Breakfast Links: Week of January 25, 2016

Breakfast Links are served - our weekly round-up of fav links to other web sites, articles, blogs, and images via Twitter.
• Intriguing book digitalized for online reading: Barrington's New London Spy for 1809, or, The Frauds of London Detected.
• Which came first: the product or the L'eggs?
• Smoking little Josiah: mandatory fumigating with brimstone against smallpox in 1775 Boston.
• Amelia Earhart's cautiously optimistic advice to an aspiring female pilot in 1933.
• Looking closely at a young New York woman's early 19thc. diary.
• Image: Another needlework pattern - for aprons or neckerchiefs - from the Lady's Magazine, 1786.
• Posthumous portraiture in 19thc. America.
• The unexpected beauty to be found in America's last surviving textile mills.
• Remains of an early African-American burial ground discovered in NYC beneath a Harlem bus station.
• Lustful looks: signs of venery in John Ward's 17thc diaries.
• Image: The Swell's Night Guide to the Bowers of Venus.
• Brighten up a dull winter day by carrying a little bouquet of bright flowers in this 19thc silver holder.
• Mr. A. Watkins and the touring bee van.
• Why (and how) does an 18thc fictional character have a grave in the cemetery of NYC's Trinity Church?
• Ranch dressing: what to wear to a dude ranch in the 1930s.
• Image: Tudor rose, Canterbury Cathedral.
• A mysterious ritual burial for two horses killed serving in the War of 1812.
• The arches of Madison Square Park in New York.
• Paper dolls and ready-to-wear brought flapper fashions to the masses in the 1920s.
• Monsters and moral panic in 18th-19thc London.
• The kitchen is the heart of the home: why these two slave cabins matter.
• Image: When you want to fight, but your horses just want to hug it out.
• Life in the King's Bench Prison.
• What they left behind: things people keep to remember their deceased loved ones.
• Somewhere between history and style: the eccentric beauty of Malplaquet House.
• Just for fun: "When you're rich, and when you're poor" from Mad Magazine, 1977, and still too true.
Hungry for more? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls for fresh updates daily.
Above: At Breakfast by Laurits Andersen Ring. Private collection.

Friday Video: Sights and Sounds of Paris in the 1700s

Loretta reports:

The closest we Nerdy History Girls come to time travel is exercising our imaginations, based on  what we find in historical materials. As to actual time travel—I’m not sure I want to go there without inoculations against a host of diseases. Also, I’m not sure how well I’d cope with the smells. My fantasy is a sort of bubble, in which I’m invisible to others, and which contains a translation device that allows me to understand what people are saying. This would include speakers of English, whose pronunciation not only varies depending on locale, but has also changed over time.

While not in English, this video gives a hint of what it might be like in that bubble, walking through a part of Paris in the 1700s.*

*My thanks to author Lauren Willig, whose Facebook post I stole it from.

Readers who receive our blog via email might see a rectangle, square, or nothing where the video ought to be.  To watch the video, please click on the title to this post.

Saving Local History and the 18thc Covered Wagon Inn

Isabella reporting,

I live in Chester County, Pennsylvania, not far from Philadelphia. Independence Hall, Carpenters' Hall, and the Liberty Bell are forty or so miles to the east, and Valley Forge National Park is the proverbial stone's throw away.

Although the county is a region almost embarrassingly rich in 18thc. history, there aren't as many surviving buildings as you might think. Part of this is the nature of that past - most of 18thc. Chester County was farmland - plus the usual hazards to old structures of fire and strong weather, but the largest threat has always been progress. Just as that 17thc. developer William Penn looked at the colonial wilderness and envisioned his famous "Green Countrie Townes" replacing forests, so his later counterparts were - and are - every bit as eager to wipe out yesterday for the sake of a more profitable present.

The photograph, above, shows the Covered Wagon Inn in Strafford, PA, built around 1780 as a way station for travelers and commercial traffic on the busy road between Philadelphia and Lancaster. Beyond that, it's not famous. It doesn't have landmark status. It's not even a particularly striking example of vernacular architecture, and besides, the interiors were gutted long ago to convert it into a modern restaurant (it's currently the showroom for a furniture maker.) But the Inn is a tangible link to a long-gone Chester County, and a vivid reminder that, however fast we're whizzing along Route 30 today, we're only about seven generations removed from the 18thc. Pennsylvanians who stopped here for a meal and to water their horses.

