Day 45... Time Spent Traveling

I am back! I just spent 6 days in West Virginia. at a Living History conference. What a beautiful place!  It is so nice to travel around and see different parts of the country.  If only our world wasn't so big, then you could go to West Virginia for a weekend, or San Francisco for supper, or Minneapolis for the Monday night square dance, and be home the next day to weed the garden and feed the dog!

And, be home to make pottery. In an effort to save my house from the tax man, I have signed up for 16 more "vacations" this summer and fall!  So where the heck is my special project? I am trying to find time to work on it. Tomorrow I will make the first plaster mold.

In the 1600s, many of my ancestors on both sides packed up their belongings and left their homes in England to travel many miles across the sea.  They could not go back to weed the gardens or feed the dog. They traveled so far that most never went back to their homeland again.

The folks that built this house, their ancestors also came from England in the 1600s.  First to Boston, then to Windsor CT and then just a days journey to Torringford. 

The history of pottery in New England is very fascinating. It had a lot to do with traveling constraints too.  English coming to the Boston area started making pots right away. My favorite quote is...

In Salem MA in 1629. Rev Higginson wrote in a letter home,

“It is thought here is good clay to make bricke, and Tyles and Earthen pots, as need be. At this instant, we are setting a brick-kill on worke to make Brickes and Tyles for the building of our houses.”

Potters had to be in one place to do pottery.  Clay is not very portable. Back then, you used the clay you had, built your shop usually within walking distance to your clay pit, and found other odd jobs to do in the winter when the clay froze and was unworkable. And then there were those hugh kilns! They were not portable at all and took a lot of time to build and maintain. Small pottery shops had to get all the potting done in the spring, summer and fall. Most potters had other things to do too. They weeded the garden, pruned trees, mucked stalls, chopped wood. 

Eventually, the apprentices, sons and nephews, moved to new locations to start their own pottery businesses.  The inland roads were in terrible condition till the middle 1800s.  Yellow clay had to be hauled up by ship from New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania. We do not have yellow clay here in New England. The feldspar that makes up clay, is contaminated with lots and lots of iron, making the finished pottery red, soft and porous. 

The earliest attempt to make a harder yellow stoneware clay was by Isaac and Grace Parker in the suburbs of Boston in 1742.  They had been making red ware. Isaac knew the importance of the harder yellow clays and took out a loan for 125 pounds to ship clay up from Martha's Vineyard. Forty year old Isaac built a kiln of the clay, hundreds of pots and fired it up with cords and cords of wood.  The kiln collapsed from the high heat and all the pots were broken. They hired an experienced stoneware potter, James Duche,  from PA and he came to live with the Parker's and their 10 children. Another attempt failed and in the fall of 1742 Isaac died!  Yikes. Grace was left with 10 children, the Duche family and the 125 pound loan to pay back. They did not give up. They shipped clay up from Pennsylvania and had a good firing. However, with the onset of the French and Indian war in the middle 1700s, ships were needed elsewhere, the cost of shipping was not feasible and Grace started selling off her property and goods.  In 1776, Grace died and the attempt to make stoneware here in New England was put off for another 100 years when the roads improved and shipping costs went down.

As you can see, history does not change. It cycles. I am finding more and more difficult to do pottery in the winter. Heating the 200 year old barn with all its drafts is not feasible. What with the cutbacks in every ones pay checks, my wholesale orders are almost non-existent, everyday folks are buying pots made in China at Walmart and gas prices are cutting out our tourist business.

I have had to change my lifestyle to a traveling demonstrator.  Hence the 16 more trips that I will go on this summer. I can pack all my pots, wheel, tents and supplies into my tiny Nissan Sentra. Some refer it to a "Clown Car" when it is packed and tables and poles sometimes on the roof!  But, it gets about 32 miles per gallon of gas. 

My dream is a New Ford Transit, painted yellow with blue holding bands and blue feathering....



 But for now, its back to the barn to make some pots, work on that special project and see if I can pay off my taxes first!

Want me to send you an email notice of my next post?  Sign up right here:
Subscribe to I saved a homestead by Email

Day 34... Things keep getting in My Way... Jobs

I have not cast the special pottery piece yet... maybe next week.  I think it would be great to have no job, no outside job that is.  I would stay home and weed the gardens, pick off and put asparagus beetles into the "Jar of Death", visit with friends, take naps, cook out on the fire pit, weave, read and watch the grass grow.

