Gravestone of the Day: Abigail Mitchel

Abigail Mitchel, 1714, Haverhill, MA

HERE LYES ye BODY OF

Mrs ABIGAIL ye WIFE OF

Mr ANDREW MITCHEL

WHO DIED DESEMBER ye

12 1714 AGED [2?]4

YEARS

This stone showcases the "ornimorphic" forms noted by Allan Ludwig. These bird-like shapes are characteristic of carvings from Ipswich, MA executed during the early years of the 18th century.

Six Percent Revisited

Andy Hall, guest-blogging for Ta-Nehisi Coates, takes on the myth of the 6% in a new post, "Small Truth Papering Over a Big Lie."

In addition to Joseph T. Glatthaar's study of the Army of Northern Virginia, which Hall mentions, I recommend the following books to anyone who is interested in the question of white Southerners' investment in slavery:

• Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country by Stephanie McCurry
• What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War by Chandra Manning

I'm glad to see this issue getting some attention on a blog with such a large popular readership.

Jackson

Today, Hark! A Vagrant presents a brief, humorous biography of Andrew Jackson in comic strip form.

Gravestone of the Day: Richard Warner

Richard Warner, 1768, Pepperell, MA

ERECTED

In Memory of Mr

RICHARD WARNER

he Departed this Life

Sept. the 15th, 1768 in

Ye 93d Year of his Age.

He was a Kind & Loving husband,

A pleasant & tender Parent, Compas

sionate to the poor, diligent in bu

siness honouring God with his

Substance, & now, is gone to receive

a reward for his past labour.

It looks like this carver initially left the d off of "husband" — the comma suggests that he didn't intend to put it on another line and the size of the d is much smaller than the last two letters of "receive." Dropped ds and ts are not uncommon in New England gravestones.

Gravestone of the Day: Ebenezer Convers

Ebenezer Convers, Woburn, MA

EBENEZER

CONUERS SON

OF JAMES & HAN-

NAH CONUERS

AGED ABOUT 5

YEARS DIED

[November 9, 1693]

Pottery Barn Museum Collection

I hope I can point to this collection without sounding like a shill for the nostalgia-peddling, over-charging swindlers who run Pottery Barn. Their latest evil plan involves teaming up with the American Folk Art Museum and the Shelburne Museum to make a couple of gorgeous reproductions available to the mass market under the title of The Museum Collection. Curse you, Pottery Barn. It is so hard to criticize you when I am drooling over your merchandise.

I have gone on record as a critic of the American Folk Art Museum — I think that their collection, which includes both 18th-century needlework and the paintings of Henry Darger, is incoherent* — but they do have some amazing quilts. The exquisite Sunburst Quilt that is being reproduced by Pottery Barn was made by Rebecca Scattergood Savery of Philadelphia sometime in the 1830s or 1840s. Pottery Barn's catalog description does not attribute the quilt to its quilter, preferring the passive voice — "The original was crafted near Philadelphia around 1835 . . ." — even though the quilt's authorship is fairly well documented.


The Museum Collection also includes two reproductions of hooked rugs from the Shelburne Museum. While I do not find these rugs nearly as appealing as the sunburst quilt, I have enjoyed reading their catalog descriptions. When the catalog says that "hooked rugs are believed to be indigenous to America," I have visions of little woolen squares scampering through the forests or growing on beach plum bushes.

* I don't have a problem with Henry Darger — I just think that featuring ordinary handicrafts of the 18th-century alongside 20th-century "outsider art" tends to encourage a the modern viewer to perceive the 18th-century objects as idiosyncratic, rather than as the mainstream productions of an historical era.

Gravestone of the Day: Freelove Windsor

Freelove Windsor, 1783, North Burial Ground, Providence, RI

IN Memory of

Mrs. FREELOVE

WINDSOR,

the late amiable

Consort of

Mr. Olney Windsor,

who died Feby. 17th.

A.D. 1783, in the

28th. Year of her

Age.

Freelove was a fairly popular name in 18th-century Rhode Island, though I have not seen it much elsewhere. Freelove Windsor was the wife of Olney Winsor, whose gravestone appeared yesterday.

Gravestone of the Day: Olney Winsor

Olney Winsor, 1837, North Burial Ground, Providence, RI

Sacred to the Memory

of

OLNEY WINSOR, ESQ.

who died March 15, 1837,

in the 84th year

of his age.

He sustained through life

the character of a sincere Friend,

an affectionate Husband & Father,

an active & intelligent Citizen,

a true Patriot & an honest Man;

fuly believing

the truths of Divine Revelation,

his life was regulated by its precepts,

& his death

cheered by its promises.

