Tempus
A Scrap of Fabric
The Threads that Tie Together the Factory
and the Victorian Home in Nineteenth-Century America
Victoria Sung, Harvard Class of 2010, History Concentrator
Tempus: The Harvard College History Review, Vol. X, Issue 1, Summer 2009.
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“‘Shadows lie upon the folded years,’
But these fragments doth remain to bring back
Old, old memories.”
– Jacob Lippincott, Salem, New Jersey, 18541
A scrap of fabric, measuring no more than an inch-and-a-half wide and two inches
long, is situated among thirty-five other scraps of similar size on a fabric sampler at the
Longfellow House in Cambridge, Massachusetts.2 The sampler was the work of the historic
home’s matron, Fanny Appleton Longfellow, and presently sits inside a cardboard box
down in the cellar of the house. This particular scrap with its pattern of small, pink flowers
is made of a type of cotton, called sateen, produced through a weft-heavy weaving
technique that entails a four over, one under structure.3 The fewer number of interlacings
create a softer texture and satin appearance in comparison to the standard one over, one
under structure of plain-woven cotton. Perhaps this scrap was produced at the Merrimack
mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, as the banner and lithograph on the top portion of the
sampler would suggest. Merrimack Manufacturing Company was, after all, known for
being more experimental in terms of the selection of textiles it produced than the other
mills along the Merrimack River.4 In fact, Merrimack printed on a variety of fabrics that
1
Sarah Suzanne Woodman, “The Fabric of Their Lives: A Commemoration of Family, Friends, and
Community by Three Women in Salem County, New Jersey” (M.A. Dissertation, University of Delaware,
Winterthur Program, 2003), iii.
2
Fanny Appleton Longfellow Fabric Sampler, Longfellow National Historic Site, Cambridge, Massachusetts,
LONG 22581. Fanny’s fabric sampler (22 1/2 inches wide by 15 13/16 inches long) dates from 1845-1852
and contains 36 swatches of fabric from the clothes of her two oldest children, Charley (b. 1844) and Erny (b.
1845). Though a large, brown liquid stain covers the upper right hand corner, and a lighter stain, the lower
right hand corner, the object is in very good condition: the lithograph on the top portion is entirely visible,
Fanny’s labels above each swatch are still legible, and the colors and patterns of the fabric scraps are vibrant.
3
Nancy Andrews Reath, “Weaves in Hand-Loom Fabrics, IV. Satin Weaves,” Bulletin of the Pennsylvania
Museum, Vol. 22, No. 110 (Feb., 1927), 318 (http://www.jstor.org/).
4
Diane Fagan Affleck, Just New From the Mills: Printed Cottons in America, Late Nineteenth and Early
Twentieth Centuries (North Andover: Museum of American Textile History, 1987), 46.
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employed a range of weaving techniques, including those that had a design of raised dots
woven into a sateen base just like the scrap.5
From the mills at Lowell, the fabric reached the hands of Fanny Appleton
Longfellow, the daughter of one of Merrimack’s founders, Nathan Appleton, in 1847. Born
in 1817 at their Beacon Hill home in Boston, Massachusetts, Fanny was the youngest of
Nathan’s four surviving children from his marriage to Maria Theresa Gold. The Appletons
were a prominent New England family: Maria’s father and grandfather were both graduates
of Yale, her great-grandfather was a graduate of Harvard, and while Nathan had more
provincial origins, he too was admitted to Dartmouth, though he forwent his education to
manage a profitable mercantile business with his brothers. Although Thomas Gold initially
objected to his daughter marrying a “farm boy,” Nathan Appleton became one of the
wealthiest and most influential men in Boston. A merchant, an industrialist, a politician,
and a philanthropist, Appleton still found time to be a father, not only providing for his
children, but also remaining deeply involved in their lives through adulthood.6
“At this season of the year, this part of town is truly delectable,” Nathan Appleton
wrote when he first acquired the home in which Fanny grew up on Beacon Hill.7 The part
of town he was referring to had a magnificent view that overlooked the Charles River to the
right, the Boston Common to its front, the Bulfinch State House to its left, and the center of
town was just a several minutes’ walk away.8 But this part of Boston, with its privileged
view from the top of a hill, was not the Boston that everyone knew. In fact, the very
commerce and industry that provided the Appleton family wealth also gave rise to the
5
Fagan Affleck, 95.
For a comprehensive biography of the Appleton family, see Louise Hall Tharp, The Appletons of Beacon
Hill (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1973).
7
Nathan Appleton, as quoted in Tharp, The Appletons of Beacon Hill, 3.
