Collection Spotlight: Butter Cooler

Inside a cabinet in the Gibson House dining room, a new (technically old) object sits upon one of the shelves. The object is an opulent silver butter cooler, acquired by the Gibson House in November 2024. The butter cooler was a gift to Mary Crowninshield Warren Hammond in 1867 from her father, Dr Jonathan Mason Warren. Mary was Rosamond Gibson’s older sister; she and her husband, Samuel Hammond, lived across the street from the Gibson House.

Butter cooler, Vincent Laforme, Boston, c.1850 
Collection of Gibson House Museum

This beautiful silver butter cooler, still in excellent condition, is stamped with "Lincoln & Foss," the symbol of the sellers Charles Foss and Albert Lincoln. While the actual manufacture date is unknown, this stamp reveals a potential timeline: “Lincoln & Foss” was renamed “Haddock, Lincoln & Foss” in 1859 after an independent silversmith in Boston named Henry Haddock joined the firm, suggesting that the cooler was made in the early 1800s. 

The maker of the dish was prominent Boston silversmith Vincent Laforme; the gothic “L” and eagle hallmarks stamped on the underside are his marks. Laforme was the son and brother of silversmiths. Born in Germany in 1823, he and his family moved to Boston in 1833 where his father trained him and his brothers in silversmithing. A decade later, Vincent set up his own shop at 5 Water Street where he worked with his brother Francis—their business name was Laforme and Brother. In 1854 the name was changed to F.J. Laforme & Co. after the brothers parted from the company, but three years later the business went out of operation. During Vincent’s time at the company, the Laformes would wholesale their products to larger companies including Lincoln & Foss. Vincent continued to work as a silversmith where he was cited as a good craftsman but a poor manager. 

Collection Spotlight: Stereoscope

If you are of a certain age, you might have fond memories of the View-Master. This red toy made by Mattel came with a set of round cards with images on them (mine were dinosaurs); when you inserted the card into the viewer, the images became three-dimensional. So much fun!

These viewfinders mimic a much older object—the stereoscope. An invention of the nineteenth century, the stereoscope plays on our binocular vision to produce an exciting viewing experience. Two images—a left eye and right eye view of the same scene—are printed on a stereograph card, and when viewed through the stereoscope, appear as a single 3D image. The first stereoscope was debuted at the Great Exhibition of 1851, a world’s fair held in London, and quickly became popular on both sides of the Atlantic. Just five years later, more than a half million stereoscopes had been sold.

Stereoscope in the library, Gibson House Museum

Mary Ethel Gibson: An Emblem of Boston's Victorian Era

The research for this blog post was conducted in preparation for an interview with the What’s Her Name podcast in 2023. To learn more fascinating details about Ethel’s life, listen to their episode, “The Boston Brahmin.”

Ethel and husband Freeman Allen, c.1925
Gibson House Museum

Mary Ethel Gibson, born in 1873—and more often referred to as Ethel by friends and family—was brought into a world on the precipice of great change. Over the course of the first few decades of her life the telephone was invented, as was the automobile and kodak camera; electricity made its way into homes; and even the first airplane took flight. The city of Boston itself was also changing, as waves of immigration created a massive population boom, which not only encouraged the city to create the Back Bay neighborhood that Ethel would spend her entire life in, but also created new social pressures that sparked various progressive movements. At the Gibson House, as we have begun to uncover more details about Ethel’s life, we can see the ways in which she navigated these changes, both by holding on to the traditions she grew up with and by taking advantage of the newfound freedoms afforded to her in the 20th century. Ethel’s community and her status in society informed and shaped her life during such rapidly changing times. In many ways, Ethel and her experiences during the 19th and 20th centuries are emblematic of Boston’s Victorian era, but she was also an individual who made individual choices. No one person’s story is enough to understand any period of history, but knowing more about Ethel and her life not only expands our understanding of the Gibson House and the Gibson family, but also the greater world they occupied.

Collection Spotlight: Hair Wreath

There is a peculiar object that hangs above the desk in Rosamond Gibson’s bedroom. At first glance, the item appears to be a simple wreath of pressed flowers surrounding a woven circle, adhered to a paper backing and framed in gold. Upon closer inspection, however, the inner circle is actually a woven piece of gray human hair! Hair works, often made by women as a leisurely pastime, were meant to commemorate the death of a loved one or to honor a friendship.

