The Paca Bed: Bedrooms in the late eighteenth century

The William Paca House might be closed for the winter, but take a tour later this year, and you will see our forthcoming exhibit: an eighteenth-century bed with possible Paca connections, newly conserved and awaiting assembly in the second floor of the house.

A few months ago, Historic Annapolis staff members and interns piled into several cars and took a weekend trip to Williamsburg. We were off to pick up the Paca bed!

The bed; loaded into our curator's car (with Natalie's supervision, and some custom-made padding!)
and ready to return to Annapolis

Recently donated to the William Paca House, the dismantled bed pictured above will soon be assembled in the room that is currently interpreted as Mrs. Paca’s lying-in chamber. The bed has been confirmed as dating from the 1780s-90s by textile expert Natalie Larson. It is thought to have been bought by the donor’s grandfather, one James Bordley, from his uncle. There is therefore reason to believe that the bed has Paca connections; the Bordley family shared Wye Island with the Pacas after William Paca moved to Wye Hall.

Dr James Bordley, Jr. (1874-1956), a collector of fine American antiques and early champion of historic preservation in Annapolis, might have been the buyer. Perhaps he was trying to preserve for posterity an important piece of Annapolis' history: William Paca's bed.

Eighteenth-century beds are exciting objects, not least because a bed like this would have been the most valuable possession in a household when it was first bought.

The Paca Bedchamber

The Bed in the Bedchamber

There was rarely more than one elaborately decorated bed in a late eighteenth-century house. As the most valuable item in a household, such a bed was designed to be seen. Bed hangings were therefore extremely important. They were indeed so important that they warrant a blog post all to themselves. Look out for that!

A good and complete bed [see: "bed & furniture" in the glossary at the bottom of this post], owned by a wealthy Annapolitan in the 1760s and 1770s, would usually cost between £3 and £6. This would not have included a feather bed; feathers were incredibly expensive, and a feather bed would usually cost more than a bedstead.

Feathers needed to be properly cured and oil-free. If not, they would start to smell pretty awful after a while. Accruing enough feathers for a bed, and treating them properly, was no mean feat.

Excerpt from the Inventory of Henrietta Maria Dulany, 1766.

Key: ££.ss.dd (pounds; shillings; pence)

7 ¾ yds Irish Linnen 1/10: 14.10 ¼.0
8 ½ yds ditto 1/8: 14.2.0
...
24 ¼ yds cotton check: 2.5.0

…
9 prs. yellow and white cotton and wasted window curtains: 2.18.8
1 rich suit of bed curtains of yellow silk damask tester, valences, head piece, 4 large window curtains, 1 dozen mahogany yellow damask bottom chairs, feather bed mattress blankets bolster, 2 pillows and calico quilt: 50.0.0
…
1 tent bedstead and suit of curtains: 3.0.0
1 bed and bolster upon the tent bedstead: 3.0.0

Henrietta Maria Dulany (née Lloyd) was Paca's mother-in-law; she bought her property in Annapolis, on 162 Conduit Street, in 1761. Among the items listed in a 1766 description of her £50 matching bedroom furniture (see above), the yellow silk and feather bed mattress would have been most expensive new.

In the 1780s, Samuel Grant, a Boston upholsterer, charged between three and four shillings per pound for feathers. To put this into perspective, a complete bed required roughly sixty pounds of feathers, which would have cost between £10 and £12 in England at the time. In contrast, a bed frame alone typically set back an individual just over £3. The feather beds we see in the Annapolitan inventories are not priced at £10 each – but then, they are not new. It is very unlikely that the societal elite of Annapolis would buy a used mattress, and - like a new car today - mattresses and bed sheets would have quickly depreciated from their first day of use.

Camp bed with sacking bottom, from Thomas Sheraton's The Cabinet Dictionary, 1803.

Feathers for me, flock for you

In the inventory of Robert Eden, the last Governor of Maryland, of the furniture &c. ‘left on his departure in his dwelling house at the city of Annapolis taken the 26^th day of June 1776’ contains good examples of beds at the extremes of wealth.[1] A ‘Servant mans Bed Room’ contained ‘1 Corded Bedstead, flock Mattrass, Bolster, 1 Rug, 1 Windsor Chair’, valued together at £3. ‘Flock’ was waste or surplus wool, sometimes combined with old rags, used to stuff mattresses or upholster other furniture. A ‘corded bedstead’ was a bedstead strung with ropes, which required regular tightening in order to hold the weight of layered mattresses – and, of course, the weight of a sleeper.

