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Princeton Mass.

The Working Girls Vacation Society: Keeping the ‘Sin’ Out of ‘Single’

During the Gilded Age, hundreds of thousands of young women worked long hours for low pay in sweat shops and factories. Some couldn’t get enough to eat, and some contracted tuberculosis in the crowded, dirty workplaces. Upper-class women came up with a way to help them: The Working Girls Vacation Society. It gave certain girls a two-week, supervised vacation in the country.

Unchaperoned co-ed bathing at Coney Island, 1897. Not the kind of vacation sanctioned by the Working Girls Vacation Society.

The rich ladies were as concerned about the morality of the working girls as much as their health. They worried the girls, once outside the home, would succumb to the blandishments of men or, worse, turn to prostitution. Getting them away from the temptations of the city and into the wholesome countryside seemed like a good way to prevent that.

And so in Boston and New York they started working girls vacation societies or clubs. They then sent the girls for two weeks to one of more than a dozen country homes — in rural Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York and New Jersey. There they got three square meals a day, fresh air and in some cases medical attention.

They could read and knit and learn how to make paper flowers. On Sunday they went to church. They helped with the housework, a nod to the rich ladies’ preference that they find a morally safer line of work as domestic servants.

Doubtful Attractions

Led by copper heiress Grace Dodge, wealthy women philanthropists after the Civil War started the YWCA and a network of working girls clubs. The reformers then saw a need to to keep the girls from going unchaperoned to vaudeville shows, amusement parks, dance halls and sporting events. In 1894, Edith A. Sawyer described in The Churchman the horrors of a such a places, “where crowds congregate, and where there are electric lights, cheap music, pink lemonade and ‘merry-go-rounds’.”

The horror!

In such public places, they believed, the working girls could succumb to sinful temptations presented by men.

“There being so few week-end resources, the public amusement places with their doubtful attractions are all that is left,” reported Far and Near, the journal of the national coalition of working girls’ clubs, in 1890.

The Working Girls Vacation Society

Katharine W.D. Herbert, wife of a wealthy stockbroker, founded the Working Girls Vacation Society in 1883 as an offshoot of the New York Working Girls Club. She was a philanthropist known for donating thousands of pieces of carved jade to the Museum of Natural History in New York.

Herbert was “struck with the monotony of their ceaseless toil year in and out.”

To start the vacation club, she and her wealthy friends held a bazaar and raised nearly $1,000. She set up an advisory board that consisted of prominent men and half a dozen ministers.

The Society then found homes. In East Haddam, Conn., three houses and three barns once owned by the Working Girls Vacation Society is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In 1890, the Society’s social worker, Annie White Strathern, furnished one of the farmhouses as a vacation home for young working women.

Phebe Howell House 1834 aka Rose Cottage of the Working Girls’ Vacation Society

The Getaway Spots

Other vacation clubs and houses formed in Boston and New York during the Gilded Age, offshoots of the YWCA, the Working Girls Club in New York and the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union in Boston.

The New York Working Girls Vacation Society eventually had 10 houses. Uplands and Hillcrest in the Adirondacks, for example, were gifts of George Dodge, Grace Dodge’s uncle.

Girls could go to Connecticut, to Farmington Lodge in Farmington, Breezy Cottage at Penfield Beach in Fairfield, and to two in Westport, including Green Cottage in Green’s Farms. Or they could stay at lodgings in New York: at Elmcote in Chester or Neversink Manse in Huguenot.

New York’s Jewish Working Girls Vacation Society had two vacation houses, one in Bellport, Long Island, and one at Big Indian in the Catskills.

Boston’s working girls went to Fernside in Princeton, Mass., Good Rest in Lancaster, Mass., The Homestead Inn in the Temple Hills of New Hampshire and one in Methuen, Mass., called The Girls Boarding House.

Churches and settlement houses also maintained vacation homes for working girls; so did Bloomingdale’s, which had a vacation house in Long Branch, N.J., for its employees.

The Working Girls Vacation Society Vacation

The wealthy ladies realized some working girls didn’t like to accept charity, so they charged a nominal fee – about $3 – for a two weeks’ vacation. They’d lend money to those who couldn’t afford it. Some got a free ride.

