Caption: This spinning jenny is a typical specimen of the kind often found in homes during colonial and post-colonial times. It was given to the Memorial House (the Jean Hasbrouck house) by its owner, William Henry Dill Blake, whose family owned the spinning jenny before him and whose wife and daughter (both named Matilda Booth Blake) likely used it regularly as a household chore. Built in the late 18th century, this spinning jenny is a reminder of the role of women in the establishment of one of New Paltz’s successful families.

A photograph of the Jean Hasbrouck House where the jenny is located.

Physical Description: This spinning jenny is comprised of a wooden frame and a large, slightly corroded iron wheel with four spokes placed at even intervals. On the right-hand side of the wheel is a grooved iron cylinder (also sporting slight corrosion with age), likely used for winding the finished thread. On the front left pole of of the frame are scratched the initials “HB;” additionally, the spinning jenny is marked with the number 213, likely a production or maker’s mark. According to the file in Historic Huguenot Street records, there are likely some pieces  missing.

Diagram of a Hargreave spinning jenny (since the image above is the only one available of the Blakes’ jenny.

Provenance: The first clue to determining the origin of the spinning jenny is the inscription “HB” on the frame. As this spinning jenny was built in the late eighteenth century, while the invention was still fairly new (American Fabrics Magazine 220), and also considering that William H.D. Blake was born much later, in 1843 (according to the Blake family papers on file at Huguenot Street), it is logical to assume that the spinning jenny was probably first owned by Blake’s grandfather or great-grandfather.  Also according to Huguenot Street records, the spinning jenny was owned by the family until Blake’s donation of the piece in 1910; it most likely came into his possession as a family object that was passed down to him. The maker’s mark, “213,” yields no significant results, though a search of the history of the spinning jenny reveals that several were manufactured underground (that is, without the inventor’s permission) because the design was so brilliantly simple and that there was dispute during the time of the spinning jenny’s true inventor and origin (Baines, Arkwright); Blake’s spinning jenny therefore could have been manufactured by any number of individuals.

Narrative: The Blake family moved to New Paltz in 1881, when they purchased the DuBois farm; shortly thereafter, William and Matilda, the two youngest Blake children, were born. During this time, spinning, weaving, knitting, and almost all other forms of textile production were considered “women’s work,” as such activities allowed them to work primarily in their homes (thus fulfilling the typical duties of wife and mother) while still providing the family with additional income from selling the resulting product. Family workshops were the norm, to such an end that almost every household contained at least one “knitting frame” (loom) and one spinning wheel (AFM 217). According to Historic Huguenot Street records, the Blake spinning jenny replaced an older spinning wheel previously owned by the family; one can easily imagine the mother Matilda spinning yarn at home on a typical day to the sounds of her children’s laughter and the pitter-patter of little feet. Later, as the daughter Matilda grew bigger, her mother would have taught her how to spin the yarn herself, to the end of her being expected to produce her own quantity of yarn as an adult. Unlike her brothers, Matilda spent her entire life on her family’s farm on Libertyville Road in New Paltz. It is likely that she continued to make use of the spinning jenny through her school years up until her enrollment in the New Paltz Normal School. Beyond that, the latest mention of the spinning jenny in historical records is a newspaper clipping, dated May 6, 1910, that announces William H.D. Blake’s donation of the piece to the Memorial House. While a seemingly random choice, the spinning jenny is actually a quite significant piece, as it symbolizes an industry and a community of workers that played a very large role in shaping the economy of New Paltz, as well as a symbol of the financial success of one of New Paltz’s most successful farming families.

Works Cited:

American Fabrics Magazine. Encyclopedia of Textiles. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1960. Print.

Baines, Edward (1835). History of the cotton manufacture in Great Britain;. London: H. Fisher, R. Fisher, and P. Jackson.

Roth, Eric. Ed. “William H. D. Blake Family Papers (1794-1982).” Historic Huguenot Street Archives. Historic Huguenot Street, 10 July 2002. Web. 12 May 2015. <http://www.huguenotstreet.org/william-h-d-blake-family-papers/&gt;.

Infinite thanks to Ashley Trainor and Carrie Allmendinger from Historic Huguenot Street for sharing their records, knowledge, and expertise with me for this project.