A bed currently in the Paca House, featuring a sacking bottom,
in the room that is interpreted as a child's sick room

Eighteenth-century bedsteads, especially the cheaper examples, would often be corded or feature sacking bottoms. Regularly tightened rope would create the tension needed for a bed that wouldn't swallow the sleeper whole.

The coming Paca bed features slats to better support mattresses. Slats were a more expensive alternative to a rope-based bed support, but they were available to those who could afford them.

Another interesting bed in Robert Eden’s house is his own, recorded as belonging to 'His Excellency's Bed Room'. On top of the ‘Mahogany 4 post Bedstead with white Dimothy furniture ornamented Cornice with vases compleat’ were the layered mattresses that ensured the comfort of a wealthy man or woman. Ordinarily, a straw-filled tick would form the base of the bed, followed by a feather bed and a mattress, a bolster, the bottom sheet, two pillows, a top sheet, blankets, and a counterpane (bedspread). Eden’s hair mattress (£4) probably sat atop his large feather bed, which – together with a bolster, and pillows – cost £10. A mattress of hair, wool, or straw would have been a much cooler surface to sleep on than a feather bed in hot summer months. It is likely that Annapolitans would only have layered their feather beds on top of their mattresses during the winter, when extra warmth in the night was welcomed.

Things that go bump in the night

The bedchamber was the scene of all sorts of night-time activity. It seems needless to say that a bed (and before public hospitals, one's own bed) was central to life’s ultimate moments: birth and death.

The Paca Bedchamber

Less monumental events, though just as essential, also occurred in the bedchamber. In January of 1775, Charles Carroll (III) ordered “a very neat night chair, with its furniture formed with such a deception as to appear anything but what it truly is … but not troublesome to use”.[2] An equivalent in the Paca House is not quite so glamorous, but is more akin to the usual receptacles used by men such as Paca and Carroll.

Indeed, Carroll ordered many chamber pots from England - often several dozen (highly breakable!) pots at a time. Those readers who witnessed the November 2013 installation of the carpet in the Paca dining room will understand the drama of knocking over a full chamber pot, and watching in horror as the contents pour onto your luxurious woolen carpet!

Shortened shut-eye

Contemporary literature and modern studies suggest that it would have taken much longer to get to sleep at night before the introduction of artificial light. Whilst today lying awake for two hours before drifting off is frustrating, in the mid-eighteenth century it would have been the norm.[3]

Surprisingly, before artificial lighting sleep patterns in the Western world were not so uniform as the conventional c.11pm-7am of recent centuries. In the early modern period and into the eighteenth century, it was not uncommon to have a 'first sleep' and a 'second sleep', the alert period in-between used for study or prayer among other activities. One explanation for such a routine is that a fire intended to last throughout a winter night would require tending in the early hours. As a man with servants to tend his fire for him, and as a man whose work was conducted in daylight, Paca was likely to have slept through the night.

Henry Robert Morland, Woman Reading by a Paper-Bell Shade, 1766.

Away from prying eyes

A four-poster bed, surrounded by a canopy, had a variety of practical benefits. Not only would the canopy provide privacy, but it would also protect the sleeper from cold drafts and insects. Rooms would often be shared by several occupants; and it was not uncommon for families to sleep in one room. In the house of a man like Paca, however, privacy would have been important. Increasingly over the eighteenth century, the bedchamber ceased to be a public arena for entertaining. At a time when social elites were increasingly concerned with appearances, Paca and his wife Mary would have required private spaces.

Whilst William Paca was wealthy enough to afford matching curtains in the bedroom, it was not uncommon for a room to be without window hangings in the late eighteenth century. There were few window curtains in comparison with bed hangings before the American Revolution. When privacy within a room was as significant as protection from prying eyes on the street, bed hangings become the priority; they provided a little of both.

Privacy behind curtains in the room currently interpreted as Mary's lying-in chamber, where she might have slept apart from her husband during pregnancy

It is likely that William and Mary shared the same bed. Peter Earle writes, ‘it is clear that the wife was expected to sleep in the same bed as her husband and be available for his embraces, though under some circumstances, such as catching the pox from his whores, it was accepted that a wife may well want to ‘part beds’’. One does not suppose that any such "circumstances" afflicted the Paca House.

