’s copy when we reopen next month.

Alice Morse Earle and the Domestic History of Early America

In the early 20th century, when collectors of antiques, curators of museum exhibits, and directors of pageants needed information about colonial American life, they frequently turned to the works of Alice Morse Earle (1851-1911). Earle began her writing career in 1891 with the publication of The Sabbath in Puritan New England, and over the next twelve years she would produce sixteen more books on the life, manners, customs, and material culture of colonial America, including Colonial Dames and Goodwives (1895), Home Life in Colonial Days (1898), Old Time Gardens (1901), and Two Centuries of Costume in America, 1620-1820 (1903).

Alice's copy of China Collecting in America

 In our library here at the Alice, we have a copy of Earle’s China Collecting in America, originally published in 1892. Alice Miner’s copy is the 1924 edition, acquired just as she was opening her own collection of china to the public. It seems quite likely that she also consulted Earle’s other books as she was making purchases and deciding how to arrange the rooms of the museum. Historian Susan Reynolds Williams’s new book, Alice Morse Earle and the Domestic History of Early America, provides us with some very interesting insights into what was surely a significant influence on Alice Miner’s ideas about the colonial era.

Earle’s books were carefully researched and thoroughly documented, but because she wrote for a popular audience, she was dismissed by some academic historians as a writer of mere “pots-and-pans history.” It was not until the 1980s, with the development of women’s history and material culture studies, that Earle came to be appreciated as a pioneer in both of these areas. However, very little has been written about her, in part because she left behind no personal papers and hardly any other biographical material. Williams thus had to piece together Earle’s life and career from a variety of other sources—genealogical research, scattered correspondence in various archives, conversations with descendants, and Earle’s own published works.

Alice Morse in 1873, just before
her marriage to Henry Earle

Alice Morse was born in 1851 in Worcester, Massachusetts, the daughter of Edwin and Abigail Clary Morse. Alice had a comfortable, middle-class childhood which included an excellent education and time at a fashionable finishing school in Boston. In 1874, she married Henry Earle, a stockbroker, and moved to Brooklyn Heights, where she would live for the rest of her life. Alice devoted herself to the traditional concerns of middle-class women—home, husband, children (the Earles had four), as well as the many social, literary, and historical organizations that flourished in late-19th century Brooklyn. She began publishing her historical writing in 1890, and very quickly became both a popular author and a respected authority on the colonial era.

Earle frequently photographed her children in gardens and
historically-inspired settings 

Earle saw herself as a representative of white, middle-class American culture, and specifically that of families with roots in rural New England of the 17th and 18th centuries. In a time of rapid urbanization, technological change, and large-scale immigration, Earle looked to the past as a source of timeless values. While she rejected the harsh Calvinist doctrines of Puritan religion, she felt that Puritan attitudes toward home, family, duty, and industry were worthy of emulation. Earle hoped that by introducing her readers to the material world of colonial America, they could recreate something like the environment in which those values had originally flourished.

Earle preferred to use photographs to illustrate her books whenever possible,
believing they were more accurate than drawings. This one is from Stagecoach and Tavern Days, 1900.

As Williams notes, Earle felt some ambivalence about her role as both wife and mother and professional writer. She took her mothering duties very seriously but also felt constrained by middle-class gender norms at times; she felt that women had a duty to improve themselves and their communities but never publicly aligned herself with any of the groups advocating for radical social change (we don’t even know if she supported women’s suffrage). Similarly, while her books celebrated women’s traditional domestic role in the colonial era, they also made it quite clear that women’s work was absolutely central to the social and economic fabric of pre-industrial America.

Earle hoped that this book cover, designed using the
blue-and-buff color scheme of the Colonial Dames of
America, would appeal to members of that organization.

Earle's writing blended conservative and progressive ideology, suggesting that it was possible to embrace the benefits of progress while striving to improve the present by looking to the past. Like many of her contemporaries in the Progressive movement, she believed firmly in the ability of furnishings, houses, and gardens to influence behavior. Earle did not question the power of white, middle-class, native-born Americans to set cultural standards, and she assumed that her primary audience would be people like herself. But she also believed that these standards could be met by anyone willing embrace them, regardless of class or ethnic background. Not everyone had an ancestor who fought in the Revolutionary War, but anyone could own (or at least appreciate) a Staffordshire plate, a Queen Anne chest, or a pewter porringer.

All of Alice Morse Earle's books are in the public domain, and can be found in digital libraries such as Google Books and the Internet Archive.

