I said a few summers ago to a farmer's wife who lived on the outskirts of a small New England hill-village: "Your home is very beautiful. From every window the view is perfect." She answered quickly: "Yes, but it's awful lonely for me, for I was born in Worcester; still I don't mind as long as we have plenty of quiltings." In answer to my questions she told me that the previous winter she had "kept count," and she had helped at twenty-eight "regular" quiltings, besides her own home patchwork and quilt-making, and much informal help of neighbors on plain quilts. Any one who has attended a county fair (one not too modernized and spoiled) and seen the display of intricate patchwork and quilting still made in country homes, can see that it is not an obsolete accomplishment.
A form of decorative work in which many women took great delight and became astonishingly skilful was what was known, or at any rate advertised, by the ambitious title of Papyrotamia. It was simply the cutting out of stiff paper of various decorative and ornamental designs with scissors. At the time of the Revolution it was evidently deemed a very high accomplishment, and the best pieces of work were carefully cherished, mounted on black paper, framed and glazed, and given to friends or bequeathed by will. One old lady is remembered as using her scissors with extraordinary deftness, and amusing herself and delighting her friends by occupying the hours of every afternoon visit with cutting out entirely by her trained eye various pretty and curious designs. Valentines in exceedingly delicate and appropriate patterns, wreaths and baskets of varied flowers, marine views, religious symbols, landscapes, all were accomplished. Coats of arms and escutcheons cut in black paper and mounted on white were highly prized. Portrait silhouettes were cut with the aid of a machine which marked and reduced mechanically a sharp shadow cast by the sitter's profile through candle-light on a sheet of white paper. Mrs. Lydia H. Sigourney wrote in rhyme of a revered friend of her youth, Mrs. Lathrop, of a period about a century ago:—
"Thy dextrous scissors ready to produce
The flying squirrel or the long-neck'd goose,
Or dancing girls with hands together join'd,
Or tall spruce-trees with wreaths of roses twin'd,
The well-dress'd dolls whose paper form display'd,
Thy penknife's labor and thy pencil's shade."
I once found in an old lacquered box in a cupboard a paper packet containing all the cut-paper designs mentioned in this rhyme—and many more. The workmanship of the "spruce-trees with wreaths of roses twin'd" was specially marvellous. I plainly saw in that design a derivative of the English Maypole and encircling wreaths. This package was marked with the name of the paper-cutter, a Revolutionary dame who died at the beginning of this century. Her home was remote from the Norwich home of Mrs. Lathrop, and I know she never visited in Connecticut, yet she made precisely the same designs and indeed all the designs. This is but a petty proof among many other more decided ones of the fact that even in those days of scant communication and infrequent and contracted travel, there were as in our own times waves of feminine fancy work, of attempts at artistic expression, which flooded every home, and receding, left behind much decorative silt of varying but nearly universal uselessness and laborious commonplaceness.
One of the cut-paper landscapes of Madam Deming, a Boston lady who was a famous "papyrotamist," is here shown. It is now owned by James F. Trott, Esq., of Niagara Falls. It is a view of Boston streets just previous to the Revolution. In that handsome volume, the Ten Broeck Genealogical Record, are reproductions of some of the landscape views by Albertina Ten Broeck at the same date. They show the house and farm surroundings of the old Ten Broeck "Bouwerie," the ancestral home in New York, and give a wonderfully good idea of it. These are not in dead silhouette, for an appearance of shading is afforded by finely cut lines and intervening spaces. The highest form of cut-paper reproduction and decoration ever reached was by the English woman, Mrs. Delaney, who died in 1788, the friend of the Duchess of Portland, and intimate of George III. and his queen. She reproduced in colored paper, in what she called "paper mosaics," the entire flora of the United Kingdom, and it is said it was impossible at first sight to distinguish these flowers from the real ones.
CHAPTER XII
DRESS OF THE COLONISTS
At the time America was settled, rich dress was almost universal in Europe among persons of any wealth or station. The dress of plain people also, such as yeomen and small farmers and work-people, was plentiful and substantial, and even peasants had good and ample clothing. Materials were strongly and honestly made, clothing was sewed by hand, and lasted long. The fashions did not change from year to year, and the rich or stout clothes of one generation were bequeathed by will and worn by a second and even a third and fourth generation.
In England extravagance in dress in court circles, and grotesqueness in dress among all educated folk, had become abhorrent to that class of persons who were called Puritans; and as an expression of their dislike they wore plainer garments, and cut off their flowing locks, and soon were called Roundheads. The Massachusetts settlers who were Puritans determined to discourage extravagance in dress in the New World, and attempted to control the fashions.
The Massachusetts magistrates were reminded of their duties in this direction by sanctimonious spurring from gentlemen and ministers in England. One such meddler wrote to Governor Winthrop in 1636: "Many in your plantacions discover too much pride." Another stern moralist reproved the colonists for writing to England "for cut work coifes, for deep stammel dyes," to be sent to them in America. Others, prohibited from wearing broad laces, were criticised for ordering narrow ones, for "going as farr as they may."
In 1634 the Massachusetts General Court passed restricting sumptuary laws. These laws forbade the purchase of woollen, silk, or linen garments, with silver, gold, silk, or thread lace on them. Two years later a narrow binding of lace was permitted on linen garments. The colonists were ordered not to make or buy any slashed clothes, except those with one slash in each sleeve and another slash in the back. "Cut works, imbroidd or needle or capps bands & rayles," and gold or silver girdles, hat-bands, belts, ruffs, and beaver hats were forbidden. Liberty was thriftily given, however, to the colonists to wear out any garments they chanced to have unless in the form of inordinately slashed apparel, immoderate great sleeves and rails, and long wings, which could not possibly be endured.