Rooms with a Different View

“The music grew clearer and lovelier all the time. She was beyond stopping herself. She crept around the bushes holding her breath. Standing on her toes, she could see most of the room, its richness and elegance set it apart from any room she had ever seen.

“Satin curtains framed the windows. The carpet was woven in a cabbage-rose design…Richly upholstered chairs and divans were scattered throughout the room.”

– Emmeline by Judith Rossner

Are you sitting down? If so, are you sitting on a chair? What kind of chair? I ask because it turns out that chairs have a lot to say—more than I ever realized before I visited the American Museum and Gardens in Bath.

This is the sitting room of Deer Park House, a farmhouse near Pikesville, Maryland. Deer Park was built c.1750, but these furnishings come from the Federalist period of decoration in the late 1700s. Note the lush high-back armchair covered in imported French silk. This room is similar to the one described by Emmeline.

I was drawn to the American Museum because I’d heard they had one of the largest collections of quilts in Britain and exceptional gardens. On these two points, they didn’t disappoint.

But what I didn’t realize was that inside the palatial Georgian manor the museum’s creators had secreted entire rooms from American houses that were slated for demolition or sold off in pieces in the 1950s.

Crazy Patchwork Door Curtain. Marie Holm and her husband ran a traveling menagerie that toured the Midwest during the 1930s. Embroidered woolen curtain, Marie Hansen Holm, c. 1940, Minnesota.

The American Museum and Gardens was founded by Dr. Dallas Pratt and John Judkyn, partners who exported antiques from England to the United States via the nearby Bristol port.

When their ship left New York headed back to England, it wasn’t empty. It was full of American history. In 1958, Pratt and Judkyn bought Claverton Manor near Bath to create a lasting record of American dwellings and objects, in England.

Enter a series of rooms literally lifted from American soil and rebuilt inside Claverton Manor. Here’s the 17th century room. The panelling, corner cupboard, and floorboards are from a house in Wrentham, Massachusetts.

Let’s get down to the granular detail of this room. Notice that the rug is on the table not the floor. The rug was the most valuable thing this emigrating family owned. Too good for the floor. On the floor, they had a bearskin.

The bible at the end of the table with their family lineage written in the front was likely the only “legal” evidence of their existence. This was their birth certificate and passport rolled into one.

Why is there armor on the wall? Each colonist had to show that he could defend himself if the ship carrying himself and his family from England was threatened by pirates. The armor was largely symbolic on the ship, but in the new world, it would be hammered into cooking and farming implements because it was the only bit of metal they would have.

And what about that swift and the sack of fiber to the right? That’s linen, not wool. The English Wool Act of 1698 meant that American colonists couldn’t export wool back to England. So growing and processing flax was a show of resistance to this restrictive law.

Let’s look at the family’s luggage. Here it is: a chest. The Bible box on top of it, the armor, and the rug would have gone into the chest along with anything else they might have needed in the new world.

Now, let’s get back to chairs. Do you notice anything about the seats of the chairs in the 17th century room? One of them has a rush bottom and two have simple cushions.

As the docent for the textile tour led us through each room, she always pointed out the chairs and the rugs as rooms and time passed and fortunes changed. Now there were cushions on every chair. Now the rug was on the floor. Now the cushion was built into the chair seat. The rug was softer and larger. Now, the entire chair was upholstered with imported French silk and the rug was silk tied at twenty knots per inch.

These Shaker chair tapes would have been easy to miss, but they are exquisite in their woven simplicity.

The wall coverings changed, too, from wood panels, to milk paint, to stenciled patterns, to the ultimate wallpaper printed with the image of George Washington.

”Washington—Justice & Peace”, Wallpaper, 19th century. Made by the American Print Works, Fall River, MA.

Quilts also changed from homespun wool to whole-cloth quilts stuffed with rags to intricate pineapple log cabin patchwork quilts made entirely from imported silk.

The Museum has a whole room dedicated to quilts with two carousels full of a rotating display of quilts. Log Cabin Pineapple Variation, Elizabeth Caddock, Silk, c. 1904, Newark, NJ.

Walking through these rooms and seeing how furnishings changed showed me just how lucky I am to be writing to you about it all now from a fully upholstered IKEA Strandmon wing chair in an indigo inspired fabric with no less than three pillows around me.

The American Museum and Gardens are located just outside the gorgeous city of Bath which, of course, has the famous Roman baths, but let’s face it, it’s also Jane Austen and Bridgerton central.

You can easily spend an entire day at the American Museum and still wish you had more time. For myself, I could have spent the whole day imagining the story of this little girl holding her little carved dog in one hand and scrunching up her pinafore in her other.

The name of the 18th century New England artist who painted this portrait is lost but he would have been one of many “limners”—itinerant painters.

The museum tour begins with Native American artifacts and model dwellings, then a room dedicated to religious artifacts from New Mexico, and carries on through fifteen period rooms to the late 1800s finishing with a folk art gallery, quilt gallery, and rotating special exhibitions.

Made by women of the Penobscot tribe, Maine, 1840-60. Hood made of wool trade cloth, decorated with silk ribbons and colored beads from Europe.

There’s a cafe on site, a shop, and those unforgettable gardens. Highly recommended!

Live, Laugh, Log Cabin, LAST CHANCE

Ann and Kay have cooked up a Knit Stars class all about log cabin knitting, a way of knitting that can fill a lifetime with endless fun. Enrollment is open until midnight tonight, and the classes launch in November. Come see what the fuss is about!