No, he is not reacting to the doorbell. This picture goes with the next article...
"Did you say your head itches?"
(image courtesy of oldbookillustrations.com)
The Footman Always Knocks Three Times
I used to think the doorbell was a modern invention. Push the button on the porch and a bell rings in another part of the house entirely. Like switching on a light or answering a telephone call, I assumed it was a modern sensation.
But no, the electric doorbell was invented in 1831. And the word "doorbell" dates back to at least 1815.
The concept itself is even older. Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella, writing of a visit to London in 1808, observes with surprise that unlike houses in other parts of Europe, the houses in London feature doorknockers instead of bells to announce visitors. He found the knocker infinitely more useful than a bell because "the knocker may be so handled as to explain who plays upon it, and accordingly it has its systematic set of signals. The post-man comes with two loud and rapid raps, such as no person but himself ever gives. One very loud knock of less vehemence denotes a servant or other messenger. Visitors give three or four. Footmen or coachmen always more than their masters; and the master of every family has usually his particular touch, which is immediately recognized."
French visitor Louis Simond makes much the same observation the following year (1809) while describing the dinner hour rush of carriages through the streets of London. "Stopping suddenly, a footman jumps down, runs to the door, and lifts the heavy knocker--gives a great knock--then several smaller ones in quick succession--then with all his might--flourishing as on a drum, with an art, and an air, and a delicacy of touch, which denote the quality, the rank, and the fortune of his master."
The bell, by contrast, was deplored as imparting no information about the ringer. I've not been able to discern anything about the type of bell Espriella refers to; every house of that era that I have ever visited has a knocker or nothing.
I used to work with a guy who, when he had something to say, would come up to a co-worker's door and scratch with his finger nails like an obsequious rat. It gave everyone the creeps, but I think he meant only to be respectful.
In his case, most of us would have preferred the anonymous, non-respectful doorbell.
Until next time...
--k
Saved by the Licemeister
"Mom?" my daughter whined at the breakfast table. "I think theres a louse in my milk." Before this month, I would have thought she was referring to her brother. But recently, we've all lived a little bit of history that I would rather have simply read about. Head lice invaded our home, or rather, our heads.
Since I started this column by talking about bedbugs, I guess its not a real stretch to move onto the topic of lice. Im actually glad the insect invasion in our home was the latter rather than the former, which are much more difficult to eradicate. But it still hasn't been much fun, especially for my daughter.
It all started with an itchy head. Okay, it obviously didnt start there, but that's when we noticed it. My head was itching, but my husband didnt see anything. And then one morning as I was combing my daughter's hair, some of it crawled away from the comb. I couldn't be sure of what I'd seen, but since her hair usually doesn't move that much, I knew it was something out of the ordinary. I took her to the school nurse. She identified white nits in her hair, which are the egg casings left by an earlier batch of bugs. These were more than an inch away from her scalp, which meant her hair had grown considerably since the eggs were laid. The lice had been there for a while. The color of adult lice ranges from translucent to light brown, so they really did look like crawling bits of my daughter's ash blonde hair.
It was time to get serious. The nurse gave us lice-killing shampoo and we rushed home to douse our heads. From what I could tell, this had virtually no effect on the little buggers. I was able to remove several with the fine-tooth comb and they were noticeably not killed. Not even ill. So I went online and read everything I could find. It seems that lice are developing a tolerance for traditional treatments, so the only pesticides that work are the prescription-strength ones. I started trying folk remedies, one of which is to "suffocate" the lice with olive oil or mayonnaise. A Harvard study revealed that lice immersed in olive oil for two hours will drown. So I poured oil all over my head, put on a shower cap, and struggled for two hours chasing a puppy around the house, trying to answer the phone, etc. with oil running down my face. At the end of two hours, I combed three or four lice non-suffocated lice out of my hair. The next day I tried mayonnaise. On my daughter's hair, I used globs of thick conditioner. Lice apparently do not need to breathe very often.
