By Andrea Cronin, Reader Services

Sometimes you come across the completely unexpected when searching the MHS collections. Initially I hoped to highlight the food of the season, and began a search for an interesting menu from any date in the month of November. If turkey had been on any of the menus, that would be the subject of today’s post. Not finding a satisfactory menu  and determined to have some sort of turkey in this post — be it fowl or country — I started searching for descriptions of Turkey. With a subject search for “Istanbul (Turkey) – Description and travel” a collection finally caught my eye. 

What I found was a letter, written in 1830, containing a beautiful yet brief description of Constantinople in the Henry K. Loring papers. However, the depiction of mosques, minarets, and palaces was not the most intriguing excerpt from this letter. A lovers’ tiff revealed in the very same letter entirely captivated my attention!

Captain Loring’s passenger ship arrived in Constantinople (now Istanbul) on 27 November 1830. As a sailor abroad, Loring often wrote to his sweetheart Sarah Hichborn in Boston from his various destinations, including the Greek Islands, Italy, and Turkey. During this stop in Constantinople, he wrote to Hichborn on 18 December 1830 responding to a situation that she addressed in a prior letter, which is not among this collection of correspondence. She seemingly accused him of intentionally impressing ladies other than herself while he was last in Boston. The captain addressed the issue with such ostentation I am uncertain whether his sentiments are flirtation or vainglory:

Dear Sarah, as you observe, distance, does not seperate minds. May ours, never be seperated. But be always, united according to your good Wishes, I cannot recollect, were I took Tea, excepting it was at your house, I do not remember, any ladies, that I could possibly, have impressed them, with any Particular regards for me. I suffer it was on account, of my beauty, Gentlemanly appearance &c. I think you aught to have gratified me, by telling me who they were, Now by way of retaliation I shall not tell you, how near I come, loosing my heart, at Constantinople. The Turkish and Armenian ladies, are certainly very beautifull.

Ooh, trouble! I would advise the captain that retaliation is not always the best course of action in matters of the heart.

Dear readers, if you are worried about their relationship, let me reassure you. Captain Loring and Sarah Hichborn married on 21 March 1833.

By Andrea Cronin, Reader Services

“We are striving to promote the Culture of Silk,” wrote Dr. James Mease of Philadelphia to Colonel Timothy Pickering of Salem on 13 November 1826. The wealthy physician dabbled in various interests outside of medicine including geology, agriculture, local history, and something called sericulture.

Sericulture, or silk farming, is the breeding of silkworms for the production of silk. In short, silkworms require white mulberry leaves or osage orange leaves to create liquid silk. These caterpillars then spin the liquid silk into cocoons, using the sticky protein sericin to glue each strand together. The cocoons are collected and boiled before the pupas develop and emerge as silk moths. The silk threads of the emptied cocoons disband as the sericin dissolves in hot water. This “raw silk” is then reeled and woven into the cloth. Sounds easy, right?

Silkworm breeding is exhaustively needy at best and disease-ridden at worst. An adult silk moth cannot eat, drink, or fly. The sole purpose of its existence is to mate (which it relies entirely on human intervention to achieve) and produce the next generation. At odds with the laborious milieu of sericulture, Dr. James Mease remarked in the 13 November 1826 letter:

[We] find that the there is no difficulty in breeding the worms – we have abundance of red or native mulberry trees and also the white sort. I imported an ounce of eggs from Genoa last spring and gave them to three persons, who had very great success with them. The Cocoons were twice the size of those produced from Egg previously here.

With mulberry trees aplenty, Dr. James Mease’s associates and other American silk farmers eagerly produced raw silk throughout the early 19^th century.

