By Susan Martin, Senior Processing Archivist

You hear a lot of discussion nowadays about whether schools should still be teaching students to write in cursive. Less than half of U.S. states require it, usually sometime between third and fifth grade. I don’t know about writing cursive, but reading it is certainly a requirement for my job. And sometimes it’s especially challenging.

One of the things we see in almost every manuscript collection here at the MHS is cross-writing. Your garden-variety cross-written letter looks something like this.

This is the first page of a four-page letter, written on folded stationery. As you can see, the writer got to the end of the fourth page and had a little more to say, so went back to the front, turned the paper on its side, and finished the letter there. The idea was to save paper and postage.

MHS archivists see pretty much every variety of cross-writing. The kind pictured above is very common. Here it is again in a letter from Margaret Fuller to Mary Peabody.

Letter writers have also been known to snake their writing around the margins of a letter or even to turn a written page upside down and write in the gaps between the lines. Sometimes they’ll change the color of their ink for the cross-written portion to make it easier for their correspondent to read.

Then there’s this madness.

What you’re seeing here is a triple cross-written letter. It starts in the usual way, from top to bottom. The second pass goes from left to right, and the third is diagonal down the page. I don’t know about you, but trying to read this makes my eyes cross. With a lot of time and some fancy Photoshopping, I might be able to figure out what it says, but it would be tough!

This letter comes from the papers of William Blackler Gerry of Marblehead, Massachusetts. Gerry (pronounced “Gary”) was a master mariner in the China and India trade and commanded a number of ships, including the Charlotte, Beeside, Sappho, Farwell, Akbar, Cohota, and Noonday. The collection consists mostly of his correspondence with Mary Susan “Sue” Bartlett between 1841 and 1856, before and after their marriage. Included are letters written from Manila, Philippines; New Orleans; Liverpool, England; Pazhou (Whampoa) and Guangzhou (Canton), China; New York; Baltimore; Kolkata, India; Indonesia; and San Francisco.

If his surname sounds familiar, that’s because his grandfather’s brother was Elbridge Gerry, U.S. Founder, Congressman, governor, vice president, and inspiration for the word “gerrymander.”

William B. Gerry’s papers are chock full of cross-written letters. He even joked about it to Sue on 14 January 1843, when he wrote, “I fear your eyes will not like to behold a single letter now that you have been so used to those cross ones but I am afraid I shall have to close this without doing that for you.”

When it comes to reading handwriting, we all get better with practice. But every once in a while, something like this comes along to keep us from getting too confident.

By Meg Szydlik, Visitor Services Coordinator

In a previous blog post I wrote about an astronomy book from the MHS collection called The Mysteries of Time and Space. I enjoyed that experience so much I decided to dig into another book to celebrate the winter solstice and clear winter skies. This time, I decided to tackle a children’s school primer called An astronomical and geographical catechism: For the use of children and selected the 2nd edition, published in 1796. I thought it would be interesting to compare it with what I learned in grade school in the early 2000s after over 2 centuries of exploration and advancement in both astronomy and geography.

Despite being written in the 18th century, the astronomy section was shockingly similar to what I remember learning. Reading through the question-and-answer style text, I was thrown back to 4th grade, learning about stars and planets again. Precise measurements of the distance between the planets and the sun, the length of different planetary years, and even information about moons matched up with what I remember from my grade school days. The one thing that didn’t was the fact that there were 7 planets, indicating that Neptune (and Pluto) had not been discovered yet. The 7th planet, which we call Uranus today, was named but some quick googling told me that William Herschel discovered Uranus so presumably Caleb Bingham, the author of the text, just used his name. It was also so interesting to see Bingham encourage the possibility of life on the other planets in the solar system, as I was certainly taught that there was no life outside of earth. All in all, it was strikingly similar to what I learned as a child. I love knowing that while scientific discovery does grow and expand, that does not mean that all knowledge is new.

Geography, however, was a more complicated section. While there was certainly some overlap (I also learned that a peninsula is land mostly surrounded by water, for example), there were a lot of very 18th century, Early Republic aspects as well. Some of this is inevitable, since the borders of the world have changed substantially since 1796, including the introduction of 34 additional states, but some of it was a bit more surprising. When Bingham is talking about longitude, I was surprised to see no reference to the Prime Meridian which goes through Greenwich, England. It turns out that the Prime Meridian was not established until 1884, long after this book was published. Instead, Bingham says to count longitude “from a certain meridian.”

The section on continents was perhaps even more fascinating. Today of course, we consider there to be 7 continents–Africa, Antarctica, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America. However the text only offers up 2 continents: the “eastern” continent with Africa, Asia, and Europe, and the “western” of North and South America. Australia makes a surprise appearance as “New-Holland” and a potential 3rd continent. And Australia is not the only place with a new name. There are references to Prussia and Persia, neither of which exist in the same form today. It was also really startling to realize that so many states in the U.S. moved their capitals at one point or another. While the capital of Massachusetts has always been Boston, 8/15 of the states had different capitals in 1796 than they do now. There was also an extreme bias in the descriptions of the states. There was a clear preference for the Northern states over the Southern, New England over other Northern states, and Massachusetts over other states in New England. No wonder we have multiple copies of this book here at the Massachusetts Historical Society! I loved the opportunity to take a peek into what students were learning over 200 years before I entered the classroom myself. So much was the same and even the things that were different were interesting windows into 18th century exploration.

The Mysteries of Time and Space
An astronomical and geographical catechism: For the use of children

By Susan Martin, Senior Processing Archivist

When processing a collection, I almost always find interesting little pockets of material that I wasn’t expecting. It happened again recently while I was processing the Hill family papers and came across a few folders related to an early 20th-century settlement house in Boston.