But what finally gets them is all the combing. We ordered a Lice Meister comb (a name so good, I could not possibly have made it up) and gradually combed all the baby, "teenage" and adult lice out of hair. Every day I examined my childrens heads, the nurse examined them, my husband examined mine and we all saw nothing. Yet we combed, there they were, wriggling in the tines.
Not anymore. We're "done" for the moment. Of course, we'll always have to keep checking now, because they're much more prevalent than I had realized. The nurse said they're common in Europe and no one seems to get upset over it. So if they're common now, imagine how much more they were around in an age before we could wash their eggs out of pillow cases and vacuum them off the sofa. One thing is for sure-- in my future books, my characters will scratch their heads a lot more often.
Until next time...
--K
The Foremost Authority on Unicorns
"I've got green alligators and long-necked geese
Some humpty backed camels and some chimpanzees
Some cats and rats and elephants, but Lord, I'm so forlorn I just can't find no unicorns"
I don't actually like Irish Rovers Unicorn Song, but because the vestiges of St. Patricks Day are still around, the dopey tune just sort of sprung into my head when I started writing this piece. What I wanted to say is if you're looking for tales of unicorns, dragons, leviathans, and fair damsels, I have a source that may surprise you. All these creatures are found in the King James Version of the Bible. More modern translations are not nearly so much fun--dragons are reduced to jackals and the glamorous unicorns become mere oxen. Leviathans, however, are allowed to retain their grandiose mythical status, at least in the New Revised Standard and New International Version. A damsel is now just a girl. Ho hum.
For the past several years, I've made an attempt to read a "daily" Bible, which is a version that breaks the text up into 365 readings with the idea that you read one each day and thus read the entire Bible in a year. Usually, I can finish the year's worth of readings in about fifteen months. But the first time I attempted the King James Version, it took me two full years, and I have to confess that even then I was probably thinking about other things while my eyes dutifully scanned the page. It was really more an exercise in history than faith for me because I spent more time thinking about how things were said rather than what was actually said.
One example that got me right off the bat was how the Old Testament patriarchs died. In the book of Genesis, Abraham "gave up the ghost, and died in a good old age." Ishmael, Isaac, and Jacob all give up "the ghost" too, and so a phrase that I thought to be very modern is obviously not. I put the phrase in the mouth of one of my characters in an upcoming book, so it will be interesting to see if I get any reaction.
Since I write primarily historical novels, I figured my characters would be familiar with the King James Version of the Bible and therefore I should be, too. So not only was the grand Bible reading effort not really a spiritual exercise, it was not even a true academic exercise. It was just part of a business plan.
I decided to try the KJV again this year, hoping that now the novelty has worn off and that I will find new spiritual insights. Instead, I'm looking up the definition of leviathan in the dictionary. And today (I'm writing this on March 21, so naturally the selection I was reading today was labeled February 28. Must be a misprint) I realized that the Lord established a form of working welfare. In Leviticus 23:22, the Lord orders Moses to tell the people to leave some grain in the field when they harvest ("thou shalt not make clean riddance of the corners of thy field when thou reapest") in order to make provision for the poor and homeless. But he doesn't order the Israelites to give food to the poor--he expects the poor to go out and glean for themselves. Mercy and help but no handouts. I like that.
I wonder if I put my orders in flowery King James- era language (I've heard the KJV was deliberately set in language that was archaic even in King James's time, so perhaps I should say King Richard-era language) my children might see the wisdom of my words and respond appropriately. "Thou shalt make clean riddance of the corners of the corners of thy bedroom before thou liest in front of the TV" or "thou shalt not pusheth thy sister aside in thy haste to gain access to the bathroom facilities."
Of course, the kids in Moses's time had no wait for bathroom facilities. And I'm willing to bet there were a lot of two-seaters around in King Richard's day. But while I don't always like living in a world where dragons are mere jackals and we've reduced the noble unicorn to an ox, I do prefer modern sanitation. So I'll wait while both my children finish with the bathroom, and maybe while I wait I'll look around for a few one-horned oxen.
