From Publishers Weekly
In 1851, when theologian Horace Bushnell stood on the village green in Litchfield, Conn., and looked back lovingly on the "Age of Homespun," he was expressing a perennial American nostalgia for the "good old days," when clothing and other necessities were mostly made at home by family labor. Historian Ulrich (author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Midwife's Tale) has not set out to deflate the sentimentality that accompanies Bushnell's vision, but rather to trace its genesis and understand how it has weathered the test of time. In her previous works, Ulrich studied the lives of ordinary people, examining their diaries and what they left for probate when they died in order to understand their place in history. Here, under the tutelage of various museum curators, Ulrich shifts toward a material culture study studying objects to understand the people who used them. From 14 artifacts of early American life (baskets, spinning wheels, needlework, etc.), Ulrich uncovers details about their makers and users and the communities they built. Eighteenth-century New England was a battleground of Indian, colonist, slave and European cultures, and each left its mark on the design of these "surviving objects." A quote from Bushnell and an illustration of an object open each chapter. What follows is anything from a rambling digression on a particular cabinet's provenance to a detailed discussion of how dyes were made or flax prepared. As fascinating as the book can be, though, general readers may give up halfway through, finding it frustratingly diffuse and too much of a patchwork. But early Americanists, historical sleuths and "textilians" will delight. 165 illus.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Items produced in the home to be used by their owners and treasured by later generations are worthy of study in their own right, but they also tell us much about those who made and kept them. Ulrich, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812, again offers brilliant insights into the lives of early Americans, as she examines their material culture as well as their lives. This engaging combination of women's studies, history, and the study of museum artifacts will delight a wide variety of readers. Chapter by chapter, Ulrich presents interesting early American objects and follows their description with the even more fascinating stories of the people who owned them and the world in which they lived. This work, approachable for the casual reader but based upon firm scholarship, would be a welcome addition to most larger academic and public libraries. Theresa McDevitt, Indiana Univ. of Pennsylvania
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Eleven artifacts common to the decades between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries--from an ordinary cross reel to wind yarn to a much-coveted Hadley cupboard--come alive in the skillful prose of the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Midwife's Tale (1990). In fact, each chapter reads like a well-crafted detective story. She starts, for instance, by trying to identify the piece's provenance, and then branches out into geography, genealogy, history, and other "ologies," weaving a fascinating story in the process. We learn that a Boston framed needlepoint, hung by Eunice Borne over the fireplace, borrows some inspiration from a similar French stitchery; that wigwams represented another form of weaving; and that cupboards, their painted surfaces aside, were structures for preserving and displaying family wealth. Clearly, Ulrich takes her tender, loving time in "study[ing] the flow of common life," in order "to discover the electricity of history," and the result is an edifying, entertaining voyage for any reader. Barbara Jacobs
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"This is a history so artful and astonishing that it makes me realize
how little I know about my own craft. Laurel Ulrich looks at the things
people made in the Age of Homespun and the meanings they and their
descendants attached to them. Each chapter is circular, beginning with an
object and the stories about it, then establishing context until the reader
gets some glimpse of both the richness of the world from which the object
came and the things stories about the object seek to conceal. Put the
chapters together, and there is a history of New England through the early
industrial revolution that opens out largely from women's work -- both
Indian and white."
-- Richard White, author of 'It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own':
A New History of the American West
"Once upon a time Harvard was West Podunk in the world of material
culture studies. No longer. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's appointment
to the faculty and now her trail-blazing book, The Age of Homespun,
redraw the map of an exciting field still full of surprises. Objects
made by and for American women transport readers into a landscape that
alternately teems with personal stories and opens onto stunning
historical perspectives."
--Cary Carson, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
"Although handmade clothing and textiles are often ignored or marginalized
as antiquarian oddities by academic historians, Laurel Ulrich has carefully
selected examples from which she has been able to tease powerful and
significant stories. Readers will enjoy the individual tales and, through them,
find their understanding of Colonial America a richer web."
-- Jane Nylander, author of Our Own Snug Fireside: Images of the New England
Home
"With her usual magic, Laurel Ulrich finds the world in small
pieces of evidence. Slavery, Indians, international commerce, class,
revolution, gentility all are woven into the fabrics she describes.