The only job my grandfather ever had was here on the farm. Farming is busy and hard work, long hours and dirty. But it is also rewarding. Grampa liked Sunday drives. On Sunday, in the afternoons, when we didn't go fishing with Dad, we would go on  joy rides.  My grampa had bought a brand new Rambler station wagon in 1960. He paid about $2,000 for this beautiful blue wagon with white top. He kept plastic seat covers on it.  It still smelled new in 1971 when he died and left the car to my mom. We drove it for awhile before it died and Stewards Auto Parts in New Hartford CT has it now. It is still on his lot. 

My dad was an automobile mechanic, so we had used cars. Only once got a new car. In 1961 we bought a new Corvair!

Grampa would take us all to Brooklyn NY once in a while to visit the relatives. He was born in Brooklyn in 1889 to German immigrant parents.  He raised chickens, cows, grew flowers and vegetables. He bought the new Rambler to cart around plants, and us kids.

Before him, Alpha Davis, a renter, worked as machinist at the Torrington Brass Company. Back when a family man could have a job, a house, raise children on a factory salary and his wife could stay home and take care of the kids and house. They had a set of twins. Reginald and Winthop were born in 1904.  Ten years later, Alpha moved to Fairfield CT where he was still a machinist at a factory and his wife was still unemployed.

Not to say factory work was great. It's not for me. I packaged syringes at a factor at 19 and though I would die of boredom.

In 1880, Martha Birge, the surviving daughter of Nathaniel, was keeping house for her father here. He was 71, and I don't know how much farming he was doing. He was the first recorded owner of the house and was a "joiner" on the 1850 and 1860 census. A joiner was a man who made mortise and tendon joints for boxes, drawers and such. My property then was valued at $1,500. Ten years later, the census had Nat down as a farmer and the property had jumped to $2,000.

Before Nat was his father, Simeon.  I don't know what Simeon did for a living. In the 1850 census, Nat was the only person on this side of the highway who was listed as anything other than Joiner.  The rest were farmers. Simeon had fought with his brother in the Revolutionary War. I assume he was farming in between wandering around fighting the British.

Through all this, the women would be "keeping house". I would have like to be my "house keeper". As it is, I have to run around doing odd jobs to fill in gaps in the pottery business. I hope to get the special pot done this coming month if I am not pulled into too many directions. I do hope so.




Want me to send you an email notice of my next post?  Sign up right here:
Subscribe to I saved a homestead by Email

Day 29.... In the Busyness Business

 I have not made a cast of my special project... yet.  Seems like there is always too much to do. Taught a bunch of great kids from age 4 to 16 at White Memorial Nature Center yesterday. After what, 12 days of clouds and rain, I did not realize is would be sunny and hot so I got my first sunburn working with the kids on the potters wheel on the lawn.  Then went to water a friends greenhouse plants till 7:30... there is never enough time in 24 hours. Each day should have 48 hours. You could work, take a nap, have fun around the house and yard, take a nap, visit friends and then go to sleep for another 8 hours... or would that really work?



Phyllis 1938



I remember momma. She was a busy person. My mom lived here from 3 days old till she was 37 years old. Thirty seven seems so young to me now.  Her parents, Frank and Irene, were married in the living room here. They were both in their late 30s, Frank had been in WWI and never married and Irene's first husband had died in his 20s. Frank and Irenes tumulus marriage did not last long, and somehow, grampa Frank got custody of little Phyllis. My momma Phyllis, grew up here with housekeepers and helped with the cows, chickens and greenhouses.  She loved plants and animals. She wanted to be a professional ice skater. She rode horses, went swimming a lot, skated and went skiing. She had pen pals, a favorite in New Zealand. She collected movie star photographs. She got a Brownie camera and took lots of photos of her cats and her favorite dog, Tippy.  So I now have photos of this house, Tippy, vacations she went on, her friends and lots of  letters.  In the "old" days before computers, people wrote more letters. They sent postcards. I have a hugh collection of her postcards, ones she received and ones she bought as souvenirs.

