Colonial days in old New York

by Alice Morse Earle

“Knitting was an art much cultivated, the Dutch women excelling in the variety and intricacy of the stitches. A knitting sheath, which might be of silver or of a homely goose-quill, was an indispensable utensil, and beside it hung the ball-pin-cushion. Crewel-work and silk embroidery were fashionable, and surprisingly pretty effects were produced. Every little maiden had her sampler, which she began with the alphabet and numerals following them with a Scriptural text or verse of a metrical psalm. Then fancy was let loose on birds, beasts, and trees. Most of the old families possessed framed pieces of embroidery, the handiwork of female ancestors. Flounces and trimmings for aprons worked with delicately tinted silks on muslin were common. I have several yards of fine muslin painted in the early days with full-blown thistles in the appropriate colors. Fringe looms were in use, and cotton and silk fringes were woven.”

Tape-looms were also found in many households; and the weaving of tapes and “none-so-prettys” was deemed very light and elegant work.

Though to the Dutch is ascribed the invention of the thimble, I never think of the Dutch women as excelling in fine needlework; and I note that the teachers of intricate and novel embroidery-stitches are always Englishwomen; but in turn the English goodwives must yield to the Dutch the palm of comfortable, attractive housewifery, as well as shrewd, untiring business capacity.

CHAPTER IX
THE COLONIAL WARDROBE

The Dutch goodwife worked hard from early morn till sunset. She worked in restricted ways, she had few recreations and pleasures and altogether little variety in her life; but she possessed what doubtless proved to her in that day, as it would to any woman in this day, a source of just satisfaction, a soothing to the spirit, a staying of melancholy, a moral support second only to the solace of religion,—namely, a large quantity of very good clothes, which were substantial, cheerful, and suitable, if not elegant.

The Dutch never dressed “in a plaine habbit according to the maner of a poore wildernesse people,” as the Connecticut colonists wrote of themselves to Charles II.; nor were they weary wanderers in a wilderness as were Connecticut folk.

I have not found among the statutes of New Netherland any sumptuary laws such as were passed in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Virginia, to restrain and attempt to prohibit luxury and extravagance in dress. Nor have I discovered in the court-records any evidences of magisterial reproof of finery; there is, on the contrary, much indirect proof of encouragement to “dress orderly and well according to the fashion and the time.” Of course the Dutch had no Puritanical dread of over-rich garments; and we must also never forget New Netherland was not under the control of a government nor of a religious band, but of a trading-company.

The ordinary dress of the fair dames and damsels of New Amsterdam has been vividly described by Diedrich Knickerbocker; and even with the additional light upon their wardrobe thrown by the lists contained in colonial inventories, I still think his description of their every-day dress exceedingly good for one given by a man. He writes:

“Their hair, untortured by the abominations of art, was scrupulously pomatumed back from their foreheads with a candle, and covered with a little cap of quilted calico, which fitted exactly to their heads. Their petticoats of linsey-woolsey were striped with a variety of gorgeous dyes, though I must confess those gallant garments were rather short, scarce reaching below the knee; but then they made up in the number, which generally equalled that of the gentlemen’s small-clothes; and what is still more praiseworthy, they were all of their own manufacture,—of which circumstance, as may well be supposed, they were not a little vain.

“Those were the honest days, in which every woman stayed at home, read the Bible, and wore pockets,—ay, and that, too, of a goodly size, fashioned with patchwork into many curious devices, and ostentatiously worn on the outside. These, in fact, were convenient receptacles where all good housewives carefully stored away such things as they wished to have at hand; by which means they often came to be incredibly crammed.