Moreover, she finds these weavers, spinners, and embroiderers creating a
culture of homespun later to be memorialized in the formation of American
identity."
-- Richard L. Bushman, author of The Refinement of America: Persons,
Houses, Cities
"THE AGE OF HOMESPUN is a rich blend of history and material culture and of
history and memory that reflects the storytelling and analytic skills of
one of today's finest historians. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich has written a
superb evocation of an important dimension of eighteenth-century America
and its reconstruction by subsequent generations."
-- Thomas Dublin, author of Transforming Women's Work: New England Lives
in the Industrial Revolution
"A yarn of a story? A richly woven text? A tapestry of tales? Readers
of THE AGE OF HOMESPUN will have to reach deep into their baskets of metaphors
to find words to describe this stunning work of scholarship and storytelling,
in which Ulrich asks us to think hard about the spinning of wool--and the
writing of history."
--Jill Lepore, author of The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of
American Identity
"In a unique work of astonishing originality, Laurel Ulrich
has achieved two distinct goals: recreating the textiles that early
Americans made and used, but also the illusions that 19th-century
Americans imagined about their forebears' domestic milieu. She does
all of that with due attention to particularity of place and change
over time--providing a superb example of the gifted historian's craft."
--Michael Kammen, author of American Culture, American Tastes
"In THE AGE OF HOMESPUN, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich explodes an enduring
American myth, one that has isolated early New England women and their
work from such larger historical currents as the colonization of American
Indians and the Industrial Revolution. The result is a deeply intelligent,
richly detailed study that enriches fundamentally our understandings of
early American history and American historical memory."
--Neal Salisbury, author of Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and
the Making of New England, 1500-1643
how little I know about my own craft. Laurel Ulrich looks at the things
people made in the Age of Homespun and the meanings they and their
descendants attached to them. Each chapter is circular, beginning with an
object and the stories about it, then establishing context until the reader
gets some glimpse of both the richness of the world from which the object
came and the things stories about the object seek to conceal. Put the
chapters together, and there is a history of New England through the early
industrial revolution that opens out largely from women's work -- both
Indian and white."
-- Richard White, author of 'It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own':
A New History of the American West
"Once upon a time Harvard was West Podunk in the world of material
culture studies. No longer. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's appointment
to the faculty and now her trail-blazing book, The Age of Homespun,
redraw the map of an exciting field still full of surprises. Objects
made by and for American women transport readers into a landscape that
alternately teems with personal stories and opens onto stunning
historical perspectives."
--Cary Carson, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
"Although handmade clothing and textiles are often ignored or marginalized
as antiquarian oddities by academic historians, Laurel Ulrich has carefully
selected examples from which she has been able to tease powerful and
significant stories. Readers will enjoy the individual tales and, through them,
find their understanding of Colonial America a richer web."
-- Jane Nylander, author of Our Own Snug Fireside: Images of the New England
Home
"With her usual magic, Laurel Ulrich finds the world in small
pieces of evidence. Slavery, Indians, international commerce, class,
revolution, gentility all are woven into the fabrics she describes.
Moreover, she finds these weavers, spinners, and embroiderers creating a
culture of homespun later to be memorialized in the formation of American
identity."
-- Richard L. Bushman, author of The Refinement of America: Persons,
Houses, Cities
"THE AGE OF HOMESPUN is a rich blend of history and material culture and of
history and memory that reflects the storytelling and analytic skills of
one of today's finest historians. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich has written a
superb evocation of an important dimension of eighteenth-century America
and its reconstruction by subsequent generations."
-- Thomas Dublin, author of Transforming Women's Work: New England Lives
in the Industrial Revolution
"A yarn of a story? A richly woven text? A tapestry of tales? Readers
of THE AGE OF HOMESPUN will have to reach deep into their baskets of metaphors
to find words to describe this stunning work of scholarship and storytelling,
in which Ulrich asks us to think hard about the spinning of wool--and the
writing of history."
--Jill Lepore, author of The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of
American Identity
"In a unique work of astonishing originality, Laurel Ulrich
has achieved two distinct goals: recreating the textiles that early
Americans made and used, but also the illusions that 19th-century
Americans imagined about their forebears' domestic milieu. She does
all of that with due attention to particularity of place and change
over time--providing a superb example of the gifted historian's craft."