She met my dad in 1946. She was sixteen and wrote to her mom in New Hampshire, how she had met "Richie". He gave her a box of candy in a yellow and lilac flocked container that she kept all her life. Richie was an automobile mechanic. They moved here to the farm for a couple of years and my brother was born, then they moved out and I was born, then they moved back four years later. Richie and grampa re-muddled the barn then. Dad wanted to repair cars and so they gutted the old barn throwing out the cow stanchions and probably a lot of good old stuff. Mom helped in the greenhouses and the garden. We had a hugh garden. Mom did a lot of canning. We rarely bought vegetables from the store.  I am a little embarrassed to say I still have a couple of her canned beans down in the cellar. In an old house, things get pushed back into cupboards and priorities shift. Someday I may throw those beans out.

My sister came along six years after me. Mom took us all on day trips. My brother was a Cub Scout and Mom was the leader. I went along as the team mascot. We took trips to the Hershey's Peter Paul candy factory, http://naugatuck.patch.com/articles/the-demolition-of-peter-paul#photo-5022211 the Pez factory, http://www.pez.com/, Mount Tom, Mohawk Mountain. So many day trips.

My dad loved fishing. We would go all over CT, MA and NY fishing and mom would bring her embroidery or knitting. She was still working on embroidering quilt squares... "The State Flowers" when she died.  She kept the embrodery floss in a woven sweet grass basket from Maine. Now I have to try, or perhaps my daughters will, to finish it... someday. She also knitted tiny Barbie clothes for our dollies.

She was a very good cook. We came home from school everyday to homemade cake and cookie snacks. Stuffed peppers, Rabbit Cacciatore, Beef tongue, Beef roasts and Tuna-noodle casseroles for supper. We ate really well. She made us fresh squeezed lemon aid and our homemade cider. We also drank a lot of Kool aid.  Running a house, taking care of three children and two men, weeding, canning, day trips and cooking, kept her very busy.

I have tried to follow in her footsteps. Only instead of the greenhouse, I work in the pottery barn. It is a very busy lifestyle. Running a house, taking care of children, weeding, day trips and cooking have kept me busy too. I would have liked to do more at home stuff. I would have liked to stay home and cook and clean.
I think my mom enjoyed it all.  Keeping busy and puttering around at a variety of things, meeting new people and hanging out with friends and relatives is what makes our lives so good.

And so, I am off to the barn. Like my mom, I get to work by walking out our back door onto the old stone steps across the driveway and lawn. Her to the greenhouses which are gone now, and me to the barn... re muddled but still standing.


Want me to send you an email notice of my next post?  Sign up right here:
Subscribe to I saved a homestead by Email

Day 27... Diversify and Adapt...

The special pot is out of the kiln and I have sprayed it with a can of varnish to fill in the porous clay. In the old days, I would have used soap, Murphy's oil soap works good. This would be absorbed into the fine holes of the fired clay. If I do not seal the pin holes, when I pour plaster over the mold, the plaster will also soak into the fine holes of the model and I will not be able to separate the model from the mold. So I use a "release" such as spray varnish or oil soap.



Norwich CT pottery and beehive kiln

 I have been making pottery since 1970. In 1986, I was inspired by my moms old yellow ware bowls to try to make some myself.  I had grown up in this house making cookie and cake batter in these bowls. My girls were 1 and 3 years old when my sister and I went on a road trip to Ohio to research the production and lives of potters in the 1800s. Liverpool, Ohio was the center of yellow ware production in the 1800s.  Thousands of pots were cranked out for years. Every home had a yellow ware bowl.  Many people also used the pie pans, blanc mange molds and colanders that were very necessary in the kitchen. Yellow ware was not widely used for dinner ware. Paupers used simple red ware porringers and mugs and ate off of wood tureens... http://www.rogerabrahamson.com/... Tradesmen, shop owners and the wealthy used fine china.. earthen ware and porcelain imported from Europe. Yellow ware was mostly a kitchen tool.

Potters have secrets. Like most tradesmen, they were in competition with others to make money to survive. When they stumbled upon a good decorating or firing method, they tried to keep it to themselves. Very few notes were made on clays, glaze recipes and firing procedures.  There were no books on "Yellow ware for dummies". I had to experiment.  My first pots were quite ugly, but I had to start somewhere. The clays came out too pinkish or too tan. Glazes were cloudy or crazed. The wonderful feathering disappeared when fired. Colored bands fell off the pots as they dried.

I persisted and finally found out the best clays for the yellow color, temperatures to fire, and glazes to fit properly. It is still an uncertain task.  The clay I get now is from Missouri.  It is shaft mined, and as they mine out deeper and deeper into the earth, each 2000 pound batch I get every year has changed a little. I have to readjust my temperatures. The recent batch has much more grit to it and I find that extremely annoying as I had to adjust the glaze thickness to cover the roughness of the fired pots.

