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)

Venice and Boston: A 19th Century Love Affair

This blog post is one of a two-part series on collections at the Gibson House Museum from Italy.

When you leave the Music Room at the Gibson House, a small wooden icon frames the doorway above you. Visitors ask about this object regularly: What is it? Who is the saint depicted? Why is it located in such a prominent spot? As one of the only overtly religious items in this Brahmin (and, therefore, staunch Protestant) household, it does catch your eye.

The icon is of St. Mark (San Marco), the patron saint of Venice. On the wall to its right is a copy of Flora, a well-known painting by Venetian Old Master Titian. If Paris is sometimes considered the essential European destination for American travelers today, Venice held the same appeal for late-nineteenth-century American travelers. It wasn’t necessarily a center for contemporary art or fashion; rather, it represented an old Europe that Americans found exotic and romantic. Venice was no longer an international powerhouse, but its Renaissance-era art and architecture reminded travelers of its previous glory (in a distinctly non-threatening way).

The 19th Century Allure of Roman Ruins

This blog post is one of a two-part series on collections at the Gibson House Museum from Italy.

In 1898, after a year of study at MIT for architecture, Charlie Gibson took an extended trip to Europe. It was common for wealthy American men to make such a trip—to cap off their education and before settling down to work and family—known in nineteenth-century parlance as a Grand Tour. The Grand Tour could include a variety of European destinations (some even traveled as far as Turkey), but the essential stops were London, Paris, Venice, and Rome. Travel to Rome, in particular, was seen as a chance to complete a classical education, specifically through study of the architecture and history of ancient Rome.

Traveling to Rome was difficult in the nineteenth century. A robust tourist industry had developed by the eighteenth century, and yet transportation, lodging, and access to reliable guides remained sketchy. Some Italian architects and artists made a living serving Grand Tourists. Giovanni Batista Piranesi was one. Starting as early as 1740, Piranesi worked in Rome producing views of the ancient Roman ruins. For many, Piranesi’s depictions of Rome were the way they imagined and understood the city.

Veduta dell'Anfiteatro Flavio, c. 1771
Giovanni Batista Piranesi

The Acquaintance of Charlie Gibson, Jr. and Isabella Stewart Gardner

Oftentimes visitors to the Gibson House Museum ask our guides about Charlie Gibson Jr.’s relationships with other well-known Bostonians, especially Isabella Stewart Gardner. Although the two were neighbors for nearly forty years, there is not much evidence that they were close. (Isabella Stewart Gardner was both a generation older than Charlie and was part of a higher social class.) There is, however, evidence that they were acquaintances. Isabella Stewart Gardner was, and still is, considered one of the most prominent, and perhaps

Drawing Room at 152 Beacon Street, 1900.
Image: Gardner Museum

eccentric, members of Boston’s elite in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She was born in New York City in 1840 to a wealthy family. In 1860, just before she turned twenty, she married Jack Gardner and they moved to Boston, to 152 Beacon Street in the Back Bay. Although the couple traveled abroad quite a bit, Beacon Street was their home until Jack’s death in 1898, after which Isabella purchased land in the Fens for the museum and home they had been planning. During this same period, Charlie Gibson was born (1874), grew up in the Back Bay at 137 Beacon Street, and went on the trip to France which inspired his travelogue, Two Gentlemen in Touraine (1899). The Gibson family lived just two blocks from the Gardners during the entire time they resided in the Back Bay.

To Mold or Not To Mold: A History of Food Molds from the Victorian Era to Today

The kitchen pantry at the Gibson House stores an extensive collection of food molds. While the preponderance of these molds are metal, their form and decoration change depending on their purpose. Ranging from simple lady finger pans to ornamental scaled fish, they provide insight into how function and entertainment converged upon Victorian food culture.

