According to the tale, upon the birth of their daughter, a king and queen gave a great feast in which they invited only twelve of the thirteen wise women in the kingdom. The reason given was that they possessed only twelve golden plates for them to eat from, and therefore one guest had to be left out. On the night of the feast, each of the wise women gave the beautiful baby a gift. The twelfth gift was just about to be bestowed, when all of a sudden the door burst open and the uninvited, thirteenth witch (for that is what the wise women really were) came storming into the hall. "This child will prick her finger on a spindle in her fifteenth year and fall down dead!", she exclaimed before storming out again. Everyone was shocked; wouldn't you be? Luckily, the twelfth wise woman, who had been interrupted before she could bestow her gift, stepped forward and announced that although she could not remove the curse just laid upon the child, she could soften its effects. The gift she gave to the newborn babe was the promise that the child would not die, but only fall into a deep sleep ~ a sleep of one hundred years ~ a sleep from which she could be revived by a prince ~ a charming prince. Just to be safe, the king decreed that all the spindles in the kingdom were to be burned. The child grew into a beautiful princess and her fifteenth birthday came and went without incident. Everyone sighed a sigh of relief that possibly the curse would not be fulfilled after all. But despite all the precautions they had taken to protect their daughter, the king and queen were appalled to find, upon returning from an outing one day, that their daughter was lying prostrate on a bed in an old tower of the castle.
Apparently, the young princess had wandered through the various rooms of the castle, and finding the door of the tower room unlocked, had ventured in. There she found an old woman rocking back and forth in a chair, and spinning flax on a spindle. The girl was fascinated since she had never before seen anyone spinning ~ remember, the king had years before decreed that all the spindles in the kingdom be destroyed. The princess, being enraptured by the rhythmic motions in which the old woman was engaged, asked if she could, herself, try to spin the flax. The old woman agreed to show the princess how, and as she reached out to take the spindle, the finger of the princess was pricked.
According to the tale, published in The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales by Pantheon Books, under the alternative title: Little Briar Rose, the exact wording is: ...and there in a little room sat an old woman with a spindle, busily spinning her flax. "Good day, old mother," said the King's daughter; "what are you doing there?" "I am spinning," said the old woman, and nodded her head. "What sort of thing is that, that rattles round so merrily?" said the girl, and she took the spindle and wanted to spin too. But scarcely had she touched the spindle when the magic decree was fulfilled, and she pricked her finger with it.
I have always loved the tales spun by Jacob and Wilhelm ~ the Brothers Grimm. In fact,on my bookshelf I have three volumes of their tales; and in two of the volumes, the tale of the sleeping beauty is illustrated with images of a shriveled old crony hunched over a flax spinning wheel, with the young princess approaching.
I'm sure that all the readers of this post understand why the image I just described is so wrong, and why it bothers me. It bothers me that the engravers of the illustrations felt they could take the license to interpret the spindle with which the old woman was spinning, as a flax spinning wheel. I own a number of spinning wheels, both flax and wool, and can positively state that it would have been difficult for the young princess to have pricked her finger on the spindle of the flax wheel, because no sharp point extends from the spindle assembly. Granted, the spindle assembly of the flax wheel (shown above) contains two rows of bent wire hooks to guide the fibers as they're wound onto the spindle shaft, but the Brothers Grimm did not state that the princess got her finger pricked on one of the spindle assembly guide hooks. Now the spindle of the wool wheel, which is variously called a great wheel (shown below), is indeed pointy and sharp. A princess could certainly prick her finger on the spindle of the wool wheel, but the Brothers Grimm did not say that the old woman was spinning wool, it specifically stated that she was "spinning her flax."
No, the tale, as written by the Brothers Grimm, describes the old woman as spinning flax on a spindle ~ simply a spindle. So it must be assumed that the tool upon which the old woman was spinning ~ and upon which the princess pricked her finger ~ would have been what's known as a handspinning drop spindle. The accompanying photo shows one of these spindles.
It is made of wood ~ which would corroborate the part of the tale that stated that the king decreed that all spindles in the kingdom be burned. Wooden drop spindles could indeed be burned. The action of spinning flax on this kind of drop spindle involves attaching some flax fibers to the slender spindle, giving it a twist to make it spin around, and then suspending it so that it's weight tightens the loose fibers into a tight spun yarn. And that action would indeed corroborate the part of the tale in which the princess asked: "What sort of thing is that, that rattles round so merrily?"
