The Age of Homespun by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Author:Laurel Thatcher Ulrich [Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-41686-5
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2001-12-08T16:00:00+00:00

Watercolor portrait of Denny Sockabasin, daughter of a Passamaquoddy chief, at a British Fort, 1817. COURTESY ABBY ALDRICH ROCKEFELLER FOLK ART MUSEUM, WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA

The outside of Molly Ocket’s pocketbook, open.

COURTESY MAINE HISTORICAL SOCIETY, ON LOAN TO MAINE STATE MUSEUM, AUGUSTA, MAINE

Women were more likely to embroider than to own a pocketbook. Ebenezer Punderson owned a tent-stitch pocketbook worked by his wife or daughter. Matthew Patten received “a purse workt in holes with Creall [crewel]” from the wife of a friend. He didn’t have the vocabulary to identify the technique she used, but it was surely queen stitch, which was worked on a canvas and did indeed produce small perforations like tiny buttonholes.42 Eli Twitchell would have been perfectly comfortable, then, putting his cash in an ornamental wallet. Whether Molly or some other person transformed the twining into its present form, we do not know. Twitchell’s is a “double pocket-book” like Punderson’s, though its two side-pleated pouches were sewn into a lining made from green wool. Twitchell used his pocketbook. The binding on the edges is almost worn through, exposing the blue wool used to baste it.43

Twitchell’s father, fourth in an unbroken succession of Joseph Twitchells, was one of the original grantees of Sudbury-Canada. Born in Sherburne, Massachusetts, he became captain of the militia, town clerk, representative, judge, and sometime guardian to the Christian Indians at nearby Natick. According to Twitchell family lore, Indians came to the old homestead long after their father’s death “to see if there was not something still due them.” That is probably true. During Twitchell’s lifetime, Natick Indians had control over their own affairs. As land sales whittled away their original grants, the remaining Indian inhabitants were increasingly dependent on the white men who employed them as farm laborers, surveyed their land, indentured their children, and administered their estates. By then most of his descendants were in Bethel. The population growth that hounded Indians out of Natick took the descendants of Englishmen to Maine. In the 1760s, Twitchell bought up the best mill lots and nearly all the land on which the compact part of Bethel now stands. Although he remained in Sherburne, four of his sons became Bethel residents.44

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