A New Wilton Carpet for the Gibsons

In about 1890, Rosamond Gibson redecorated the front hall of her home at 137 Beacon Street. Her mother-in-law, with whom she had shared the house for nearly seventeen years, had recently passed away. And in the thirty years since the house was built, styles had changed. Rosamond selected an embossed, gold-leaf wallpaper, called “Japanese Leather.” She also chose a luxe red-on-red patterned Wilton carpet.

Wilton red-on-red pattern

The carpet was manufactured by the Bigelow Carpet Company in Clinton, Mass. Bigelow was a prominent name in carpets; the company’s founder, Erastus Bigelow, developed the first power loom in America. His inventiveness ultimately revolutionized the carpet industry, making quality carpets cheaper and quicker to produce. By the late nineteenth century, Bigelow carpets were a household name. Bigelow’s classic advertising campaign encouraged people to consider purchasing a carpet for their home and business, “A Title on the Door Rates a Bigelow on the Floor.”

The Wilton style of carpet that Rosamond selected was top of the line. Traditional Wilton-weave carpets have a thick, cut pile that resembles velvet. They were the most expensive to produce and served as a status marker in many wealthy homes.

Rosamond’s carpet held up well, but after almost 130 years of use, it became worn and faded. In 2016, the Museum’s Board of Directors, with the help of several generous donors, undertook a project to reproduce a new carpet for the Gibson House.

Letters from Pharaoh's Land Part II: Aboard the S.S. Memphis, 1895

In a previous post (see “Letters from Pharaoh’s Land, Part I,” December 1, 2015), I outlined a brief history of tourism on the Nile River in the late nineteenth-century and indicated that Dr. Freeman Allen, future husband of Mary Ethel Gibson, took a cruise there in 1895. By the late decades of the nineteenth-century, American and European tourists regularly vacationed in Egypt, staying in luxurious hotels, visiting local markets, exploring archaeological sites, and—thanks to the services of businesses like Thomas Cook and Sons and the Thewfikieh Nile Navigation Company—cruising the Nile River. In this, the second part of a two-part post on Nile River cruises, we discuss Dr. Allen’s 1895 cruise—adding a more personal dimension to our story of late-nineteenth-century Egyptian tourism.

Letters from Pharaoh's Land Part I: Tourist Service on the Nile River

Cairo to Assouan: Map of the Nile River

 Twenty-one Days’ Trip from Cairo to First Cataract and Back, including the various Excursions as specified in the Itinerary, inclusive of Philae, donkeys (where required) to places visited on the river bank, provisions (wine excepted), and all the advantages in the Programme; FIRST-CLASS THROUGHOUT.

The above text, from an advertisement for the Thewfikieh Nile Navigation Company, appeared in the December 1895 edition of Gaze’s Tourists Gazette, the official publication of Henry Gaze and Sons, Ltd, a London travel agency. As the sole booking agent for the Thewfikieh Co., H. Gaze and Sons often advertised for the company, which provided tourist services on the Nile River. The same advertisement from which the above text is excerpted also outlined other important information, including price and the carrying capacity of the company’s fleet of steamships. In 1895, for the price of $171.50, a tourist could book passage on a steamship and spend three weeks on the Nile, soaking in the natural landscape and studying all the ancient ruins alongside the river.

Letters from Cuba: Fourteen Months as an Army Surgeon

“I am writing this letter from the camp of the 7th US Cavalry with two troops of which I have been out on a practice march since Jan’y 13th. . . . We are now in our third week and on our way home and we hope to reach Havana in about five days. I have a fine little horse that I have had for about 6 months and he is standing the march splendidly.”

These words Dr. Freeman Allen wrote from Cuba to future wife Mary Ethel Gibson in January 1901. The doctor had been in Cuba for a year by that point, hired on contract by the US Army as acting assistant surgeon in western Cuba. Altogether, the young army doctor spent fourteen months on the island as part of the American occupation force in the years after the Spanish-American War (Feb.–Dec. 1898).

The Japanese Leather Wallpaper

Visitors to the Gibson House Museum often first notice the wallpaper in the grand entryway. It has become the most iconic symbol of the Victorian Era home, which is why I used it as the background for this blog. In this post, I decided to explore the origins of the wallpaper, and the international political context in which it was imported to the United States. 

Japan closed itself off from Western trade in 1639. It wasn’t opened up again for another two centuries. The re-opening of Japan began in 1853, when American Commodore Matthew Perry entered Tokyo Harbor with an intimidating naval force. This action led to political negotiations between Japan and the United States. In the next few years, the Japanese government decided to open up trade willingly, in anticipation of being forced to do so anyway. This led to the Harris Treaty of 1858, the first commercial treaty between America and Japan. In 1868, a revolution in Japan put political power back in the hands of the emperor. Under this leadership, it became Japanese policy to assimilate to Western technology, so as to avoid being usurped by it. One result of this policy was the establishment of a factory for kinkarankaragami. 

Westerners first saw large quantities of Japanese goods in the London International Exhibition of 1862, which prompted a craze for them. Among the items displayed in the exhibition were wallpapers called kinkarankaragami (which translates to “golden foreign-origin leather paper”). We call this Japanese leather wallpaper, because the paper is meant to resemble leather. This effect is achieved by placing moist paper on carved wood, then beating it with a brush until the design is embossed. After the paper dries, it is then painted, gilded, and treated to render it waterproof.