Back in the later 1980s, I went to trade shows and sold my reproductions to museum gift shops or antique and country stores. Places were folks that wanted the country look could buy yellow ware that was much less expensive than the antiques.  Old yellow ware was the Tupperware of the day, it was carelessly used and tossed around. Earthen ware is not as durable as stoneware and many pieces cracked and broke. So today, though thousands were cranked out by those early factories in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York.. ok, most of New England and Midwest were making some form of yellow ware by the 1880s, many of the pots were broken, chipped and thrown out. The market in the 1980s also wanted lead free pots they could use and save their antiques for posterity, which is a good thing.

I cranked out thousands of pieces of pots for a few years before the market started slipping away. Shop owners were not selling and they wanted to see the pots to buy rather than place the large orders I depended on.  Traveling expenses went up.. gas, hotels, food.. I stopped traveling and started camping out.

Then a friend set me up with the Goshen Fair.  This was my first paying demonstration. I have set up for ten years now in the Antique Barn near the entrance every Labor Day weekend. I get to talk to people about pottery, show them how it is made, talk about Hervey Brooks the famous potter that had an 1800s shop two miles down from the fair grounds, hang out with farmers and craftspeople and make money doing it.

Next came the Big E. Another friend suggested I call Dennis Piccard at Storrowton Village in Springfield MA. Now, every year, I demonstrate with my wooden treadle wheel, in 1800s clothing at this great little spot of Heaven at the Big E every September.  http://www.thebige.com/sv/

I now demonstrate all over New England and this will be my first year at the South Carolina State Fair. Great! However, fairs are only running for four or five months in the summer and fall.  In the off months, I teach after school classes, museum workshops and at my home.  My pottery list has moved into some red ware, stoneware face jugs and casting figure bottles and sundries.  I make clay marbles and tiles too. Diversify. 

I also fill in with working at greenhouses. I have woven some planters, birdhouses and little red cardinals for garden color into my stock of pots. 

I still love yellow ware though. I am making more one-of-a-kind special pitchers and steins that show off the beauty of this style of pottery. But I also have to change with the times to accommodate more customers.

When my grampa came from Brooklyn to start his own greenhouse here, he built one greenhouse to grow chrysanthemums and ship them back down to New York by train.  Originally he and his brother raised homing pigeons, chickens and a few dairy cows. Times may have changed for him, because he gave up on chickens and cows, expanded and started growing geraniums and petunias for cemetery boxes, which seemed to be a thriving business in the 60s. He also grew strawberry, tomato and pepper plants for gardeners. He stopped shipping flowers to New York.

Our local Indians once populated and hunted game on this ground. There was a wigwam 1/4 mile from this house when the first English settlers moved in from Windsor CT in 1744.  They cut down all the trees where the Indians had hunted. Killed or scared away a lot of the wild critters. Moved in cows and chickens. Plowed up the land and piled rocks for stone wall barriers. Then mills moved in and roads improved so locals started buying goods from farther away instead of from each other. Growing flax was not profitable when large mills in Massachusetts started turning out yards of cheap cotton. A few of our large dairy farms survived into the 1960s. Then car dealerships sprawled across the east-west highway as horses and oxen became a thing of the past.  McDonalds put the small hot-dog stand out of business. The old Applehouse has been replaced by a conveince mart. Walmart, Petco and Price Chopper moved on top of the cemetery in the middle of a cow pasture.

All along the way, people had to change and diversify. They had to adapt to changes and life styles in order to make a living. That is what I am trying to do too. So this special pot I am making will be mold cast. I am setting aside my love for turning yellow ware to try to pay off my tax bill!

Want me to send you an email notice of my next post?  Sign up right here:
Subscribe to I saved a homestead by Email

Day 26... Surprising developments



The special project did not explode in the kiln! Ok, so after 30 years of runing kilns, I know enough to avoid explosions, but with pottery, you just never know.  Once, I had a load of pots, over $1000 worth of yellow ware, and the tiny cone bar in my sitter was too close to the tube assembly and when the cone started to melt it attached itself to the assembly resulting in the switch not flipping off. Well, the kiln was on way too long, you can tell by the color of the heat after a while. You know that it is taking too long to fire, so you check the peephole and say... "Oh my God!", (and that is a prayer),  its overfiring!  There is nothing you can do except shut off the kiln, pray and wait another 8 hours or so to see what the damage is.