One notable feature of these objects is their versatility. Molds made of copper, pewter, or tin could be used for the baking, steaming, and setting of jellies, cakes, custards, and puddings. One type of mold in the Gibson kitchen is an ice cream mold, a technology pioneered by Agnes Marshall. Her 1885 seminal work, The Book of Ices: Including Cream and Water Ices, Sorbets, Mousses, Iced Souffles, and Various Iced Dishes, showed readers how to use her inventions, including molds and ice cream freezers, alongside recipes. Molded foods were conveniently labor saving for kitchen staff and women homemakers. They could be prepared around a day before the meal, then the mold could be removed just before serving.

1898 Mangle: Laundry Is the Mother of Invention

Have you ever wondered what doing laundry was like in the 1800s? Today, most laundry routines consist of shifting clothes between washing machines and dryers. But what kind of technology was involved in laundry in the nineteenth century?

Trade card for the Bench Wringer
Collection of Historic New England

Laundry in the Victorian era would have been a very time-consuming process. Collecting, cleaning, and drying out the clothes would have taken hours. According to The Library Company of Philadelphia, “clothes would be soaped, boiled or scalded, rinsed, wrung out, mangled, dried, starched, and ironed, often with steps repeating throughout.” Victorian clothing often included delicate fabrics, intricate detailing, and unique closures, all of which would have affected how a garment was cleaned. Making laundry even more challenging was the fact that many households in the 1800s did not have running water.

Thomas Dalton, Boston Abolitionist (1794—1883)

Gibson House Museum( 1992.401.82) 

The women of the Gibson Family—Catherine Hammond Gibson, Rosamond Warren Gibson, and Mary Ethel Gibson Allen—kept albums filled with photographs of relatives and friends. These images were typically studio portraits, traded as part of the custom of leaving calling cards when paying someone a social visit. At the Museum, we find them to be a helpful "who's who" of Boston, and especially the Back Bay, in the nineteenth century.

In two different albums, Catherine included a photograph of Thomas Dalton. Dalton was a free African-American man born on the North Shore in Gloucester in 1794 who became a well-known activist and abolitionist in Boston's Black community. At the age of twenty-three, Dalton moved to Boston, where he first worked as a bootblack. He eventually opened his own used clothing store on Brattle Street and went on to become a prosperous merchant. His store, located near today's Government Center, was at the foot of the west slope of Beacon Hill, the center of Boston's Black community.

Little Women Clubs and Boston Philanthropy

Illustration by Jessie Wilcox Smith, c. 1915.

Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, published just after the Civil War, was a runaway best seller that impacted generations of readers and significantly influenced American culture as a whole, through countless editions, versions, sequels, translations, images, plays, and films. Little Women was so compelling that it inspired young fans to create spontaneous clubs, such as the “Little Men and Little Women,” the “Alcott Reading Club,” and the “Alcott Literary Club.” Inspired by the March sisters’ Pickwick Portfolio, five sisters from a small town in Pennsylvania created a family newspaper in 1871 that boasted a thousand subscribers nationwide before winding down a few years later.

     
A charming spinoff, The Little Women Club (1905), by Marion Ames Taggart, a children’s book about four friends aged eleven to thirteen who decide to form a club and who enact the novel in their daily lives, seeded Little Women Clubs across the United States. The clubs became so popular that adults soon took notice and began taking control. Some clubs were created to preserve the Alcott homestead, Orchard House, transforming it into a house museum. Young settlement workers followed the trend, creating a Louisa M. Alcott Club for Jewish immigrants, which aimed to “instruct small girls in all branches of housekeeping.” There was an Alcott Club sponsored by Hull House in Chicago, and a San Francisco chapter of the Little Women Club that provided poor children with “practical and moral training” and a few weeks of country life under the care of settlement workers. Little Women Clubs became generally associated with mental cultivation, character development, and philanthropy.