8
Tharp, 7-8.
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comparatively poor working and living conditions of many of Boston’s other residents. A
bustling trade port and, by the middle of the nineteenth century, a center of textile
manufacture, Boston was also home to the rugged sailors and rope-spinners, boardinghouse
matrons and mill operatives who sustained those industries.9 Nathan Appleton and the other
families of New England gentility lived in luxury, as Appleton’s request to his brother for
home furnishings reveals: “We want a pair of Grecian Lamps—rather elegant than showy
and some handsome chimney ornaments—novel and elegant—a pair of stylish bell ropes
for the drawing rooms—something tasty, prevailing colors orange and light green with
some wood color or pearl color…”10 And though he may never have imagined that the
refined tastes of the home would mingle with the mercantile stench of fish and salt, or with
the industrial whirring of cotton spinning and weaving, his daughter would make a fabric
sampler for her children that suggests the two worlds were not so disconnected after all.
This piece of fabric, from its origin in the Lowell mills to its final position on Fanny’s
sampler, is just one of thirty-six scraps. Indeed, a piece of blue and white checkered cotton,
or one with bright green polka dots, all tell the same narrative of three seemingly distinct
strands in nineteenth-century American history: the development of the domestic textile
industry, the changing conceptions of childhood, and the growing interest in preserving
memory. Fanny’s fabric sampler questions the separation of these strands and evokes an
important social question that exists, with degrees of variation, throughout every century of
America’s past: How does the private world of the home, of childhood and memory, relate
to the public world of industry?
9
Tharp, 7.
Nathan Appleton, as quoted in Tharp, 7.
10
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This single cotton scrap, all one-and-a-half by two inches of it, is material proof of
the transformation of the early American textile industry. Its even, lightweight texture and
colorful, printed design tell a story of the shift from an economy of homespun to one of
mechanized production that by 1836 translated into 120 million yards of printed cotton
each year.11 Though Nathan Appleton is best remembered for his crucial role in this shift,
he began his career not as a manufacturer, but as a shipping merchant—one who was quite
frustrated with the many embargoes that disrupted his business. It was incomprehensible to
Appleton that his young, independent nation was importing so many textile manufactures
when he was certain that with ingenuity and resourcefulness, America could utilize the
cotton in the South and the waterpower in New England to produce superior textiles right at
home.12 Appleton, along with others, most famously another Boston merchant named
Francis Lowell, set about on bringing this conviction to life, and in 1813, they unveiled the
successful invention of the power loom, a machine that would transform the domestic
cotton business. “I well recollect the state of admiration with which we sat by the hour
watching the beautiful movement of this new and wonderful machine, destined as it
evidently was, to change the character of all textile industry,” Appleton proudly asserted in
his 1858 pamphlet, Introduction of the Power Loom.13 He was right. The power loom
allowed the multiple steps of textile manufacture, from raw cotton to finished cloth, to be
carried out in one, machine-integrated operation, producing fabric in larger, better, and
11
Fagan Affleck, 11.
William Appleton and Co. Collection, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School,
Boston, Massachusetts; Tharp, 52, 100.
13
Nathan Appleton, as quoted in Tharp, 65.
12
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faster quantities than the hand spinning and weaving of earlier decades. In 1814, the men
constructed a factory at Waltham, Massachusetts, and in 1822, one at Lowell.14
The power loom, combined with a new method of printing called roller printing,
launched the large-scale manufacture and printing of cotton in America. After the
Merrimack mill was established in 1822, two new mills were constructed in 1828, one in
1830, three in 1831, and another in 1835, so that in less than two decades nine cotton
companies were up and running.15 The roller printing method, like the power loom, made
possible the complete printing of cotton textiles in one, smooth operation: roller printing, as
opposed to its predecessors block printing and plate printing, involved several engraved
copper rollers, each inked with a different color, that rotated around a central drum,
continuously printing on a sheet of fabric that ran between the drum and the rollers.
Whereas it took an expert block printer around fifteen hours to print a design of four colors
on fabric that measured fifty yards long by one yard wide, a roller-printing machine could
do the same work in about one-and-a-half minutes.16 With the introduction of the power
loom and the roller printing machine, technological developments that heretofore existed
only in Europe, Nathan Appleton helped spur the domestic cotton industry, ensuring the
quality and competitiveness of American-made goods.
The incorporation of this new machine technology in American textile mills
allowed companies to keep up with changing fashions. Many of the mills printed more than
one thousand new patterns annually, including the “conventionalized” flower motif on the
14
Lawrence Manufacturing Co. Collection, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School,
Boston, Massachusetts.