Until next time...
--K
Reader Beware
James Oglethorpe laid out the city of Savannah in the colony of Georgia in 1783. Or at least that's what I read in a beautiful "history" brochure I picked up in Savannah recently. Since I knew that Oglethorpe founded the colony in 1733 and that Georgia was no longer even a colony by 1783, I was pretty certain that Savannah's origins dated back a little further than the brochure claimed.
In this case, the mistake was most likely just a typographical error. But the lesson is there, nonetheless: READER BEWARE. Just because you read it in print, even in a history book, doesn't mean it's accurate.
History is one of the academic subjects most susceptible to widely varying interpretation. It's not difficult to see why. If you ask a couple of family members to describe a recent reunion or party, you'll get a bunch of different stories, or different versions of the same story. Should one family member write his or her version in a diary, then later that will be viewed as what "really happened." I find it interesting that while people expect that stories passed down through an oral tradition will lose some factual veracity, they still trust a written account to contain the truth. We must remember that a written account, even a contemporaneous one, is still only one person's opinion. That one opinion may be repeated in different versions in different books over the years, and that seems to give it an aura of Truth. The repeated stories appear to corroborate themselves.
This became a real problem for me when I was researching the Peggy Stewart affair (Maryland's version of the Boston Tea Party) for my book, Restitution. I read many accounts of the events leading up to the burning of the vessel and its cargo of tea and found a number of them to be quite similar. In fact, when I looked closer, I found that some of them matched word for word. As far as I could tell, they best matched not any of the contemporary accounts, but a textbook printed in 1903. People dealing with stories about legendary figures like Betsy Ross or even modern urban myths know that just because a story is repeated doesn't make it legitimate. And that's true whether it's in print or not.
The other thing of which a reader of history needs to beware falls at the opposite end of the spectrum. Instead of old stories of dubious authenticity, the problem is new research that is linked to dubious conclusions. I blame universities for this one. Professors are encouraged to undertake research (which is good) and to publish their findings (also good). But somewhere there comes a pressure to reach landmark conclusions with each new research project, and that's where the problems crop up.
TV episodes are written so that each hour-long episode reaches a dramatic and fulfilling conclusion. Research, on the other hand, may progress for years without uncovering anything new, let alone stunning. It remains valuable for reaffirming previous findings. But it wont sell books. So the author is pressed to draw exciting inferences. Several years ago, I read about some archaeological findings in Annapolis. One study concerned the spacing of holes for bristles in toothbrushes unearthed in a particular segment of town. I thought it was wonderful to have so much evidence of prevalence of oral hygiene in the 18th and 19th centuries. But the author went much further, and from the degree to which the holes were irregularly spaced, drew inferences not only about the brushes' manufacture but also about the relationship between the people who made the toothbrushes and the people who used them.
Huh?
Without corroboration such as an entry in William Faris's diary, I have no idea how the author could even begin to jump to such conclusions.
I may be guilty of a bit of historically inaccurate writing right now. Its been a while since I read the studies and it may have been the research on the different diameters of dinner plates that lead to the conclusion about the relationship between the manufacturer and end user. Either way, I still did not see the connection. I think the author was pressured, either by the academic world or his own ego, to overlook his valuable "small" findings in order to reach for major "significant" social conclusions. And, in my opinion, he failed.
I will end with a final warning that is really more of a lawyerly disclaimer: do not ever take anything I write (or say) as more than my own opinion. It is a terrific opinion, of course, and I recommend it highly. But its still only my opinion. And that's a fact.
Until next time...
--K
All the kids wanted was a restroom. But I was searching for more--I was on the lookout for a respite from the unmitigated dullness of I-95. This is not a new theme for me. Ever since my parents moved to South Carolina eleven years ago, we’ve been traveling that 600 mile stretch of highway, which is always either incredibly boring or incredibly stressful (and sometimes even the stress gets incredibly boring). Today, since the kids needed a break just south of Richmond, Virginia, I decided to unravel the mystery of Colonial Heights. Was it really colonial? And were there any heights?
