Posts Tagged home life
This time of year I feel so nostalgic about activities surrounding Valentine's Day! I fondly recall making cards for my mother on construction paper by coloring with crayons. Many looked a lot like this one in the museum's collections.I also have many happy memories of exchanging cards with my classmates in elementary school, especially cutouts featuring kids or animals.
Take a look at this Cutout Valentine, "The Flags Spell 'Come Back to Me' Because I'm Lonely as You Can See," 1945. A mechanical card with two pieces hinged together so that the boat can rock from side to side. It was a gift to the museum from Mrs. Harvey Firestone, Jr. (Elizabeth Parke Firestone) and came in with the archival collection, Firestone Family Papers.
This year I searched our collections for more selections of valentines and found some surprises. I happened to find several which struck me as a quite unique. One is designed to look like a promissory note, picture above, from a bank in the 1850s. Another is a cutout card featuring kids playing with radio equipment in the 1920s - then the latest technology! The third example is a card that folds out to form an elaborate 3D tissue bell.
Then I came across this photo of a Valentine's Day Party. It is identified as a Girls' Club Valentine Dance, but they look like ladies and a gentleman to me. The room is decorated with crepe paper streamers and a large heart-shaped doorway. The sign above the doorway reads, "Kiss Me!"
My searches also came up with a man named Eugene Valentine. Once I saw this I realized that Valentine is indeed a last name, not just a romantic holiday. The name is from the Latin "Valentinus" based on "valere," meaning to be strong. In the British Isles, it has been recorded from medieval times as a first and then a last name with many different spellings, including Valentyn, Vallentine, and Valentine.
I also found a business named Valentine-Souvenir Company of New York City. There are several dozen postcards made by this company in our collections, but not one is a Valentine card. It turns out this company was formed from several later mergers of the founding company started by John Valentine of Dundee, Scotland, in 1825. The original Valentine Company made lithograph prints before starting to produce postcards in 1896. From 1914 to 1923 the Valentine-Souvenir Company of New York City printed postcards using the letterpress halftone color printing process.
I think that any search for Valentine's Day cards needs to include heart shapes as a design motif. In addition to the cards, I expected to find jewelry, dishes and quilts to have heart motifs, but here's something unexpected: a forerunner of the bicycle made with heart shapes cut out of the wooden wheels.
What would Valentine's Day be without a box of chocolates? This 1950s magazine advertisement says it all. Happy Valentine's Day!
Cynthia Read Miller, Curator of Photographs and Prints, is continually fascinated with the museum’s over one million historical graphics.
by Cynthia Read Miller, holidays, archives, correspondence, home life, Valentine's Day
If you’ve visited Firestone Farm in Greenfield Village, have you ever seen our presenters canning jams, jellies, and other delicious pantry staples? If not, you’re in for a treat.
This fall we got a firsthand look at what goes into canning. While canning is a food preservation technique first experimented with more than 200 years ago, it’s gaining a resurgence among foodies and families looking to eat local as much as they can each year and enjoy favorite flavors all year long.
When we visited Firestone Farm in September, our team was working with some fresh products from our farms almost every day. Our presenters make everything from bottle pickles to cucumber catsup. If a recipe doesn’t set quite right, it doesn’t go to waste - when peaches don’t seal, they become a tasty pie filling.
As you’ll see in the video, presenters Becky Goodenow and Larissa Fleishman start out by sterilizing the jars they’ll use for canning that day. You can’t touch the inside of the jar, as you might contaminate it, so a clean cloth is used to wipe it down. A metal spoon is most important because it helps disperse the heat from the hot liquid. This helps to prevent the cooler glass jar from cracking as you pour in the boiling liquid.
Today there are a variety of products to choose from when it comes to canning. You can even purchase your very own jam and jelly maker to take a lot of work out of the equation. Ball Canning brand offers a community and resources website to enthusiasts, too. Or look for the Ball Blue Book of Canning and Preserving Recipes the next time you’re at the book store.
Watch this video to see Becky and Larissa in action making a batch of chili sauce from Buckeye Cookery. You can make it at home, too. You can also visit The Henry Ford’s library of historic cookbooks for inspiration.
Chili Sauce, Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, 1880, p. 132.
Peel tomatoes and onions, chop (separately) very fine, add the peppers (chopped) with the other ingredients, and boil one-and-a-half hours. Bottle it and it will keep a long time.
Lish Dorset is Social Media Manager at The Henry Ford.
farms and farming, recipes, making, home life, Greenfield Village buildings, Greenfield Village, food, by Lish Dorset
Mother’s Day, a holiday devoted to honoring mothers, has its American origins in the years following the Civil War. To aid national healing in the wake of unprecedented personal loss, many women’s groups wanted to create a day focusing on peace and motherhood.