I think that it can be stated, unequivocally, that the thing upon which the young princess pricked her finger would have been a wooden drop spindle like the one I have illustrated. There is one problem, though. It seems that it would be difficult to prick your finger on one of these spindles, unless one end would be sharpened to a sharp point with a knife. The witch who wanted to bring her curse to fruition could have sharpened one of the ends of her spindle into a very sharp point, but then that sharp end would have probably caught on the forming thread ~ making it impossible for it to rattle "round so merrily." But the Brothers Grimm did not include such an important point in their tale.
Perhaps we'll never know what exactly the princess pricked her finger on, but we can be certain that it wasn't the flax spinning wheel that commonly appears in illustrations of the tale.
The subject of this post is the peck/half-peck measure shown above.
The word peck is derived from the Middle English word, pecke, which in turn was derived from either the Old French words, pek and/or picot, or from the Middle Low German word, pekken, all dating from the 13th Century. One source suggests that the word peck was derived from the Latin word picotus. The original meaning of the word is unknown, but it might have referred to the amount of oats fed to horses. A peck has, over the centuries, come to amount to one quarter of a bushel, or eight quarts in dry measure. It is a measure of volume rather than weight.
The word cooper comes from kuper, a Lower Saxon word meaning "a tub", and was conferred on one who makes tubs, along with casks, barrels and similar items. It has been suggested that the idea of containing liquids inside a vessel constructed of wooden staves or slats arose from the shipbuilding industry. In the days of ships that were constructed of wood, the idea was to fit wooden boards tightly together so that the liquid of the ocean waters would be kept out. Someone must have looked at that and realized that if you could keep the ocean water out of a wooden ship, you might likewise keep liquids inside a similarly constructed wooden vessel. A cooper might make nothing but containers other than casks. In that case, he was called a white cooper.
The kinds of things the white cooper made included: buckets, piggins and peck/half-peck measures, in which the ‘head’ was installed part way between the two ends. The head was so positioned so that two different dry measurements could be obtained from the single cask, such as shown in the accompanying illustrations.
One might wonder why the peck/half-peck measure was created. A half-peck measure simply needed to be filled twice to obtain the amount that would fill the peck measure. So what was the point of constructing a single container that measured both, pecks and half-pecks? I have searched high and low for an answer to this question, but have have no luck. Perhaps the cooper who initially created it, thought that the peck and half-peck sizes were good one to work with. A bushel/half-bushel measure would have been too large for anyone to handle easily, while wooden containers smaller than the peck/half-peck size would have been less than convenient to use. Apparently the first cooper to construct the peck/half-peck measure realized that it was an ideal size for a combined measuring container.
The "cold feet" to which I am referring in the title of this post implies being cautious or afraid to do something. But this post is going to be about the physical condition of having feet that are actually cold because of low temperatures.
If I have cold feet today, I can put on an extra pair of regular socks (or maybe a first pair), or I can put on thermal socks that have a source of power to heat up. I can also simply turn the heat up in my house or car ~ because if my feet are cold, the rest of my body might also already be, or soon will be getting, cold.
But during the centuries before the Industrial Age, when cars and houses became heated by battery or electricity operated heaters, most people's houses were heated by fireplaces or cast-iron stoves that were fueled by wood or coal (or perhaps peat). Their horse-drawn carriages had no built-in heaters of any sort. So while the people inside a house could put their feet closer to the fireplace, or even rest them on the stove, the riders of horse-drawn carriages had to resort to other means. (It's no secret that the structure of most carriages did not include fireplaces or cast-iron stoves.)
The item shown at the top of this post is what was known, variously, as a foot-warmer or foot-stove.
In fact, before the cast-iron house stove was invented, the foot-warmer, in its Dutch form, was called a stoof, from which the English word stove was derived. As the other photos show, the foot-warmer was constructed of a tin box held in a wooden frame. The sides of the tin box were pierced with holes in a design ~ in this example, of a heart within a circle. The holes were not just for design purposes, but rather they provided multiple points to permit heat to radiate outward from the center of the box.
The box had one little door which gave access to the center of the box, and through which a small scoop or tray could be inserted (to add hot coals) or removed (to discard the spent ashes). A wire handle on the top of the foot-warmer made it easy to carry.