I grew up in a town called Arlington Heights, Illinois and am embarrassed to admit that until I was in my mid-twenties, I thought that "Heights" was just a fancy term for a collection of housing developments. It wasn’t until I was reading a description of the battle at Harpers Ferry, when they described attacks from "Maryland Heights," that it finally dawned on me that the army was not attacking from a suburban housing development. They were attacking from those big bluffs overlooking the town. (Actually, I think I first asked someone about housing developments during the Civil War before my fiance explained what the heights were.)
My confusion is understandable if you are familiar with the northwest suburbs of Chicago: there are lots of housing developments and no hills higher than a pitching mound.
So anyway, I wanted to ask someone if Colonial Heights lived up to its name. But there was no historical marker or visitor’s center for Colonial Heights. Just a mile south, however, was the exit for the Petersburg Visitors Center. So we pulled off and started following the signs.
Though we didn’t have to go far, it seemed a long way because we had to turn every two blocks. I felt like we were going in a giant circle, (my son thought it was more of a stair-step pattern.)
But we arrived, the center was open and the restrooms were clean and inviting. Housed in an early 19th Century building in an old section of town near the old train depot, the center looked promising. But to my disappointment, only the basement of the building was open, and they had racks of brochures but no exhibits about the town. In fact, when I started asking questions, the friendly guide admitted that they didn’t even have any brochures about the attractions in Petersburg. She did recommend visiting a number of sites, including the Siege Museum and the Blandford Church. And she told me that Colonial Heights did indeed live up to its name – during the Revolutionary War, Continental soldiers fired down from the heights during the battle of Petersburg. (I didn’t see any heights as we drove past the town, but maybe they’ve turned them into pitching mounds.)
So we struck out, in terms of finding a great informative visitor’s center like we found in Halifax last year. But before we left, we spent a few minutes walking through the streets (labeled "Old Towne Historic District"). Despite the bright mid-day sun, my daughter said she thought the area was "sort of creepy and all run-down." My son asked if we could hurry up since his black shirt was absorbing all the sunlight and making him hot. They both asked why there were so many cars parked around and yet no people in sight. Then they asked why I was writing down everything they said.
I decided it was encouraging to see so much of the old town preserved – all the uneven brick streets, the early 19th Century buildings, and odd train relics including something that looked like an early locomotive. But it was sad to see the area so devoid of life. Further up the hill, the buildings housed antique shops and restaurants, and those seemed to be doing some business. All in all, it was an enjoyable place to walk around (unlike Emporia, where we tried a similar stop a year or two ago).
On our way back home, I hope to return to Petersburg to visit the Siege Museum and maybe the tavern on the next block up from the visitor’s center. We may even try to stop by the store with fresh painted bricks advertising "live and dressed poultry" for sale.
Think how much fun our dogs would have with those souvenirs!
Until next time...
--K
We're Number Two
A visit to Jamestown is fun, and since the first successful English settlement in North America is celebrating its 400th anniversary this year, you should go if you can. But if you don't have time for an extensive trip to the Williamsburg area and you do happen to be traveling the I-95 corridor in Virginia, I recommend a stop at the "second successful English settlement in the New World," the Citie of Henricus. Yes, it is a bit like settling for a trip to the World's Second Largest Ball of Twine, but Henricus is worth a visit for many reasons. In addition to the convenience, you'll find fewer crowds and interpreters who can take time not only to answer your questions, but give you enough information to inspire a whole new round of questions.
The Citie is a recreation (just as the Jamestown Settlement is a recreation) that tries to give visitors a sense of what it was like to live in Virginia in 1611. Information about the site was garnered primarily from historical records rather than archaeology because the original site sits under the James River these days. The actual location is a matter of some dispute, but oral history seems to corroborate that the original site was near the recreation site in the Dutch Gap Conservation Area in Chesterfield County, just north of Petersburg.