Although the contents of this simple table are unassuming and seemingly unimportant, the table actually displays a piece of technology that would become an important token household item during the establishment of the colonies.  This tabletop hand loom consists of a sturdy, hollow wooden base about one to two feet in length. Inside of the base is  a thin board with slots cut out of it at perfectly even intervals to create little bars; on these bars is cast a newly-begun fabric tape. On both sides of the board are rotating wooden dowels, one of which holds the thread being fed into the piece, and the other of which is empty but may very well have been designed to have the finished tape wound around it.

3/4 view. A finished tape is faintly visible, draped across the cushion on the trunk in the background.

A back view of the loom. The weaving would actually be done on the end where the thread was being fed into the work, and the finished tape would gather at the back. 

During the mid sixteenth century, the textile industry thrived in Europe as well as in the colonies. The demand for trained textile workers was so great that, despite its being a predominantly Catholic nation, King Edward VI actively encouraged foreign Protestants to come and find work in England in 1549; the result was an influx of Protestant immigrants primarily from  France and Germany (AFM 214). In 1598, with the passing of the Edict of Nantes, Protestants were officially recognized and given a much wider range of religious and personal freedom; this cessation of the religious wars in France caused the textile industry there to grow significantly and, by 1646, French Protestant textile workers were known for their fine woolen fabrics (216). In 1685, when the Edict of Nantes was revoked and persecution of the Huguenot people resumed, the majority of them fled France in a panic, many relocating to England and other parts of Europe, and others settling in the New World.

The tabletop hand loom pictured here would have been used by a young girl. In the colonies, like in Europe, the majority of work to be done consisted of manual labor, a task considered unsuitable for women of the era. However, the need for more income was apparent to the Huguenot settlers, and as a result, women took up spinning and weaving (also referred to as knitting)–the typical “women’s work”–as a source of income. Family workshops became the norm throughout all of the colonies, to such an end that almost every household contained at least one “knitting frame” (loom) and one spinning wheel (217). The youngest girls would first learn the basics of weaving on miniature looms like this one, making long woven tapes that could then be used for a variety of household purposes, such as tailoring clothes or binding together items. As they grew bigger and their skills matured, young women would learn to weave cloth, some of which was used in the home and most of which was sold for profit both domestically and overseas. 

An example of the weaving process on a large adult-sized loom

For this week, I chose to write about my copy of C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia.

Additional proof of its age can be found on the back cover, which sports a price tag of $19.99. Mom had the good sense to buy this back when books were fairly cheap.

My copy is a paperback anthology of all seven books. I don’t remember when I received it–I seem to have always had it with me–but I know for certain that my mother (a devout Christian and a fan of Lewis’s works) was the one who purchased it, probably for her own reading pleasure before it was given to me. I also know that I must have taken it to school at some point, because on the title page is written my name, scrawled in her practiced busy-mom handwriting.

This copy of the text, if you couldn’t already tell, is quite old. Despite having been treated carefully, it shows signs of age and wear that signify its having been owned by loving readers. The pages are slightly worn at the edges. The plastic film on the cover is beginning to peel away, and (as you can see from the photograph) there are little stains on the pages from the dust, fingerprints, errant (unwelcome) insects, and yellowing from age that mar the clean, white surfaces. Although I never dog-eared a page in that book (a lesson driven into me by my elementary-school librarian), the bottom corners of some of the pages have folded and crumpled slightly from being inserted and taken out of bookshelves and other convenient spaces–carefully by my mother, less so by the then-seven-year-old me.

This collection of The Chronicles of Narnia is a special edition, published in 2001. The opening page of each book, as well as the title page for each chapter, has been paired with an original illustration by Pauline Baynes.

Lovingly detailed and quite intricate, not uncommon for a collector’s edition

Interestingly, the books are not arranged in publication order in this volume. Rather, Lewis himself arranged them in his “preferred order”–presumably chronological order. Although this book was published years before the fandom culture really took off, I would still assume that this arrangement, illustrations included, would have meant little to the novice or casual reader (who would likely not notice the difference between the original and anthology editions), but would have elicited strong feelings–both good and bad–among the community of avid Narnia readers, and perhaps also been an incentive for them to purchase this copy even if they had read or owned previous editions. This, in fact is the first and only time I’ve ever heard of this kind of rearrangement being done to a book series. Clearly, this is an edition meant to be collected and read by serious lovers of the series or, at the very least, by collectors of famous literary works.