The user would scoop up some hot coals from the fireplace or pull them out of the stove, using fireplace tongs or shovel. The hot coals would then be placed in the scoop/tray, and then into the foot-warmer. The foot-warmer's door would be closed and fastened (in this example by a small loop of wire that was bent to catch on the inside edge of the box). The user would then lift the box by the wire handle and carry it to the carriage. The foot-warmer would normally be set on the floor of the carriage in front of the seat, the riders would take their places on the seat with their legs and feet on either side of the foot-warmer, and then they would spread a blanket over their laps. A male rider would often gallantly permit his female riding companion to place her feet onto the top of the foot-warmer if she wished.
The blanket would trap the heat radiating from the foot-warmer, thereby heating not only the riders' feet, but their whole legs. The type of blanket that was usually employed for use on a carriage was what was called a horse-hair blanket. It was called that whether it was constructed from horse hair or not. The horse-hair blanket tended to be a quilt that was filled with sawdust or hay, which added to it extra insulating properties. When the riders arrived to their destination, such as the church or meeting-house, the foot-warmer would be carried along for continued use.
Foot-warmers were used more by women than by men, perhaps because men tended to wear heavy leather boots as compared to women who tended to wear cloth or thinner, patent leather shoes.
Children also crowded around the foot-warmer to warm not only their feet and toes, but also their hands and fingers. In fact, the children often were granted the 'privilege' of loading and emptying, and carrying the foot-warmer.
I titled this post: "Sometimes you don't find objects; the objects find you" because it is true.
Years ago, I was visiting a local antique store, and I came across a book that I thought I would buy. It was titled: Pennsylvania In The War Of The Revolution, Battalions And Line. 1775-1783, Volume II. The subject matter of the book included histories and rosters of the regiments that made up the Pennsylvania Continental Line during the American Revolutionary War. The book has what is known as "three-quarter leather binding with hand-marbled paper covers." The pieces of leather on the cover are of a reddish-brown color, and the marbled paper is predominantly red. I like books that are so nicely bound, and so the purchase of this one was not in question. The only problem I found in the book was that it included information only on the Continental Line and not the various provincial militia troops. (Of the thirteen men from whom I directly descend, who took up the Patriot Cause during that War, they all served in provincial militia units rather than the Continental Line. Therefore, the book I had found, although interesting enough, was not of much use to me personally. What was a bit aggravating was that this volume, being the second of two, contained an index in which I could see that information regarding my own Patriot ancestors had been included in Volume I.
About four or five years after finding the above-mentioned book, I was visiting an antiquarian bookstore in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Much to my surprise, I came across a box of nineteen books from the published Pennsylvania Archives. They were under a table of other books, in a part of the store that I had not really intended to visit. The books were from the Second Series and included nineteen volumes. At the time, I did not take the time to check if every volume was in the box; I was assured that the set was complete by the owner of the bookstore. The bookstore owner said that the whole set, which consisted of nineteen volumes, was there, and so as the price was right, I purchased the box. As I was looking through the books that evening, at the motel in which I was spending the night, I put them in order to make sure that every volume was accounted for. In so doing, I discovered that there were actually two copies of Volume VI (i.e. Six) and no Volume XI (i.e. Eleven). In this set, Volume X (i.e. Ten) was titled: Pennsylvania In The War Of The Revolution, Battalions And Line. 1775-1783, Volume I. The set of books that I had just purchased was complete, with the exception of missing only one volume ~ and that volume was the one that I had purchased about five years before. I was dumbstruck! I could hardly wait to get home to check if the book that had been on my shelf for five years was the one missing from this set.
The nearly complete set of books that I purchased in Lancaster were also three-quarter leather bound, with hand-marbled paper covers, but while the paper marbling was the same as the other single volume ~ predominantly reddish in color ~ the leather portions were of a dark brownish-black color. The set was published in 1895, while the single volume was published in 1880.
It's amazing how the set-minus-one-volume made its way to be found by me, and for the missing volume to be the one that I already had in my possession. I am not sure if it was coincidence or fate that brought all nineteen volumes together, but somehow they all found me.
