RL Fifield vacuuming samplers with a dental vacuum in the old Textile Conservation Lab, MFA Boston, 2001. Back in the early aughts, I was a Collection Care Specialist in Textiles and Fashion Arts (TFA) at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. I was working on a National Endowment for the Arts grant to photograph and perform condition reports on 10,000 objects a part of their American collections. This work was undertaken in part to plan for a brand-new textile storeroom during the

‘Tis the season for illness. Cooking tomes of the past often included a chapter of recipes to be made for the ill and infirm. Certainly, our need for something comforting remains, but general folklore shared today mentions chicken soup, ginger ale, toast, and saltines. Consider these recipes from Fifty Years in Maryland Kitchen (1881) by Mrs. B. C. Howard. Be well. #domestic #history #illness #FiftyYearsinaMarylandKitchen #homeremedies #foodways #home #cooking #food #Maryland

I’m not an expert on Baltimore, by any means. I’ve never lived there. I was born in Towson and grew up in Carroll County. But Baltimore was my first exposure to City and all that big “C” entails. The redeveloped Harborplace of the early 80s. Field trips to the National Aquarium, before it was $35 per person. Seeing traveling Broadway productions at the Morris Mechanic Theatre, now being turned into brutalist rubble. It pains me to see the amazingly beautiful stretches of Balt

Ladies in nymph-like attire twirling and leaping through fields – sounds like the turn of the century pageantry movement to me. The Centenary Pageant in 1927 for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad is a rather late occurrence of this type of display of civic and industrial pride. Part artistic endeavor and part technological exhibition, Baltimore and Ohio set up a location for the festival at Halethorpe near Baltimore. The pageant, staged each afternoon of the festival, melded hist

The Accident in Lombard Street. Charles Wilson Peale. Winterthur Museum. 1962.88. A pie lays broken in the street, a distraught servant teased by the chimney sweeps who caused her to drop it. She’s likely on her way back from the bakery to which her mistress sent the pie to be baked. While the British had an extensive print culture in the late 18th century, Americans did not. Depictions of 18th century American laboring classes are exceedingly rare. While the Jersey Nanny has

I used to hate oysters. Typically, tidewater Marylanders pat oysters in cracker meal, fry them, and if you need a condiment, slather on some tomato ketchup. Churches in the area used to have fried oyster and ham suppers, though the increasing costs of oysters have certainly limited how many of those signs you drive by in the Maryland countryside. I equated fried oysters to a bit of breaded tire. It wasn’t until I was in my early twenties and enjoyed the briny sweet slide of a

I spent July at a Research Fellowship at Winterthur Museum, Library, and Garden. This mainly meant identifying manuscripts and object collections that might have something to tell me about my research topic: working women’s dress, as illuminated through the study of newspaper runaway advertisements. Read more about the project here, and an article on the work here. My goal now is to study more about the supply of garments to indentured and enslaved servant women, through purc

My time here at Winterthur is wrapping up. I took yesterday to visit two incredible local institutions, the Friends Historical Library at Swarthmore College, and the Chester County Historical Society. I only wish I had more time, but as any researcher knows, one can really collect information, photos of documents, and references until you are blue in the face. Until you really analyze and share what you have in a lasting way (not just a “I saw a document somewhere, if I remem

RL Fifield. I attended the American Institute for Conservation’s Annual Meeting in Indianapolis at the end of May. The opening reception was on a steamy night at the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA). While the reception was welcoming, it was difficult for the conference attendees to fully forget during these festivities that IMA had just decimated several senior conservation staff positions, part 21 positions lost during recent restructuring. However, as I worked my way throu

My research on indentured and enslaved servants’ lives has led me to mapping out their existence on historic maps of Philadelphia. I’m hoping to better understand their relation to the community, merchants, and manufacturers in their environment. I’ve found some useful resources to help recreate their world. They work best together: a little from one source, a little from another. Read another post on my project here. Mapping West Philadelphia: Landowners in October 1777: Thi