15
Philip S. Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement: From Colonial Times to the Eve of World War
I (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1979), 23.
16
Fagan Affleck, 16.
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scrap of fabric.17 Conventionalized design was considered the opposite of naturalistic
design, the former having been the favored method of English print designers, and the
latter, of the French in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Whereas naturalistic design
tried to create the illusion of three-dimensional flowers on a two-dimensional piece of
fabric, conventionalized design attempted to match the two-dimensionality of the material
with simplified, flat forms.18 The New England factories printed both, along with the
checks, polka dots, stripes, and plaids found on the other scraps on Fanny’s sampler. The
fabric scrap’s rose-colored petals also point to the mid-nineteenth-century invention of
synthetic dyes, which enhanced the printed designs through a new availability of bright,
colorful pigments.19
Perhaps Fanny requested several yards of the flower-printed fabric from her father,
or perhaps she purchased the fabric herself from one of the shops in Boston. Either way,
from the standardized sheets that ran through the cold metal of the Lowell machines to the
warmth of her Cambridge home, Fanny made the cloth her own as she held it in her hands
and decided what to do with it. The cotton sateen with its tiny pattern of pink flowers
would be perfect for Erny, who was two years old, and so she had a gown made for her
baby boy.20 This small scrap of fabric, and the type of garment it was fashioned into,
unravels another nineteenth-century phenomenon, namely, changing conceptions of
childhood.
17
Fagan Affleck, 29.
Fagan Affleck, 36-37.
19
Fagan Affleck, 48.
20
Fanny Appleton Longfellow Fabric Sampler. The scrap is labeled, “Erny’s gown, 1847.”
18
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Beginning with its texture, the soft, lightweight cotton is characteristic of the
material that dominated children’s clothing in the nineteenth century, a material that
reflected a new attitude toward children. As a point of comparison to two-year-old Erny,
Henry Gibbs was two-and-a-half years old in 1670.21 A portrait shows Henry wearing a
pinafore and petticoats over the many layers of a bodice, a padded corset, a linen shift,
underpetticoats, and of course, hanging sleeves.22 Typical of seventeenth and eighteenthcentury children’s wardrobes, stiffened corsets were intended for proper posture, long skirts
discouraged running, and hanging sleeves would have made it difficult for a child to raise
his arms above his head.23 Clothes were thus seen as a means of restricting movement and
childish behavior, reminiscent of the swaddling of colonial times, when parents used linen
bandages to bind an infant’s limbs to his body, hoping to propel him past the early perils of
youth and directly into the straight and sturdy figure of an adult.24 But even more than
physical form, by dressing their children like adults, eighteenth-century parents squeezed,
tied, stretched and restrained them so that they would act like one.25 On the other hand, the
fabric that nineteenth-century children wore was more breathable and flexible, and their
garments simpler and looser, signaling a relaxing of constraints on both the everyday lives
of children and the larger notions of childhood.26 In fact, the combination of a loose frock
with trousers enabled children to frolic around with free use of their limbs, climbing,
21
Karin Calvert, Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood, 1600-1900 (Boston:
Northeastern University Press, 1992), 42.
22
Calvert, 42.
23
Calvert, 44.
24
Calvert, 8, 29.
25
Calvert, 44.
26
Calvert, 82-83.
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running, jumping, and rolling in a manner that would have been impossible in eighteenthcentury attire.27
Along with the simpler cuts and lighter materials that distinguished children’s
clothing in the nineteenth century from that of adults, the pattern of pink flowers on Erny’s
gown shows that children were not dressed as boys or girls, but quite simply, as children.
Though the color and print of the fabric might seem to have been an odd choice for a boy,
its presence in Erny’s wardrobe points to the fact that the gender-specific dress code of
modern day infants—that blue is for boys and pink for girls—is only a twentieth-century
construction.28 The androgynous convention of dress apparent in Fanny’s sampler proves
that during the nineteenth century, children’s membership to this time of innocence and
play characterized them more than their gender, thereby suggesting the increasing emphasis
on the isolation of childhood as a separate stage of development.29 In fact, Erny’s younger
sisters Fanny and Alice wore the same gown of pink, patterned flowers, as their mother
diligently made note of on her sampler in a later hand.30 Interestingly enough, though the
sampler contains four swatches of pink fabric—two solid, pale pinks and two white scraps
with patterns of small, pink flowers—they all belong to Erny, whom Fanny constantly
describes as the gentler and sweeter of the two boys in her diaries. In fact, she calls him her
“hummingbird” and “little lamb” while noting Charley’s fun-loving and impish nature,
suggesting that though rigid gender codes did not exist, colors still evoked subtle
differences in associations.