But you couldn’t go if you had a reputation as a floozy. Harriet Comstock in the Christian Observer in 1907 made it clear that girls with loose morals weren’t welcome. The society sent “the better class of working girls to beautiful country homes for pure fun,” she wrote. [Emphasis added.]

How much fun? Certainly not too much.

In East Haddam, the girls’ supervisor carefully noted their weight gains and the amount of milk they drank as measures of their health improvement. The responsibilities of the trained resident social worker included “instruction in crafts such as making paper flowers and tooled leather purses, and leading hikes and motoring excursions to local sites.”

Every Friday evening the girls came up with their own entertainment, and they went to dances held in the recreation center.

At Fernside in western Massachusetts they could read, sew, walk, take a drive in a wagon or do nothing. At least the old mansion had a theater where they could put on amateur theatricals.

In 1890, Far and Near described a typical vacation, perhaps overselling the “fun” part.

How the girls enjoy the complete change from work and worry to good country air, the tramping to the mountains and the places of interest, or, if at the seaside, the bathing; the dances in the barn, the games and the music. On rainy days fancywork, crocheting, knitting, and reading make the time fly as if on wings.

Prayers Twice a Day

In 1913, Hugh Thompson reported the working girls chafed at the restrictions during their getaways. Thompson wrote in “The Vacation Savings Movement,” in Munsey’s Magazine:

[T]hey were unpopular because of the restrictions imposed on the inmates. In most of them the girls had to live by rigid rule; there was no freedom of action. The situation was summed up by a saleswoman who told an investigator: “Why, you can’t even look at a man if you go there! I do not want to be bound to go to prayers twice a day.

The general feeling, Thompson wrote, was that the self-supporting women who worked so hard wanted absolute freedom to rest or seek innocent amusement.

A U.S. sweatshop, around 1890.

They also may have resented their benefactress’ condescension. Harriet Comstock, who promoted the Working Girls Vacation Society in her writing for church magazines, described a missive from the society’s secretary. The secretary had written to a vacation home supervisor about a working woman:

“I am sending you a little forlornity; try to make her think she is in heaven.”

2-1/2 Percent

The 1900 census reported 261,081 unmarried working women between the ages of 10 and 35 living in the state of New York. By 1909, the New York vacation societies hosted about 1400 working girls a year, according to Amy E. Spingarn. “A trifle over 2-1/2 percent are provided for,” she wrote.

Springarn had conducted a survey on vacation resources for working girls and reported her findings in “Summer Vacations for Working Girls” in the The Survey.

A 15-year-old girl punching sheets at the Boston Index Card Co. in 1917. Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine.

Their income, she wrote, ranged from $1 a week to $16 a week, and their average age about 20. The vacation societies charged a few dollars, but most come free. The girls are factory workers, sales clerks, teachers, dressmakers and stenographers. Sometimes the girls didn’t have clothes, and sometimes the Society repaid the family for lost wages.

Tuberculosis

“Do the people of New York City realize how many working girls have tubercular and cardiac trouble?” the New York Vacation Club Society asked the editor of the New York Times in 1923.

Some of the girls with symptoms of tuberculosis went to the Adirondacks for treatment. They could stay at Hillcrest year-round for treatment.

Article from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 21, 1907

Anna Buchanan, the assistant treasurer of the Working Girls’ Vacation Society, in 1891 gave an example of a working girl helped by a visit to Santa Clara in a letter to The Christian Union.

One of these was a young dressmaker, who was very feeble and had a bad cough. She was sent to the mountains, where she not only gained strength, but her cough disappeared, and she came home comparatively well, and ready for her winter’s work.

Dining room at “Uplands,” Santa Clara. The caption read, “The good fellowship among the girls here makes it seem more like a school than a sanitarium.”
The Circle, volume VIII, No. 1, July-August, 1910, p. 9

In 1945, the Working Girls Vacation Society of New York shut down. Katharine Herbert died that same year.

The New York Working Girls’ Vacation Society mission continues as a successor organization, the Stony Wold-Herbert Fund, which provides grants for study and research in pulmonary diseases.