As a child, I only ever read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I remember that the coexistence of fantasy and religious symbolism fascinated me, but also that I unfortunately lost interest in it after discovering that the order of the books in the anthology wasn’t the “correct” (that is, publication) order. I didn’t have access to a computer at that time, and wasn’t going to be bothered looking up and arranging copyright dates; alas, the book remained untouched in my room until recently, when I decided to read the series as a whole. As a fan of fantasy literature, and as someone who appreciates Lewis’ works, I’m certain that I’ll get the most out of this special edition copy (or, at the very least, be able to enjoy it in the way that it was meant to be).

Sorry this post is a bit late! I had a lot of trouble posting it for some reason.

I thought it was a bit ironic that I was assigned Portrait 8 for this week. I’ve been fascinated with the concept of body art since I started building on my initial ear piercing around the age of fourteen. Like Charlotte, I can strongly identify with the way tattoos become a part of you, and with the desire to turn one’s best memories–the ones you want to hold onto always–into permanent, irreversible marks. Unlike Charlotte, I come from a family that doesn’t feel the same way about such things. When I pitched the idea of getting a tattoo for my eighteenth birthday, the answer from both my parents was a resounding “no.” They voiced the same concerns that Miller cites in his chapter, mainly, the fact that they will change drastically as your body does.

And so, I am left to show the meaning of things in much less permanent and personal ways. Like Charlotte’s collection of earrings that she was forced to remove, my grandmother’s necklace lives in a little felt box on top of the stereo speaker in my bedroom. I mentioned before that I don’t wear it very much. I did a lot of thinking about that after writing the post, and I realized that it probably stays there because I don’t think about my grandmother all that often. I was very young when I knew her, and was young when she died. I never had the opportunity to form a relationship with her beyond annual Christmas visits, so on some level, it’s understandable. Of course, the reverse is also true–because we don’t have photographs of her (or anyone, really) up in my room or anywhere else in our house, I tend not to think very much about relatives I rarely see. My own bedroom–crammed to the nooks with things I’m currently using and thinking about but sporting very little in the way of memories–has become a reflection of the way I think primarily in the moment. My grandmother’s necklace, in its little box alongside a handful of other trinkets, is almost a physical symbol of my fleeting moments of remembrance, and its absence a symbol of my own thoughtlessness in the midst of a busy life. Like Charlotte’s photograph of her lover, it’s become a memory-turned-artifact.

Of course, that’s not to say that my mind would change if my connection to my grandmother consisted of more than just jewelry. I like to think that I’d give more thought to distant relatives and past memories if I had more permanent and outwardly visible reminders around me–pictures, knickknacks, photograph albums, or perhaps a meaningful piece of body art like Charlotte’s tattoo. On some level, I think it would. My mother recently has begun clearing things out of our house, and I’ve been searching through years’ worth of uncovered materials in hopes of finding some family photographs to put up in my room. From an anthropological standpoint, I feel like there’s been a trend toward collecting memories nowadays–be it a family history, heirloom, or story–so I think people like Charlotte, who mark their own bodies with memories, and others who collect and display memorabilia, are on some level beginning to make the world into one very large habitus, comprised of the unique artifacts and memories of individuals.

As I mentioned in my previous post, my grandmother’s cross is one of a small collection of costume jewelry pieces compiled during her lifetime. Curiously, though,  I don’t remember her ever actually wearing most of it. Granted, I was very little when we used to visit her–I think I was in second grade the last time I saw her in person–but the only jewelry I remember seeing her wear were her wedding rings and clip-on earrings.

Related to this fact is my grandmother’s health, or, more specifically, her allergies. This woman was allergic to practically everything, but one of her most severe allergies was to various kinds of metal. She had to cover her oven handle with duct tape and make other modifications like that to avoid her hands and wrists breaking out into a terrible rash. Considering that the cross necklace is made of an indeterminate composite metal, and also taking into account that certain “pure” metals  (like the gold in her wedding rings) didn’t cause a reaction, it is somewhat unsurprising that she didn’t wear the cross necklace but wore certain other pieces. How she originally got hold of it will probably forever remain a mystery, as the person closest to her knows nothing about it–why did she buy it if she knew she couldn’t wear it, was it given to her as a gift and by whom, etc.–but it is clear that the necklace was likely used for display or for personal comfort during my grandmother’s lifetime, rather than its intended purose as a means of accessorizing.