--Michael Kammen, author of American Culture, American Tastes
"In THE AGE OF HOMESPUN, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich explodes an enduring
American myth, one that has isolated early New England women and their
work from such larger historical currents as the colonization of American
Indians and the Industrial Revolution. The result is a deeply intelligent,
richly detailed study that enriches fundamentally our understandings of
early American history and American historical memory."
--Neal Salisbury, author of Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and
the Making of New England, 1500-1643
Book Description
Using objects that Americans have saved through the centuries and stories they have passed along, as well as histories teased from documents, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich chronicles the production of cloth--and of history--in early America. Under the singular and brilliant lens that Ulrich brings to this study, ordinary household goods--Indian baskets, spinning wheels, a chimneypiece, a cupboard, a niddy-noddy, bed coverings, silk embroidery, a pocketbook, a linen tablecloth, a coverlet and a rose blanket, and an unfinished stocking--provide the key to a transformed understanding of cultural encounter, frontier war, Revolutionary politics, international commerce, and early industrialization in America. We discover how ideas about cloth and clothing affected relations between English settlers and their Algonkian neighbors. We see how an English production system based on a clear division of labor—men doing the weaving and women the spinning--broke down in the colonial setting, becoming first marginalized, then feminized, then politicized, and how the new system both prepared the way for and was sustained by machine-powered spinning.
Pulling these divergent threads together into a rich and revealing tapestry of --the age of homespun,--Ulrich demonstrates how ordinary objects reveal larger economic and social structures, and, in particular, how early Americans and their descendants made, used, sold, and saved textiles in order to assert identities, shape relationships, and create history.
Pulling these divergent threads together into a rich and revealing tapestry of --the age of homespun,--Ulrich demonstrates how ordinary objects reveal larger economic and social structures, and, in particular, how early Americans and their descendants made, used, sold, and saved textiles in order to assert identities, shape relationships, and create history.
From the Back Cover
"This is a history so artful and astonishing that it makes me realize
how little I know about my own craft. Laurel Ulrich looks at the things
people made in the Age of Homespun and the meanings they and their
descendants attached to them. Each chapter is circular, beginning with an
object and the stories about it, then establishing context until the reader
gets some glimpse of both the richness of the world from which the object
came and the things stories about the object seek to conceal. Put the
chapters together, and there is a history of New England through the early
industrial revolution that opens out largely from women's work -- both
Indian and white."
-- Richard White, author of 'It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own':
A New History of the American West
"Once upon a time Harvard was West Podunk in the world of material
culture studies. No longer. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's appointment
to the faculty and now her trail-blazing book, The Age of Homespun,
redraw the map of an exciting field still full of surprises. Objects
made by and for American women transport readers into a landscape that
alternately teems with personal stories and opens onto stunning
historical perspectives."
--Cary Carson, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
"Although handmade clothing and textiles are often ignored or marginalized
as antiquarian oddities by academic historians, Laurel Ulrich has carefully
selected examples from which she has been able to tease powerful and
significant stories. Readers will enjoy the individual tales and, through them,
find their understanding of Colonial America a richer web."
-- Jane Nylander, author of Our Own Snug Fireside: Images of the New England
Home
"With her usual magic, Laurel Ulrich finds the world in small
pieces of evidence. Slavery, Indians, international commerce, class,
revolution, gentility all are woven into the fabrics she describes.
Moreover, she finds these weavers, spinners, and embroiderers creating a
culture of homespun later to be memorialized in the formation of American
identity."
-- Richard L. Bushman, author of The Refinement of America: Persons,
Houses, Cities
"THE AGE OF HOMESPUN is a rich blend of history and material culture and of
history and memory that reflects the storytelling and analytic skills of
one of today's finest historians. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich has written a
superb evocation of an important dimension of eighteenth-century America
and its reconstruction by subsequent generations."
-- Thomas Dublin, author of Transforming Women's Work: New England Lives
in the Industrial Revolution
"A yarn of a story? A richly woven text? A tapestry of tales? Readers
of THE AGE OF HOMESPUN will have to reach deep into their baskets of metaphors
to find words to describe this stunning work of scholarship and storytelling,
in which Ulrich asks us to think hard about the spinning of wool--and the
writing of history."
