Tour guide stories

[Beth Chamberlain]

I did read that part last night when I was looking. Thing is, a church can only reinstate membership to it's own ex-communicants. The vast majority of those accused/convicted were from Church of Salem Village (Danvers) and surrounding churches (Andover,Billerica,Cambridge, etc) not from First Church (Salem).

While I understand and appreciate the gesture of First Church in reinstating the memberships I have to wonder how the ex-communicants would have felt about it given that they were reinstated into a radically different church.

Beth

[Tom_Nixon]

re.

"Who is buried in Grants' Tomb?"
Ms Jean responds:

Sailor Tom, no one is buried in Grant's Tomb.  President Grant & his wife, Missouri's own Julia Dent Grant are ENTOMBED in Grant's Tomb.

Good job! The s' in "Grants' " should help to remind people that, as one historian observed, the two things Ulysses S. Grant did truly well in his life were the Vicksburg campaing and marrrying Julia. I am always amazed at how many otherwise very smart people get this double-trick question wrong.

Does anybody else have other examples of this sort of semantic-slyness in historic questions?

[NoahBriggs]

I thought we were discussing the list of tour guide mythologies, with the intention of debunking them for future tour guides or otherwise throwing the masses into new realms of reality when they discover evidence-based research is worth a darn after all.

[hanktrent]

I think trick questions can be a double-edged sword. If the goal is to get visitors to rethink pre-conceived ideas, like how many witches were burned, thought-provoking questions accomplish that well. But they can also have the effect of making the tour guide look clever or smart while making the visitor feel dumb. Yes, there are some visitors with sturdy personalties who are overbearing and need taken down a notch or two, but the same approach wouldn't work for a shy visitor who just got up the courage to volunteer an answer and then realized that it was a set-up and he or she was made the butt of a trick question.

Hank Trent
hanktrent@gmail.com

[Veronica Carey]

Hank, I must share with you my favorite trick question for school kids (2nd thru 5th graders).  In the bedroom of the 1845 merchant home the William Root House, I show and explain a chamber pot to a chorus of "eewwws" and "gross"; then show a child's antique potty chair to similar squirming.  Then I ask my trick question:  "Did adults have potty chairs?" and get a universal chorus of "No!".   So I show them the "necessary chair" next to a bedstead, with a flourish of removing the cushion covering the hole.  This gets a lot of gasps and wide eyed responses.  Finally, I gather them all close around me as if to tell them a secret, and say that in many middle-class families it was the children's job to empty the pots out at the privy.  By then the gasps and groans are intense, but I am no longer just a grey-haired lady in an old-timey dress, I am like a god of adolescent bathroom humor.  All while maintaining a professional demeanor.

I love the school tours.

[Susan Peden]

Ah, Veronica, you have hit on one of my favorite topics of the school tour!  I have no adult necessary in our place but love to have the kids guess what that lovely porcelain pot with the pink floral design and cover are for!  Then I ask them if they know the most popular material for wiping in New England during the 18th century.... I get a lot of strange looks when I tell them "corn cobs". 

Susan

[NoahBriggs]

Wipe your own heiny with a corn cob and see how great it feels.  Then try scrap cloth.  Feels better, don't it?

[Susan Peden]

I am gonna take your word for it!  But, that custom might explain a phrase I won't use here that my grandmother used to come out with. Susan

[NoahBriggs]

For one moment, however brief, I channeled the late Charles Heath.

I've seen buckets of corncobs in privies at LH sites, but nobody could really explain how one used them for wiping.  I guess you could take the time to pre-soak them in the bucket, but somehow the whole idea just seems wrong to me in terms of comfort.  When someone hits me with the statement, I pull out the statement I gave you - ie, do an experiment and actually try it and see if it's as practical as it sounds.  Most reenactors I know either use paper (extra Harpers Weekly) or snips of scrap cloth, or stash a emergency roll somewhere inconspicuous.  A few used "Albany Patent Papers", which was proto-TP in 1856?.  The sheets were stacked flat, and Hank Trent's research indicated they were more likely medicated wipes for hemorrhoids

Did people use corncobs?  I honestly don't know, and it might simply fade into the mists of urban legend.  Some may argue that cloth or paper were too precious or scarce.  But at some point in history those items went from "sacred" to "disposable".  There will probably be arguments on both sides of the issue, with little documentation because with one or two exceptions because it's not a topic which comes up all that often.  Not because of decency, but because it was so commonplace.  I don't know how biodegradable corncobs are - if people used them that often you would think something might have shown up in outhouse pit excavations art some point

This sort of thing is the crux of most of the tour guide stories - the "insider info on how they really lived", and as the Mythbusters demonstrate constantly, experimental archaeology and using yourself as a guinea pig helps apply common sense to claims which might be outlandish.