27
Calvert, 101.
Calvert, 4, 97.
29
Calvert, 103.
30
Fanny Appleton Longfellow Fabric Sampler. A daguerrotype of the children in the Longfellow House
collection also shows Charley wearing a lace, Peter Pan collar and Erny, an open necked muslin frock with a
sash and bows on either shoulder (Daguerrotype of Charley and Erny 1849, Longfellow National Historic
Site, Cambridge, Massachusetts, LONG 4810).
28
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Lydia M. Child, author of The Mother’s Book in 1833 wrote, “Children…come to
us from heaven, with their little souls full of innocence and peace,” capturing the
romanticism that colored the new spirit of motherhood.31 But though set aside as a moment
to be cherished, childhood was by no means seen as a static period. Fanny’s sampler shows
that through periodic markers of maturity in a child’s wardrobe, society acknowledged that
it was also a time of growth and development. Fanny labeled each piece of fabric,
beginning in 1845 with “Charley’s coat,” which refers to the short coats, or gowns, mothers
dressed infants in. Charley would have been about a year old when she started the sampler,
and Erny, still a baby of but several months. Fanny goes through five years and seventeen
swatches of “gowns” for the two boys, until 1850, when she labels a light blue, white, and
black plaid cotton scrap with “1st sack of C + E.” Sacks were light frocks, often tied with a
large sash around the waist, and were worn over half-length pantaloons for boys, and halflength petticoats for girls.32 The combination of sacks and trousers allowed children to
move around more freely than gowns, signaling a maturity of movement that corresponded
with maturity of age, as they were no longer confined to their cribs but allowed to play
outdoors.33 Thus, Fanny’s notation of the boys’ “first” sack demonstrates a mother’s
awareness that her children were growing up. In fact, Fanny occasionally noted the boys’
progress in her diary as well, writing of the boys’ new capacity to understand a moral
lesson of one of her stories, of Charley’s possession of an “older boy’s plaything,” or of
their first day of school. 34 Though her labels trail off so that the last six scraps are provided
31
Lydia M. Child, as quoted in James M. Volo and Dorothy Denneen Volo, Family Life in 19th-Century
America (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2007), 194.
32
Volo, 261.
33
Calvert, 101.
34
“Charley cannot go out without his sled. He exclaims, ‘Oh what a beautiful sled this is’ and feels dignified
by the possession of an older boy’s plaything,” Fanny Appleton Longfellow in Chronicles of the Children of
Craigie Castle 1848, Longfellow National Historic Site, Cambridge, Massachusetts, LONG 21576; “The
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only with names and not types of garments, we can imagine that the boys’ clothing styles
would have kept up with their development: at the ages of eight and seven, respectively,
perhaps Charley and Erny were ready to wear the loose jacket and waistcoat paired with
trousers that resembled the garb of grown-up men.35 As a boy was expected to assume his
position in the adult male world once he left childhood behind, his development was
therefore a phenomenon of much social significance.36 In fact, Fanny’s sampler shows that
it was carefully measured and recorded even in the very clothes he wore.
Through the variety of fabrics it contains, and in turn, their reference to the richness
of the children’s wardrobes, Fanny’s sampler is a useful model of the growing dedication to
children in the nineteenth century. The Longfellows were wealthy, largely due to Nathan
Appleton’s contributions to the family, and Fanny spoiled her children just as her father
had spoiled her. With the proliferation of textiles made possible by the machine technology
of the New England mills, and with the emergence of the idea that there should be clothing
styles exclusive to children, the nineteenth century saw an increase in the care taken with
children’s dress. Children’s clothes became a new mode of display for a family’s wealth,
and the children of upper-class families usually possessed garments made of impractical
fabrics.37 A coat made for Charley from rich, midnight blue velvet and trimmed with
plentiful folds of intricately embroidered lace sits in the Longfellow House collection.38 Its
tiny size fit for an infant suggests that it was worn a handful of times at most, as Charley
would have rapidly outgrown the garment in a matter of months. In addition to these
chicks went to school today for first time,” Fanny Appleton Lonfellow in Chronicles of the Children of
Craigie Castle 1849, Longfellow National Historic Site, Cambridge, Massachusetts, LONG 21573.
35
“Charley has wanted jackets open in front with shirt or white waistcoat very becoming to him,” Chronicles
of the Children of Craigie Castle 1849; Calvert, 85.
36
Calvert, 45.
37
Volo, 260.