The modern site is actually made up of two recreated settlements: the English "Citie" and an Indian village. Just as there were very few tourists out during our recent Saturday afternoon visit, there were also very few interpreters on hand, so it took a little while to find them. But it was more than worth it.
In the Indian village, the kids were set to work making a fishnet from sinew while the interpreter explained to parents (okay, I was the only one who asked about this stuff, but the other parents were polite enough to listen) about the types of fibers used for different purposes. A weed called dogbane produces a soft yet strong silk-like fiber with much less effort than is required to process flax into linen. The guide told me that settlers were experimenting with cultivation of different fibers until tobacco production overshadowed everything else. (It's interesting to speculate what we might be wearing these days if Europeans had not provided such a lucrative market for the "sot weed.") The village did not claim to represent one particular tribe, but seemed to be in the style of Powhattan's people, who were Algonquins. I believe the living structure was referred to as a longhouse, but it was not as big as some longhouses I've seen at other settlements, so perhaps it was called something else. It was semi-permanent and made of native materials and not a Plains Indian tipi, so it looked authentic to my uneducated eyes.
The English settlement (just follow the chicken) is made up of several Tudor-esque timber buildings. My favorite detail was the use of sliding panels in the windows (in place of glass or hinged shutters). I do not know if the panels were documented, but they make more sense than shutters because they provide a better seal against weather and require no imported hardware.
The biggest building in the settlement, Mt. Malady Hospital, has diamond paned glass windows and wooden floors, so it was pretty upscale. I still wouldn't want to try the hospital food, though. After all, Henricus was an English settlement.
All in all, while Henricus may not have enough substance to satisfy someone hoping to study the spacing of 17th century post holes or analyze the contents of a Powhattan village midden, it made a great fun (and educational) stop off I-95. And that's exactly what I wanted.
Until next time...
--k
Purple Mountain Majesties
When I visit a historical site, I usually look closely at the buildings and try to imagine what the people did when they lived or worked there X number of years ago. But I often forget that the first users of the site found no buildings and usually left none in their wake. They found only trees, prairies, animals, water, deserts - whatever the land had to offer. So for me, a visit to the Wichita Mountains National Wildlife Refuge in southwest Oklahoma was a particularly valuable and beautiful reminder. Thanks to the efforts of preservationists a hundred years ago, visitors today can get a glimpse of the scene as it was when human settlers, both American natives and European opportunists, first entered the land.
According to the information provided by the Refuge’s visitor Center, bison were the most abundant land animal in North America before 1800. Prairie grasses that fed these American buffalo also supported camels, giant ground sloths and woolly mammoths in the prehistoric era. The mixed-grass prairie is only one of four types of habitat preserved in the park, which also includes rocklands, aquatic habitat and oak woodlands known as “cross timbers,” woods so dense and inhospitable that Washington Irving said traveling through them was “like struggling through a forest of cast iron.”
Irving was not the only Eastern visitor to head out into bison territory during the 19th century. So many people came—and killed bison— that by 1907, the wild herds of 60 million had dwindled to a mere 550 animals, with only 20 known to exist in the wild. Bison appeared to be headed the way of the sloths and mammoths that preceded them.
Fortunately, it was not too late to make some changes. Under President McKinley, the Wichita Mountain area was designated a forest preserve in 1901. In 1905, Teddy Roosevelt visited the site and determined that it would make an ideal big game preserve. Congress appropriated money to fence in a portion of the Wichita National Forest and import fifteen buffalo from the Bronx Zoo, of all places. Great numbers of people, including Comanche chief Quanah Parker, flocked into the little town of Cache to see the animals arrive by train for reintroduction into their native habitat.
Today, the herd is thriving. In fact, park officials sell off a large number every year in order to keep the population in a park at a consistent size of approximately 600. This allows the bison to have ample room and share space and grass with the elk and longhorn cattle that also roam the plains. You can almost hear a corny American folk song in here somewhere, and in certain lights, the Wichita Mountains even look purple.