In East Haddam, the owner of the Phebe Howell House is undertaking a historically accurate restoration of the Phebe Howell House, aka Rose Cottage. You can see pictures at Facebook.com/WorkingGirlsVacationSociety.

Images: Coney Island bathers Campbell, Alfred S. On the beach, Coney Island. New York, ca. 1897. Elizabeth, N.J.: Alfred S. Campbell, Publisher, April 20. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2005677854/. Fernside By Izzysanime – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21538381. Merry go round Highsmith, Carol M, photographer. The carousel, or merry-go-round, at Richland Carrousel Park opened inin downtown Mansfield, Ohio. United States Ohio Richland County Mansfield, 2016. -10-07. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2016632407/. Sweatshop By Unknown – http://americansformorality.com/civilrights/civilrights.html, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27485325.

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The Bates Bedspread of Maine, America’s Favorite Counterpane

The Bates Bedspread, once found in nearly every household, has links to presidents, First Ladies, a famous midwife and countless women who wove white candlewick counterpanes in their own homes.

1950 Bates Bedspread ad.

Though the first Bates Bedspread first sold in 1940, its American ancestors date to the 18^th century. George Washington gave Martha Custis the prototype for the bedspread as a wedding gift. Little did he know the precedent he was setting — or that the giant textile mills that made the bedspread named after him would employ more people than any other company in Maine.

A Bates Bedspread advertisement wasn’t far off the mark when it claimed,

Garlands and stylized flowers with a richly looped hand-woven look make this aristocratic bedspread truly an heirloom.

Candlewicking

Whitework embroidered bedspreads were fashionable when George and Martha tied the knot in 1759, but they became even more popular from about 1800 to 1840. In those days, having a fine white candlewick counterpane helped maintain one’s social standing.

In many places, the way to have an early American version of the Bates Bedspread was to make one yourself.

Candlewicking

Cloth was hard to get, especially on the frontier. The women had to pick, spin, comb, dye and card flax, wool and cotton. Cotton was bought by the pound in early America, according to historian Alice Morse Earle. Women picked out the one by one, carded it on wool cards, then spun into thread.

In Hallowell, Maine (then part of Massachusetts), Martha Ballard wrote in her diary that she had carded cotton on July 27, 1786. Ballard, made posthumously famous by Laurel Thacher Ulrich in A Midwife’s Tale, didn’t weave the cotton cloth herself; she took her spun cotton to her neighbor, Mr. Edson, to be woven.

Carding and Spinning

Most women back then spent endless hours carding and spinning. In 1790, 15-year-old Elizabeth Fuller started a diary from her home on a farm in Princeton, Mass. Entry after entry describes making cloth. “I spun two skeins today” and “I wove five yards today” were typical. In the spring of 1792, she wove for two months solid and estimated she produced 140 yards of cloth.

Some women were expert enough to make candlewicking bedspreads on home looms.

In candlewicking, large running stitches are sewn into a pattern on unbleached white muslin and passed over a small twig. The twig is later removed and the fabric shrunk in hot water, which holds the stitches in place. It gets its name from the soft cotton thread that’s also used as a candle wick.

Elizabeth Perkins Wildes Bourne made one (and probably more) on her loom in Kennebunk, Maine. Her daughter, Abigail Wildes, wove a poem into a coverlet she sent to First Lady Dolley Madison in 1809.

Benjamin Bates

Benjamin Bates, born July 12, 1808, grew up on a farm in Mansfield, Mass. He was the son of a Yankee farmer, merchant and maker of cotton cloth – probably on a home loom.

The Bates Mill complex, home of the Bates Bedspread

He moved to Boston, went into the dry goods business and made a public profession of his Congregationalist faith. He prospered and became the president of the First National Bank of Commerce in Boston, the Union Pacific Railroad and the Lewiston Water Power Company, which built the first canal in Lewiston.

The canal allowed water power to run the machinery in the textile mills that Bates’ money would soon build. Until then, weaving cloth had been a home-based profession. In 1810, for example, 88 percent of the households in Topsham, Maine, told census takers they made cloth. More than half had looms, and some loom owners, like Martha Ballard’s Mr. Edson, wove cloth for their neighbors.