In 1914, a national campaign culminated in a federal proclamation officially designating the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day. To mark this now-official holiday, many people began writing letters to their mothers. Soon, giving gifts of flowers and sending greeting cards became popular.
These examples of Mother’s Day greeting cards from The Henry Ford’s collection provide a charming glimpse into these celebrations over the past century.
Making handmade cards is a perennial favorite activity of children, and a Mother’s Day card made by a son or daughter remains a special gift. A child whose parents were first generation Polish-Americans created this card in 1942. A first grader at a Polish Catholic school in South Bend, Indiana, he decorated his card with a crayon drawing and the inscription “Droga Mamo.” He also used stickers and trimmed the edges in a scalloped pattern with a red ribbon holding the pages together. The inside pages contain a printed poem in Polish.
This 1960 card in many ways represents the typical sentiments we associate with Mother’s Day - gratitude for our mother’s loving care that we’ve received. The card’s image of a silver basket with flowers recognizes that flowers are a traditional gift for this holiday.
Husbands used cards like this one to honor their wives on Mother’s Day. They could also use it when their children were too young to give their mother a special card. The delicate visual image of the mother and the card shaped like a fan are evocative of the early to mid-1920s popular style in America.
This card for “My Other Mother” was sent in 1921 to Susana C. Cole, a 71-year-old widow who was living in Akron, Ohio, with her only daughter and son-in-law. Who was the Salt Lake City, Utah, sender of this card, then? Perhaps it was her son-in-law on a business trip or another relative - or even a former student, since Susana was a retired schoolteacher.
Other mysterious elements from this same correspondence are the singed edges of both the card and envelope - evidence that this early airmail letter encountered a dramatic fate on the way to its recipient: The U.S. Post Office message stamped on the envelope states that the letter was recovered from an airplane crash in Rock Springs, Wyoming.
This Mother’s Day card from about 1980 is anything but traditional - it’s printed on a brown paper bag! Informal and humorous, its modern theme may reflect its likely “Gen-X” givers - or their mother’s up-to-date attitude. The bright pink color of the text reflects the vivid colors popular in the late 20th century.
Have you ever given or received a memorable Mother's Day card? Tell us about it in the comments below or on our Facebook page.
Cynthia R. Miller is former Curator of Photographs and Prints at The Henry Ford.
20th century, women's history, home life, holidays, families, correspondence, by Cynthia Read Miller, archives
In explaining Mr. Ford's interest in the past, I think that in every person, after they reach a certain age, they begin to reminisce...in Mr. Ford's case, he was able to carry it further than the average person.- Ernest Liebold, secretary to Henry Ford, in the book Reminiscences
In the beginning of the 20th century, the American elite were collecting European and English paintings, sculptures and decorative arts...but as cities began to grow and rural areas grew more and more scarce, those same people began to long for fine American furniture, glassware, porcelain, rare books and more.
That is, except for a handful of people like Henry Ford.
To him, humble machines were an expression of the "genius of the American people" and a reflection of American progress. He believed that everyday objects told what wasn't recorded in written histories and reflected a way of life that was quickly slipping away.
As early as 1912, Ford was collecting "relics" that represented American industrial progress, such as wagons and threshing machines - but it was this progress that prompted him to his first restoration and renovation of a building.
In 1919, a road improvement project in Ford's hometown of Springwells Township, Michigan (now the city of Dearborn), meant his birthplace would need to be either moved 200 yards from its original location - or destroyed.
Ford decided to move the house and restore it to the way it looked at the time of his mother's death in 1876, when he was 13 years old. Ford personally took charge of the birthplace restoration, meticulously recreating the details of the house down to the original or similar furnishings.
For example, Ford remembered sitting by a Starlight stove in the dining room as a child. After 18 months of searching, he discovered the exact make and model on a porch in Stockbridge, Michigan, which he purchased for $25 and loaded into his car for the journey back to Dearborn. And when he couldn't find the precise pattern of dishes his mother had used, he had the original site of his birthplace excavated and had replicas made from the pottery shards found.
Ford dedicated the restoration of his childhood home to his mother's memory and her teachings, particularly noting her love of family, her belief in the value of hard work, in learning "not from the school books but from life," and her belief in trusting one's intuition. His mother had encouraged his early tinkering and youthful inventions, and he felt sure she had set him on his unique path in life.
When the restoration of his childhood home was completed, people were awestruck by its authenticity. It seemed remarkable to him, and others, how a recreated environment could catapult one into another time and place.
This was the beginning of Ford's interest in preservation of historic buildings, and after several other restorations of buildings at their original sites, he began looking to create a village that would represent the early days of America up to the present. Working with Ford Motor Company draftsman and architect Edward L. Cutler, Ford began laying out plans for Greenfield Village.