In this instance, the clay color had darkened to a lovely Guilden's mustard brown with little iron flecks. I use a clear glaze on my yellow ware and it is applied unusually thin, so none of the glaze ran down and stuck the pot to the kiln shelves. (Thank you God), but in over firing, my mocha tobacco tea designs, the pretty feathering patterns, the fine cobalt lines start to disappear and the white clay background melts into the pot. What you get is not Yellow ware, but some mutant form of pottery that would be ok in the art world of pots, but not ok in the authentic reproduction world of true yellow ware.

I threw most of them in the garbage can. Therapists say it is good to throw things when you are holding inner anger and need to get it out. I took a deep sigh, and threw each one into a metal trash can. The shattering and thuds were somehow satisfying and I went over to the wheel and started replacing the ones in the garbage can by making new ones.



My frog houses... two upset to take photos of theirs.

 Recently, I over fired in the same way, my 2nd time in 30 years, a load of kids pots. I especially hate ruining students pottery. Twenty two kids had made lovely frog houses. We coiled clay on the outside of upturned bowls, added house decorations, windows, doors, chimneys, vines, and 21 grammar school children made frog sculptures on top of their houses. I was impressed. Children are so uninhibited when it comes to art.  You show them what to do and let them go with it. Each frog house was an individual masterpiece!  Here is a photo of mine, that I had previously fired correctly. They were to be a lovely shade of bright green as kids like bright colors. The over firing caused the glaze to run down the pots onto the shelves and darken the glaze to olive green. I had to chip them off with a hammer and chisel and then spent hours filing down sharp edges. Glaze is just a coating of glass, so I had to be careful to get sharp fragments off or the children would cut their fingers.  Six broke. I glued 4 back together. Two had stilts stuck to the bottoms permanently. Two were in small fragments.

I was so disappointed. I wrapped them all up and returned them to the school. I anxiously awaited the children and got them together to tell them what happened. I had brought two coupons for the students whose pottery could not be fixed, "Is it mine?" Hunter asked. "Did mine break?" asked Rachel. When the two were notified, the little boy said. "Cool."

Kids are so resilient and take the outcome of there pottery projects in stride. Just like me they are excited to see how it turned out or like me, they give a sigh and say, "Well, that's not what I expected.". 

Pottery is like that. You make something and it looks one way, then you have to glaze it and you are never sure how it will turn out. Most of the time you are pleasantly surprised... but you just never know.

Fixing an old house is like that.  When I first moved back here at age 24, my kitchen was still a 1960s kitchen. My parents had remodeled it to the times. The cast iron sink was replaced with a new metal York sink with overhead cupboard. Lots of drawers and shelves, something my mom had lived without for 30 years. They put white linoleum with green and brown speckles on the floor. In 1960, linoleum came in sheets about 6 foot wide, so there was a metal strip down the center of the 15x12 kitchen to hold two pieces of linoleum together.  My dad put it directly on top of the floorboards, so by 1978, the linoleum had wear spots corresponding to the uneven edges of the floor.  The woodwork was painted white, I counted 15 layers of paint, Walls had a once white speckled paper, but my dad was a smoker so it looked a little... smoky.  As soon as I moved back I removed the linoleum. My mom said I will get slivers from the wood boards. This was true for a while.

The boards are not original. Sometime around 1900, someone removed the 7 foot fireplace that stood out into the kitchen. The kitchen took up half the downstairs. The base of the chimney and the hearth stone where once inside the room. When they removed the chimney and fireplace, they covered the old wide oak planks with diagonal four inch tongue and groove pine planks. They nailed them in with many, many three inch nails.  I experimented taking off a couple in the corner and also where the hearth had been. If I remove the diagonal planks there will be many nail holes to fill in. But also, what is under the hearth and chimney is a mystery that I have hesitated to find out. I have been here 30 years and the diagonal floor is still there. Someday... I will remove it, but not today.

A good surprise was under the white 4"verticle wainscoting boards that ran around the base of the kitchen. Also put on with many large nails, were two 15 inch horizontal planks that ran along each wall. One small section has a 16" x 28" plank. If anyone knows about our trees today, planks do not come this wide. These came from massive oak trees.  You may look around all our woods today and think, "These are old trees", but not so.  Most of our old growth, primeval trees were cut down by 1900 to use for houses, barns, fences and firewood. The planked walls, newly uncovered, where still coated with a blue and then grey milk based paint. 