38
Charley’s Coat, Longfellow National Historic Site, Cambridge, Massachusetts, LONG 13657.
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custom-made garments, for which Fanny called dressmakers to the house, the boys’ mother
also purchased ready-made clothes for them from the shops in Boston and New York. “C.
came to dinner very fine in his plaid blue gown with its steel buttons and scarlet sash, &
Erny in his blue merino & red shoes,” she writes in one of her diary entries, and “Bought
chicks beaver hats with blue & black feathers & cherry rosettes on the ears,” in another.39
Fanny’s constant references to the children’s outfits illustrate that children’s clothes, and
the textiles from which they were made, were a point of pride for parents. Indeed, the
importance placed on childhood in the nineteenth century is reflected in the luxurious, and
presumably expensive, fabric of their clothes.
As evidenced by the new wealth of materiality associated with children, childhood
was no longer seen as a period to quickly bypass, but a time to indulge, and even prolong,
as Fanny’s sampler suggests.40 That a mother chose to devote an ongoing project of such a
time-consuming nature to her two children, carefully cutting out small scraps from the
same fabrics they wore and meticulously recording details of each one, shows a growing
parental interest and investment in childhood—a far cry from the seventeenth-century
conception of motherhood that placed a higher priority on childbearing than on
childrearing.41 Along with the fabric sampler, Fanny wrote two diaries entitled Chronicles
of the Children of Craigie Castle, in which she made nearly daily entries for two years
centered around the children: what they wore, what toys they played with, or what clever
things they said. “Erny came down this mn’g with his chicken bone man dressed in fur to
take him to walk ‘for some air,’” she notes with a tone of amusement.42 Henry Longfellow,
39
Chronicles of the Children of Craigie Castle 1848.
Calvert, 8.
41
Calvert, 23.
42
Chronicles of the Children of Craigie Castle 1849.
40
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too, contributed to saving memories of his children’s youth, writing two diaries in
Charley’s young voice and a story, complete with illustrations, entitled Little
Merrythought. The book contains endearing anecdotes, such as when the father asks the
little child to translate the French sentence, “Ma mere est aimable,” into English and the
shocked and worried child replies, “My mother ate a marble!”43 Surely these exchanges
occurred in Henry’s own interactions with his children, and in writing them down he was
thus preserving snippets of their lives for future remembrance.
Preserving personal milestones and memories of childhood reflects the growing
nineteenth-century tradition of saving everyday objects. When Fanny cut out a scrap of
fabric from the clothes her children wore and pasted it onto her sampler, she was engaging
in an activity that would have been familiar to many middle and upper class Americans.
Indeed, an antiquarian sensibility emerged during this period, as people began to realize the
historical significance of family heirlooms stored away in the attics of their New England
homes.44 Teacups, spinning wheels, and even fragments of the casket that contained
Dante’s bones were saved, sealed, labeled and either displayed or safely tucked away.45
The Longfellows enthusiastically engaged in this fad of historical remembrance, entreating
Nathan Appleton to purchase the Craigie House rather than build them a new, potentially
considerable residence, as Fanny wrote in a letter to her brother that “[o]ur interest in it had
been quickened by our present guest [who]…has excited an historical apreciation [sic], or
43
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Edie’s French Lesson” in Little Merrythought, compiled in For the
Children, Longfellow National Historic Site, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
44
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth
(New York: Vintage Books, 2001), 6; Jane C. Nylander, Our Own Snug Fireside: Images of the New England
Home, 1760-1860 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 14.
45
Coffin-Fragment (Woodchips), Longfellow National Historic Site, Cambridge, Massachusetts, LONG
17243.
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rather reminded us how noble an inheritance this is where Washington dwelt in every
room.”46
Alongside this tradition of historical preservation and the maintenance of public
memory, nineteenth-century Americans also began to record their own lives more
faithfully. Through diaries and scrapbooks, bits of fabric and locks of hair, people
accumulated the bits and pieces of their lives that told their own stories, preserving the
private memory of themselves and those they loved for future generations. Fabric played a
large role in the preservation activities of women, namely in the form of patchwork quilts
and fabric scrapbooks. The Lowell mill girl, Lucy Larcom, who later published a memoir
entitled A New England Girlhood in 1889, recalled the nostalgia of quilt-making: “I liked
assorting those little figured bits of cotton cloth, for they were scraps of gowns I had seen
worn, and they reminded me of the persons who wore them.”47 A fellow mill girl who
published alongside Lucy in The Lowell Offering wrote of the many associations quilts
conjured, fondly remembering, “Here is a fragment of the first dress which baby brother
wore when he left off long clothes…and, oh, down in this corner a piece of that in which I
first felt myself a woman—that is, when I first discarded pantalettes.”48 Just like Fanny’s
sampler, the young girl’s quilt notes different “firsts”—her brother’s first sack, or her first
adult dress—reinforcing the symbolic nature of clothes, namely their associations with
specific events or stages of maturity, for nineteenth-century Americans.