Big Books, Little Books

Alice Miner collected books of all shapes and sizes, but in our current exhibit in the Weaving Room, we’re focusing on some of the biggest and the smallest books in the museum! Some are so big I can almost hide behind them...

...while others easily fit in the palm of my hand.

Old Wedgwood, by Frederick Rathbone (1898), just might be the largest book in the collection. It's 20 inches high, almost 15 inches wide, and a solid 2 inches thick! Rathbone was the foremost expert on Wedgwood china at the turn of the century, and the book is a comprehensive biographical and historical account of the company and its founder. But the highlight of the book is the 67 full-page colored engravings of beautiful 18th-century Wedgwood pieces—vases, plaques, coffee pots, urns, cameos, and statues.

Plate VIII: Three déjeûner pieces (1790s)

Plate XII: Vase in grey-blue jasper, with reliefs of the Muses, etc. (1782)

This particular copy of Old Wedgwood is signed by Frederick Rathbone and was given by him to Alice’s friend Emma Hodge and her sister, Jene Bell.

These next two books, at 4 by 3 inches, are pretty wee compared to Ol’ Wedgwood (but still not the smallest!). 

William B. Tappan, Poems of the Heart (1845)

Rev. William Bingham Tappan was (in the words of one of his contemporaries) “the most industrious and voluminous of our religious poets.” Tappan (1794-1849) was the Superintendent of the American Sunday School Union; most of his verses are religious in nature and many concern the work of missionaries (“The Missionary’s Grave in the Desert”) and the temperance movement (“Song of the Three Hundred Thousand Drunkards in the United States”). He was also a prolific writer of hymns.

A Lady, Teachers' Offering;
or Interesting Stories for School Children (1854)

Children’s literature as we know it today began to emerge in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. New ideas about the innocence of childhood along with new educational theories led to a burgeoning marketplace of entertaining and instructive books aimed at children. Many of these books were sternly moralistic; in one of the tales in Teachers’ Offering, a young boy is “deprived of the use of his feet” as punishment for carelessness. Children would have to wait until the later 19th century for more humorous and imaginative stories of fantasy and adventure.

These three books (3 1/4” by 2 1/4”) are all the work of John Stowell Adams (1823-1893), a writer of inspirational short stories and editor of numerous poetry anthologies. In each, Adams chose verses to suit the theme of the book. Floral Wreath (1851) concerns the “language of flowers”; The Crystal Gem (1853) celebrates the many forms and beauties of water; and The Seasons (1853) contains poems suitable for spring, summer, autumn, and winter. Little books like these were very popular in the mid-19th century as gifts or as tokens of affection.

Hardly bigger than a dew-drop!

And finally we have our very smallest book, Dew-Drops. At just 2 inches high and 1 1/2 inches wide, this miniature volume contains a short Biblical quotation for each day of the year. Its publisher, the American Tract Society, was founded in 1825 to produce and distribute evangelical Christian literature. Small books like this one could easily be carried in a purse or pocket, and consulted frequently.

These books, along with many other treasures large and small, are on view at the Alice Tuesdays through Saturdays.

For the Bookish

Today would be a great day to find a shady seat and relax with a good book. Perhaps Alice Miner, after finishing her needle work, would have wandered from Heart's Delight Cottage toward a stately elm tree and cracked open a good book. It's clear she enjoyed reading - as evidenced by the large collection of her books here at The Alice. She read about many things - fiction, history, reference, biographies, travel journals... Much of her non-fiction collection deals with how things were made. Specifically, the books are about china, American furniture, English furniture, decorative arts, Japanese woodblock prints, porcelain maker's marks, silver, silver maker's marks - in other words, she read a lot about the objects she collected. These books are part of our reference library at the museum, as opposed to books that are part of the collection - Alice Miner gathered some amazing and sometimes rare books together to preserve in the museum collection.

Lately I have been revisiting some of the more extraordinary books Alice collected. Here I will tell you about six of them, organized by publication date from 1914 all the way back to 1498. They are just a few of the amazing tomes stored in my office and I love to occasionally take them down from the shelves and carefully wander through their pages. Right now you can see them exhibited on the first floor in the Weaving Room.

A Century of Fashions from Contemporary Magazines 1800 to 1900 by M.J. Levey, 1914
Includes 100 hand-colored engraved costume plates representing a century of ladies fashions from magazines of the time. 