--Jill Lepore, author of The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of
American Identity
"In a unique work of astonishing originality, Laurel Ulrich
has achieved two distinct goals: recreating the textiles that early
Americans made and used, but also the illusions that 19th-century
Americans imagined about their forebears' domestic milieu. She does
all of that with due attention to particularity of place and change
over time--providing a superb example of the gifted historian's craft."
--Michael Kammen, author of American Culture, American Tastes
"In THE AGE OF HOMESPUN, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich explodes an enduring
American myth, one that has isolated early New England women and their
work from such larger historical currents as the colonization of American
Indians and the Industrial Revolution. The result is a deeply intelligent,
richly detailed study that enriches fundamentally our understandings of
early American history and American historical memory."
--Neal Salisbury, author of Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and
the Making of New England, 1500-1643
how little I know about my own craft. Laurel Ulrich looks at the things
people made in the Age of Homespun and the meanings they and their
descendants attached to them. Each chapter is circular, beginning with an
object and the stories about it, then establishing context until the reader
gets some glimpse of both the richness of the world from which the object
came and the things stories about the object seek to conceal. Put the
chapters together, and there is a history of New England through the early
industrial revolution that opens out largely from women's work -- both
Indian and white."
-- Richard White, author of 'It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own':
A New History of the American West
"Once upon a time Harvard was West Podunk in the world of material
culture studies. No longer. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's appointment
to the faculty and now her trail-blazing book, The Age of Homespun,
redraw the map of an exciting field still full of surprises. Objects
made by and for American women transport readers into a landscape that
alternately teems with personal stories and opens onto stunning
historical perspectives."
--Cary Carson, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
"Although handmade clothing and textiles are often ignored or marginalized
as antiquarian oddities by academic historians, Laurel Ulrich has carefully
selected examples from which she has been able to tease powerful and
significant stories. Readers will enjoy the individual tales and, through them,
find their understanding of Colonial America a richer web."
-- Jane Nylander, author of Our Own Snug Fireside: Images of the New England
Home
"With her usual magic, Laurel Ulrich finds the world in small
pieces of evidence. Slavery, Indians, international commerce, class,
revolution, gentility all are woven into the fabrics she describes.
Moreover, she finds these weavers, spinners, and embroiderers creating a
culture of homespun later to be memorialized in the formation of American
identity."
-- Richard L. Bushman, author of The Refinement of America: Persons,
Houses, Cities
"THE AGE OF HOMESPUN is a rich blend of history and material culture and of
history and memory that reflects the storytelling and analytic skills of
one of today's finest historians. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich has written a
superb evocation of an important dimension of eighteenth-century America
and its reconstruction by subsequent generations."
-- Thomas Dublin, author of Transforming Women's Work: New England Lives
in the Industrial Revolution
"A yarn of a story? A richly woven text? A tapestry of tales? Readers
of THE AGE OF HOMESPUN will have to reach deep into their baskets of metaphors
to find words to describe this stunning work of scholarship and storytelling,
in which Ulrich asks us to think hard about the spinning of wool--and the
writing of history."
--Jill Lepore, author of The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of
American Identity
"In a unique work of astonishing originality, Laurel Ulrich
has achieved two distinct goals: recreating the textiles that early
Americans made and used, but also the illusions that 19th-century
Americans imagined about their forebears' domestic milieu. She does
all of that with due attention to particularity of place and change
over time--providing a superb example of the gifted historian's craft."
--Michael Kammen, author of American Culture, American Tastes
"In THE AGE OF HOMESPUN, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich explodes an enduring
American myth, one that has isolated early New England women and their
work from such larger historical currents as the colonization of American
Indians and the Industrial Revolution. The result is a deeply intelligent,
richly detailed study that enriches fundamentally our understandings of
early American history and American historical memory."