Hair wreath, Gibson House Museum

The European tradition of human hair mementos trace their origins to the 17th and 18th centuries, usually to mark the death of a child. Pieces of hair could be pressed into lockets such as this mourning brooch to be kept as a token of remembrance.

Mourning brooch, Everhart Museum of Natural History

Hair wreaths, in particular, became popular in the nineteenth century and were an especially common custom in the Victorian era (1837-1901). Unlike our example of a hair wreath, most of these objects are entirely made of hair–each braided arrangement carefully coiled together to resemble flowers. It was also common for these wreaths to contain the hair of multiple people and could be placed around a photograph. Some of the more intricate hair

Hair wreath, c.1875. Maine State Museum

wreaths– which would have taken a lot of energy and time to complete– could be taken to jewelers or wig makers to arrange. Nineteenth century women’s magazines at the time, however, warned against taking your hair works to such places because the shops may add horse hair into the wreaths! Godey’s Lady’s Book, in particular, began in 1850 issuing monthly articles giving American women advice on how to make hair artworks, calling the practice an “elegant accomplishment.”

Courtesy of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia and Mütter Museum.

Collection Spotlight: Asian Export Art

Americans, and especially merchants from Boston and Salem, entered the China Trade in the late eighteenth century and by 1804, they were dominating the trade. Trade was in tea, silk, porcelain and other household goods, and illegally, opium. The Chinese government confined foreigners to the port district of Guangzhou (called Canton), where China trade merchants operated. Art for the export market became an important feature of the trade and copious amounts of Chinese porcelain moved into Boston. 

The Russell family, including Nathaniel Pope Russell, who was Catherine Hammond Gibson’s brother-in-law, were major importers of Chinese porcelain. The Gibsons inherited some of the Russell collection, including a dinner service, a pair of large palace vases, garden seats, and flowerpots. These were imported by Russell in the 1830s; the dinner service has the “R” monogram, indicating it was designed especially for him. 

Porcelain lunch plate, teacup and saucer, and creamer, c.1840
Gibson House Museum 

You can see the influence of East Asian decorative elements elsewhere in the house, including in Rosamond’s bedroom. Her thirteen-piece bedroom set, made by American designer John Vaughn, is fashioned to look like bamboo; it was extremely trendy in its time. 

Bed, John Vaughn, 1871
Gibson House Museum

Artists Known: Two Dressmakers in Gilded Age Boston

"Mrs. M. A. Friend" and "Mrs. J. E. Chapman," creators of some of the gowns in the Gibson House collection, were self-made women, in more than just business. Even their ages were reinvented several times over the years, with different dates given to census takers. In a world that frequently defined women by the men around them, they belonged to a group that allowed (conditional) self-determination: career women. Both set out to make their mark in the female-dominated field of dressmaking.
Margaret Alice McKenna Friend was born around 1850 in New Ipswich, New Hampshire; Julia Evelyn Dobson Chapman between 1850 and 1857 in New Brunswick, Canada. The former would end up separated from her husband by 1900, with three daughters. The latter, who had no children, remained married to Everett Chapman, with whom she ran a dressmaking business, until her death.
The two women's paths converged in the same place: the Boston dressmaking world. Margaret first appears in the 1882 city directory working at 25 Winter Street; from then until her last listing in 1902, her business would move several times. The Chapmans seldom moved, settling at 579 Dudley Street in Roxbury from 1892 until their business closed in 1923.

Punch Magazine, July 28, 1877

Summering in Nahant

There were two social seasons in the elite Bostonian’s calendar: the winter season in Boston, which began in mid-November and lasted until the beginning of Lent; and the summer season, which ran from about May through September. In the summer season, the wealthy decamped for their summer homes on the coast and in the mountains. One of the most popular spots was Nahant, an island community about an hour north of Boston.

The Gibson family owned a summer home on Nahant called “Forty Steps,” named after the beach that the house overlooks. Catherine Gibson inherited the home from her father, Samuel Hammond, in the 1850s, and continued to summer there for most of her life. 

Forty Steps, Nahant (Gibson House Museum)