Bates was the biggest investor in the Bates Mill, which opened in 1854. The company eventually built 11 buildings between 1852 and 1923.

Before the Civil War broke out, Bates bought cotton and produced uniforms for the Union Army. He contributed $100,000 to the Maine State Seminary, which renamed itself Bates College without his knowledge. The first girls to graduate from Bates College paid for their own education by working at the mills.

The Bates Bedspread

Bates Manufacturing Company wove its first basic Bates bedspread in 1858. Almost 60 years later, in 1915, Bates expanded and bought new kinds of looms to make Jacquards, crochets, satins, brocades, damasks and Ripplette.

The company grew and grew, and for many years the enormous Bates Mill complex employed more people than any other employer in Maine.

First Yankee farm girls worked at the mills. Then came Francophile Canadians and Irish fleeing the potato famine. No wonder then, why one mill building has a shamrock on one wall, a fleur-de-lis on the other.

Sometime in the 1930s, a Bates representative touring Mount Vernon was impressed with the bedspread George Washington gave Martha. The rep realized such an item could sell, as the colonial revival was at its peak.

The Bates rep also thought the Lewiston mills could make Martha Washington’s counterpane. So Bates designers went to work collecting samples of the antique spreads, visiting Mount Vernon and scouring museums and libraries for information about candlewicking.

Washington’s Choice

After experimenting for two years, Bates produced the first of the legendary Bates Bedspreads and called it George Washington’s Choice. It was made on a specially designed loom in January 1939. The company put the first Bates Bedspread on sale in March 1940.

It didn’t sell. But Bates added a double-knot fringe and made a few adjustments, and the Bates Bedspread caught on. It became a favorite wedding and anniversary gift in the 1940s and 1950s. Like the whitework embroidered counterpanes of the early 19^th century, it was a status symbol – and more. “Loomed to be Heirloomed” was the apt slogan.

Each Bates Bedspread had a ‘pedigree’ at one end of each bedspread that tells its size, style, year of production and loom number. New Bates Bedspreads were later introduced, such as the Abigail Adams and Queen Elizabeth.

Weavers worked seven days a week making Bates Bedspreads, but they couldn’t keep up with demand. It its heyday, 200,000 Bates Bedspreads were sold each year.

Poppy Shills for Bates

In 1948, a future president of the United States made his appearance in a Bates ad. George Bush and his new bride Barbara posed with Joan Walls of Bennington to show that Bates’ fine fabrics were perfect for the discriminating college student. The caption above the photo reads,

Victoria. Chosen by Barbara and George ‘Poppy’ Bush of Yale, and admired by Joan Walls of Bennington. Joan and Barbara wear easy-to-sew campus fashions in Bates cotton. Young marrieds on campus make Bates the beautiful basis of a long-range decorating plan. Indispensable at college, these bedspreads and matching draperies stay fresh and bright through four years of wear and washing. After graduation, they are ready to grace a future bedroom or living room.

(You can see the ad here.)

Decline

As New England’s textile industry moved South, and then overseas, the Bates Bedspread kept the Lewiston mills humming.

By 1990, the 50^th anniversary of the first Bates Bedspread, demand dropped off and only about 35,000 a year were sold. Fred Lebel, Bates’ executive vice president, told the Lewiston Sun-Journal the reason was that so many people had them and didn’t need new ones.

But then he conceded competitors were producing cheaper quality versions of the Bates Bedspread and hurting sales.

In 1992, the City of Lewiston took possession of the Bates Mill Complex after years of unpaid taxes.

Dalton, Georgia

When Bates came up with the first George Washington’s Choice, the company claimed candlewicking was a lost art. Actually it had been thriving in northwest Georgia in a small city called Dalton.

Dalton, which called itself “The Bedspread Capital of the World,” was home to a flourishing cottage industry of tufted cotton products. From the 18^th century, women made tufted cotton bedspreads for their own use.

After World War I, Dalton entrepreneurs set up roadside stands selling chenille robes and bedspreads for tourists driving south along Highway 41, known as Bedspread Boulevard. Later, thousands of men, women and children in Dalton would work on bedspreads at home for national distributors.

