Dressed for the West

Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Jan 30, 2004 by Carma Wadley Deseret Morning News

In 1840, 12-year-old Sarah Hurdie took a length of homespun material and made a pair of pants for her brother. Over the next few years, those pants likely received a lot of wear, but they were still in good enough shape by the late 1840s that they were worn across the plains with the Mormon pioneers.

And then, said Edith Menna, curator of the International Society Daughters of Utah Pioneers museum, once they arrived in Salt Lake City, "practically every man's pants in the territory was cut from that pattern."

Such a simple thing as a pair of pants can tell you a great deal, she said.

Look at a wedding dress made in 1802, and then worn by three generations of brides. Each time, alterations had to be made, but extra material was carefully tucked inside in case it was needed later. It's an elegant dress, trimmed with lace and flowers, and you can almost feel the hopes and dreams of the brides who wore it.

On the other hand, a sense of adventure is evoked by the buckskin outfit that Luke S. Johnson's wife made for him. It is easy to imaging him trudging through the wilderness in that outfit.

There's something about clothes, said Mary Johnson, president of the DUP, that make the people who wore them seem more real. "You see how many of them were handmade, and know they they were probably made by firelight or candlelight.

You see how skilled the women were." You know the clothes were stitched with love, she said, "and you see how important lovely things were."

And, she added, "you see the clothes, and you think of the culture. You think of the opera, the dances, the social life." Often, the clothes that have been saved were those worn for special occasions.

"I look at these clothes, and I can actually picture my grandmother dressed up like that," said Colette Liddell, public relations chairwoman for the DUP.

That's one reason why the museum wanted to expand its permanent gallery of pioneer clothes. "We have three walk-in closets that are filled, floor-to-ceiling, with boxes of clothes," said Menna. "Many of them have never been displayed."

The biggest problem, she said, is "that we didn't have mannequins that were small enough."

The pioneers may seem like they were bigger than life -- and on the inside, they were, said Johnson -- but "on the outside, most of them were very small."

Commercial mannequins were simply too big. "To display clothes, we had to take off arms and legs and patch and piece the best we could," said Menna.

But new mannequins are surprisingly expensive. "We contacted Dorfman in Germany (a large supplier of mannequins) and we found out that the prices started at $1,000 for each one. We needed 30. And we didn't have that kind of money," says Menna. "So we decided to make our own."

Borrowing a page out of the book of the people who wore the clothes, the DUP workers used ingenuity and resourcefulness to come up with an innovative way to display the clothes.

A lot of trial and error were involved, said Ray and Anona Piercy, who did much of the work. They started with wood and then plastic. "Then we hit on Ethafoam, and found it was the perfect medium," said Anona.

They glued together layers of the foam, which is acid-free and won't damage the clothes. Then they carved it to make bodies to fit the clothes they had. They used a hotplate to heat molds made from cans that were the size of fingers and necks. "That hot metal would slice right through the foam," explains Ray.

They then had to figure out a way to make arms and legs jointed so they would bend. They came up with cords that ran through the body, says Menna. Once they clothes were on, the cords could be pulled and tied to make the limbs bend and stay in place.

The foam is white, so to get a flesh coloring, they covered faces and hands with pantyhose. "We found a kind that could be cut and sewn without running," she said. They experimented with faces but eventually decided not to worry about that. (In the display room, only mountain man Thomas Bullock has a face.)

And in the end, they figured the cost of each mannequin was $62 -- "and $30 of that is the stand," says Menna. Of course, she added, that figure doesn't count the hours and hours of volunteer labor that went into the project over the course of two years.

The original materials were purchased with grant money from the state's Office of Museum Services, she explained. But the project has been so successful that now other museums in the state are coming to learn how to make their own mannequins.

In the gallery, mannequins are arranged in a series of vignettes showcasing mountain men, a wedding, midwifery, crossing the plains and a millinery shop. There are children's clothes, and even a display showing off the elaborate underwear women wore under the dresses. And a rare maternity dress. "Mostly, the women just stayed inside and adjusted their clothes," says Menna. "There weren't many maternity dresses. We only have three in all our collection."

With the clothed mannequins are other objects and artifacts: forceps used in child delivery, an innovative glass baby bottle, tiny coffins filled with dressed dolls, which may have been reminders of children who died young, or maybe used to teach about death, said Menna.