--Neal Salisbury, author of Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and
the Making of New England, 1500-1643
About the Author
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard University. Formerly a professor of American history at the University of New Hampshire, she is the author of Good Wives (1982) and numerous articles and essays on early American history. She won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1991 for A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard Based on Her Diary, 1785--1812. Born and raised in the Rocky Mountain West, she has lived in New England since 1960. During her tenure as a MacArthur Fellow, she assisted in the production of a PBS documentary based on A Midwife’s Tale. Her work is also featured on an award-winning Web site called dohistory.org. She and her husband, Gael Ulrich, are the parents of five grown children.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
The basket is four and a half inches high and four inches in diameter, about the size of a large tomato can, though smaller at the top than the bottom. When new it could have held a generous pound of meal or beans or twenty-four fathoms of wampum. Now light leaks through a weft ravaged by time and insects. The basket holds it shape through hundreds of invisible mends, the unseen art of a conservation lab. Tiny twists of rice paper bonded with unpronounceable adhesives like polyvinal acetate and polymethyl methacrylate fill gaps in a fragile fabric strengthened by multiple infusions of soluble nylon in ethyl alcohol. Would the basket be as precious without its story?
It came to the Rhode Island Historical Society in 1842 with a label carefully written by the donor:
This little basket, was given by a squaw, a native of the forest, to Dinah Fenner, wife of Major Thomas Fenner, who fought in Churche's Wars; then living in a garrison in Providence, now Cranston, R.I. The squaw went into the garrison; Mrs. Fenner gave her some milk to drink, she went out by the side of a river, peeled the inner bark from the Wikup tree, sat down under the tree, drew the shreds out of her blanket, mingled them with the bark, wrought this little basket, took it to the garrison and presented it to Mrs. Fenner. Mrs. Fenner gave it to her daughter, Freelove, wife of Samuel Westcoat, Mrs. Westcoat gave it to her granddaughter, Wait Field, wife of William Field at Field's Point, Mrs. Field gave it to her daughter, Sarah. Sarah left it to her sister, Elenor, who now presents it to the Historical Society of Rhode Island.
The reference to "Churche's Wars" led nineteenth-century antiquaries to date the basket to 1676, the year Captain Benjamin Church of Little Compton, Rhode Island, led New England troops in victory over the Wampanoag leader Metacomet, or King Philip. No one since has doubted the attribution.2 Displayed in the late nineteenth century alongside other relics of Rhode Island's first century, the basket quieted a troubling history of frontier conflict. Exhibited today as an icon of native art, it fulfills much the same purpose, shifting attention from the violence of the late seventeenth century to our own generation's hopes for multiculturalism.
The details in Field's description line up like clues in a mystery: a garrison, milk, a Wikup tree, shreds from a blanket, and those evocative names-Dinah, Freelove, Wait. There was a Dinah Fenner who lived in Rhode Island in 1676, though in that year her name was Dinah Borden, and she was only eleven years old. She did eventually marry Thomas Fenner, a man who helped to defend Providence in King Philip's War, and they did have a daughter named Freelove who had a granddaughter named Wait. Yet there is much in the story that remains puzzling. If the basket was made by "a native of the forest," why would she have come to an enemy garrison in time of war seeking milk, a food repulsive to a people known today to be lactose intolerant? Was she a refugee? So desperately hungry she was willing to accept any food offered? If so, how does one explain the basket? The exposed warp is indeed rough, but the twined pattern is intricate and artful. Could its maker have stripped and soaked fibers from the inner bark of a tree, gathered husks from an abandoned field, then patiently sat on the bank of a river weaving in a time and place where even friendly Indians were in danger? That hardly seems likely, yet laboratory analysis tells us there are fragments of red and blue wool still clinging to the interior of the basket. Could they have come from an English blanket?
The twentieth-century Narragansett historian and basket-maker Ella Sekatau once told a visiting scholar about a curious window in an old schoolhouse near her Rhode Island home. One pane was of "old, old glass," ridged and warped. Looking into it, people saw things that weren't there, like "a sea with Indian people, and it didn't match with the window next to it" or ancient figures standing by a big stone outcropping. Everybody saw different things, not the actual objects that sat on the other side of the window, but shadowy scenes from somewhere else. "My cousin's husband said you shouldn't have things like that, and he broke it."
