Thank You, Community Growing Partners!

Ally McDonough

UNH Master of Arts in History: Museum Studies Candidate

2024-2025 Research Assistant for the Flax to Linen Project

Thanks to a Hayes Fellowship from the University of New Hampshire Center for the Humanities, Dr. Alexander and her flax team have moved beyond the UNH campus to add three new grow sites for flax production for the 2024 season. As noted by Dr. Alexander, “The ability to deep dive into this single important fiber, while growing it at UNH and surrounding communities, offers a tremendous opportunity for university and community-wide engagement and allows the extension of historical research to include 18^th and early 19th-century flax growing and linen production in the Seacoast.” By extending the Flax to Linen Project beyond the UNH campus, researchers have utilized the expertise of the New England flax community to enhance their knowledge of both the historical significance and the modern importance of flax production in New England. 

Woodman Museum

The Woodman Museum, located in Dover, New Hampshire, has been an institution in the seacoast area for over a hundred years. Through the partnership of the Executive Director, Jonathan Nichols, and staff at the Woodman, the Flax to Linen Project found a home for the 2024 growing season. The Woodman offers various objects and collections, from art to taxidermy to four historic houses on its campus. Along with its four houses, the grounds of the Woodman offered a place for the Flax to Linen team to experiment with growing, harvesting, and processing flax. The museum also offered its archives for team members to conduct research through daybooks, diaries, and other written sources for clues on how flax in New England flourished. 

Old Berwick Historical Society

Old Berwick Historical Society (OBHS) in South Berwick, Maine, is known for the Counting

House Museum, the last remaining Portsmouth Manufacturing Company textile mill, and a collection of linen items, ships’ log covers, and written documentation from local New Englanders. The Executive Director, Beth Gallucci, a UNH Museum Studies alum, oversaw the growing of the flax on the OBHS’s property during the 2024 growing season. Her blog post in October 2024 states, “This collaboration aimed to explore the process of growing and harvesting flax, a crop that played a crucial role in the region’s pre-industrial, rural-based textile economy. Historically, flax was once a cornerstone of local life. It was essential for producing linen for clothing and household textiles. By recreating these
processes, the project offered a hands-on approach to understanding the agricultural practices and economic exchanges that shaped our ancestors’ daily lives and a deeper appreciation for the historical significance in our shared history.” Because of the remarkable relationship between the UNH History Department and OBHS, the 2024 growing season was an overall success for flax production. It provided incredible insight into how flax production influenced economic and communal relationships within New England. 

Newmarket Historical Society

High up on Zion’s Hill on Granite Street sits the Newmarket Historical Society in Newmarket, New Hampshire. The Stone School Museum, built in 1841, was bought by the newly created Newmarket Historical Society in 1966. The museum's founders collected artifacts and built their collections through donations from local families and businesses that told the story of the town of Newmarket. Dr. Kimberly Alexander spearheaded the partnership with the Newmarket Historical Society as a growth site for the 2024 flax production. She connected the Flax to Linen Project with a third growing site through her role on the Board of Directors. 

The Flax to Linen Project from the University of New Hampshire would like to sincerely thank the Newmarket Historical Society, the Woodman Museum, the Old Berwick Historical Society, the Hayes Fellowship, and the UNH Center for the Humanities for the space to branch out beyond UNH and involve the community in the growing and processing of flax. 

Flax to Linen Team Biographies 2024-2025

Hello- I am Erica McAvoy, a PhD student in history at the University of New Hampshire. My research interests include seventeenth and eighteenth-century New England. I have worked in the museum industry for the past fourteen years, most recently as the Executive Director of the Moffatt-Ladd House and Garden in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. This past November, I had the opportunity to present at the New England Museum Association annual conference on the topic of “Changing Interpretive Methods and Talking about Enslavement at Historic House Museum.” Recently awarded the Steelman Fellowship through the College of Liberal Arts at the University of New Hampshire, I am excited to continue working on my research with this support. After completing my doctoral work, I plan to continue bridging the gap between historic sites, museums, and academia. Being involved in the flax project has opened my eyes to the repercussions of fast fashion and has improved my understanding of the early household economies of New Hampshire.