My mother, Dollie's surname was Nofsker. She was descended from Michael and Anna (Servin) Naffzger. The Naffzger (variously, Neffzger) family originally made their home, during the mid-1600s, near Baden, in Canton Aargau, Switzerland (to the northwest of Zurich), but later came to reside in the village of Frauenfeld in Canton Thurgau, Switzerland (to the northeast of Zurich). Michael and Anna's son, Hans Caspar Neffzger, moved his wife Elizabeth (Gysi) and their family further westward, taking up residence in the village of Bubendorf in Canton Basel. It was at Burbendorf, that Hans Caspar Jr made a living as a shoemaker. His sons, Hans Caspar III and Hans Jakob, also took up the profession of shoemaker. A third son of Hans Caspar Jr, Heinrich, moved to the city of Basel, being listed in public records as a resident in both the Horburgstrasse and Colmarerstrasse sections of the city. Heinrich's grandson, Heinrich Naftzger, emigrated from his ancestral Swiss homeland with his maternal grandparents, Heinrich and Anna (Thommen) Meyer.
The Meyers and grandson, Heinrich Naftzger, arrived at Philadelphia in the colonial province of Pennsylvania in 1771. Heinrich Naftzger was my mother's great-great-grandfather. After he married Margareth Beschtler in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, they moved northwestward to take up residence in Miles Township, Centre County, Pennsylvania. And guess what occupation Heinrich took up? He became a shoemaker! When he died, his will revealed a number of shoemaker tools. One of Heinrich's sons, Jonathan, would take up the profession of shoemaker, in turn, being listed as such after he moved to the Bedford County township of Greenfield circa 1838.
Now, my primary intention in this post was not to give you a full family history of my mother's ancestors, but rather to point out that sometimes a profession or occupation is handed down from one generation to another. Such was the case with my Naffzger ancestors and the occupation of shoemaking.
Let's look at some names first. A shoemaker was once called a cordwainer. Cordwainers were identified in England as early as 1100. The name was gradually superseded by the name shoemaker as the need to differentiate between the shoe-maker and the shoe-seller became evident. Then there is the name cobbler. Many people think that the names cobbler and shoemaker were interchangeable. They weren't. The shoemaker, as the name suggests, made shoes. The cobbler, on the other hand, repaired shoes.
The object pictured here is known variously as a shoemaker's hammer or as a cobbler's hammer. The same hammer would have been used to make and repair shoes, so the names are interchangeable. The shoemaker worked with very small tacks when constructing shoes, in the attachment of the heels to the soles, and so a small, but heavy headed hammer was ideal for his work. But other than that function, the hammer was not used for conventional hammering of nails in the making of shoes. Rather, the hammer was used to stretch and form the leather over a wooden or metal last. The wide, blunt end of the hammer was used to peen the leather, the word 'peen' meaning to form it into shape by striking it. The leather would often be dampened and then peened with the shoemaker's hammer; this resulted in the fibrous tissues of the leather being flattened, thereby making the leather somewhat water resistant.
The leather was stretched and shaped over a wooden mold called a last.
The name for this mold was derived from the Old English laeste, which itself was derived from the Old High German leist, meaning a track or footprint.
The shoemaker's last, as shown in the accompanying examples, was commonly made of wood, carved in the form of the inside of the intended shoe. The shoemaker would come to possess lasts in various sizes to accommodate a variety of customers' foot sizes. But only one last per size was needed because there was no difference between the left and right shoes.
Both shoes in a pair tended to be given square, flat toes; left and right were interchangeable. As the Nineteenth Century merged into the Twentieth, the wooden last came to be replaced by a metal one. Then, with the development of machines that accomplished all of the duties of the shoemaker during the Industrial Revolution, the shoemaker found himself out of a job.
I acquired the wooden shoe lasts that are shown in this post at different times and at antique stores and flea markets throughout the south-central Pennsylvania region.
The lasts which were used by Jonathan Nofsker, the most recent shoemaker in my mother's family, were found in a large trunk when his great-grandson was going through his deceased parents' estate. He called me up to ask if I had any idea why his parents would have a trunk full of a bunch of carved wooden 'things'.
Although it may sound too fantastical to be true, there was a time when Starbucks didn't exist. This post has to do with an object that was used by almost every family even long before coffee was carried by Juan Valdez on the back of his mule, Conchita.
The coffee grinder was a personal means of grinding coffee beans, and just about every family owned at least one. The antique coffee grinder shown here was what was called a burr-grinding coffee mill. It employed two wheels or grinding elements between which the coffee beans passed. The grinding elements crushed the beans between them, tearing them open to release the essential oil that makes coffee taste the way it does. The coffee grinder has two thumbscrews that altered the distance between the grinding elements, therefore allowing the homeowner to change the size of the crushed pieces ~ therefore changing the amount of essential oil being released.