Dinah Fenner's basket is that kind of window. Some will use it to imagine a history more intimate and peaceful than the one in books. Others will find nothing in it they can trust. Interpreting such an object requires both imagination and skepticism, imagination to see new possibilities in an old story, but skepticism about its placid surface. Here the important question is not how a Rhode Island woman got her basket, but why milk, a basket, and a blanket should appear in the same narrative. Rereading the early history of New England with these objects in mind transforms an apocryphal story into a powerful lens for understanding exchange relations in the first century of English settlement. To write about blankets is to write about the expansion of English commerce. To write about baskets is to discover the little-known work of Native American women. To search for the meaning of milk is to find the biblical vision that animated the English quest for land. The history of Dinah Fenner's family brings these themes together in unexpected and disturbing ways, providing a solution to the origins of the basket that is less literal than Field's telling yet true to its larger themes.
The English who came to the coast of what is now New England in the early 1600s were not all alike. Some came to fish, some to pray, and among those who prayed there were enough differences to keep them squabbling and sometimes hounding one another from colony to colony for generations. The people they found here also differed. Although scholars sometimes refer to them collectively as Algonkians, they spoke different dialects, inhabited different river basins, and assigned a bewildering array of names to one another. In terms of textile history, however, Englishmen and Algonkians differed more from each other than they did among themselves. The English came from a wool-producing country proud of its blankets. Algonkians were renowned for their basketry.
Archaeological sites on coastal New England are littered with lead seals once attached to bolts of fabric. As the Englishman Richard Hakluyt espressed it in a 1584 treatise, the second purpose of colonization, after advancing the "kingedome of Christe," was the vending "of the masse
of our cloths and other commodities." The English did that with a vengeance.Yet the first Englishmen to visit North America were fascinated with the unfamiliar fabrics they found in Indian villages. Among the Algonkians, textile production was women's work. Men worked in stone, metal, and wood, producing impressive tobacco pipes, knot dishes, pendants, and other ornaments. Women made netted, twined, sewn, and plaited textiles to cover their houses, dry corn, trap fish, store provisions, carry produce, and line graves. In the words of one English observer, they made baskets of "rushes, some of bents; others of maize husks; others, of a kind of silk grass; others of a kind of wild hemp; and some of barks of trees, many of them, very neat and artificial, with the portraitures of birds, beasts, fishes, and flowers, upon them in colours." Men hunted and cared for tobacco fields. Women planted, hoed, and harvested food crops, storing them in containers of their own manufacture. Rhode Island's Roger Williams described heaps of maize "of twelve, fifteene, or twentie bushells a heap" drying on woven mats by day, covered with tarps of basketry at night.
One writer claimed to have seen an immense basket buried in the earth that held sixty gallons of maize. Another said Indian containers ranged in volume from "a quart to a quarter" (in archaic usage a quarter was eight bushels).Tightly woven bags of soft hemp held the parched maize called nokake in some dialects and yohicake, yoheag, yokeg, or nokehick in others, a food "so sweet, toothsome, and hearty, that an Indian will travel many days with no other food but this meal, which he eateth as he needs, and after it drinketh water." Williams claimed to have traveled with an Indian band "neere 100 miles through the woods, every man carrying a little Basket of this at his back, and sometimes in a hollow Leather Girdle about his middle."
Although Europeans had their own basketry traditions, basketry was far more varied among the Algonkians. Thomas Morton wrote of mats made by stitching together long strips of what the English called "sedge" with "needles made of the splinter bones of a Cranes legge, with threeds, made of their Indian hempe." In preparation for netting or weaving, women spun fine fibers between their fingers or across their thighs. William Wood said that Indian cordage was "so even, soft, and smooth that it looks more like silk than hemp." Other writers admired the "curious Coats" or mantles of turkey feathers that women wove together "with twine of their owne makinge, very prittily." John Josselyn, who spent much of his time in northern New England, described "Delicate sweet dishes . . . of Birch-Bark sowed with threads drawn from Spruce and white Cedar-Roots, and garnished on the outside with flourisht works, and on the brims with glistering quills taken from the Porcupine, and dyed, some black, others red."
Wigwams were also a form of basketry. Wood said that women framed them like an English garden arbor, "very strong and handsome," then covered them "with close-wrought mats of their own weaving which deny entrance to any drop of rain, though it come both fierce and long, neither can the piercing north wind find a cranny." Observing Indians along the Maine coast a little later in the century, Josselyn described similar structures "covered with the bark of Trees" and lined inside "with mats...