Glossary

‘Bed and furniture’: A bed, fully kitted out. i.e. with a mattress, bolster, pillows, sheets, pillowcases and hangings.
Similarly, a ‘tea table and furniture’ referred to a tea table complete with the objects needed for the service of tea.[4]

Bolster: A long, thick pillow used at the head of the bed for support. It would be placed under other pillows to stop them shifting out of place or falling behind your soft feather bed.
Tick(en)/ticking: A linen twill fabric used for cushion cases, which would have enclosed feathers[5] – or any other filling material.

With thanks to Samantha Dorsey, Curator of Historic Properties and Museums at City of Bowie; Carter Lively, Executive Director of The Hammond-Harwood House; Tara Owens, Research Intern/Education Programs Coordinator at The Hammond-Harwood House; Paul Koch.

Keep reading the curatorial blog in the coming weeks to learn more about colonial bed hangings.

Written by OUIIP intern, Elena Porter

Bibliography

‘A Guide to Reproduction Fabrics’, The Old-House Journal: Restoration and Maintenance Techniques for the Antique House. Vol V, No. 11, November 1977. (http://books.google.com/books?id=hsH6FjGJs_gC&pg=PA131&lpg=PA131&dq=%22bed+and+furniture%22+eighteenth+century&source=bl&ots=GwtqDIi7yM&sig=cloP9F66Z3HuleTDzLmjHoh5PD4&hl=en&sa=X&ei=kDv7U7KKF82oyATp1IHQDw&ved=0CC8Q6AEwAw#v=onepage&q&f=true)

A. Roger Ekirch. At Day’s Close: A History of Nighttime. (London, 2005). Orion Books. (Kindle edition).

Clive Edwards. Eighteenth-Century Furniture. (1997). Manchester University Press.

Elisabeth Donaghy Garrett. At Home: The American Family 1750-1870. (New York: 1990) Harry N. Abrams, Inc. 

R.T.H.H.‘Textiles as Furnishings in Early American Homes’. Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Jennifer N. Johnson.‘The Upholstery and Chairmaking Trades of Eighteenth-Century Newport, 1730–1790’,  May 14, 2012. Thesis for the MA Program in the History of the Decorative Arts and Design: Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum,Smithsonian Institution; and Parsons The New School for Design.

Whitney A.J. Robertson. ‘Sleeping Amongst Heroes: Copperplate-printed Bed Furniture in the "Washington and American Independance [sic] 1776; the Apotheosis of Franklin” Pattern’, Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings.

Peter Earle. The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Society, and Family Life in London, 1660-1730. (Berkeley, 1989). University of California Press.

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[1] All Robert Eden inventory information is taken from: Graham Hood. The Governor's Palace in Williamsburg: A Cultural Study. (1991). Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, p.299-300

[2] “Anywhere So Long as There be Freedom”, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, His Family and his Maryland. BMA, 1795.

Garrett, Elisabeth Donaghy, At Home: The American Family 1750-1870. p.109

[3] A. Roger Ekirch. At Day’s Close: A History of Nighttime, loc. 5082 (Kindle edition).

[4] ‘A Guide to Reproduction Fabrics’, The Old-House Journal: Restoration and Maintenance Techniques for the Antique House. Vol V, No. 11, November 1977. p.131

[5] Jennifer N. Johnson.‘The Upholstery and Chairmaking Trades of Eighteenth-Century Newport, 1730–1790’,  May 14, 2012. Thesis for the MA Program in the History of the Decorative Arts and Design: Cooper-Hewitt, National Design 

The Sauceboat of a Signer

It is amazing how one tiny fragment of pottery from an archaeological dig can tell us the appearance and function of an entire object. At Historic Annapolis, we have been delving deep into past archaeological records to see if they can tell us anything new about William Paca’s Annapolitan lifestyle.

Figure 1: White salt-glazed stoneware fragment found during the William Paca House garden excavations

This white salt-glazed stoneware fragment was dug up in the 1960s from the area just in front of the west wing of the William Paca House.[1] Although it may not look like much in its current state, a closer examination of its shape enables a direct match to be made with a white salt-glazed sauceboat on exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. The diaper pattern and the rococo edge of the fragment perfectly matches the sauceboat. This match gives us a wealth of information about William Paca’s tastes in both fashion and food!

