THE VICTORIAN SOCIETY IN AMERICA
205 S. Camac St, Philadelphia, PA  19107 ~ Phone: 215-545-8340 ~ Fax: 215-545-8379

EMAIL NEWSLETTER
Memorial Day 2004

Welcome to the  MAY issue of the VSA's email newsletter.

VSA house tour, Santa Fe 2004
capital detail

Three years after the Civil War ended, on May 5, 1868, the head of an organization of Union veterans – the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) – established Decoration Day as a time for the nation to decorate the graves of the war dead with flowers.

Maj. Gen. John A. Logan declared it should be May 30. It is believed the date was chosen because flowers would be in bloom all over the country.

THE 38TH ANNUAL MEETING
 SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO
April 28 - May 1, 2004

The annual meeting was held successfully in Santa Fe, NM, which lived up to its billing as being like no other place in the south west.

Participants experienced the influence of complex cultures that have formed a legacy rich in traditions. From the centuries-old Native American inhabitants to the Spanish traders on the Santa Fe Trail, from the pioneers and cowboys to the struggles for independence and statehood.  All this molded a diverse heritage of art, literature, natural history, spirituality and architecture unique among regions.

Pictured is Montezuma Castle (1882), now home of The Armand Hammer United World College of the American West: it was one of the highlights of the Annual Meeting.   Originally it was the Montezuma Hotel developed by the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad where fashionable Victorians came ‘to take the waters’, and other liquids, no doubt.

At the annual meeting itself, in addition to its other awards, the VSA honored outgoing board member and past-President, Billie Britz, of Hastings-on-Hudson, NY.

 Executive Vice-President, John Simonelli, gave a warm tribute and presented Billie with a token of gratitude for 23 years of continuous service on the board, and longer still as a member.  We wish her well.

For a current listing of VSA board members and emeriti  click here.

The Annual Meeting next year is....

Annual Meeting
May 3-9, 2005
 

Memorial Day

Memorial Day was officially proclaimed on 5 May 1868 by General John Logan, national commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, in his General Order No. 11, and was first observed on 30 May 1868, when flowers were placed on the graves of Union and Confederate soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery.

The first state to officially recognize the holiday was New York in 1873. By 1890 it was recognized by all of the northern states. The South refused to acknowledge the day, honoring their dead on separate days until after World War I (when the holiday changed from honoring just those who died fighting in the Civil War to honoring Americans who died fighting in any war).

It is now celebrated in almost every State on the last Monday in May (passed by Congress with the National Holiday Act, P.L. 90 - 363, in 1971 to ensure a three day weekend for Federal holidays), though several southern states have an additional separate day for honoring the Confederate war dead: January 19 in Texas, April 26 in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and Mississippi; May 10 in South Carolina; and June 3 (Jefferson Davis' birthday) in Louisiana and Tennessee.

General John A. Logan
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, [LC-B8172- 6403 DLC (b&w film neg.)]
from www.usmemorialday.org/

 

BRITISH ARTS & CRAFTS

VSA member The Arts & Crafts Home is the place for the design and supply of Arts & Crafts Movement furnishings in the U.K.

From a fork to a dining table to a whole house,  Arts & Crafts Home specialize in the finest replicas of the greatest designers of the period, including William Morris, Voysey, Mackintosh, Dresser, Godwin, Pugin, De Morgan and Knox.

Mark Golding of British Arts & Crafts also provides the list of U.S. Arts & Crafts events listed at the VSA's Victorian Events page.

Visit their website at: http://www.achome.co.uk/

NanceeDees Ravishing Hats & Accessories

If you need an authentic Victorian hat to top off your costume, VSA member Nancee Jelsema has the perfect answer.

Nancee has specialized in providing new, authentic replicas of hats worn at the turn of the century, custom made with care and fine attention to detail. 

Visit: Nancee Dees Hats

VSA IN THE NEWS
read reports in a new window to keep the newsletter open
 

From The Durango Herald, CO

Durango resident Tom Doak, who is dressed as deceased Durango resident John W. Fulcher, speaks to a group of about 25 people on a tour of the Animas City Cemetery.

 Six members of the Victorian Society dressed up as past Durangoans and talked about the lives of those buried in the neglected cemetery.

Read report here.

From the Montclair Times

Inn is out of a preservation list

Ron Emrich stood before a meeting of Northern New Jersey Chapter of the Victorian Society at the Montclair Women’s Club to deliver a presentation on Preservation New Jersey’s list of the 10 Most Endangered Historic Sites in New Jersey.

Read report here.

From the Savannah College of Art and Design Campus Chronicle

Interior design professor Gillian Davies (left) and Vice President for Human Resources Susie Clinard accept the Victorian Society in America Preservation Award from Charles J. Robertson, chair of the preservation committee, May 1 at the Victorian Society in America’s annual meeting in Santa Fe, N.M.

Read report here.