In December of 1905, Rosamond Warren Gibson attended a Congregational church fair in Norwood, Massachusetts, which was sponsored by the “Mission Circle” and the “Little Women.” Rosamond was on the Committee of Arrangements. Cake and candy tables, a fancy table (featuring precious or whimsical handmade items for sale), and a photo and art table were all well patronized. Entertainment consisted of a cantata entitled Santa Clause’s Mistake, a dumbbell drill by two squads of girls, with piano accompaniment, and “a tambourine drill in Spanish costume by 12 young ladies.” Designed to promote mental cultivation, character development, and philanthropy, Little Women Clubs were an outgrowth of two important social trends spanning the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the women’s club movement and the settlement house movement.

Part 3: The Poet

This post is the third of a three-part series on the life and writings of Charles Hammond Gibson, Jr., founder of the Gibson House Museum. You can read the first part here and the second here.

The mysteries of our lives resolve themselves very slowly with the progress of years. Every decade lifts the curtain, which hides us from ourselves, a little further, and lets a new light upon what was dark and unintelligible.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1896

A portrait of the artist as a young man: independent and well-traveled, Charles Hammond Gibson, Jr. (1874–1954), the bachelor-poet of Boston, achieved early success. His first two books, Two Gentlemen in Touraine (1899) and Among French Inns (1905), both on French

Charles Hammond Gibson, Jr., c. 1920.

travel, were so popular they went into second editions. In Two Gentlemen in Touraine, Gibson explored the art, architecture, and social customs of rural France, depicting it as an enchanted “fairyland,” a greenwood and pastoral escape route in the gay Arcadian literary tradition of the Victorian era—in sharp contrast to the cooler, monochromatic stones of old Beacon Street. As explored in the second blog post in this series, Two Gentlemen in Touraine told a thinly veiled autobiographical tale of initiation into the transatlantic gay subculture of the 1890s, with the Count Maurice Mauny Talvande as guide and mentor. Among French Inns takes the form of a travel book embedded in a comic novel—a farce—containing a wry parody of Isabella Stuart Gardner and John “Jack” Lowell Gardner, Jr. in the character of Mr. and Mrs. James Blodget Wilton.

Gibson’s first love, however, was poetry, and in the first decade of the twentieth century he produced two substantial volumes, The Spirit of Love and Other Poems (1906) and The Wounded Eros (1908). Working closely with the Riverside Press of Houghton Mifflin, he planned to produce a total of four volumes, to be bound as an elegant set, including Odes and Elegies (1908) and Dialogues and Satires (1909). The last two volumes were never produced, although most of the poems were prepared in manuscript.

The Gibson House Icebox

Have you ever thought about what life was like before refrigerators? In 1830, a new invention changed the way Americans handled food: the icebox. 

Icebox.
Gibson House Museum 2004.11

At the Gibson House, an icebox can be found on the ground floor. It is a large, dark-brown box made from hardwood that looks almost like a drawer or large chest. It has multiple compartments to store different types of food; the compartments are lined with tin or zinc to insulate it. It is currently located in the kitchen, but originally it would have been kept outside the back door of the kitchen, on top of a zinc plate. 

Ice harvesting began here in Boston in 1805. Ice was harvested in the winter from frozen lakes and ponds and was delivered from house to house by an “iceman.” Frederic Tudor, one of the Gibsons' neighbors in Nahant, founded the Tudor Ice Company and later became known as Boston’s “Ice King.”  

The primary location of local ice harvesting in the 1850s was Jamaica Pond. By 1874, the Boston Globe reported that the Jamaica Plain Ice Company was cutting about 5,000 tons of ice a day. Prior to delivery, it was stored in insulated sheds that could contain up to 80,000 tons of ice. Once the ice was delivered, people would store it in their icebox, just like the one at the Gibson House.

The Mystery of the High-Backed Chair

Tucked into a corner of the dining room at the Gibson House sits a high-backed armchair. In 2018, long-time museum patron Robert Severy offered to fund a restoration of this chair, as the red upholstery had cracked and faded. But what, exactly, would we be restoring? To solve this object mystery, we needed the help of two esteemed curators, a fabric reproduction specialist, and a restoration studio.