When I first came into possession of that necklace, I wore it more than I’ve worn any other piece of jewelry before or since. I felt as if I were taking a piece of Grandma with me, and so I wore it to church, to school, and around my home. At the time, it was much too large for me and probably looked a bit silly, but I didn’t care. As I got older, though, I stopped. I started moving out of my (incredibly short-lived) “girly” phase by the end of third grade (shortly after her death), and I didn’t wear jewelry, pretty clothes, or anything like that anymore. The necklace took a place in my jewelry box and remained there until I started looking into it more deeply for this class. Since doing that, I’ve worn it as jewelry a little more often (in keeping with its original purpose), but in my mind that doesn’t pay enough homage to what the necklace represents. I’ve considered framing it alongside a photograph of her (thus bringing its purpose back to display), but at the same time, I’d like to be able to wear it as my grandmother was never able to. Basically, although I can trace the necklace’s function, I’m unsure of what it’s function will be in the future, aside from the fact that it will always connect me to my grandmother and (hopefully) my children to their family history.

I mentioned at the end of my last post that I was hoping to take my grandmother’s necklace to a jeweler to see what I could learn about it or its origins, and this is what I did over the weekend. I took it to Hannoush Jewelers in the Galleria and asked the woman behind the counter what she could tell me about it straightaway. I was, as it turns out, correct in assuming that the metal is not real silver. According to the jeweler, it’s likely a composite metal, as all precious metals are stamped (many with a maker’s mark as well as with the name of the metal), even when the piece is only plated.

The jeweler also told me that the stone in the center of the cross is likely either aventurine or a dark jade. Not knowing much about jade and having never heard of aventurine,  I decided to do a Google image search for both (links to results below).

Aventurine: https://www.google.com/search?q=aventurine&client=tablet-android-samsung&espv=1&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sboxchip=Images&sa=X&ei=IrrPVPK2L4eNsQTJl4LADg&ved=0CAgQ_AUoAQ&biw=800&bih=1280

Jade: https://www.google.com/search?q=jade&client=tablet-android-samsung&espv=1&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sboxchip=Images&sa=X&ei=RrrPVIOgOvePsQTEsoDABw&ved=0CAgQ_AUoAQ&biw=800&bih=1280

Aventurine seems to have a higher mica/reflective mineral content (and thus a more “sparkly” appearance) than the stone in the cross, and the jade seems much brighter in color. Digging a little deeper (I actually did a Google image search for “green jade with red flecks), I found this image.

(Unfortunately, I couldn’t zoom in on the necklace close enough for a comparison shot. Sorry.)

This stone is actually neither aventurine nor jade, but rather green chalcedony flecked with iron oxide or red jasper/piedmontite, commonly known as “bloodstone” or “dragon’s blood jasper”. (I can link to some information I found about bloodstone if anyone wants it.) Given that this stone looks strikingly similar to the one in the cross, I think it’s a safe bet to say that the stone in the cross is the so-called bloodstone. Ironic, isn’t it?

In short, the jeweler informed me, it’s just a piece of costume jewelry. I think she (and my dad) thought I would be disappointed at the fact that it isn’t valuable in a monetary sense, but that actually isn’t true at all. Finding out what I did about the necklace revealed something about my grandmother; that is, that she was very frugal and worried about money constantly. I mentioned in class that she had a hard life growing up–she actually ended up needing to quit school to work so that she and her mother could bring in a livable income after her father died. Even after she got married and was able to stop working to rear the children, she always worried that the money would run out. Even during their older years, after my father and aunt had moved out, she worried  about how they would afford things like home repairs, insurance, and maintaining their property. Although the cross symbol (and little accessories as well) attracted her, she wasn’t going to spend inordinate amounts of her/her husband’s hard-earned money on them when that money could be put toward savings or practical expenses. In a sense, I’m very similar in that I try to be as practical ad possible with money. My family has never had to worry about money the way my grandmother did (thank God), but my parents always made sure to model fiscal responsibility for my sister and me growing up, and I’ve sort of taken that to extremes now that I have a job. I think it’s interesting that we’re kind of connected in that way.