By Andrea Cronin, Reader Services

“We desire you to embrace the first favourable Wind and weather and proceed to … any other ports places or Islands where you may think it likely to find seal plenty,” wrote the Boston fur merchants Ebenezer Dorr, Ebenezer Jr. Dorr, Joseph Dorr, and John Dorr to the captain of their snow  Pacific Trader, Samuel Edes, on 11 September 1799. The four-page letter details the responsibilities expected of Captain Samuel Edes during his voyage, including those expectations of the crew to capture and skin any available seal for profit.

The letter stipulates instructions on the preservation of seal hides.

…on your arrival at a suitable place for sealing you will immediately secure your vessel and set your people to work killing seal and preserving their hides either by drying or Pickling as the weather will permit, always remembering, that to have them well dried is our wish in Preference to Salting or Pickling.

This preference for dried hides over pickled ones benefited the merchants twofold. Dried pelts were more stable to transport aboard a sailing vessel because pickled ones were subject to putrefaction and other means of deterioration. Dried pelts additionally yielded higher profits than pickled pelts in Canton. If the process of pickling a seal skin seems curious, it may be interesting to know that pickling (preservation of perishables in brine or vinegar) is often part of the tanning process (the conversion of animal skin to leather by use of tannic acid or other chemicals) . The Dorr merchants informed the captain of their preservation preferences to achieve higher profit in market.

By Anna J. Clutterbuck-Cook, Reader Services

In 1917 Margaret C. Robinson picked up her pen and wrote a note to her friend and fellow anti-suffrage activist Mary Bowditch Forbes. In addition to passing along a pro-suffrage newspaper column a friend had forwarded from Utica, New York, and apprising Mary Forbes about her high hopes for the latest issue of her Anti-Suffrage Notes newsletter, Margaret Robinson gleefully offered up a juicy piece of political gossip:

Emily Balch asked [Henry] Ford to pay her expenses for a year in Christianin [,Egypt] to work for peace. She got leave from Wellesley for last year and had her plans all made to go. He not only refused but told her he wanted nothing more to do with women! Emily Balch told this to the person who told me! She ^(Miss Balch) and other pupils of Rosika [Schwimmer] have started the People’s Council which is openly demanding the overthrow of our government! Isn’t that great anti-suffrage material?

What is the truth behind this second-hand hearsay? A bit of research using the MHS reference resources fills out this story in more detail. Emily Greene Balch (1867-1961) was a professor of sociology and economics at Wellesley from 1896 to 1918. She was a politically active pacifist and a founding member of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). In 1915 she stood as a delegate to the International Congress of Women at The Hague, at which female peace activists from North America and Europe attempted to broker an end to the First World War. The following year, while on sabbatical from Wellesley, she took part in the International Committee on Mediation in Stockholm, Sweden, with financial support from industrialist Henry Ford. Ford had supported other women peace activists, including Rosika Schwimmer, in their work before — so Emily Balch may have had good reason to believe he would be interested in supporting further ventures.

As the United States entered World War I in April of 1917, Balch took an additional year of unpaid leave from Wellesley to pursue anti-war activism. During this year she helped organize the People’s Council of America for Democracy and the Terms of Peace, a group opposed to the U.S. involvement in the war. The pacifist position during wartime was almost universally seen as unpatriotic (as Robinson notes, tantamount to “openly demanding the overthrow of our government!”) and Wellesley was one among many institutions of higher learning to curtail their faculty’s academic freedom by demanding they not speak out against the war. Emily Balch’s resolute anti-war stance led the Trustees of Wellesley to decide not to renew her contract for the 1918-1919 academic year. Margaret Robinson and Mary Forbes likely would have approved their decision. In 1946, Emily Balch was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her work — a recognition that would surely have been a bee in the bonnet of these two fellow New Englanders.

Robinson’s original letter can be found in the Mary Bowditch Forbes Papers here at the MHS; we also hold a small collection of materials related to the Massachusetts Public Interests League, one of Margaret Robinson’s anti-communist organizations. A letter from the MPIL collections was featured as our February 2011 object of the month. Both collections are available for research here in the library.

