The Age of Homespun

New-England Kitchen at the Brooklyn Sanitary
Commission Fair, 1864

If you read a lot about the Colonial Revival, you start to notice certain recurring symbols and themes. Perhaps the most persistent, and most interesting, is the spinning wheel, which for many Americans in the 19th and early 20th century was the quintessential symbol of the bygone era that came to be known as the “age of homespun.” Beginning in the mid-19th century, spinning wheels started to appear everywhere—the New England Kitchens of the Civil War-era sanitary fairs; early historical exhibits like those at the Essex Institute in Salem and the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association in Deerfield; the photographs of Wallace Nutting. The spinning wheel was both an obvious and immediately recognizable relic of the past, as well as a powerful emblem of virtues like thrift, piety, and industry.

Platt Ryder, Woman at Spinning Wheel,
ca. 1860

Minister and theologian Horace Bushnell coined the phrase “age of homespun” in 1851, in a speech he gave at the celebration of the centennial of Litchfield County, Connecticut. Bushnell encouraged his audience to look to the everyday lives of anonymous people as the source of the nation’s greatness: “It is not the starred epitaphs of the Doctors of Divinity, the Generals, the Judges, the Honourables, the Governors, or even of the village notables called Esquires, that mark the springs of our successes and the sources of our distinctions. These are rather effects than causes; the spinning-wheels have done a great deal more than these.” But by the time Bushnell gave his speech, the age of mechanized textile production was well under way. Those women who still spun or wove did so by machine in the factories of Lowell, Lawrence, and other New England mill towns. “This transition from mother-and-daughter power to water-and-steam power,” said Bushnell, “brought with it a complete revolution of domestic life.”

Demonstration of spinning flax,
Alice T. Miner Museum, 1926

The spinning wheel and all that was associated with it, then, became a way for Americans to make sense of the dramatic changes that industrialization had brought about. To understand the significance of wheels, looms, and other paraphernalia of domestic textile production to collectors like Alice Miner, we must (to use an obvious metaphor) unravel various skeins. First, what did textile production in the 17th and 18th centuries actually look like? Then, how did 19th and 20th century antiquarians and collectors interpret the tools and products (particularly woven coverlets) of colonial women, and what do their choices about collection and display tell us? And finally, why did some Americans in the early 20th century feel that it was important to preserve or revive the arts of textile production?

These are some of the questions that I will try to answer over the coming months. Along the way, we will see some familiar faces, like Frank Gunsaulus, William Morris, and Jane Addams, and we will meet some new ones, like Martha Ballard, Anna Ernberg, and Eliza Calvert Hall. Who knows, I may even try to do some spinning myself!

Sources:

Christopher Monkhouse, “The Spinning Wheel as Artifact, Symbol, and Source of Design,” in Kenneth L. Ames, ed., Victorian Furniture (Victorian Society of America, 1982), 155-159.

Beverly Gordon, “Spinning Wheels, Samplers, and the Modern Priscilla: The Images and Paradoxes of Colonial Revival Needlework,” Winterthur Portfolio 33 (July 1998), 163-194.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (Knopf, 2001).

Testing the Waters: The Hudson-Fulton Exhibition of 1909

The story of the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which opened in 1924, really begins with the museum’s Hudson-Fulton Exhibition of 1909. The first exhibit of American furniture at an art museum, the Hudson-Fulton served as a way to “test the waters” to find out if there was an audience for American decorative arts. At the time, there were still many people who doubted the artistic value of American things and did not consider them worthy of being in museums. 

Portrait of Robert W. de Forest from
the collection of the Metropolitan Museum

But a group of progressive museum administrators who had come to the Met in the early 1900s believed that exhibiting American decorative arts would help open the museum to a broader audience. People who were not regular museum-goers might be intimidated by their lack of knowledge about fine art—painting and sculpture—but ordinary household things were potentially more accessible. Museum administrators also hoped that decorative arts displays would help teach good design and workmanship to visitors, who would use that knowledge to beautify their own homes and communities. 

The Hudson-Fulton Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum was due largely to the work of two administrators, trustee Robert de Forest and his assistant, Henry Watson Kent. They planned the exhibit to correspond with events that were happening all over New York to commemorate the 300th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s exploration of the Hudson River as well as the (slightly belated) centennial of the launch of Robert Fulton’s first steamboat in 1807. De Forest and Kent hoped to capitalize on the excitement generated by the celebration, as well as a planned exhibit of Dutch master paintings at the Met, to draw visitors to the American decorative arts display.

Promotional brochure produced by the
New York Central Railroad

Because the Met had no permanent collection of American objects, everything in the exhibition had to be borrowed from private collectors. The task of finding suitable objects fell almost entirely to Henry Watson Kent. Over the course of his career, first at the Slater Museum in Norwich, Connecticut, and then at the Grolier Club in New York, Kent had made many personal connections with collectors all over the United States. He was able to recruit R. T. H. Halsey and Luke Vincent Lockwood, two well-known experts on American furniture, to serve as advisory members of the exhibition committee.

Most of the seventeenth-century pieces on display were owned by a single collector, H. Eugene Bolles, a somewhat eccentric Bostonian lawyer who began collecting American antiques long before it became fashionable to do so. His cousin, George Palmer, lent many pieces from his collection of eighteenth-century furniture, while R. T. H. Halsey lent items from his collection of furniture made by Duncan Phyfe in the early nineteenth century. Other collectors lent portraits, silver, ceramics, and pewter, in addition to furniture.