One member of the family, Nellie Frank Hill, was very active in the settlement house movement. I couldn’t find a lot of biographical details about Nellie, but I know that she was born in 1876, the fifth of eight children of farmer and produce dealer Charles Henry Hill of West Groton, Mass.

Nellie’s portion of the Hill family papers relates primarily to the Frances E. Willard Settlement, a home for working women in Boston. Nellie served variously as vice president, secretary, head resident, and general manager of the organization and worked closely with its founder and president, Caroline Matilda “Tillie” Caswell.

The Willard Settlement began in 1894 in a tenement house at 422 Hanover Street, where three rooms were set aside for women who worked at local factories to relax and socialize. The organization grew over the years and was officially incorporated in 1903, later moving to 44 Chambers Street in the West End of Boston. Urban renewal in the mid-20th century dramatically changed the area, and the street doesn’t even exist anymore, but you can find it on this map posted by Historic New England.

The Willard Settlement’s stated mission was: “providing, maintaining and supporting a home or homes for young working women or women earning very low salaries or those training for self-support who need temporary aid, and helping in any possible way those who are strangers and need assistance.” You can learn a lot about what that assistance looked like by reading this 1910 pamphlet, which contains photographs and details about the organization’s membership, activities, finances, etc.

Women earning $5.00 a week or less paid $3.00 for room, board, and laundry. Meetings and classes for residents—and for others in the community—were held at the neighboring clubhouse. Two classes specifically mentioned in the pamphlet included cobbling (for boys) and housekeeping (for girls). The clubhouse had an auditorium, gymnasium, library, pharmacy, assembly hall, and “sloyd” (craft) room. There was even a camp in Bedford, Mass. for 12-to-20-year-old girls that was named after Nellie.

The settlement house also boasted a truly impressive rooftop garden, which is where I would undoubtedly have spent most of my time if I’d lived there.

Of course, settlement houses and affiliated clubs had a darker side, as instruments for Christian proselytizing and “Americanization.” A 1911 book called Handbook of Settlements describes the Willard Settlement neighborhood this way: “A highly congested quarter of the West End. The people are largely Jews, with a sprinkling of Americans, Irish, Italians, and Negroes.” According to a 1919 issue of the Union Signal, published by the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), the settlement provided social services to a population that was “nine-tenths Jewish and one-tenth Italian.” The WCTU admitted that so-called Americanization was the “main work” of the movement.

The Willard Settlement was “avowedly temperance and Christian.” Daily prayers were mandatory for house residents, who were expected to maintain “good moral character.” Meanwhile, at the clubhouse, local immigrant and Jewish families—“neighbors of alien race and faith,” per the WCTU—could learn to speak and read English or improve their elocution (I presume to lose their accents). Their children were inculcated with “patriotism and loyalty.”

I couldn’t determine when the Willard Settlement officially closed its doors. I did find Nellie Hill and Tillie Caswell in the 1930 U.S. census. The two women were living together and running a health resort for women in Lake Maitland, Florida. After Tillie’s death in 1938, Nellie returned to Groton, Mass.

By Meg Szydlik, Visitor Services Coordinator

Content warning: use of outdated but period-typical language to describe disabled individuals.

With this post, I am returning to my old stomping ground in the archives. I have written three previous blog posts focusing on the presence of disability in our archives which can be found here, here, and here. I wanted to dive into some more collection materials on the topic.

While looking at our online collections, I came across this poster advertising the “Fairy Sisters” in 1873. The two girls, named Cassie and Victoria Foster, were little people and were billed as the smallest people alive. Whether or not that was true, that was their claim to fame, and later that of their brother, Dudley. Both of the girls died tragically young of infections Victoria at 3 ½ and Cassie at 11. Dudley lived to 17 before dying of a heart condition. Their lives, and the way some people still talk about these performers, demonstrate the tendency of others to romanticize the exploitation these children experienced. Personally, I’m not convinced that a 3 ½ year old should be working in any capacity and I’m even less convinced when the work consists of being gawked at by strangers for their disability. However, it would be many years after all three of these children’s deaths that legislators would even sign the Coogan Act, a law intended to protect child performers.

The 19th and 20th centuries were full of labor strikes and gains, including laws limiting and prohibiting child labor. The 1908 pamphlet shown below outlines some of the restrictions for girls and women in the workforce, including hour restrictions, school requirements, and access to workers comp if injured on the job. Their lives were certainly not easy, but there were at least some protections. Others took up the fight against child labor as part of the general battle for labor rights. It’s hard to read about all the child labor fights and not think about how different the lives of child performers would have been had they been afforded the same opportunities, limited as they were for the impoverished mill worker children these pamphlets were given to. In fact, the entertainment industry is still exempt from a lot of the same child labor laws that govern virtually every other industry and it shows in the current boom of podcasts from grown-up child stars

Both the mill children and child circus performers lived brutal lives, but there was little romanticization of mill workers’ lives. In contrast, there was (and still is) a romanticization of circus and sideshow life. The lights! The glamour! Life on the road! They were loved by millions! What could they possibly have to complain about? That perspective fails to account for the rampant abuse in the industry. Being on display is not something many people are comfortable with, especially when they are not demonstrating a skill. A gymnastics showcase is a bit different than staring at someone because something about their body is non-normative and usually specifically disabled, whether it is microcephaly, dwarfism, or giantism. The objectification is made even worse by how young some of the people in the sideshow were.

Eventually laws were signed to protect disabled children including the 1975 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). Regardless, the Fairy Sisters and their brother should never have been sideshows as children. They should have been children and children only.