From San Jose's Mercury News

Honors and accolades are raining down on the Conservatory of Flowers in San Francisco, the glorious Victorian-era jewel in Golden Gate Park that reopened to the public in September after a $25 million, multiyear rehabilitation.

Read report here.
subscription required

NEW BOOK
by VSA member

Philadelphia's Broad Street: South and North (Images of America)
by Robert Morris Skaler

Robert Morris Skaler, a forensic architect and architectural historian, has been collecting historic images of Broad Street for forty years.

A past president of the Philadelphia chapter of the Victorian Society in America and a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania School of Architecture, Skaler is also the author of West Philadelphia: University City to 52nd Street.

OBITUARY
Robert Devlin Schwarz, VSA Member

We regret to report the death of VSA member, Robert D. Schwarz, 61.

Mr. Schwarz, of Gladwyne, PA took the antiques business founded by his father in 1930, and turned it into one of the most respected art galleries in the United States. In the early 1970s he helped foster a renewed interest in nineteenth–century European and American paintings and the fine and decorative arts of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Philadelphia. Schwarz’s 1987 catalogue, A Gallery Collects Peales, is considered a standard reference, as is the gallery’s 150 Years of Philadelphia Still Life Painting, the first comprehensive survey of the subject.

As curator of the Stephen Girard Collection at Girard College from 1970 to 1980, he documented that important historical collection in a scholarly catalogue. Subsequently, he published more than seventy informative catalogues in conjunction with the Gallery’s exhibitions. The Schwarz Gallery has sold paintings and other works of art—American and European—to a wide range of private collectors as well as many of the country’s major museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brandywine River Museum, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Timken Museum of Art, and the Winterthur Museum. Robert Schwarz was a long-time member of the Art Dealer’s Association of America, The Art and Antique Dealers League of America, and La Confédération Internationale des Négociants en Oeuvres d’Art (C.I.N.O.A.).  

We welcome Mr. Schwarz's son, Robert Jr., who continues the Philadelphia gallery's membership of the VSA .

used with permission.

Francis M. Finch, The Blue and the Gray and Other Verses
(New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1909)
(frontispiece)

IN MEMORIAM

By the flow of the inland river,
Whence the fleets of iron have fled,
Where the blades of the grave-grass quiver,
Asleep are the ranks of the dead;
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment day;
Under the one of the Blue,
Under the other, the Gray.

Excerpt
The Blue and the Gray
Francis Miles Finch (1827-1907)

full text at:
http://www.pa-roots.org/~memorialday/bg1.html

AND FINALLY..

Your staff of one at the email newsletter, being an Oscar Wilde aficionado, is pleased with the the increasing interest in ornamental sunflowers.  The sunflower is one of only four major crops of global importance native to the United States (blueberry, cranberry, and pecan are the other three).

Having recently toured New Mexico I can report that Native Americans have been using wild sunflower for food and medicine for at least 8,000 years. Archeological evidence suggests that Native Americans began cultivating and improving the sunflower as early as 2300 B.C. Thus, sunflower cultivation may predate cultivation of the "Three Sisters" of corn, beans and squash. The seeds of sunflower were usually roasted and ground into a fine meal for baking or used to thicken soups and stews. "Seed-balls", similar to peanut butter, made from sunflower butter made a convenient carry-along food for traveling. Roasted sunflower hulls were steeped in boiling water to make a coffee-like beverage. Dye was extracted from hulls and petals. Face paint was made from dried petals and pollen. Oil, extracted from the ground seeds by boiling, provided many tribes with cooking oil and hair treatment. Medicinal uses included everything from wart removal to snake bite treatment to sunstroke treatment.

When the colonists and explorers sent seed from the New World back to Europe, the sunflower was treated mainly as a curiosity and a garden flower. It was not used as an edible crop again until it reached Russia. In Russia, the Holy Orthodox Church forbade the use of many foods, including many rich in oil, during Lent and Advent. The Russians eagerly accepted the sunflower as an oil source that could be eaten without breaking the laws of the church. Russians also enjoyed sunflowers as a snack food. In the past 50 years, Russians have bred sunflowers for high oil content and improved disease resistance. In 1966, an open pollinated Russian bred cultivar was introduced into the U.S. This and other cultivars began the first sustained U.S. commercial production of the oil seed type of sunflower.

Sunflowers are easy to grow provided they have direct sun. Hence the name! Well-prepared, fertile soil will yield large flower heads and the meatiest seeds.  Tall growing varieties should be thinned to stand 2 to 2 1/2 feet apart in the garden and staked to help support the seedhead under windy conditions. With the wide assortment of old and new sunflower varieties available, surely one or more will find a way into your garden this spring.

web site links

Let us know what you think of the e-newsletter and what you like to see in it.

UNTIL NEXT TIME
visit us on the web at www.victoriansociety.org

The Victorian Society in America
205 S. Camac Street
Philadelphia, PA 19107
info@victoriansociety.org

Copyright 2004. Victorian Society in America. All rights reserved.