It wasn't meant to represent any specific place in the United States, or even serve as a particular town - Ford created Greenfield Village primarily from buildings that he had purchased and moved to the site, organizing them around a village green with a courthouse, a town hall, a church, a store, an inn and a school. He placed homes along a road beyond the green. He brought industrial buildings, such as carding mills, sawmills and gristmills to the village and made them operate.
Today, Greenfield Village is organized into seven historic districts, with real working farms, a glassblowing shop, a pottery shop and more...so that, just like Henry Ford when he surveyed his preserved birthplace, you, too, can be transported to another place and time to learn about the ordinary and extraordinary people who shaped America.
(Editor's note: Much of this information is excerpted from Telling America's Story: A History of The Henry Ford, which explores in-depth the origins and history of Greenfield Village, Henry Ford Museum and its artifacts.)
Have you been to Greenfield Village before? Which buildings and/or experiences are your favorite, and why?
Ford family, home life, books, Greenfield Village buildings, Henry Ford, Greenfield Village history, Greenfield Village
Winter in Greenfield Village: Hanging Hams, Bacon and Fatback at Firestone Farm
Every winter, Firestone farmers work hard preserving meats from our December butchering. Hams, bacon and fatback are all cured using a process that would have been very familiar to the Firestones in 1885.
Every day, Firestone farmers rub these cuts of meat with a mixture of salt, sugar and various spices. The salt dehydrates the meat, while sugar prevents it from getting too tough and the spices help to give the meat a nice flavor. It takes several weeks for larger cuts of meat like hams to finish curing. Once a week, old cure is removed from the meat and it is replaced with fresh cure.
Once the meat is cured, it is wrapped in cheesecloth sacks and hung in the cold room located in Firestone Farm’s cellar.
Near the meat are several other foods that were preserved last year, including dried chili peppers, pickles and crocks of sauerkraut as well as jars of tomatoes, pickled green beans, applesauce and more.
When you visit from April through November, make sure to check out the Firestone home's cellar and cold room - you'll be sure to notice our cured meat hanging from the ceiling in our cold room...and as the year progresses and the time for butchering once again approaches, there will be very little cured meat left hanging in cheesecloth.
#Behind The Scenes @ The Henry Ford, home life, food, farms and farming, Greenfield Village buildings, Greenfield Village, winter
This week, we marked 10 years that R. Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion House has been on exhibit in Henry Ford Museum!
This prefabricated house was reconstructed mostly from the parts salvaged from the only two Dymaxion Houses ever made - one of which was inhabited by the Graham family of Wichita, Kansas.
Did you know that a family actually lived in a Dymaxion House? It's true - William Graham, an original investor in Fuller Houses Inc., purchased the two prototypes and lived in a hybridized version of it from 1948 until the 1970s.
Fast forward to present day (last week, actually), when we came across this tweet:
It turns out that Robby Simpson, a fifth-grade science teacher at Columbus Academy in Columbus, Ohio, and his school have been bringing students to The Henry Ford for the Great American Museum Experience (G.A.M.E.) program for years, and they always enjoyed the Dymaxion House exhibit. As it turns out, Ted Graham's daughter began attending Columbus Academy recently, and last week he offered to come talk to the fifth graders about his experience growing up in such a remarkable building before they made their trip to Dearborn to see the real thing.
Watch the video to hear some of the great things we learned from the visiting fifth graders, including:
Additional Readings:
- The Dymaxion House: A New Way of Living
- Membership Spotlight: Blake Almstead
- “Tuning” the Dymaxion House
- Dymaxion House at its 1948-1991 Site, near Andover, Kansas
education, Henry Ford Museum, childhood, home life, Dymaxion House, Buckminster Fuller
Each year, Greenfield Village closes for the winter season - but that doesn't mean it lies dormant! This is the time for freshening up the homes, grounds and vehicles in preparation for the busy year ahead. Take a peek into what happens during winter in Greenfield Village - then join us in April to enjoy the results!
In 1800s Ohio, the harsh winters provided little opportunity for families like future tire magnate Harvey Firestone's to enjoy fresh foods. In order to keep the family fed until spring, the Firestones worked hard to preserve and enjoy the crops and animals they raised all year long on the farm, which included their hogs.
Very little of the pig went to waste, as the men of the family carefully cut pork chops, roasts, bacon and more from the animal. From there, the women rendered the fat for lard, soap and other uses.
Today, we continue this tradition, but with trained professionals slaughtering the hogs; our Firestone Farm presenters then butcher and preserve the meat in the farmhouse's root cellar.
Continue Readingfarm animals, winter, home life, Greenfield Village buildings, Greenfield Village, food, farms and farming, by Ryan Spencer