It's also a reminder that may soon be gone. The Covered Wagon Inn has the misfortune to sit on a valuable corner lot, and there are plans to replace it with a CVS drug store. Although the lot is large enough to work around the Inn, the CVS representatives are adamant: they want that corner so the new store can have a drive-thru window. They can't see an imaginative way to incorporate the old Inn into their plans. Their architect promises to honor the memory of the old inn by incorporating a stone wall into the store's design.

That's not enough. Surprisingly, local preservation laws to save the Inn don't exist. But people who care about local history are trying to persuade the town supervisors, the real estate company holding the property, and CVS to change their plans and save the Inn. No one expects a historically accurate restoration or recreation, but rather a historically sensitive plan to preserve and incorporate the Inn into a modern commercial use for the corner. You can read more about the efforts here. You can follow the Inn on Facebook here, and you can sign the Change petition here. I'd appreciate it if you do.

But more importantly, I hope you'll take a long look at the links to the past in your own neighborhood. So many need your help, and perseverance and creative thinking are the only ways to keep the past as part of the present, and the future. Because once that old house, or shop, or tavern, or mill, or bridge, or whatever it may be, is gone, it's gone forever.

UPDATE, 5/20/16: The Covered Wagon Inn looks like it has had a reprieve - read more here.

Above: The Covered Wagon Inn, photograph via Google street view.

Mr. Curtis's Acoustic Chair

Curtis's Acoustic Chair

Loretta reports:

While researching another topic entirely, I came upon Mr. Curtis’s Acoustic Chair. This is another of the items that were familiar enough to people at the time to become the subject of witticisms, while being completely new to me.

“Mr. Curtis, about 1830, by the aid of several mechanics, brought out his acoustic chair, which was stated to possess such wondrous power, that His Majesty could sit in his palace, at Windsor, and hear communications from his ministers at Whitehall. Whether our present Sovereign does not require her ministers to keep at such a distance, and, therefore, has not patronized Mr. Curtis's acoustic chair, or whatever other cause may have operated, probably will never be known, but that gentleman's name does not appear to be continued in the list of Her Majesty's household.”— William Wright, A Few Minutes' Advice to Deaf Persons (1839)

Mr. William Mullinger Higgins’s Philosophy of Sound and Musical Composition (1838), whose relevant pages I show above, contains the shortest and easiest-to-understand explanation I came upon.

You can learn more of the technical details in the Mechanics’ Magazine of January 14, 1837 here.

Another illustration (of the chair at home) and explanation appeared in The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction on 18 February 1837 here.

Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on the caption will take you to the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.

From the Archives: Big Furry Mittens from the 19thc.

Isabella reporting,

I live outside of Philadelphia, one of the areas hit hardest this weekend by the blizzard known as Winter Storm Jonas (and why do the Weather Powers That Be feel the necessity to name storms?)  As we dig out from 29" of snow plus drifts, I remembered this post, and thought about how much harder this all would have been in the 19th c., when these furry mittens were first worn.

They're made from buffalo leather and likely buffalo hide (the museum that owns them isn't quite certain about the fur/hair, but it does look the same as the popular shaggy buffalo coats and robes from the same era), and they would have qualified as serious cold-weather wear. Mittens are always warmer than gloves because the fingers are kept together. But there's a definite trade-off between warmth and dexterity, as anyone who has tried to do much of anything wearing mittens can attest.

But I'm guessing these mittens had a specific purpose. Stage, coach, and sleigh drivers were a hardy breed. The position required skill with horses, knowledge of the roads, and the necessary strength to drive and control a team of horses in all weather and on all kinds of roads. Driving in winter weather must have been especially cruel. The painting, right, shows the English Dover to London coach laboring through a snow storm, while the one, lower left, features a pair of Canadian sleighs, one having driven the other off the road.

North American drivers often wore long, gauntlet-style mittens like these for extreme weather. The extended cuffs stretched over the sleeves driver's coat, protecting his hands and forearms from driving snow and wind, while the leather palms could securely hold the reins. The mittens would have to have been removed to make any adjustments to the harnesses, but during a long, cold drive, they must have offered a welcome warmth - and probably made quite the style-statement at stage posts and inn yards.

I spotted these mittens on the The Clothing Project, a tumblr devoted to the clothing collections of the Fenimore Art Museum and the Farmers' Museum. Many unusual American pieces here, and worth checking out!

Top left: Men's Mittens, 19th c., Bison Hide & Fur, Farmers' Museum, Cooperstown, NY. Photo by The Clothing Project.
Right: London to Dover Coach, Winter, by Henry Alken, private collection.
Lower left: Run Off the Road in a Blizzard, by Cornelius Krieghoff, c 1850, Art Gallery of Ontario.