Figure 2: White salt-glazed stoneware sauce boat. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Online: http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O151250/sauce-boat-unknown/

The design of the sauceboat and the material in which it was made conveys that William Paca was an exceedingly fashionable gentleman. Rococo tableware was all the rage amongst elite circles from London to Annapolis in the third quarter of the eighteenth century. An excavation of the Calvert House on State Circle, Annapolis, has revealed that the Calvert family owned rococo style white salt-glazed plates with similar decorative motifs to William Paca’s sauceboat.

Figure 3: White salt-glazed plate from the Governor Calvert House. http://www.aia.umd.edu/seeking_liberty/gov_calvert.html

What would have been served in William Paca’s sauceboat?

The colonial dining table would often have included a large dish of meat or fish accompanied by a complementary sauce served in an elegant sauceboat. A popular combination was the serving of duck with an orange sauce, a pairing still popular today! To make your own authentic eighteenth-century dish, follow these instructions:

·         1.) Stuff a duck with a mixture of ducks liver, streaky bacon, butter, onions, parsley and mushrooms

·         2.) Place bacon slices on top of the duck and cover with paper (or foil if you want to follow twenty-first-century conventions!)

·         3.) When the duck has been roasted, pour some of the gravy juices into a stew pot

·         4.) Add minced shallots and the juice of an orange to the stew pot and heat[2]

·         5.) Serve the sauce in a beautiful rococo stoneware sauceboat

Figure 4. A little after Paca's time, a gentleman demonstrates the joy that a sauceboat (albeit a slightly less elegant version)  could bring.  A convalescing man happily eating a meal, assisted by his grinning servant, coloured etching by J. Sneyd, 1804, after J. Gillray.   © Wellcome Library, London http://catalogue.wellcomelibrary.org/record=b1160208

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[1] Stanley South (1967). The Paca House: A Historical Archaeological Study. Alexandria, Va., Contract Archaeology.

[2] The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. Online at http://recipes.history.org/2013/06/to-dress-duck-with-juice-of-oranges/

Would the Paca House have kept a cat?

As part of our new 'Ask the Curator' initiative at the William Paca House, we have been researching the likelihood that the Paca House would have kept a cat. If not a cat, we asked, what other animals might have been family favorites? This blog is a place for us to share this research - and hopefully many more interesting findings in the future.

Background

Archaeological evidence from Maryland and Virginia indicates that there were many cats living in this area in the late eighteenth century and earlier. In one seventeenth-century well shaft alone, the remains of thirteen cats were discovered.[1] Many of these cats would have been kept in households to reduce the population of rodents and insects. In wealthier homes they would be fed by servants, and kept away from the family.

Domesticating wild animals

It was during the eighteenth century that pet-keeping for pleasure became commonplace in America and Britain. Pets were referred to as “favorites”; the modern meaning of ‘pet’ was not widely used until the nineteenth century.[2] From the beginning of the eighteenth century wild animals such as squirrels and deer were tamed and taken into the home for the amusement of young children, a phenomenon peculiar to prosperous households in Colonial America (and to the astonishment of their European guests). These animals would be cared for by the family personally, and often at great expense.

Philip Mercier, The Sense of Touch, 1744-47

Contemporary thought on animals

By the late eighteenth century, previously popular sports which encouraged violent treatment of cats were regarded as terribly cruel, with the advent of an intellectual movement towards humane treatment of animals. The earliest legislation against cruelty to animals had come from Puritan Massachusetts in 1648,[3] but this “humane” attitude was not fully and widely established until the 1790s in the early United States and Britain.[4] From then on it became popular for families to keep household animals, so that children may learn the quality of benevolence by caring for their cats and dogs.

Slaves would often own dogs, for hunting, protection, and companionship. This was more common near plantations than in a house such as the William Paca House. Slave owners would not give animals to their slaves as favorites, because ownership of animals indicated authority over the household.[5] Sarah Hand Meacham claims that ‘Chesapeake elites … kept favorites in part because doing so gave them unconscious validation of their right to have slaves’.[6]

Gifts of domestic animals were highly gendered. Women and girls would be given small ‘decorative creatures’ such as birds and squirrels,[7] which they would take care of themselves. Birds were particularly popular because they were thought to be signs against witchcraft,[8] even at the end of the eighteenth century, and unlike the traditional ‘familiar spirits’ thought to be kept by witches.

