DOI Heft:
No. 215 (January 1915)
DOI Artikel:A visit to Washington headquarters
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.43457#0242
A Visit to Washington Headquarters
THE CANDLE-ROOM
A VISIT TO WASHINGTON HEAD-
QUARTERS
We have recently discovered three
rooms in the Washington Headquarters
Museum, on Harlem Heights, called the “Candle-
Room,” the “Quilting-Room” and the “Spinning-
Room,” constructed on novel lines that have never
been attempted before. These rooms are high up
in the old house, lighted by deeply recessed dormer
windows, looking east, north and west over the
new city, and are designed to illustrate three
branches of the household work of our grand-
mothers—early lighting, the quilting-bee and the
spinning of flax and wool.
These rooms seem to have been equipped from
the winnowings of a great garret in some Colonial
house that has been enriched by the accumula-
tions of 150 years of family discards. In the
Quilting-Room, whose quaint wall-paper seems to
have been in place for a hundred years, one notices
first the rush-bottom chairs with scroll backs, sup-
porting the quilting frame, the Seth Thomas clock,
the eagle looking-glass and the rag carpet on the
floor. The chairs are drawn back from the quilt
and there is such an air of suspended activity that
you know instantly that the quilters have just
stepped into another room for a dish of tea. And
then, with a mild shock, one sees hanging along the
wall the wraps of those fair ones who must have
been gone for a mere trifle of a hundred years.
The spinster of the straw bonnet and the flow-
ered shawl was from Salem town, and the Quaker
bonnet and blue umbrella were the belongings of
the visitor from Philadelphia, while the little old
ladv who wore the black bonnet and shawl of a
friend in mourning was from Hicksville, Long
Island. One stops to look at the minor articles on
the wall, the almanac hanging from the clock
shelf, printed at Burlington, Vermont, 1800, the
sampler in the miniature quilting frame, the work
of Alary Taft (aged twelve), West Bloomfield, 1828,
and the patchwork of old-fashioned calicoes bear-
ing on the centre square, in faded ink, the name of
“Mehitable A. Bullard, Hooksett, N. H.”
The Candle-Room is centred on a framework of
tallow dips hanging from slender rods above the
laver of old gazettes that kept the drippings from
LXXX
THE CANDLE-ROOM
A VISIT TO WASHINGTON HEAD-
QUARTERS
We have recently discovered three
rooms in the Washington Headquarters
Museum, on Harlem Heights, called the “Candle-
Room,” the “Quilting-Room” and the “Spinning-
Room,” constructed on novel lines that have never
been attempted before. These rooms are high up
in the old house, lighted by deeply recessed dormer
windows, looking east, north and west over the
new city, and are designed to illustrate three
branches of the household work of our grand-
mothers—early lighting, the quilting-bee and the
spinning of flax and wool.
These rooms seem to have been equipped from
the winnowings of a great garret in some Colonial
house that has been enriched by the accumula-
tions of 150 years of family discards. In the
Quilting-Room, whose quaint wall-paper seems to
have been in place for a hundred years, one notices
first the rush-bottom chairs with scroll backs, sup-
porting the quilting frame, the Seth Thomas clock,
the eagle looking-glass and the rag carpet on the
floor. The chairs are drawn back from the quilt
and there is such an air of suspended activity that
you know instantly that the quilters have just
stepped into another room for a dish of tea. And
then, with a mild shock, one sees hanging along the
wall the wraps of those fair ones who must have
been gone for a mere trifle of a hundred years.
The spinster of the straw bonnet and the flow-
ered shawl was from Salem town, and the Quaker
bonnet and blue umbrella were the belongings of
the visitor from Philadelphia, while the little old
ladv who wore the black bonnet and shawl of a
friend in mourning was from Hicksville, Long
Island. One stops to look at the minor articles on
the wall, the almanac hanging from the clock
shelf, printed at Burlington, Vermont, 1800, the
sampler in the miniature quilting frame, the work
of Alary Taft (aged twelve), West Bloomfield, 1828,
and the patchwork of old-fashioned calicoes bear-
ing on the centre square, in faded ink, the name of
“Mehitable A. Bullard, Hooksett, N. H.”
The Candle-Room is centred on a framework of
tallow dips hanging from slender rods above the
laver of old gazettes that kept the drippings from
LXXX