Atlas to Cruttwell's Gazetteer by Clement Cruttwell, 1808
A gazetteer is a geographical directory or reference for information about places and place names, population GDP, etc. - used in conjunction with an atlas or maps. Cruttwell's Gazetteer is an atlas of the known world including numerous maps. Clement Cruttwell was well-regarded in his time and even corresponded with George Washington - to whom he sent his own translation of the Holy Bible. Our copy of this book is inscribed "Levi Platt Esquire", indicating perhaps that Alice Miner purchased the book from descendants of the Platt family as she did numerous other pieces in the collection. Levi Platt (1782-1849) was a son of Zephaniah (1735-1807) and Mary Van Wyck Platt (1742-1809). 

Travels Through the Interior Parts of North America in the Years 1766, 1767, 1768 by Jonathan Carver, 1781
The journal of Jonathan Carver's expedition into the interior of America. Carver (1710-1780) traveled further west than any British explorer before the Revolution. Illustrated with copper engravings. Carver was a captain in the Massachusetts colonial militia during the French and Indian war, enlisting in 1755. His expedition was sponsored by Major Robert Rogers (1731-1795 - of Roger's Rangers fame) with an aim to find a western water route to the Pacific Ocean. Despite the immense success of the book, Carver died a poor man in London in 1780.

The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker's Director by Thomas Chippendale, 1754
A furniture pattern book illustrated with 161 engravings of Chippendale's own designs. He was the first furniture maker to publish a book of his own creations. The book includes furniture patterns in the Gothic, Chinese, and Rococo styles along with more plain domestic designs. The drawings established the fashion for furniture for the period and were used by many other cabinet makers. The term "Chippendale" is now regularly used to describe English Rococo furniture. This book sold well and helped to increase Chippendale's clientele. 

A Treaty with the Indians of the Six Nations compiled and edited by Benjamin Franklin, 1744
Also known as the Treaty of Lancaster between Virginia, Maryland and the Iroquois League. This is an original copy of the treaty published and sold by Ben Franklin from his printing office in Philadelphia. These treaty negotiations were held in Lancaster, Pennsylvania between June 25 and July 4, 1744. The Iroquois agreed to hand over their claims to the Shenandoah Valley in exchange for 200 pounds of gold. The demarcation lines were vague and not agreed upon by all parties, resulting in later treaties. Although the leather binding is a more recent addition, I like to think that perhaps Ben himself once held this book!

Enneades ab Urbe Condito ad Inclinationem Imperii Romani (History of the World) by Marcus Antonius (Coccius) Sabellicus (1436-1506), 1498
A history of the world from its inception to 1504. Published by Bernardinus and Mattheus de Vitalibus, commonly called Li Albanesoti, who were brothers. This is the only book they published together. They were active between 1494-1536 in Venice and Rome. Their printer's mark is shown below.

It is interesting that this history supposedly covers through the year 1504 when it was published in 1498. It is decorated with woodcut outline initials that have been hand colored, and printed in Latin. This wonderful book was purchased by Alice Miner from her friend and fellow collector, Frank Gunsaulus in 1919. 

Please come to see these amazing objects here at The Alice. Due to their delicate nature they will be on exhibit for only a short time and then carefully boxed and stowed away again in my office.

It's the Little Things...

A few recent additions at the museum have made it possible to exhibit for the first time in many years some objects Alice Miner collected. We now have a dress that probably belonged to Mrs. Miner exhibited on a simple mannequin in the Miner Room on the third floor. 

Another display addition is a glass case for jewelry and small objects. This lighted case is on display in the Sheraton Room on the second floor of The Alice. In it you will see many pieces of jewelry, small objects from the children's room - including miniature books and tiny dolls, bakelite jewelry, lockets, eyeglasses and more.

These shoe buckles are said to have belonged to the third President of the United States and author of the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson.

One of the few necklaces in The Alice collection this is an Egyptian scarab piece made of gold, turquoise and other carved stones. It has a matching scarab bracelet. Although Alice Miner and her sisters traveled in Egypt we do not know where she purchased these lovely adornments.

Two pair of 19th century eyeglasses. One was worn by Mrs. Betsey Persons of Rochester, Vermont. The other pair (forefront) belonged to Judge Chew of Richland County, Ohio. The leather glasses case in back also belonged to Mrs. Persons.

A 19th century amethyst and gold pin. There are two sets of earrings to match this bright pin. In back is a french carved ivory pen point holder from the mid-19th century.

Brown and black bakelite earring and pin set. Bakelite was one of the first synthetic plastics - this set likely dates to the early 20th century. Along with these wonderful objects are many more small things to catch your imagination. Come for a tour sometime and see them for yourself. The Alice is open Tuesday - Saturday with tours at 10am, noon and 2pm.