Greetings - My name is Thomas Seamans, and I am from Leominster, Massachusetts. After graduating from high school, I enlisted in the United States Air Force and served on active duty from 2001-2021. I was deployed four times to support Operation Southern Watch, Iraqi Freedom, and Juniper Shield. While serving, I earned my associate’s degree in criminal justice in 2010 and then an undergraduate degree in military history in 2019. Since retiring from the Air Force, I have begun my master's degree in the Museum Studies Program at the University of New Hampshire. I am a research assistant for the Flax to Linen project and acted as the Flax Program Coordinator for the 2024 growing season, where I managed three community grow sites.  I am an active member of the Wachusett Mountain Men, an amateur bowyer, and a primitive weapon enthusiast.  My passion for experimental archaeology and historical exploration made the program a good fit for me. One of the most rewarding and inspiring aspects of the UNH Flax to Linen project has been the opportunity to engage with the wider New Hampshire community and partner with the New England fiber community. Their dedication to sustainable textile production and public outreach and education through lectures, demonstrations, and literature has greatly enhanced my knowledge and appreciation for linen production.

Hi!- My name is Ally McDonough, and I am from Charleston, South Carolina. I completed my bachelor of arts degree in 2022 at Wofford College and majored in Religion with a concentration in the Middle East and North Africa. I am a second-year master's student in the University of New Hampshire History: Museum Studies program. My research interests include early American religious life, particularly emphasizing women’s experience with changing spiritual practices. I am excited to join Team Flax as a research assistant because of the archival research done to learn about flax's growth and processing. I am incredibly excited about learning more about the women who processed the flax within the homes of New England and how that community worked and functioned. I look forward to learning more about the flax-to-linen process through the eyes of the archive and sharing those experiences with our blog followers. 

Seeds of the Past: A Flax Garden Journey in Time at the Old Berwick Historical Society

                         Old Berwick Historical Society & The Counting House Museum

Seeds of the Past: A Flax Garden Journey in Time

 By Beth Gallucci, Executive Director

 

Why Flax? This was a question often asked by visitors to the Old Berwick Historical Society’s (OBHS) experimental archaeology project at the Counting House Museum, Seeds of the Past: A Flax Garden Journey in Time. The answer is deeply rooted in New England history. This spring, in collaboration with the Woodman Museum and the Newmarket Historical Society, OBHS (and partners) grew their own community flax gardens, a project initiated by Dr. Kimberly Alexander, as part of her broader flax-to-linen research. The project was funded by a grant from the James Hayes Fellowship at the UNH Center for the Humanities.

 

This collaboration aimed to explore the process of growing and harvesting flax, a crop that played a crucial role in the region’s pre-industrial, rural-based textile economy. Historically, flax was once a cornerstone of local life. It was essential for producing linen for clothing and household textiles. By recreating these processes, the project offered a hands-on approach to understanding the agricultural practices and economic exchanges that shaped our ancestor’s daily lives, and a deeper appreciation for the historical significance of flax in our shared history. 

 

Dr. Erin Sigel, Collection Manager at The Hodgdon Herbarium/Department of Biological Sciences at the University of New Hampshire and her staff extracted some of OBHS’s flax plants from the garden in mid July. The samples will provide a picture of this years growing cycle and aid Dr. Alexander’s research. Additionally, filmmaker Catherine Stewart was onsite documenting the process.

 

OBHS planted its flax on June 1st, and after a 91-day growing period, the crop was harvested on August 30th. The growth of some flax strands was affected by the site conditions, including prior construction, backfill, and an underground clay pipe. These factors contributed to uneven growth and yellowing of the stems in certain areas of the garden. However, we had a successful harvest overall and will proceed with drying the flax stooks, followed by the retting process, which will allow us to then break, scutch, and comb the flax in preparation for spinning it into linen thread.