I am very grateful that those who came to those mountains before me decided that the view was worth preserving for future generations of people, and bison. (And I’m grateful to my friend Brenda who knew that the visit was worth all the complaints we would hear from grumpy kids stuck in the backseat of a hot car on the way home!)
Until next time...
--K
Getting Railroaded
Sometimes a bad thing can be a sign of good things to come. That was the case when we visited the B&O Railroad Museum with my parents. My dad is recovering from a serious illness and consequently drives with a temporary pass enabling him to park in the convenient handicapped parking spaces. The spaces are only convenient, however, when they are not filled with other cars. On this particular Saturday afternoon, there was almost no parking available at all. So what was going on?
The place was not, as I feared, overrun by squirrelly two-foot-tall Thomas the Tank Engine fans lining up to shake hands with Sir Topham Hat. (We lived through this once when my son was two, and I’m still recovering.)
Nope, this time it was the museum’s Steam Days, which we had been hoping to catch over the summer but always seemed to miss. We had the chance to ride on the first mile of track in America on a train pulled by a steam-powered locomotive and watch demonstrations by another, much older engine. Even though we’d visited the museum before, we experienced lots of new sights, sounds, smells and sensations, and my 9 and 11-year-old kids (and other older children there) were not too jaded to enjoy it.
Inside the enormous repair building, however, my daughter did whimper a bit—she was cowering in fear that one of the big locomotives might fall over on her. But overall, I think they had as much fun as much as they did when they were young enough to line up to be frightened by a large over-stuffed figure of Sir Topham.
On the train ride, which was included in the price of admission and did not require a long wait, we were told to ride in the first car “if you want to get dirty.” The cars are nothing like modern railroad cars. As with the first rail cars that were pulled by horses, these cars are wooden, enclosed only halfway up and quite open. So the soot from the coal engine can blow all over you. Of course, I think it can blow all over passengers in the other cars, too, so I didn’t figure it would make that much difference. Anyway, we headed for the front right away, since I wanted to experience period-style dirt so I could write about it. My son was already covered in dirt and black dog hair, so he didn’t care. And we all looked about the same when we got off, and my hair didn’t even smell like coal.
The smell of coal is quite pervasive once the engine gets moving, but the sensation I noticed most was the noise. The musical noise. The bells and whistles on these locomotives were really loud. Either the engines themselves don’t make much noise, or by the time the engine got going, we had already been made deaf by the cathedral clang of the bell and the drawn out wail of the whistle. I don’t know whether engineers in the old days felt the need to announce their presence with such repeated vigor, but even so, it still would have been impressive.
The clouds of steam jetting out from the sides were impressive, too, especially since you can immerse yourself right in the middle of the cloud as the locomotive pulls away from the platform. (I was certain a lawyer from somewhere would make us stand behind a plexiglass shield somewhere in the next county.) That was as we watched the next ride, not during our own ride, when we had to stay inside the car. Anyway, during our ride, we were sprayed with tiny droplets of what I hope was water. As we steamed through fields, sending white jets of steam and thick black plumes of smoke up in our wake, the sweet smell of wildflowers (okay weeds) mingled with the oily smell of coal.
The engineer leaned pretty heavily on the horn as we passed Mt. Clare, one of about 87 colonial mansions built by the Carroll family. I tried to imagine how annoying that might have been for the occupants about 100 years ago, when the thick black smoke and persistent toll of the whistle would not have been quaint at all.
I suppose one day minivans, garbage trucks and school buses will seen quaint, too, and people will pay admission to see a few preserved examples. It’s funny how much more interesting it seems to imagine life in the past than to actually be in a position to remember it. If I spend much more time admiring the beautiful steam locomotives during Steam Days, at least I know I will be too deaf to listen to my friends in the nursing home talk about their glorious days on the school bus.
Until next time...
--k