I scraped the woodwork and painted it all a sage green. It is on the east, south and west end of the house and is perfect for light. with four large drafty windows, the kitchen is filled with warm light.  I replaced the metal York sink and cupboard, with the 1930 cast iron sink, (my family does not throw things out, the cast iron sink my grampa had replaced the stone sink with in 1930 was in the cellar. The legs are still there.. I couldn't throw them out either!) This time the sink is back without the legs. A friend made a wood cupboard underneath and an old wood cupboard hangs above the cast iron.


The Kitchen 2010...still not done...
with Emily and Rusty dog


The ceiling. Sadly, my dad had knocked down the plaster ceiling, which from photos  I have, does not look too bad. But they wanted a modern house and put up white cardboard squares that had also turned dingy and ugly. Down they came one day with bushels of mouse droppings, nests, fibers, wood shavings and spiders. The exposed beams were not meant to be exposed. They are cross cut. 2 1/2" by 6 1/2" rough beams. The sub flooring above was also rough cut, so I dealt with falling splitters of old wood for the next 10 years while I debated what to do with it. 

The beams were unevenly spaced and rough cut. I could pay an exorbitant amount or get This Old House TV show to re lath and re plaster it like it should be. I could put up plaster board, but that would be uneven. I could put up wood strips and place plaster board between each row of beams. But they would be so irregular.  Finally, I saw a magazine with a planked 1800s ceiling. That was it. I could even do this myself. So now, I have white, five inch planks that look like they were always there. They are tongue and groove keep out the wood chips, mice and dust and I think it looks great.

But there are still wide oak planks hiding under the diagonal floor boards waiting to be exposed. Like a load of pots that you put in the kiln, will I be pleasantly surprised to open it all up or not?

Want me to send you an email notice of my next post?  Sign up right here:
Subscribe to I saved a homestead by Email

Day 25... More About Flax and Linen Weave

I am now firing my special pot today! I took special care in drying it and now it is ready for its' first firing.

Yesterday, I went to a sheep and wool festival in Rhode Island.  Coggeshall farm, http://www.coggeshallfarm.org/ is a historic farm site/museum in Bristol RI.  The house there was built in 1790. Sheep, chickens, turkeys wandered around the lawns. The farm cats are friendly. Horses donkeys were there too. Outbuildings and sheds are accurate of the time period.

There was also a great reenactor/demonstrator there who was an accurate and funny guy that made learning about flax production so interesting. I watched it 3 times. 

Flax was grown all over New England till cotton was easier to process, (mass production in the early days). Mills and faster machinery, the demand for fabric and the cheap cotton from the south, eventually put flax production here out of business.  Most communities had someone who liked and was good at weaving.  Farmers grew acres of flax. Broadcasting the small seeds, weeding once they sprouted and the the plants grew think and dense, blocking out further weeds as the flax grew. Then there would be beautiful blue flowers. In the fall, flax was cut, soaked, dried, beaten, scutched and haked into 2-3 foot fibers that are then spun into an incredibly strong and durable fiber. Cotton-jean is a fabric woven of cotton weft and linen warp threads... (blue jeans c. 1700s). Wool and linen was turned into a strong and warm fabric called Linsey-woolsey. I just did a Google search and can find very few places that make Linsey-woolsey today and our modern bluejeans are cotton and sometimes hemp-cotton. These hemp based bluejeans come from the cannabis family of plants, but you can't go smoking your blue jeans... industrial hemp has very little THC levels.

The Birge family of farmers that owned my house grew, spun and wove linen into fabric. They wore linen clothes every day. One family in Maine had acquired a loom in 1786. Between 1787 and 1792, two girls of the family wove check, diaper, huckabak, worsted, dimity, woolen "shurting," towles, blankets, "rag coverlids," and lawn hankerchiefs as well as "plain cloth".  Simeon Birge (the guy who I think built my house), well, his mother lived across the street. During the Revolutionary War, she wove tent fabric along with all the other fabric the family needed for clothes. I just heard that most people had two sets of clothes. One for every day and one for Sunday go-to-meeting. I supposed they didn't wash their clothes too often... maybe while they slept they could hang them near the fireplace to dry?