By Susan Martin, Collection Services

Those of us who process manuscript collections are always stumbling on interesting and unexpected finds. I was recently working with the MHS’s George E. Ellis papers to improve the arrangement and description of the collection, and one letter immediately caught my eye. It was written by 10-year-old Helen Keller.

Between 1888 and 1892, Keller was a student at Perkins School for the Blind in South Boston. (The school moved to Watertown, Mass. in 1912.) She found a happy home at Perkins, which she described in her 1902 autobiography The Story of My Life: “Until then I had been like a foreigner speaking through an interpreter. In the school where Laura Bridgman was taught I was in my own country.”

The subject of this letter, written to Dr. Ellis on 27 April 1891, is four-year-old Tommy Stringer, another Perkins student who was both blind and deaf. Stringer’s family was unable to support him, so he had been brought up from an almshouse in Pennsylvania to the Perkins kindergarten. Keller became his energetic advocate and wrote to friends and strangers alike, as well as newspapers, to solicit donations for his education. Ellis was one of the many who contributed. Keller wrote to him gratefully:

Mr [Phillips] Brooks once told me that love was the most beautiful thing in the world, and now I am sure it is, for nothing but love could brighten Tommy’s whole life. I think we ought to love those who are weak and helpless even more tenderly than we do others who are strong and beautiful….I have read that there are lonesome and dismal places in this great world, but I cannot imagine anything so sad and lonely as a little child’s heart who has no loving mother to caress and care for him. But we shall all be so good and gentle with little Tommy that he will think the world is full [of] loving mothers and patient fathers.

It just so happens that Ellis was the president of our very own MHS at the time, an historian, and a former minister of the Harvard Church in Charlestown, Mass. He corresponded with many notable people, but this letter, written in large, neat, blocky handwriting, stands out from the rest. It’s amazing to realize that it was written just four years after Keller met Annie Sullivan, at which time Keller could barely communicate at all, let alone read and write. (About a year later, she explained to the readers of the children’s magazine St. Nicholas how she wrote by placing a “grooved board” between the pages, probably some version of a noctograph.)

George E. Ellis died in 1894. In his will, he bequeathed $30,000, as well as his home and all its contents, to the MHS. Funds from the sale of his property were used to help build and relocate to our current home at 1154 Boylston Street. Our very own research room, Ellis Hall, is named after him. We hope to see you there sometime!

Thomas Stringer graduated from Perkins in 1913 and became a woodworker in Pennsylvania, dying in 1945.

By Peter Drummey, Librarian

The extraordinary come-from-behind victory of Oracle Team USA in the recent America’s Cup competition calls to mind a time when Boston was the center of American yacht racing design and development.  Between 1885 and 1887, the local team of Charles Jackson Paine (owner) and Edward Burgess (designer), first as part of a syndicate and then twice on their own, defended the Cup in three successive campaigns.  The triumph of their center-board sloop, Volunteer, over the British challenger, Thistle, in September 1887, was the cause of an enormous victory celebration that took place, on October 7, 1887, 126 years ago , at Faneuil Hall in Boston.  While photographs of elegant Volunteer evoke a romantic, now long-lost age of sail, she was, in her own day, as innovative as the wing-sailed catamarans that vie for the Cup today.  Designed and built in great secrecy with steel frames and plating, Volunteer could carry ballast lower in her hull than her wooden-hulled predecessors.

Although 19th–century Boston was increasingly divided along ethnic and political lines, in 1887 the entire city came together in a joyous outpouring of patriotism at a monumental reception for their local heroes. So many ardent supporters attended the event—which included the reading of a poem written for the occasion, “Bostonia Victrix”— that the program was interrupted at several points “to allow the assembled multitude to greet the guests of the evening with a hand-shake.”  Newspaper reporters estimated that 7,000 people queued up for the opportunity to personally thank “enterprising” Charles J. Paine and equally “inventive” Edward Burgess, the “guardians of the Cup.”