The Old Berwick Historical Society houses an extensive collection of linen items, including dresses, waistcoats, military patches, pantaloons, and tablecloths, as well as artifacts like ships’ log covers and linen-lined clothing and shoes. Among these pieces, the Counting House Museum also displays a diary entry written by Benjamin Gerrish, a farmer from South Berwick, Maine, dating to the late 18th century. On October 18, 1791, Gerrish recorded harvesting 50 pounds of flax. After his death in 1792, his probate inventory listed several linen items, including pillowcases, a set of linen damask curtains, and two homespun linen diaper tablecloths valued at 6 shillings. Wills and probate documents like these offer valuable insights into the significant role that flax and linen played in the New England economy.

Join OBHS & The Counting House Museum in celebrating the final weeks of their historic exhibition, “Material Culture: Domestic Cloth-Making in 18th Century New England.” On view through October, the exhibit is open on Sundays from 1-4 PM, or by appointment. This thoughtfully curated display will be of particular interest to textile enthusiasts, artists, and scholars of material culture.

 

The UNH Flax-to Linen-Project Expands to Three Community Grow Sites

Posted by Dr. Kimberly Alexander

Director of Museum Studies and Senior Lecturer, UNH Department of History

James Hayes Fellow, 2023-2024 and 2024-2025

Funded by two fellowships from the UNH Center for the Humanities, the overall conceptual framework for this project began in a UNH History Department classroom in Spring of 2023 while teaching a new course for HIST600/800 entitled "From Homespun to Fast Fashion: A Global History of Textiles."  Now in our second year, in addition to growing, harvesting and processing flax and conducting primary source research, the Flax Team has presented over a dozen talks, given numerous demonstrations, and of note, opened an exhibition about the project at the Woodman Museum in Dover. (The exhibition entitled “Combing History: Flax and Linen in New Hampshire” is on view through 24 November 2024.)

For the 2024-2025 season, we shifted the project from its initial physical core at UNH and took what the project team learned about the growing and processing of flax out into the larger public Seacoast museum and history community. Dr. Alexander and graduate research assistants in the UNH History/Museum Studies program are working with three community partners (‘grow sites’), where each will grow flax and can incorporate hands-on teaching about the importance of growing flax and processing linen in New Hampshire into their public educational activities. Other related educational opportunities include discussions of sustainability, fast fashion and circular design models, gendered workspaces, and community agricultural events and seasonal celebrations.

 

There are three components to this next phase of the project: Allocating funds to three community partners as grow sites [Woodman Museum, Dover; Old Berwick Historical Society, South Berwick, ME, and Newmarket Historical Society, Newmarket]; exploration of the use of film shorts with film-maker Catherine Stewart to increase audience reach throughout New Hampshire and beyond and continued archival research. 

In the past, the unrecorded thousands of hours of cutting, retting, braking, spinning, dying, weaving, and sewing small clothes, bed linens, and all manner of domestic items contributed greatly to a New Hampshire family’s financial stability. This aspect of domestic production in rural economies continues to remain largely absent from history texts, particularly in the time before the mid-19^th century and the growth of the textile factory/industrial complex seen in just about every New Hampshire town.

 

The ability to deep dive into this single important fiber, while growing it at UNH and surrounding communities, offers a tremendous opportunity for university- and community-wide engagement and allows the extension of historic research surrounding our flax project to include 18^th and early 19^th century flax growing and linen production in the Seacoast.  The project started in the classroom and will continue evolve in the classroom, but it will spill out into the community, to Woodman Farm, and local archives, to presentations for interested groups both inside and outside UNH. It is anticipated that students will take this multi-faceted experience with them beyond the campus to expand in any number of ways.

 

Dr. Alexander’s research is funded by two James Hayes Fellowships from the UNH Center for the Humanities.

All photos are from community flax harvest days at the community grow sites.

Lecture: Textile Tuesdays at the Newmarket Historical Society

‘Flax & Linen: A New Hampshire Perspective on the American Revolution’

Dr. Kimberly Alexander, University of New Hampshire History Department

6 August 2024 at 6:00

Newmarket Historical Society, Stone School Museum, Granite Street

Free and open to the public— donations gladly accepted.