On a Sunday afternoon in 1992, I was collecting fallen autumn leaves along Chapel Road outside Havre de Grace, Maryland where my grandparents lived. I no longer remember what the leaves were for. My boyfriend lifted me on his shoulders so I could pluck them from the trees along the edge of a dried up soybean field that rested next to the driveway, and is now occupied with vinyl-sided houses. It was a sunny and fresh day. We crossed the country road to investigate the remnants

An embroidered apron at LACMA, similar in concept to those depicted in the Winterthur fraktur below. M.2007.211.131 I’m not a Pennsylvanian German scholar, but I love considering the depiction of 18th century dress in the ebullient art form of fraktur. What is real? What is fancy? Can we trust depictions of women when they hold gargantuan sprigs of flowers in their hands? Do we trust the printed or embroidered sprigs on these women’s aprons? Their caps have black cauls (the c

Read this great book on 18th century commerce in the backwoods of Virginia. Ann Smart Martin’s Buying into the World of Goods: Early Consumers in Backcountry Virginia is incredibly readable (and available on Kindle to boot! Or in full at Project Muse if you have a subscription).  Her skilled divining of consumer culture from sources including ledger books, correspondence, and material culture rebuilds a history of burgeoning 18th-century consumerism, not only for those most a

I recently visited my great uncle, Uncle B, in Arizona. Having left our ancestral seat for a life of western adventure in 1947, we don’t have all that much in common. However, as conversations meander in and out of the present and past, interesting cultural gems emerge, such as foodways, stories of prize winnings at The Graw racetrack in Havre de Grace, and hard work. While the 1991 film Fried Green Tomatoes brought that dish roaring back to the table, I have yet to see my fa

Rock Run United Methodist Church. Harford County was a site of early Methodist activity in America. Rock Run, Harford County, Maryland. RL Fifield 2007. Driving through the countryside anywhere in America, you may pass any number of signs proclaiming towns that no longer exist. My grandfather was in the car  sometime in the 1990s, when we were driving on Rock Run Road toward the Susquehanna River. He pointed to a house on the left and said “that used to be the Rock Run Store.

At this point during the winter, I start to get the itch for digging in the dirt. Alas, it’s a rather pointless itch as I must confine my green thumb activities to a few boxes hanging from the windows of my Manhattan apartment. But as I pointed out in my post on 18th century year-round gardening, seasonal gardening is a luxury. In the past, each month had purpose in tending the supply of vegetables to the family, whether tending to wintering crops, fostering seed, or getting

I roll over this analogy in my mind as I work with my study of 1,000 runaway indentured and enslaved women and their 6,000 garments, which I’ve cataloged in a database. See my Textile History article on the Runaway Clothing Database project and a post featuring repeat runaway Eleanor Farrell here. The data shows that for the whole period 1750-1790, gowns were worn in equal amounts to all other shorter garments. But when you compare 1750-60 with 1780-90, it becomes apparent th

Perhaps Amtrak is a little late for many rail fans, but the Amtrak history website led to me losing a few hours last night while I poked around the various features. Amtrak will never have the glamour of the Baltimore and Ohio’s Royal Blue service. But for those of us still attracted to the possibilities of passenger rail service, Amtrak is what we’ve got. After 40 years of service, there’s some stuff to look back on. Features on the website include a chronological history, a

Caraway and Salt Flatbreads from Agata & Valentina, NYC. RL Fifield 2012. Caraway. It’s lyrical. It’s herbal, savory, and astringent. My French friends confuse it for a cumin seed.  It evokes strong feelings of admiration or disgust, depending on whose palate is assessing it. And it’s one of my favorite flavorings. When I was a child, caraway appeared solely in rye bread and in sauerkraut on Thanksgiving (yes, Marylanders include sauerkraut on their Thanksgiving table, and I

My brother Mr. F is Cleveland’s Man about Town. During my May visit, he toured me around a number of sites and neighborhoods, including Shaker Square, downtown, Detroit Seaway, and Cleveland’s West Side Market. West Side Market. RL Fifield 2012. I knew zip about Cleveland, beyond its being the butt of many jokes – most of these, I found out, are told by people from Ohio. Sure, Cleveland suffered the same blight that most cities have suffered over the last 60 years of anti-urb