Household furniture—I go back full seventy years—was simple and easily cared for. Carpets were generally what was known as “three-ply.” I don’t see them now, but in places, on humble floors, I see imitation Brussels or some other counterfeit. The first carpet I ever saw woven in one piece, like all the rugs so plentiful now (and that was at a much later date) was on the parlor floor of the Goodman house, on Toulouse Street, the home so full of bright young girls I so loved to visit. There was no concern to take away carpets to be cleaned and stored in the summer. Carpets were taken to some vacant lot and well beaten. The neutral green on Canal Street, green and weedy it was, too, was a grand place to shake carpets; no offense given if one carried them beyond Claiborne Street where were no pretentious houses. Then those carpets were thickly strewn with tobacco leaves, rolled up and stored in the garret, if you had one. Every house did not boast of that convenience.
Curtains were not satin damask. At the Mint when Joe Kennedy was superintendent, and his family were fashionable people, their parlor curtains were some red cotton stuff, probably what is known as turkey red; there was a white and red-figured border; they were looped over gilt rods meant to look like spears and muskets, in deference, I suppose, to the military side of that government building, for there were sentinels and guards stationed around about that gave the whole concern a most imposing and military air.
I remember at the Breedloves’ home there were net curtains (probably mosquito net), with a red border. They were thought rather novel and stylish. There were no madras, no Irish point, no Nottingham curtains even, so one did not have a large variety to choose from.
People had candelabras, and some elaborate affairs—they called them girandoles—to hold candles; they had heavy crystal drops that tinkled and scintillated and were prismatic and on the whole were rather fine. The candles in those gorgeous stands and an oil lamp on the inevitable center-table were supposed to furnish abundance of light for any occasion. When my sister dressed for a function she had two candles to dress by (so did I ten years later!), and two dusky maids to follow her all about, and hold them at proper points so the process of the toilet could be satisfactorily accomplished. Two candles without shades—nobody had heard of shades—were sufficient for an ordinary tea table. I was a grown girl, fresh from school, when I saw the first gaslight in a private house, at Mrs. Slocomb’s, on St. Charles Street. People sewed, embroidered, read and wrote and played chess evenings by candlelight, and except a few near-sighted people and the aged no one used glasses. There was not an oculist (a specialist, I mean) in the whole city.
Every woman had to sew. There were well-trained seamstresses in every house; no “ready-mades,” no machines. Imagine the fine hand-sewing on shirt bosoms, collars and cuffs. I can hear my mother’s voice now, “Be careful in the stitching of that bosom; take up two and skip four,” which I early learned meant the threads of the linen. What a time there was when the boys grew to tailor-cut pantaloons! Cut by a tailor, sewed at home, what a to-do there was when Charley had his first tail-coat; he could not sit on the tails, they were too short, so he made an uproar.
I recall also how I cried when sister’s old red and black “shot silk” dress was made over for me, and I thought I was going to be so fine (I was nine years old then and was beginning to “take notice”). The goods fell short, and I had to have a black, low neck, short-sleeve waist. In vain I was told it was velvet and ever so stylish and becoming. I knew better. However, that abbreviated dress and those abbreviated tails did duty at the dancing school.
But we have wandered from house furnishings to children’s clothes. We will go upstairs now and take a look at the ponderous four-poster bed, with its awful tester top, that covered it like a flat roof. That tester was ornamented with a wall paper stuff, a wreath of impossible red and yellow roses, big as saucers, stamped on it, and four strands of same roses reaching to the four corners of the monstrosity. The idea of lying, with a raging fever or a splitting headache, under such a canopy! However, there were “swells” (there always are “swells”) who had testers covered with silk.
I hear a rumor that furniture covered with horse-hair cloth is about to come to the fore again. Everybody in my early day had black haircloth furniture; maybe that was one reason red curtains were preferred, for furniture covered with black haircloth was fearfully funereal. However, as no moth devoured it, dust did not rest on its slick, shiny surface, and it lasted forever, it had its advantages. Every household possessed a haircloth sofa, with a couple of hard, round pillows of the same, the one too slippery to nap on and the others regular break-necks.
Door in the French Market.