Late-17th century chest with drawers
from the H. Eugene Bolles collection

The Hudson-Fulton Exhibition was a wild success, setting a record for attendance that would stand until the opening of the American Wing. While art critics had focused their attention on the exhibit of Dutch painting, visitors flocked to the furniture galleries. De Forest and Kent were vindicated in their belief that Americans would accept decorative arts as museum pieces. Soon after the exhibit ended, the Met acquired the Bolles collection for its permanent collection (philanthropist Margaret Olivia Sage purchased it, then donated it to the museum), intending for it to become the nucleus of a future American Wing.

However, the exhibition also made museum curators realize that some changes needed to be made to the way the items were displayed. At the Hudson-Fulton Exhibition, the furniture pieces were lined up in chronological order along the walls of the galleries. This method of organization was in accordance with accepted curatorial practice, but was thought by some observers to be a bit dull. Moreover, the relatively small scale of the pieces meant that they looked inconspicuous and out of place in the soaring Beaux-Arts galleries of the Met.

View of the Hudson-Fulton Exhibition. Note architectural wall fragment at far right.

Creating a series of period rooms seemed to be the perfect solution. The smaller scale of the rooms would complement the furniture as well as provide the broader context for the history of American decorative arts. Creating home-like settings would allow visitors to enter imaginatively into the scenes being depicted and, it was hoped, encourage them to think about the ways they could apply ideas from the exhibits to their own homes.

Over the next fifteen years, Robert de Forest and Henry Kent, along with curator R. T. H. Halsey, would work to build the Met’s collection of American decorative arts and to create a proper setting for their display. By the time the American Wing opened in 1924, much had changed in the world of art and antiques—and the colonial revival was about to become more popular than ever.

“The Illusion of Daily Occupancy”: Period Rooms and the Colonial Revival

Period rooms are so much a part of our modern museum landscape that it’s hard to imagine that they have only been found in the United States for a little over a hundred years. The first American period rooms were created by antiquarian George Francis Dow for the Essex Institute in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1907. It’s no coincidence that the three rooms—a kitchen of 1750 and parlor and bedroom of 1800—represented New England homes of the colonial era. The development of museum period rooms and the colonial revival were very closely related trends.

Period rooms first appeared in Europe. Artur Hazelius founded the Nordiska Museet (Nordic Museum) in Stockholm in 1873. Hazelius set up vignettes or tableaux similar to those found in wax museums, using mannequins to display the costumes and furnishings of the various geographical regions of Sweden. In 1891, Hazelius opened the first open-air, “living history” museum, called Skansen, which incorporated entire buildings occupied by families who demonstrated their traditional crafts and trades to visitors. Like American proponents of the Colonial Revival, Hazelius was worried that rural, pre-industrial skills and values were being lost and needed to be preserved in a special setting.

Organ grinder and women in traditional dress at Skansen, 1905
Photo from Wikimedia Commons

By the 1890s, museums in Zurich, Nuremberg, and Munich also had period rooms. Previously, these museums, like most, arranged their collections by type or material. But in the 1880s, museum curators began to feel that visitors would have a better understanding of art and history if they organized objects by period and style, thus giving a total picture of the culture of a specific moment. While there were many people in the United States who were very interested in the “Skansen Idea” and period rooms, it took some time for the idea to be implemented in this country. In part, this was because many museums still resisted the idea of presenting early American furnishings and household objects as “art.”

New England Kitchen of 1750, Essex Institute
Postcard from the collection of the New York Public Library

George Francis Dow presented his period rooms at the Essex Institute as historical exhibits, rather than artistic ones: his aim was to give visitors the impression they were peeking into scenes of everyday life in colonial New England. In an article written for the Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Dow explained how he created this sense of reality:

“These rooms [the kitchen, bedroom, and parlor] were then furnished with every detail, however small, so as to show interiors in an old-time house of that locality. An effort was made to heighten the illusion of actual human occupancy by casually placing on the table before the fireplace in the parlor a Salem newspaper printed in the year 1800 and on it a pair of silver-bowed spectacles, as though just removed by the reader. Elsewhere was placed a work basket with a half-knitted stocking on the top of other work, the knitting needles in place; and in other ways the illusion of daily occupancy was created.”

Parlor of 1800, Essex Institute
Postcard from the collection of the New York Public Library

The period rooms were just the beginning for Dow; in 1910 the Institute acquired its first historic structure, the 17th-century John Ward house, and moved it to a lot behind the museum. Dow restored the building to what he believed was its original appearance, and, inspired by Skansen, had guides in colonial costume providing interpretation for visitors. Over the years, the museum purchased many more buildings, including a shoemaker’s shop and an elegant Federal mansion, which served as examples of the varied architectural styles found in New England before the Civil War.

Bedroom of 1800, Essex Institute
Postcard from the collection of the New York Public Library

Because Dow’s aim was to create an illusion of historical reality, he was happy to use reproductions in his period rooms and houses. Nor was he trying to recreate actual places; rather, his rooms were imaginative composites of “typical” rooms. This would not be the case in the period rooms established in museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum in the 1920s and 1930s. Here, the goal was to bring together the finest pieces of decorative art and place them in worthy settings, generally by removing woodwork and other architectural elements from existing buildings and reinstalling them in the museums’ period rooms.

The opening the American Wing of the Metropolitan in 1924, the first permanent exhibition at an art museum of American furniture and decorative arts, marked an important turning point in the Colonial Revival. We’ll cover this key development in a future blog post.

The Essex Institute merged with the Peabody Museum of Salem in 1992 to become the Peabody Essex Museum. You can still visit their historic properties, including the John Ward House.