In 1942, the Dalton News reported that an early version of a Bates Bedspread from Dalton, Ga., had made a splash when displayed at ‘one of the national bedspread marts.

According to the Dalton News, J.T. Bates of Bates Bedspread Company owned an antique candlewick spread made by his great-grandmother, Eva Deck, in 1789. Deck was 16 when she picked the cotton, spun the thread and tufted the bedspread. The newspaper considered it less beautiful than the Bates Bedspreads her great-grandson’s company sold. J.T. Bates said he would sell

…any other spread for much less than he would this old heirloom, in fact this one is not for sale.

With thanks to Ashley Callahan in Southern Tufts: The Regional Origins and National Craze for Chenille Fashion. This story was updated in 2022.

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Timothy Fuller Visits Salem, Buys Wine for Graduation

Timothy Fuller in July 1801 was about to graduate from Harvard, an event, he wrote, that “ushers me with my classmates into the great world.”

Timothy Fuller

Fuller would do well in the great world. He would prosper in his legal practice, win elected office and become a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. In 1809 he would marry Margaret Crane and together they would have eight children, including Margaret Fuller, a well-known Transcendentalist writer, and Arthur Buckminster Fuller, a Unitarian minister. His descendants would include the inventor Buckminster Fuller and former U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

Margaret Fuller

Timothy Fuller

Born July 11, 1778, in Chilmark, Mass., he was the son of the first minister to Princeton, Mass., also named Timothy Fuller.

His diary offers a vivid picture of the life of a Harvard student at the turn of the 19th century. He describes his tutors, his coffee club, his fear of the yellow fever, his social visits and his views on politics.

Peirce Nichols House.in Salem

One of his classmates, Benjamin Peirce, graduated at the head of his class and later became the Harvard librarian. (Benjamin was a relative of Sarah Nichols Peirce.) Fuller visited Peirce at his home in Salem, Mass. They then visited the museum of the India Marine Society, the forerunner of the Peabody-Essex Museum.

On July 13, 1801, he wrote in his diary,

July 13. In Salem with Peirce.

Early this morning we went into the museum of the India marine society, which has been only two years collecting, but is extensive, considering the time. I breakfasted with Peirce at his father’s and then took affectionate leave of that very interesting family. Betsy Peirce gave me a beautiful nosegay, of which the chrysanthemum formed a part. She has promised to preserve its seed, and the seed of a very beautiful double pink, to give or send me next autumn. Arrived at Boston before twelve o’clock and purchased my wines for Commencement at Mr. Stackpole’s.

This story last updated in 2022.

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Elizabeth Fuller, 15-Year-Old Spinster

As an unmarried young woman on a farm in Princeton, Mass., during the late 18^th century, Elizabeth Fuller led a life preoccupied with yarn – washing it, carding it, spinning it , weaving it.

At the spinning wheel

She was born on Oct. 13, 1775, one of 10 children of Timothy and Sarah Williams Fuller. Her father was a Harvard graduate, the first minister in the town. In 1788, Rev. Timothy Fuller represented Princeton at the convention that adopted the U.S. Constitution.

When Elizabeth Fuller was a teenager she began to keep a diary. Entry after entry described making cloth: “I spun two skeins today,” “I wove five yards today.” In the spring of 1792, she wove for two months solid and estimated she produced 140 yards of cloth.

She also recorded visiting with neighbors, going to church on the Sabbath, making cheese, baking pies and scouring the pewter. She studied her grammar at home. Every so often she noted the weather was ‘pleasant’ or she simply wrote, ‘Pleasant.”

On May 8, 1791, 15-year-old Elizabeth Fuller wrote in her diary:

8 — Sabbath. I went to church A.M. Mr. Thurston preached. Mr. John Rolph & his Lady & Mr. Osburn her Brother & a Miss Anna Strong (a Lady courted by said Osbourn) came here after Meeting and drank Tea.

The next day she appears to have revised her opinion of Mr. Thurston. And she spun.

9 — I spun four skeins. Mr. Thurston here this P.M. a visiting he is an agreeable Man appears much better out of the Pulpit than in.

This story updated in 2022.

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