The basket is four and a half inches high and four inches in diameter, about the size of a large tomato can, though smaller at the top than the bottom. When new it could have held a generous pound of meal or beans or twenty-four fathoms of wampum. Now light leaks through a weft ravaged by time and insects. The basket holds it shape through hundreds of invisible mends, the unseen art of a conservation lab. Tiny twists of rice paper bonded with unpronounceable adhesives like polyvinal acetate and polymethyl methacrylate fill gaps in a fragile fabric strengthened by multiple infusions of soluble nylon in ethyl alcohol. Would the basket be as precious without its story?
It came to the Rhode Island Historical Society in 1842 with a label carefully written by the donor:
This little basket, was given by a squaw, a native of the forest, to Dinah Fenner, wife of Major Thomas Fenner, who fought in Churche's Wars; then living in a garrison in Providence, now Cranston, R.I. The squaw went into the garrison; Mrs. Fenner gave her some milk to drink, she went out by the side of a river, peeled the inner bark from the Wikup tree, sat down under the tree, drew the shreds out of her blanket, mingled them with the bark, wrought this little basket, took it to the garrison and presented it to Mrs. Fenner. Mrs. Fenner gave it to her daughter, Freelove, wife of Samuel Westcoat, Mrs. Westcoat gave it to her granddaughter, Wait Field, wife of William Field at Field's Point, Mrs. Field gave it to her daughter, Sarah. Sarah left it to her sister, Elenor, who now presents it to the Historical Society of Rhode Island.
The reference to "Churche's Wars" led nineteenth-century antiquaries to date the basket to 1676, the year Captain Benjamin Church of Little Compton, Rhode Island, led New England troops in victory over the Wampanoag leader Metacomet, or King Philip. No one since has doubted the attribution.2 Displayed in the late nineteenth century alongside other relics of Rhode Island's first century, the basket quieted a troubling history of frontier conflict. Exhibited today as an icon of native art, it fulfills much the same purpose, shifting attention from the violence of the late seventeenth century to our own generation's hopes for multiculturalism.
The details in Field's description line up like clues in a mystery: a garrison, milk, a Wikup tree, shreds from a blanket, and those evocative names-Dinah, Freelove, Wait. There was a Dinah Fenner who lived in Rhode Island in 1676, though in that year her name was Dinah Borden, and she was only eleven years old. She did eventually marry Thomas Fenner, a man who helped to defend Providence in King Philip's War, and they did have a daughter named Freelove who had a granddaughter named Wait. Yet there is much in the story that remains puzzling. If the basket was made by "a native of the forest," why would she have come to an enemy garrison in time of war seeking milk, a food repulsive to a people known today to be lactose intolerant? Was she a refugee? So desperately hungry she was willing to accept any food offered? If so, how does one explain the basket? The exposed warp is indeed rough, but the twined pattern is intricate and artful. Could its maker have stripped and soaked fibers from the inner bark of a tree, gathered husks from an abandoned field, then patiently sat on the bank of a river weaving in a time and place where even friendly Indians were in danger? That hardly seems likely, yet laboratory analysis tells us there are fragments of red and blue wool still clinging to the interior of the basket. Could they have come from an English blanket?
The twentieth-century Narragansett historian and basket-maker Ella Sekatau once told a visiting scholar about a curious window in an old schoolhouse near her Rhode Island home. One pane was of "old, old glass," ridged and warped. Looking into it, people saw things that weren't there, like "a sea with Indian people, and it didn't match with the window next to it" or ancient figures standing by a big stone outcropping. Everybody saw different things, not the actual objects that sat on the other side of the window, but shadowy scenes from somewhere else. "My cousin's husband said you shouldn't have things like that, and he broke it."