 
The Annapolis gentleman’s animal of choice: a cat or a dog?

Towards the end of the eighteenth century cats became popular domestic animals amongst urban professionals, merchants, bankers and the like in Britain. While the trend for importing, or capturing and keeping, animals to domesticate was as evident in Colonial America as it was across the Atlantic, cats were rarely the animal of choice. Very few letters and journals from the Chesapeake Bay area mention cats, and there are no advertisements for missing cats in the Maryland Gazette or Virginia Gazette. Significantly, although many portraits of the time feature birds, squirrels, and dogs, nobody in the Chesapeake area chose to pose with a cat.[9]

John Singleton Copley, Young Lady with a Bird and Dog, 1767

Men in this region tended to keep working animals as “favorites”. Working dogs were significant as indications of an individual’s connections and social standing. Emotional attachment to a dog displayed that a man was in touch with English cultural trends. George Washington is said to have proudly informed visitors that he had paid two hundred dollars for a “superb bull[dog] of English breeding”.[10] Greyhounds, pointers, and spaniels were popular English breeds. Eighteenth-century men knew each other’s dogs by sight, taking advantage of opportunities to return dogs to their owners as a sign of goodwill and friendship. When Washington admired the female spaniel belonging to Richard Sprigg in Annapolis, Sprigg sent Washington one of the spaniel’s pups.[11] The exchange of animals was an arena for the demonstration, and even formation, of social connections.

There were some men who owned cats at this time, but it was not fashionable to do so in Maryland and Virginia. Robert Wormeley Carter of Virginia recorded the death of “our old cat Corrytang” in his diary in 1780. The animal had been “a favorite cat of my fathers [sic]”, and Carter had “taken great care of him on that account, tho’ troublesome”. Taking good care of the cat, and doing so personally, was a means of demonstrating filial duty to Carter’s young son.[12]

However, Charles “Nasifer Jole” Cole was ridiculed at the Tuesday Club, Dr. Alexander Hamilton’s social club in Annapolis, for his attentions to his cats. Hamilton commented that “Some may think it very Strange, that Mr Jole, a gentleman born and bred in a christian [sic] land, should pay so much deference and respect, to these brute creatures”.[13] It was highly unusual for a grown man to take an interest in cats.

Conclusion

In 1790, Thomas Jefferson arranged for a pair of angora cats to be transported to his residence in New York City from Paris.[14] However, these cats were likely purchased for the entertainment of guests – to be displayed as exotic animals. If William Paca kept a favorite animal, it was probably a dog. An English dog would have represented Paca's English connections and status. The women of the house were more likely to have favored birds and squirrels above cats. The cats that almost certainly resided in and around the Paca household would probably have remained out of his sight, curtailing the local population of rodents and insects behind the scenes.

Written by OUIIP intern, Elena Porter

[1] Sarah H. Meacham, ‘Pets, Status and Slavery in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake’. The Journal of Southern History. vol. 77, no. 3, August 2011, p.540
[2] Tague, ‘Dead Pets: Satire and Sentiment in British Elegies and Epitaphs for Animals’. Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2008, 41, 3, 289-306, The Johns Hopkins University Press.
[3] John D. Blaisdell, "An Ordained Compassion: The New England Puritans and Their Laws against Cruelty to Animals," Argos, Speciale Uitgave, Zomer 1991. 11-17.
[4] John D. Blaisdell, ‘A Most Convenient Relationship: The Rise of the Cat as a Valued Companion Animal’. Between the Species. Vol. 9, (1993). Issue 4. p.227
[5] Sarah H. Meacham, p.525
[6] Ibid., p.524
[7] Ibid., p.525
[8] Ibid., p.541
[9] Sarah H. Meacham, ‘Pets, Status and Slavery in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake’. The Journal of Southern History. vol. 77, no. 3, August 2011, p.540
[10] Ibid., p.531
[11] William Oxley to William Galt, July 29, 1837, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 35 (October 1927). Quoted in Sarah H. Meacham, p.539
[12] Sarah H. Meacham, p.540
[13] Ibid., p.548
[14] Silvio A. Bedini, Thomas Jefferson Statesman of Science, McMillan Publishing, New York, 1990, 201. Quoted in Blaisdell, 1993.