Thomas Michie and GHM board 
members examine chair.
Photo: Laurie Thomas

Finding Old-School Fashion in the Fast-Paced World

Getting dressed in the 1860s and 1870s was a complicated process. Women’s fashion included many layers and separate articles that combined to form the perfectly assembled outfit, or “costume,” as we refer to it in museums. The Gibson family women had access to designer clothing and custom-tailored dresses and gowns, which they wore to showcase their social status and fit into society. Each piece of clothing had a specific purpose or occasion to be worn. Opera gowns, morning gowns, day dresses, and tea gowns were all popular styles in the 1860s and 1870s. Much of the clothing in the Gibson House Museum’s collection dates from the 1870s and 1880s, when the matriarch, Catherine Hammond Gibson, and her daughter-in-law, Rosamond Warren Gibson, lived in the house together.  

           

Turquoise bodice, c.1870s
Gibson House Museum (2019.3)

When I first began cataloging the clothing from the Gibson House Museum’s collection, I was overwhelmed with how to begin. I soon found that it was not as complicated as I’d thought; cataloging artifacts is as simple as assigning an accession number and recording details about the object.

One of the first articles of clothing I cataloged was a beautifully detailed turquoise dress that has aged rather poorly. There are some tears and discolorations in the fabric, which make it more difficult to picture how it would have been worn in the 1870s or 1880s. Like many of the dresses from the Gibson House Museum’s collection, it was taken apart, either to be washed or because alterations needed to be made. Although some of the fabric is in poor condition, as a whole, the dress is exquisite; its delicate silk fringe and vivid color caught my eye.

The Sound of Music: The Importance of Music in Victorian Homes

Listening to music within the home was something that was deeply cherished among Victorians of all social classes. In a world that was limited to objects such as music boxes to reproduce sounds in the home, live music was especially appealing. Many forms of outside entertainment were sought after, but attending these events could prove inconvenient given New England's challenging weather and limited transportation options. Naturally, it made sense to bring the entertainment into one's home, thereby giving rise to the presence of a “music room” within many upper-class Victorian houses. At the Gibson House, the music room is the most lavish room and was a place where the Gibson family regularly entertained guests and friends.  

Mason & Hamlin Symmetrigrand Piano, 1908
Gibson House Museum (2006.08)

The piano became an especially fashionable musical instrument to possess, either an upright or a baby grand, depending on the wealth of the family. Since at the time many popular songs were made available in sheet music form, amateur musicians could play to their guests and family. There is quite an extensive collection of sheet music at the Gibson House Museum, collected over the years by the family. Along with individual pieces, there are bound albums containing a number of miscellaneous works, such as polka music and waltzes. The majority of the music is from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries (1879–1934), and was largely published in Boston. (The name Oliver Ditson & Co. appears often, indicating it was, perhaps, the family’s company of choice when purchasing new music.) The Gibson family’s music collection contains many pieces by well-known classical composers, including works like Fugue in G Minor (The Little) by J. S. Bach and Danse Polonaise by Xaver Schwarwenka, which you can listen to here and here.

Matching Sailor Suits for the Gibson Cousins

Henry Freeman Allen, c.1918
Gibson House Museum (2006.18.20)

Until the end of the nineteenth century, most American children were dressed like miniature adults. Prior to age three, boys and girls alike wore “dresses,” or long shifts that were simple to get on and off and easy to launder. At about three or four, girls began wearing more elaborate dresses, like their mothers, and boys were “breeched,” or put into pants, like their fathers. 

Beginning in the 1860s and 1870s, however, specific clothing for children became popular. And one of the most popular, and enduring, outfits for young boys was the sailor suit. Queen Victoria dressed the Prince of Wales, Edward VII, in a custom-made sailor suit in 1846, modeled on a real Royal Navy uniform. The prince’s portrait was painted in this outfit and it set off a craze for sailor suits that would last into the twentieth century.