Exhibition Spotlight: A rare extant blue and white striped homespun linen dress, c. 1800, with a New Hampshire provenance

By Kimberly Alexander

Understated and refined describes the time-worn beauty of this hand-sewn, unlined homespun c. 1800 linen dress. The indigo blue and white stripes, loosely pleated back, and empire waist subtly elevate the style of this every day, at-home or work dress.

 

The numerous patches and repairs reveal its inherent value to the wearer/wearers and the reluctance to discard such a frequently overlooked garment. It is not known if the maker and the wearer are the same or related in some way – perhaps future research will uncover additional information. Employing blue and white stripes was indeed common in early America. There was an extensive network of flax growers, spinners and linen weavers working throughout New Hampshire and the Seacoast region in the 18^th and into the 19^thcenturies. 

The weft-woven stripes indicate that the fabric was turned and cut horizontally to obtain the vertical striping implying a definite style choice and economical use of the linen. As noted by Adjunct Curator for the Irma Bowen Collection, Astrida Schaeffer: "In all, the gown is assembled out of thirty-two pieces (aside from its patches) and its use of fabric is extremely frugal, in places suggesting that the fabric is recycled from a previous object." Donated by Mary Pepperrell Ffrost Sawyer, of Durham NH, the dress has a strong local New Hampshire connection.

 You can view the dress at the Woodman Museum in Dover in the exhibition “Combing History: Flax and Linen in New Hampshire” through 24 November 2024.

Courtesy of The Milne Special Collections and Archives at Dimond Library. University of New Hampshire, part of the Irma G. Bowen Textile Collection

 

For a detailed description and images, see: https://scholars.unh.edu/bowen_collection/597/

UNH Dimond Library, Archives and Special Collections 

 

3rd Annual Farm and Flax Day, Gilmanton, NH

From the Gilmantion Historical Society:

Experience Flax to Linen production as it was done in Colonial times at our historic flax retting pond. Discover the amazing qualities of linen and learn why this ancient fiber is making a comeback as a fabric of the future! 

Try your hand at processing flax or watch our wonderful team of presenters transform this ancient plant from stalk to thread to fabric. 

 

Flax Presenters are:
Peter Cook
Diane Howes
Cheryl Callahan
Lori Baldwin 
Michelle Parrish
Patty Williams
Marion Ceres & others

Stroll through the Howe Barn to view our exhibit of flax & linen artifacts that span 100's of years as well as our collection of antique farm implements. 

Blacksmithing presented by Norm Miner 
In addition, lacemaking demos will be presented by the New England Lace Group. To learn more: https://www.nelg.us/

Additional Participants:
The UNH Flax to Linen Project 
Marion Dillon & Members of the NNE Fibershed
Patty Williams Aker Fiber Farm

Like to hike? The Howe Conservation area includes a beautiful hike to Meetinghouse Pond on the Joe Urner Trail. 

Cost: Free but donations are encouraged for our ongoing restoration efforts.
Event Rain date is Sunday, July 28th.

Exhibition Spotlight: 18th Century Shoes on view at the Woodman Museum

By Kimberly Alexander

For Stratham, New Hampshire shoemakers such as Samuel Lane and Josiah Brown, tailors like Samuel Watson of Dover, and printers of newspapers, broadsides and books, linen played an important role. Often, in its ubiquity, it goes unmentioned and unnoticed in historical records. 

 

For example, the linen was used as the ground for embroidered shoe uppers and linings and embroidered samplers; it was employed also for interior lining material on waistcoats, jackets, and stays. Separately from clothing items, linen thread and cloth had scores of utilitarian purposes, used for grain sacks, thread for stitching, tape for binding; even linen rags for making paper were a sought-after commodity by newspaper publishers, printers and booksellers.

 

Join me for a look at three pairs of shoes featured in Combing History: Flax and Linen in New Hampshire.

