American Indian baskets made in New England

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 2004 by Nan Wolverton

When she started from her home she carried upon her shoulders a bundle of baskets so large as almost to hide her from view. In the bundle would be baskets varying in size from a half-pint up to five or six quarts, some made of very fine splints, some of coarse, and many skillfully ornamented in various colors. Her baskets were so good that she would find customers at almost every house. And after traveling a dozen or twenty miles and spending two or three days in doing it her load would all be gone. (12)

John Wesley Johnson (1829-1907), who grew up making and peddling baskets as an Indian captive in Maine, recalled in 1861 that peddling baskets was "a hard life, and although a person might be very tough, yet this kind of life followed up pretty closely, would wear upon him." (13)

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Indians could also sell their wares through stores. The daybook entries of Potter and Allen in Oakham, Massachusetts, for example, include entries for moccasins, mats, and baskets in the 1830s, a combination that suggests Indian manufacture. (14) In this case, and in others, the goods received by storekeepers may help identify the makers as Indians. In the account book of the storekeeper Jonathan Devotion (b. 1769) of Windham, Connecticut, for instance, one Joseph Walton is credited for baskets, mats, and for bottoming chairs in 1798. (15) This combination suggests that Walton may have been an Indian.

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The Shakers were among the customers for Indian-made baskets, and such baskets are often found in collections at historic Shaker sites today. The Shakers sold them along with their own baskets to their customers. Johnson notes in his memoir that while stopping in Alfred, Maine, he and his fellow travelers visited the Shakers, who treated them with "great kindness and respect." Johnson writes that the Shakers "bought quite a number of baskets, and showed us over their extensive grounds." (16)

Both flag and splint chair seats wore out with use, and, instead of replacing the chairs, thrifty New Englanders had chair bottomers make new seats. These workers were often itinerants who traveled to the houses or barns of customers, in some cases telling stories or otherwise entertaining the children of the household as they worked. (17) In his reminiscences, the writer and spiritualist Thomas Robinson Hazard (1797-1886) recalled sitting in "my little armed flag-bottomed chair, that dear good old squaw Esther, the last Indian Queen of the Narragansetts, made for me, as she sat by Aunty Phillis' kitchen fire." (18) The historian Frances Manwaring Caulkins (1795-1869) of New London County, Connecticut, recorded in 1859 hearing an Indian love story told to her as a child "by an old Mohegan woman who was bottoming chairs." (19)

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Another early historian, Sylvester Judd (1789-1860), whose work was published in 1863, stated that "Indians and squaws peddled brooms and baskets" in Hadley, Massachusetts, and other towns, (20) and that the Indian "women made and sold baskets and mats and other things." (21) Since precolonial times Indians had made mats for covering the frames and lining the sides of wigwams and for sleeping or sitting upon. Indians probably made doormats for their white customers. The poet Lydia Howard Sigourney (1791-1865) commented in the 1820s that one notably neat Connecticut home had "at each door a broad mat made of the husks of the Indian corn" that "claimed tribute from the feet of those who entered." (22) The Montauk Indians on Long Island, who frequently mingled with the Mohegan and other Indian groups on the southern New England mainland, reportedly "made baskets and 'scrubs' [pot cleaners] to sell to the white people." (23)