The Tingley brothers stones in Providence don't have the same personality as the hand-carved stones, but I still find them appealing. The slate is so fine, the letters are so precise, and everything is so well preserved. They always draw my eye.

Lydia Dyar: NOT an Enemy to Her Country

Boston Gazette and Country Journal, 28 March 1774 via America's Historical Newspapers

Lydia Dyar, whose flamboyantly patriotic gravestone in Billerica is the subject of the essay I am working on at the moment, was a small-scale merchant. Nearly every spring between 1760 and 1774, she advertised in the Boston newspapers, touting her new stock of imported garden seeds. At her shop in the North End of Boston, customers could find a variety of vegetable seeds — cabbage, spinach, carrot, turnip, lettuce, cucumber, squash, cauliflower, pea — along with beans, herbs, and flowers.

Even during the height of the nonimportation crisis, the Widow Dyar continued to buy seeds from London and Messrs. Edes and Gill of the Gazette, strong Whigs both, continued to run her ads. Unlike the unfortunate Cummings sisters, whose business activities attracted the ire of a tar-and-feather-wielding mob in October of 1769, Lydia Dyar and the other seed sellers of Boston went unmolested. The March 6, 1769 issue of the Boston Gazette carried five seed sellers (Lydia Dyar, Abigail Davidson, Elizabeth Greenleaf, Bethiah Oliver, and Susanna Renken), all of whom advertised their wares as imports. A year later, when tempers were running high over the Boston Massacre, Dyar omitted the word "imported" from her ad, though two other sellers (Davidson and Renkin) still advertised their seeds as "Imported in the last ship from London" (Boston Gazette, 9 April 1770).

"Burn a Confederate Flag Day"

General J.C. Christian from Jesus' General is leading a campaign to get progressives to participate in "Burn a Confederate Flag Day" on September 12, 2010. He envisions it as a counter to the 9/12 Tea Parties and hopes that it will expose the Tea Partiers' "conscious effort to show African Americans as subversive and anti-American and to tie that to Obama."

My first question: should participants burn the Confederate national flag to protest the Confederacy's assault on the U.S. Constitution or the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia to protest the ongoing racism of the Lost Causers?

Gravestone of the Day: David Marsh

David Marsh, 1777, Haverhill, MA

In Memory of Deacn

David Marsh who

Departed this

Life novemr. the

2d. 1777 and in

the 80th. year

of his age

Gravestone of the Day: Benjamin Chamberlin

Benjamin Chamberlin, 1778, Pepperell, MA

THIS MONUMENT

Is Erected in Memory of

Mr. Benjamin Chamberlin

who departed this Life

in the Continental Army

at Valleyforge in the

year 1778; In ye 17th

year of his Age.

He was ye Son of Mr. Phineas Chamberlin

and Mrs. Lydia his wife.

Name of the Day: Sweeten Reed

Mr. Sweeten Reed lost £200 in real estate during the Boston fire of 1760:

He (or a son with the same name) went on to marry a woman named Anna and had at least one child.

Gravestone of the Day: Submit H. Smith

Submit H. Smith, Grove Hill Cemetery, Waltham, MA

SUBMIT H.

Wife of

ABIJAH P. SMITH,

Died Sept. 1, 1849,

AET. 70.

Tea Partiers Visit Colonial Williamsburg

Bless those first-person interpreters. I did my share of first-person impressions in my reenacting days, and I can only imagine how annoying it must be to give 18th-century responses to visitors who are more interested in 21st-century politics than in 18th-century history.

Gravestone of the Day: Edward Thurston

Edward Thurston, 1706, North Baptist Burial Ground, Newport, RI

HERE LYETH THE BODY

OF EDWARD THURSTON

WHO LIVED 90 YEARS

& DEPARTED THIS LIFE

Ye 28 DAY OF FEBRUARY

1706

Restoring Daguerreotypes Digitally

Cincinnati, 1848, Cincinnati Public Library

Pete's friend, Ross, is getting his Ph.D. in computer vision at the University of Rochester. One of his recent projects involved magnifying and restoring a series of daguerreotypes taken by Charles Fontayne and William Porter on September 24, 1848 in Cincinnati. Strung together, the daguerreotypes show two miles of the city's waterfront.

A story about the restoration project appears in this month's Wired magazine. The article and images are available online — I highly recommend them. The level of detail they were able to recover is truly amazing.

Gravestone of the Day: Jerusha Mitchell

Jerusha Mutchell, 1755, North Burial Ground, Providence, RI

In Memory of

Mrs Jerusha Mitchell

ye Wife of Mr James

Mitchell Decd Sep-

tember ye 22d 1755

in ye 47th Year of 

her Age.