 

Wool Shoes

 

These late 18th-century brown-black woolen shoes were likely made in New England, possibly in New Hampshire. The wearer and the maker are currently unknown. The wool upper retains a bit of a sheen, associated with popular calamanco uppers, and they are lined with locally produced linen. A "transition" style of shoe, the pointed toes and lower heels give a nod to fashion circa the 1780s-1790s. On the other hand, the straps or lachets, requiring buckles to affix them to the foot, carry on an earlier tradition. They are amply sized, well-finished, and may have been the "best shoes" of a "middling” sort, or perhaps they belonged to a woman who wanted a more traditional shoe. 

 

Loan courtesy of the Irma Bowen Textile Collection, University of New Hampshire, Archives and Special Collections, Museum #438. For more: https://scholars.unh.edu/bowen_collection/975/

  

Photo, Astrida Schaeffer; Courtesy UNH Irma Bowen Clothing Collection

Embroidered Cream Silk Shoes

 

Made in Boston, Massachusetts, this pair of elegant silk shoes with embroidered toes are lined with linen and feature diminutive string ties rather than the straps for buckles as seen in the adjacent woolen shoes. They are also a transitional shoe from the late 18th century. In both pairs of women’s shoes, as well as in the red silk shoes (adjacent), linen is used for lining and backing, and linen thread is used for sewing and for ties.

 

Loan courtesy of the author.

 

Red Silk Shoes

 

Although the maker and wearer are unknown, these vibrant and stylish red silk satin, linen-lined buckle shoes, c1780s, were possibly made in England and likely worn by a woman of means in New Hampshire. The architectonic, balanced color scheme and smooth satin surface is indicative of the transition away from the heavy embroidery and richly decorated silk brocades from earlier in the 18th century associated with the Rococo style, shifting to the burgeoning, Neoclassical influence of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

 

Loan courtesy of the Moffatt-Ladd House and Garden, Portsmouth, NH. 

**************

For more on Georgian Shoes in America:

 

The shoes on view here, in addition to dozens of others, are discussed in Treasures Afoot: Shoe Stories from the Georgian Era [Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. Honor Book Award 2019, Historic New England.]

https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/11565/treasures-afoot

 

For more in the UNH Flax-to-Linen Project

http://www.theflaxprojectunh.com

June 2024 Events: Combing History: Flax and Linen in New Hampshire

 Join us in June at the Woodman Museum, Dover, NH! 

All programs planned in conjunction with "Combing History..." are free, thanks to generous support from the NH Humanities.

For Your 2024 Planner: Events for 'Combing History: Flax and Linen in New Hampshire'

For additional details, follow this blog or
woodman museum.org

 

Exhibition Spotlight: 18th Century Stays from the Kensington Historical Society

 On View in 'Combing History: Flax and Linen in New Hampshire' 

at the Woodman Museum, Dover, NH. 

By Kimberly Alexander

 

What were stays? 

 

Stays were essentially a stiffened ‘foundation’ undergarment which supported the bust, aligned posture, trimmed the waist, and supported the dress or gown worn above it.  Women (as well as children and some men) of all socio-economic backgrounds wore stays – the design, materials, stitching and mending could reflect this. Generally, stays were not intended for the tight lacing associated with producing a tiny waist (there are always exceptions) but rather to help keep the body comfortable and the appearance neat. Not surprisingly, the shape of stays would change with the prevalent fashion.  The stays on view exemplify one of the exhibitions primary themes of ‘linen seen and unseen’: linen was used as an outer layer, an interior lining (although frequently that has deteriorated and requires scrutiny to see the evidence) and for sewing. 

The identity of the stay maker or makers are currently unknown, but fortunately, the owner of the two pairs of stays have been identified through the Kensington Historical Society. It is likely that Sarah Green (1746-1804) wore both the indigo-dyed, twilled linen stays, and the wool and linen lined, brown-gold stays, c. 1770s-90s. The interiors (not visible in the display) reveal rough hand sewing and linen patching indicating an alteration. The stays were donated by a descendant of the wearer, Sarah A. Green and are on loan courtesy of the Kensington Historical Society, Kensington, NH. 

Thank you to the Kensington Historical Society board and to University of New Hampshire History major and Kensington Historical Society Intern, Mikayla Tilden for making this loan possible.