[hanktrent]

I've seen buckets of corncobs in privies at LH sites, but nobody could really explain how one used them for wiping.  I guess you could take the time to pre-soak them in the bucket, but somehow the whole idea just seems wrong to me in terms of comfort.

Why all the speculation? I've used corncobs at at least two events where we were staying in a cabin with a privy. At one they were soaking in a bucket, at another they were dry.

You just, um, use them. Like toilet paper. It's kinda self evident. How much detail should I go into, LOL?

They worked well enough that I wouldn't doubt their use on the grounds of practicality alone.

Sure, scrap paper and disposable rags were nice and in cities they were probably much more abundant than corn cobs, but in the country, where you have eight kids and 100 acres of corn, guess which is going to be more abundant.

Also, from family oral history (1920s) another option was to reuse a rag, i.e. wash it out after each use. This would have been in the city. Don't know how far back that practice went, but it makes sense for a time when cloth was relatively expensive.

Hank Trent
hanktrent@gmail.com

[Kimberly Scott]

I was told by one tour guide that only young boys knew how to swim, and if they only lived near large bodies of water.  Bathing was rare; people didn't wash themselves often.  I'm sure she said more but I was too busy trying not to laugh out loud...

[Susan Peden]

There are a couple repro books out there that list activities for boys and activities for girls.  I think one of them specifically lists swimming as a boy's activity.  Perhaps she had used something like that as a reference.  In the mid 1850s physical activity was beginning to be encouraged for young women in Female Seminaries.  Articles were being written about exercises for young women. 
Bathing also became more regular during this period.  There were flush toilets in some Boston homes, but they didn't make it into popularity for a very long time in much of the country.  Like so many changes, there were those folks who recommended bathing more than once in a while but there were many who hadn't caught up with the fads!

I have actual research on bath tubs etc. is anyone wants it but I won't run on here in the myth discussion

Susan

[hanktrent]

I was told by one tour guide that only young boys knew how to swim, and if they only lived near large bodies of water.  Bathing was rare; people didn't wash themselves often.  I'm sure she said more but I was too busy trying not to laugh out loud...

  I'm not sure what's laugh-out-loud wrong about that. Maybe a slight exageration, but I'd say that it was more socially acceptable for boys to wear the minimal (or no) clothing required to swim and to be more athletic, so there was a male-female difference in those who could swim. If you didn't live near a large body of water, how would you learn to swim, unless you were wealthy and travelled? It's not like there were swimming pools everywhere. Bathing, as in immersing yourself in a bathtub, was rare compared to taking what we'd call sponge baths.

The problem is when one tries to generalize and summarize for the entire United States. One could make a case that bathing was wildly popular in the 1850s-60s based on the hydropathic fad that swept through, or one could make a case that bathing was rare because of the work required to heat the water, fill a bathtub and empty it on the average farm.

So anything can sound silly when compared to a specific subset--"look at all those people swimming on the beach in New York! How can you say they didn't swim!" But what was happening on the beach in New York didn't necessarily translate to the cornfields of Indiana, and yet one can't really say that either is or isn't average or typical--they're just different subsets of the American experience.

What's funny is that I went through this in my childhood. My mother had never learned to swim, because she told me that in her childhood (1930s) there wasn't the social pressure to do so, compared to when I was growing up (the 1960s). It was an optional sort of athletic thing, like not everyone learns lacrosse or hockey or archery whatever. Don't know if that's true, but it was what she said.

So when I didn't have any particular interest in swimming, she had to back me up against the teachers, other kids, other parents, etc., who came at swimming with the mindset it was something you had to learn as part of basic skills and you were strange if you didn't unless you had a specific excuse not to, like a phobia or health problem (neither of which I have/had).

We'd go to the beach and I loved wading and messing around the tidepools, or canoeing and rowing on the swamps and shallow rivers and flooded meadows. When people act as if there couldn't be a world where most people didn't learn to swim, it seems strange to me, because I know what it's like to consider swimming another sport that one might or might not want to learn; it really isn't required to live a normal life. From what I can see, the only reason that "everyone" learns to swim today is peer pressure, plus the availability of swimming pools. Take that away, and things would be different.

Hank Trent
hanktrent@gmail.com

[Jennifer Hill]

Susan, I'd be interested, thank you.

I suppose I thought that people without servants probably brought a bucket in once a week or something... Kind of like having a sponge bath, standing in a round tub.  Not a bathtub.  By the fire.
I have absolutely no documentation for that; it is just a raw thought crawling out of the woodwork! 
I didn't even realize I had that, 'til this discussion surfaced.