46
Charles C. Calhoun, Longfellow: A Rediscovered Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004), 167; Fanny Appleton
Longfellow to Thomas Gold Appleton, 30 August 1843, as quoted in Historic Furnishings Report, Volume I:
Administrative and Historical Information, Illustrations, and Bibliography (Cambridge: U.S. Department of
the Interior/National Park Service, 1999), 47.
47
Lucy Larcom, A New England Girlhood (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1973), 122.
48
Benita Eisler, ed., The Lowell Offering: Writings by New England Mill Women (1840-1845) (Philadelphia:
J.B. Lippincott Company, 1977), 152-153.
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Fanny’s fabric sampler fits within this larger practice of preserving memory through
quilt making. Fanny, however, was no seamstress. Though she occasionally did small
embroideries on the children’s clothing, a crocheted snood left half undone and an
unopened sewing book in the Longfellow House collection suggest the sewing-intensive
nature of a quilt would have been a rather laborious undertaking. In fact, Fanny was the
first to admit her lack of skill when it came to handiwork: “It is a great pleasure to me to
have pretty things about me associated with a kind of remembrance, worked in love, and
not the cold purchase from my own purse which so many must necessarily be,” she wrote
to Henry’s mother, Zilpah Longfellow. “[B]ut alas, I am not much skilled in handicraft,”
she resigned.49 Perhaps a fabric sampler seemed more manageable to Fanny, with its
medium of paper, ink, and glue. But it seems likely that there were also other reasons. The
four fabric scrapbooks a nineteenth-century mother and her two daughters from Salem
County, New Jersey put together help us to understand why Fanny might have chosen to
follow the fabric scrapbook tradition rather than making a quilt. These three women also
preserved fabric, 782 fragments to be exact, of cotton, silk, wool and linen from the
garments and home furnishings of family and friends. This decision to place the swatches
within the leaves of a book rather than sewn together into an object with a practical
function suggests that the women were not only interested in showcasing their large
collection, but also in ensuring that the significance of the textiles not be lost. 50 In fact, the
women vigorously annotated each swatch, suggesting that the people from whence they
came were an important part of their lives. Perhaps Fanny, too, wanted to keep more than
49
Fanny Appleton Longfellow to Zilpah Longfellow, 19 February 1847, as quoted in Historic Furnishings
Report, 64.
50
Woodman, 5.
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just the actual pieces of fabric her children wore. Indeed, she carefully labeled the sampler,
hoping, it seems, to ensure that the significance of each scrap be saved for future
generations of the Longfellow family.
But Fanny also diverged from the fabric scrapbook tradition, making her sampler
truly unique and all the more intriguing. Rather than saving her scraps of fabric within a
bound volume, which was the common practice, Fanny chose to attach the scraps to a
factory sample folder instead. One can presume that the decision was deliberate, as the
lithograph of the mills prominently occupies nearly half of the paper, and as thus, is
unavoidable. Had Fanny wanted a blank sheet of paper for her project, it is reasonable to
imagine the ease with which she could have procured a sheet of similar size and thickness.
And though a single instance leaves open the possibility that she had no other suitable
backing lying around the house, the fact that she used another factory sample folder for her
own fabric swatches two years earlier largely negates the likelihood of this proposition.
The nineteenth-century New England mills used sample folders, first designed by
the factory’s selling agent and then sent to the factory where samples were attached and
labels affixed, to display available fabrics to potential buyers. The selling agent controlled
not only how the factory’s products were presented to the public, but also influenced
production choices: as fashions changed much more rapidly with the new machine
technology, companies were under constant pressure to print the newest patterns before
their competitors. Therefore, the selling agent served as the eyes and ears of the company,
relaying back information about which prints sold successfully, and which did not, so that
the factory could quickly adjust supply levels to meet consumer demands.51
51
This paragraph draws from Fagan Affleck, 25-26, 45.