"For the comfort of the militia, when they should go into the service, the assembly directed that each town whould provide one tent for every 1,000 pounds on the list, and Torrington standing 5,816 pound and.15 shillings, was required to provide five, if not six tents. Hence, Dea. John Cook, then town treasureer, paid one order to the widow Mary Birge, by the hand of her son John Birge,(Simeons brother who went off to war and fought at the battle of Cowpens), for tent cloth, amounting to five pounds and siz shillings, and also, paid Cart. John Storng, one of the selectmen, seven pounds and sixteen shillings lawful money, for tent cloth.".. History of Torrington CT by Samuel Orcutt.

"She, (Mary), is remembered as tall and slight in form with blue or gray eyes. She was totally blind for several years before her death".... Kelloggs in the Old World and the New, Volume 1, Timothy Hopkins. If she wove for years and the lighting was bad... night by candle, overcast days, dark winters, I suppose it would have been a strain on her eyes.




Not my reed, but this is what one looks like.

 I found two reeds in my attic. So yesterday at the fiber fest in Rhode Island, I asked a new acquaintance about the reeds in my attic. They are about 40" long, made of tiny reed strips with fiber cords holding the reeds together. There are scratched marks on the ends, maybe Roman numerals. I have not found out any more about these yet. I especially want to know how old they are. Having just spent three hours trying to find out about old looms with no success on the Internet, I am going to close out for today.

Tomorrow, if all went well in the world of the kiln, I should be ready to make a plaster cast of the special pot.


Want me to send you an email notice of my next post?  Sign up right here:
Subscribe to I saved a homestead by Email

Day 23... Bagged

Me with my head in a bag age 5 with Beagles

No firing the special pot today, have to pack for a trip to RI.

I have a fondness for beagles.  My dad had hunting beagles. I  think. That is what I remember.   It seems I have always had a bag on my head, following my own inner GPS. Like the modern GPS systems though, mine seems to steer me wrong sometimes.

There is a lot of things I have forgotten. Probably due to lead paint... was I one of those kids who chewed on wood work?  I got my start with clay, making mud pies in the greenhouse and modeling little figures with the clay putty my grampa used for glazing windows. I have read since that there was a good deal of lead in putty as in paint before 1970. 

So is my head feeling heavy from the 1,000 things on my mind or is it filled with lead?

Grampa was an old school florist. His father came from Bruschal Germany in 1881 to Brooklyn NY. Great grampa Karl and his sister came to American, part of the huddled Masses at Ellis Island looking for a better life and opportunity.  One of 8 children born in Germany, Karl was only 16 when he and his older sister Barbara, 21, boarded a ship, steerage class, and got their first glimpse of Lady Liberty in New York harbor.

I have photos of them in Brooklyn in their gardens and greenhouses. Today it is hard to believe that Brooklyn still had dirt roads and farms.  (My computer will not recognize my scanner, or the printer at the moment so I can't attach photos.) The greenhouse flower and vegetable business grew and they began to vacation in the country. They bought a house on Hayden Hill Road in Torrington, further up Torringford Street. Then my grampa Frank bought this house and 15 acres of farmland. He built his first greenhouse in 1935 I think.



Don't know this lady, but look at those beans!

I love being in a greenhouse. The moist heat, smell of dirt and plants, bugs crawling around. Good earth. Out of the earth comes miraculous flowers. Flowers from little tiny seeds, nurtured with water, grow into perfect flowers. Just look at a fresh flower as it buds and opens. What a miracle!  I have some magic beans growing in my jewel pots on the back porch right now. With the past 7 days of rain, they have sprouted and are now up and leafing out.  Each day for the past 2 weeks, I have checked them and now they are here!  Magic beans are sturdy, hardy, versatile plants. They grow from red, white and black speckled seeds about the size of large lima beans.  They have swollen under the earth and have good sturdy stocks.  They will grow 8' to 10' tall. They will be covered with perfect miracle bright red blossoms that last for weeks. The blossoms will turn into string beans up to 10" long! Really!  Although slightly fuzzy pods, they will taste great in salads and fried with onions and bacon (Emilie's favorite).  If you let some pods stay on the stalks till October, you can gather the red, white and black speckled beans and eat those in chili or save them for next year. Cycle of life again.

Scarlet Runner Beans!

Want me to send you an email notice of my next post?  Sign up right here:

Subscribe to I saved a homestead by Email