Antiques

Magazine Antiques, May, 2003 by Wendell Garrett

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, 1836

The American Revolution gave rise to major symbols that this country celebrated conscientiously thereafter. National loyalty passed from the king of England, now a source of evil, to the new "king," George Washington, the source of good. By the 1820s the Declaration of Independence took on the aura of a sacred document, and July 4, Independence Day, came to be widely celebrated. The fact that both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died on July 4, 1826, lent an almost mythic quality to the date.

The rising patriotic tide of the 1820s was augmented by the formation of an association in Charlestown, Massachusetts, to erect a granite memorial to the Revolutionary battle of Bunker Hill. Daniel Webster gave an oration at the groundbreaking in 1825 and another at the dedication of the monument in 1843. The First event attracted more than two hundred veterans of the Revolution, and the second a crowd of one hundred thousand.

In 1876, after four wars and a succession of economic and political crises, the United States reached its centennial. A loose collection of states had been fused into a union, and a simple agrarian society had become a complex industrial one. The Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia drew President Ulysses Grant, escorted by four thousand military men, and it attracted one of every five Americans during its duration from May 10 until November 10.

The central feature of the celebration was not historical or patriotic but industrial. Machinery Hall was the most spectacular attraction, with its centerpiece, the Corliss steam engine, which was connected by pulleys, shafts, wheels, and belts to thirteen acres of motionless machinery. William Dean Howells called the engine "an athlete of steel and iron with not a superfluous ounce of metal on it." Only one man was needed to operate the source of power for eight thousand other machines. It was American material progress that merited the loyalty and respect of the citizenry.

Although few historical themes were celebrated at the Philadelphia exposition, the "olde tyme" New England kitchen exhibit moved many visitors to reflect on the past. One periodical described "the wide chimney, with its high mantel, the latter deoorated with candlesticks, and other articles in familiar use at that period.... An old-time spinning-wheel stands in one corner, and a small wheel for flax in another. There is a cradle which was in early use in the colonies, and a diminutive desk which John Alden brought over with him in the Mayflower." The kitchen was housed in a log cabin, because in 1876 it was believed that New England settlers, like frontier pioneers, had lived in log houses. The New England kitchen was staffed by costumed guides who served visitors Boston baked beans and brown bread.

Until the centennial Americans felt fortunate to have left their past behind. However, in the 1880s and 1890s the past looked better than the present. They saw in it a haven for traditional values that might, in time, restore their idealized America, now overrun by waves of immigration and noisome industrialization. In their search for the simple agrarian life Americans began to treasure colonial relics to show that, even if they had lost the present, the past was theirs. These antiques were then incorporated into wooden houses in the New England style, painted white with dark colored blinds, and the colonial revival came into being. Collecting antiques became a passion, and reproducing them with varying degrees of accuracy became a business. However, there was constant adaptation and confusion of forms and details.

Wallace Nutting, who was born in the first year of the Civil War and died in the first year of World War II, was a paradigmatic figure in the rediscovery and invention of Old America. Declaring that "whatever is new, is bad," he retreated to the hill country villages of northwestern Connecticut, which he felt were symbolic archetypes of a vanishing America, and that the state itself was "a museum of late seventeenth and early eighteenth century American life."