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Fanny arranged her fabrics on a sample folder from her father’s company, the
Merrimack print works. A lithograph of the mills occupies the top portion of the folder, and
a banner reading “Merrimack Prints” and “Lowell, Mass” runs along the edges of the
image. The lithograph depicts an idyllic scene of two couples strolling along the River, as a
dog leaps in the grass and another man sits on a rock sketching the view. One of the men in
the foreground prominently gestures to the mills on the other bank, a row of brick houses
with white church spires, rather than black smoke, rising into the clear, blue sky. The scene
aptly fits Nathan Appleton’s exuberant description of Lowell to his brother in 1825:
On the banks of the Merrimack are already three superb factories and two
immense piles of brick buildings for calico printing. In front of these, on the
banks of the factory canal, which is fenced in and ornamented with a row of
elms, are situated the houses of the people. They are handsomely and
uniformly planted with flower gardens in front and separated by wide
avenues. There is a beautiful Gothic stone church opposite the dwelling
houses and a parsonage of stone is erecting. There is a post office, fine
taverns, one of which is a superb stone edifice of the same material and
perhaps two hundred houses all fresh from the hands of workmen. The
ground is intersected with fine roads and good bridges. The whole seems
like enchantment.52
More importantly, the lithograph clearly evokes Fanny’s family connection to the Lowell
mills, and more largely, the success of the early American textile industry. Fanny was
certainly proud of the Appleton family name, and perhaps she was commemorating her
past for her children so that memory of the Appletons would not be lost among successive
generations of the Longfellow family. Perhaps she was trying to teach a moral lesson of
sorts to the children—that not only much of their clothing, but their wealth and comfortable
style of living came from her father’s entrepreneurship. Indeed, this would not have been
the first time that Fanny tried to teach them a moral lesson. As parents were increasingly
implicated in the development of their children, nineteenth-century children’s books tended
52
Nathan Appleton, as quoted in Tharp, 103.
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to have moral endings that parents hoped would instill life lessons during the formative
stages of their lives.53 Even as young boys, Fanny told Charley and Erny such stories,
writing in her diary, “They listened delightedly to my moral lesson & seemed to understand
it.”54
Perhaps, also, Fanny hoped not only to preserve a certain memory of her children
and of her father, but of herself as well. After all, in this age of Victorian motherhood, it is
safe to presume that Fanny understood the important roles mothers were to occupy in
shaping their children’s futures. Curiously, Fanny completely fails to mention the
children’s nannies in her Chronicles of the Children of Craigie Castle although it is known
that she had much help with raising the children: nurses were at the children’s sides
throughout the day, dressing them, taking them on walks, feeding them while their parents
dined at the dinner table, and putting them to bed.55 Fanny’s omission of these helping
hands from her version of the boys’ childhood suggests that she wished to be remembered
as a sufficiently doting and loving mother who raised her children with her own two hands.
In making her fabric sampler, then, Fanny not only confirmed her membership to the
leisure group of upper and middle class women, but also left proof of the attentive, handson care she provided her children.
More importantly, Fanny seems to have made her sampler with a dual purpose in
mind: not only to preserve memory of her father, herself, and her children for future
generations, but also the more immediate objective of displaying her pride and gratitude to
her father during his lifetime. Though Fanny and her siblings teased Nathan Appleton by
calling him “The Great Manufacturer,” the grand name newspapers christened him, and
53
Volo, 270.
Children of Craigie Castle 1849.
55
Historic Furnishings Report, 52, 55, 57.
54
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though it is true that they were frequently bored with their father’s business as young
children, they were nevertheless extremely proud of his ingenuity.56 Indeed, Nathan
Appleton made sure his children were aware of his contributions to the textile industry,
taking them to visit not only the textile mills in Lowell, but also the Gobelin tapestry
factories in Paris, the silk mills in Lyons, and the lace factories in Belgium while on their
grand tour of Europe.57 Knowing how strong his crusade for American-made manufactures
was, the Appleton children were anxious to please their father. The Appleton family
biographer Louise Hall Tharp wrote, “Nathan Appleton was heart and soul in the project,
full of enthusiasm for the new machines. He could never quite give up hope that a day
would come when his oldest son would see the adventure, the excitement, in
manufacturing.”58 But perhaps Nathan Appleton applied too much pressure on his son.
Tom Appleton’s heart lie not with manufacturing but painting, and as he left for Europe he
wrote a letter to his father that captures his feelings of failure: “…You know as well as I
do, that my life, the life of an artist (and how alone am I, ashamed of the name) counts for
nothing in this country...I feel now, humbled and despicable before men who can build
towns, pour whole villages into factories…59 Fanny, too, was well aware of her father’s
pride in domestic production, yet she had a wandering eye and an insatiable appetite when
it came to beautiful imports. When the Longfellows went to New York in October of 1843,
they purchased $370 worth of Brussels, Imperial and Wilton carpet for their new home.