Now, off to find out the truth!  Jennifer

[Susan Peden]

Jennifer, you are not far from the truth.  When I get back to work next Tuesday, I'll poke around in my old research for my sources.  Hank is quite correct in saying that regionally, bathing habits could be very different. 

Here is Charlotte Beecher's take on Cleanliness (1856) from Domestic Economy for the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School, first entered into the Library of Congress in 1842!  Go to chapter 9 on Cleanliness.

http://books.google.com/books?id=AUJIAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=Books+by+Catherine+beecher&hl=en&ei=TFGtS56YBIGdlgfwkMSRAQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=book-preview-link&resnum=5&ved=0CFYQuwUwBA#v=onepage&q=&f=false

Here is a photo of one type of small tin bathtub in which one would stand and catch the water or pour water over oneself from a pitcher or other vessel.  Don't let the Australian website address bother you.  We had these too. This was just the first photo of one that I could find easily.


Here is one much like the one we have at work: a hip bath.  We also have a mid century catalogue which shows one for sale.


And, out in our barn at the Sheldon Museum we have one of these, and the water heather to go with it!


I will retype an article from VERMONT History magazine which was published in the early 20th century describing the clothing and bathing habits of a family from the late 18th century into the early 20th century and post it next week.

Susan

[Jennifer Hill]

Thank you, Susan.
I knew about hip tubs & slipper tubs [are they later?], etc.

Lliving in a house with indoor wood stove heat [yep, with the ash & soot & various other less than optimal accessories], I know how cold it can be everywhere in the house except in front of the fire.  If we'd not had modern conveniences, I'd have wanted to bathe & dress right there.  I'd have warmed the water on the stove, most likely.

Susan, does that big tub have a galvanized lining?  It's a beauty!   Jennifer

[Susan Peden]

Yes the big tub is galvanized!  I would love to have that one in my house!  I'd have to give up the linen closet but I can live without it.
Susan

[larry pettiford]

but the same approach wouldn't work for a shy visitor who just got up the courage to volunteer an answer and then realized that it was a set-up and he or she was made the butt of a trick question.

Reminds me of Antique Road Show.  I always feel sorry for those people.

[Tom_Nixon]

re. "Who is buried in Grants' Tomb?"

I think trick questions can be a double-edged sword. If the goal is to get visitors to rethink pre-conceived ideas, like how many witches were burned, thought-provoking questions accomplish that well. But they can also have the effect of making the tour guide look clever or smart while making the visitor feel dumb. Yes, there are some visitors with sturdy personalties who are overbearing and need taken down a notch or two, but the same approach wouldn't work for a shy visitor who just got up the courage to volunteer an answer and then realized that it was a set-up and he or she was made the butt of a trick question.

Hank Trent
hanktrent@gmail.com

Good point Hank. It's my intent only to amuse and not to make anyone on this site feel foolish by these trick questions. I am reminded of the response of a reenactor who I admire. When confronted with the most famous dumb question out there, he responded with the aplomb a senior diplomat:

"I have been asked that question by everyone from little children to PhD's. and NO we don't use real bullets or the event attendance would go way down! ". Everyone laughed. Nobody felt bad. 

[hanktrent]

While we're talking about bathing, if anyone has more information on the context of shower baths in the period, I'd be interested.

I've run across casual mention of shower baths as if everyone knew what they were and many folks had them, even to the point of saying, "Few houses [in the city] are built without a room furnished with all the et ceteras for a plunge and shower bath." (1849)

But it was such an emotional topic in the period that it's hard to figure out context. Hydropaths promoted them for health reasons as an important medical treatment, prisons used them for punishment like waterboarding, and so it's hard to figure out how the average person would have perceived them.

I've seen an original "shower head," at a Kentucky museum that looked like a super-sized copper version of a modern shower head, probably to allow more water to flow through under lower pressure. I'm guessing a shower bath would be most practical where a family got water from a cistern in the attic, but I don't know if families ever filled a reservoir by hand to use them. And were they generally used cold? Was that the point, based on the hydropathic background? Did one use soap too, or just plain water? Were they primarily for cleanliness or health maintenance? In this hotel, it seems they were available but not known by everyone, and perhaps you wore a nightshirt or some clothes while using it?

So I'm curious about how the average city dweller or country dweller or different demographics would think about a shower bath, and also if it had any regional difference, i.e. more northern because of the hydropathic connection or more southern because of the cooling ability.

Hank Trent
hanktrent@gmail.com