Dinah Fenner's basket is that kind of window. Some will use it to imagine a history more intimate and peaceful than the one in books. Others will find nothing in it they can trust. Interpreting such an object requires both imagination and skepticism, imagination to see new possibilities in an old story, but skepticism about its placid surface. Here the important question is not how a Rhode Island woman got her basket, but why milk, a basket, and a blanket should appear in the same narrative. Rereading the early history of New England with these objects in mind transforms an apocryphal story into a powerful lens for understanding exchange relations in the first century of English settlement. To write about blankets is to write about the expansion of English commerce. To write about baskets is to discover the little-known work of Native American women. To search for the meaning of milk is to find the biblical vision that animated the English quest for land. The history of Dinah Fenner's family brings these themes together in unexpected and disturbing ways, providing a solution to the origins of the basket that is less literal than Field's telling yet true to its larger themes.
The English who came to the coast of what is now New England in the early 1600s were not all alike. Some came to fish, some to pray, and among those who prayed there were enough differences to keep them squabbling and sometimes hounding one another from colony to colony for generations. The people they found here also differed. Although scholars sometimes refer to them collectively as Algonkians, they spoke different dialects, inhabited different river basins, and assigned a bewildering array of names to one another. In terms of textile history, however, Englishmen and Algonkians differed more from each other than they did among themselves. The English came from a wool-producing country proud of its blankets. Algonkians were renowned for their basketry.
Archaeological sites on coastal New England are littered with lead seals once attached to bolts of fabric. As the Englishman Richard Hakluyt espressed it in a 1584 treatise, the second purpose of colonization, after advancing the "kingedome of Christe," was the vending "of the masse
of our cloths and other commodities." The English did that with a vengeance.Yet the first Englishmen to visit North America were fascinated with the unfamiliar fabrics they found in Indian villages. Among the Algonkians, textile production was women's work. Men worked in stone, metal, and wood, producing impressive tobacco pipes, knot dishes, pendants, and other ornaments. Women made netted, twined, sewn, and plaited textiles to cover their houses, dry corn, trap fish, store provisions, carry produce, and line graves. In the words of one English observer, they made baskets of "rushes, some of bents; others of maize husks; others, of a kind of silk grass; others of a kind of wild hemp; and some of barks of trees, many of them, very neat and artificial, with the portraitures of birds, beasts, fishes, and flowers, upon them in colours." Men hunted and cared for tobacco fields. Women planted, hoed, and harvested food crops, storing them in containers of their own manufacture. Rhode Island's Roger Williams described heaps of maize "of twelve, fifteene, or twentie bushells a heap" drying on woven mats by day, covered with tarps of basketry at night.
One writer claimed to have seen an immense basket buried in the earth that held sixty gallons of maize. Another said Indian containers ranged in volume from "a quart to a quarter" (in archaic usage a quarter was eight bushels).Tightly woven bags of soft hemp held the parched maize called nokake in some dialects and yohicake, yoheag, yokeg, or nokehick in others, a food "so sweet, toothsome, and hearty, that an Indian will travel many days with no other food but this meal, which he eateth as he needs, and after it drinketh water." Williams claimed to have traveled with an Indian band "neere 100 miles through the woods, every man carrying a little Basket of this at his back, and sometimes in a hollow Leather Girdle about his middle."
Although Europeans had their own basketry traditions, basketry was far more varied among the Algonkians. Thomas Morton wrote of mats made by stitching together long strips of what the English called "sedge" with "needles made of the splinter bones of a Cranes legge, with threeds, made of their Indian hempe." In preparation for netting or weaving, women spun fine fibers between their fingers or across their thighs. William Wood said that Indian cordage was "so even, soft, and smooth that it looks more like silk than hemp." Other writers admired the "curious Coats" or mantles of turkey feathers that women wove together "with twine of their owne makinge, very prittily." John Josselyn, who spent much of his time in northern New England, described "Delicate sweet dishes . . . of Birch-Bark sowed with threads drawn from Spruce and white Cedar-Roots, and garnished on the outside with flourisht works, and on the brims with glistering quills taken from the Porcupine, and dyed, some black, others red."
Wigwams were also a form of basketry. Wood said that women framed them like an English garden arbor, "very strong and handsome," then covered them "with close-wrought mats of their own weaving which deny entrance to any drop of rain, though it come both fierce and long, neither can the piercing north wind find a cranny." Observing Indians along the Maine coast a little later in the century, Josselyn described similar structures "covered with the bark of Trees" and lined inside "with mats...