After hearing of her purchase, Nathan, with his textile mills in Lowell, chastised his
daughter in a letter: “As to your arrangements for carpets, I think you are rather
56
Tharp, 10.
Tharp, 171, 173, 189.
58
Tharp, 249.
59
Tharp, 249.
57
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premature…I cannot suppose that in respect to the making up there can be any advantage in
having it done in New York rather than in Boston.”60 The following spring, Fanny proved
herself a dutiful daughter and heeded her father’s advice, writing reverently but
lightheartedly:
Both economy + patriotism, not to speak of taste, decide me to patronize the
Lowell manufacture largely. Do I not properly practice the precepts you
inculcate? If any body grumbles about the Tariff, you can tell them that a
very fastidious young woman of your acquaintance assures you she
infinitely prefers home carpeting for beauty, excellence + cheapness.61
Given this context, it is likely that Fanny deliberately chose to make her sampler on a
Merrimack sample folder. After all, what better way to prove her support to her father than
to take out the folder with the fabric her own children wore from the mills during one of
Appleton’s visits to the house?
Fanny tied together three generations of her family through her fabric sampler. Not
only did she attempt to preserve memory of the past—of her father, herself, and her
children—for the future, but perhaps she also tried to prove the promising path of her
future, her children, to her father, who represented her past. In fact, the man who gestures
into the background in the sample folder’s lithograph evokes a relevant interpretation of
American landscape painting, namely that a view into the distance is a view into the
future.62 Perhaps Fanny, then, was implicitly acknowledging the connections that bound the
mills in the distance to the success of her children’s future.
60
Nathan Appleton, as quoted in Historic Furnishings Report, 48-49.
Fanny Appleton Longfellow, as quoted in Historic Furnishings Report, 49.
62
Angela Miller, Landscape Representations and American Cultural Politics, 1825-1875 (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1993), 14.
61
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Fanny’s fabric sampler not only sheds light on three large themes in the history of
nineteenth-century America—the transformation of the domestic cotton industry, the
changing notions of childhood, and the desire to preserve memory—but also ties them
together. Fanny connected the seemingly exclusive worlds of manufacturing and the
Victorian home, that public world of white men like Nathan Appleton with the private
world of mothers like herself, when she sat at home and made her sampler. In fact, she
made the link unavoidable when she took this leisure activity of middle and upper class
women and placed it directly in the context of the mills by using a factory sample folder.
This juxtaposition of the two worlds of the factory and the family evokes a perhaps
unintended consequence: though she references the mills in terms of the success of the
American textile industry and the contributions of that success to the future of her
offspring, the textile industry also points to the poverty of those laboring within the
nineteenth-century factories. After all, Fanny’s part of Boston was not the same Boston
many of its other occupants could call their home. Though the Lowell mill operatives were
notably better off than their counterparts at other American factories, the fact remains that
the factory girls and Fanny Appleton Longfellow lived worlds apart.63 In this way, Fanny’s
sampler is also an object of inescapable social contrasts: from the poor women and girls at
the mills to an upper class Victorian mother; from scheduled workdays and long hours to
the pleasurable hour or two of leisure activity; from mechanized production to a mother’s
handmade display of affection; and finally, from undifferentiated cloth to scraps of fabric
imbued with sentiment. Nevertheless, in embodying these contradictions, Fanny’s sampler
is significant precisely because it suggests that its maker did not see a clear divide between
the two worlds. Indeed, it was not unusual for Fanny to think of family and industry in the
63
Eisler, 19; Foner, 20-21.
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same breath because she grew up in a family in which manufacturing was the family
business. Though Nathan Appleton was a powerful man in the public world of commerce,
he was also a father in the private space of their home.
Fanny’s fabric sampler is important to our understanding of American history
because it reveals connections that may be otherwise obscured. Nineteenth-century
historiography tends to treat the world of industry, the rise of early capitalism and the
construction of imposing factories, and the world of the family, the growing conception of
the Victorian home and of the nuclear family, as two separate worlds, such that the
existence of the two in the same century seems contradictory. But through the nature of its
composition alone, from the bits of machine-produced fabric to the handwritten labels,
Fanny’s sampler shows the interconnections between the two. In fact, the world of the
factory penetrated the domestic sphere every time a piece of clothing, or a scrap of fabric,
entered into the house. And just as the scrap, with its tiny pattern of pink flowers, was able
to pass from factory to home, and eventually, into memory, its journey suggests that there
are unseen threads that weave together a history of industrialism, childhood, and
remembrance.
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23
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