18th-century household linen management and its 21st-century historic house equivalent

For the modern historic house museum collections staff, the care and cleaning of our spaces and objects are some of the most important tasks we do.  Proper dusting and routine cleaning helps preserve historic objects, vacuuming floors and wiping down woodwork help to maintain our historic interiors, and rotation of sensitive works help to prolong their life through limited light exposure and other environmental impacts.

In January and February each year, when the Historic Kenmore and Ferry Farm sites are typically closed to the public, the curatorial staff is able to access the spaces to conduct inventories and condition assessments of objects…and to clean. Spring cleaning at the Washington House this year involved quite a bit of teamwork between our curatorial and buildings & grounds staff—fresh coats of whitewash went up on high-traffic areas of this historic recreation, and the wooden floors were vacuumed, spot-cleaned, and mopped to remove built-up dirt from tours and other activities.

Maintaining the bedsteads of the Washington House is an ongoing task for our interpretive staff, as they tidy and straighten the sheets and pillows that are moved about by visitors (something we encourage and celebrate!) during their immersive tour experiences.  This year, as we (the curatorial staff) conducted our spring-cleaning routine, we tightened the bedstead ropes and refreshed the bedding to prep the house for another busy year.  But as we went about conducting our room-by-room inventories and pulling bedding out for washing or airing, we uncovered an issue: many of our modern museum object labels for the sheets and pillowcases had become unreadable.

Marking textiles in a museum collection typically entails a small length of twill (woven cloth) tape, a handwritten or applied object number, and small stitches to attach the tape to the textile object.  But for our reproduction bed linens on the bedsteads of the Washington House, these labels no longer were readable due to laundering—the “permanent” number used just didn’t last.  So what are our options?

As we like to do, we turned to the past for an understanding of what might be a better, but still historically accurate method for marking our linens.  One such resource we turned to was cookery and household books of the period.  The Workwoman’s Guide, for example, includes a number of receipts (or instructions) for making marking ink as well as detailed instructions for marking household linens with thread.  In marking of linens, according to the author (A Lady), the textile would be marked with either the husband’s initials or the wife’s first name along with husbands initials, followed by an abbreviation of the type of article, and finally by the number and a date marker (last two digits of the year, for instance). 

Existing household linens in museum collections and references in the written record indicate that some were in fact marked with numbers or initials/names (or both) to enable the items to be tracked and inventoried, although the exact combination of numbers and letters seem to vary, likely based on a complexities of the household and its linen inventory. The probate inventory taken after Augustine Washington’s death in 1743 records a variety of household textiles at Ferry Farm, including tablecloths, napkins, pillowcases, sheets, and towels.  The appraisers, however, make no note of whether these textiles were marked in any way (just noting materials or other descriptors and quantity). 

The archaeological record of Ferry Farm includes a number of implements related to sewing, as touched upon in past blog posts such as this one or this one about thimbles.  Our own museum collections house a few 18^th or early 19th century sheets or other household linens, some of which have been marked in ink or stitching with (unidentified) owners’ initials/names and dates, much in keeping with the instructions outlined in period references such as The Workwoman’s Guide and other household manuals.

So, for our modern museum inventory management purposes, I think we’ll be skipping the caustic nitrate of silver or crunchy cochineal beetles for coloring and stick to the needle and thread method of marking our reproduction bedding and other textiles.  As suggested by A Lady, the Washington House marks will include both Mary and Augustine Washington’s initials along with notations of item type (such as WS for the five pairs of White Sheets listed in the 1743 inventory) and date of creation (for many of these reproduction linens, that would be 2018 or 2019).  I’ll be getting my needle and thread ready so that next year’s inventory and spring cleaning will hopefully be easy-breezy.

Gretchen Goodell Pendleton

Aldrich Director of Curatorial Operations