The homeowner would pour coffee beans into the bowl shaped receptacle at the top of the grinder. Then, with one hand holding the grinder firmly on some work surface, the handle would be turned, with the other hand, in a clockwise direction until all the beans would be moved through the bottom of the bowl. The result of this action would be that the beans would be crushed into pieces and deposited into the drawer in the grinder's body. The process would be repeated until the desired quantity would be obtained.
The coffee grinder shown here was constructed of wood, with its sides dovetailed together and the top and bottom pieces nailed on with small headed brads. The bowl and grinding mechanism is made of metal ~ the bowl being a soft metal such as a tin alloy. The great thing about this antique is that it retains a slight aroma alluding to its purpose.
Although some coffee connoisseurs would claim that coffee has to be either percolated or steeped to be potable (i.e. drinkable), in the early days, the crushed coffee bean pieces would then be dumped into a coffee pot, water would be added, and the pot would be placed either on a ledge in the fireplace or on a stove burner to heat. The heated liquid would be poured through a strainer and into a cup, the strainer catching any floating pieces of the coffee beans.
The work required to obtain a cup of coffee by grinding the beans in one of these mills probably made the end result taste delicious.
When my brother, sister and I were young and we got sick, my mother would give us a dose of Liniment.
According to one source, a liniment was a type of balm to rub on the skin; the name was derived from the Latin linere, which meant to annoint.
As a child growing up in the 1950s and 60s, liniment was a cure-all for whatever you were sick with. If you had a cold, you took a dose of liniment. And by the term 'took a dose' means that we took it internally, rather than rubbing it on our skin. If you had the flu, you took a dose of liniment. If you had a bad stomach-ache, you took a dose of liniment. If you had arthritis, you took a dose of liniment. I don't know if liniment cured a broken arm ~ primarily because none of us ever broke our arms. I would bet, though, that if one of us had broken an arm, we would have been given a dose of liniment.
There were many brands of liniment available in the United States during the first half of the Nineteenth Century. Watkin's was one brand. Porter's was another of them; it was the brand that my mother chose. Rawleigh/McNess was another brand, and one of the few that are still being marketed.
Liniment was the descendant of the infamous circus sideshow snake-oil. And no matter what the brand, all liniments were basically the same. They all seemed to contain a variety of ingredients, one of which was bound to affect some ailment.
Porter's Liniment contained ether, ammonia, capsicum, camphor, oil of cajeput, cloves, myrrh, galangal, and safrol. The bottle's label notes that the contents were 63% alcohol. As ingredients on any product have historically been listed in order by largest percentage first and proceeding to the least percentage, this would indicate that ether comprised the most of what made Porter's Liniment work, and accounted for the alcohol content. Of the remaining ingredients, the capsicum - the thing that makes pepper hot - would help to cause a fever to break. The camphor, which was employed primarily in external medicines, was readily absorbed through the skin; when taken internally, camphor was a remedy for fatigue. It has been found to alleviate minor heart problems. The oil of cajeput was a pungent oil that came from the leaves of the melaleuca tree; the oil was used externally to reduce inflammation and internally to induce vomiting. The cloves were included to function as a carminative to prevent the formation of, and/or to promote the expulsion of gas. Myrrh was sometimes ingested to 'cure' rheumatism and arthritis, and was believed to relieve circulatory problems. Galangal was a plant related to ginger, and would have been included to function much like ginger as a stimulant and reliever of constipation. The last couple of ingredients would actually have very doubtful benefits, if any, for human beings. Ammonia has no beneficial qualities, and safrol has been found to be a carcinogen. From this list of ingredients it can be seen that a wide variety of ailments might be relieved by the liniment (while threatening to cause a few ailments if abused.
Although the Porter's Liniment bottle did not specifically warn against being taken internally, the list of uses are all related to external ones: sore muscles, cuts, insect bites and so forth. But, as I noted above, my mother gave us doses of the liniment orally. She would mix about 1/4 teaspoon of liniment with one or two teaspoons of sugar and enough warm water to fill a small glass. We would be instructed to drink the mixture down at once ~ no sipping. If you had a sore throat, look out! The liniment would burn the whole way down. But you can believe that after you took the dose of liniment you wouldn't be sick very much longer.
