Sad News

John sorting piles of can metal (and other artifacts) over in Area 2.

It is with great sadness that I post this. John Farrell, who volunteered for most of this past field season at Wiawaka, passed away on December 27, 2013.

When John first contacted me about volunteering, he was very concerned that his health would be an impediment. I assured him that he was welcome, and that we'd work with whatever limitations he had. I had no idea at the time what an important role John would play.

John watching over Area 1, ready to map.

When he was able, which was most days, John would arrive early in the morning and hang out while I obsessed about the weather and finished coffee as other volunteers would arrive. Once on-site, John set up in his chair, positioned so he could see everything going on. In between wrangling bag tags and bags, sorting artifacts, and prepping maps John would identify mysterious things that came out of the ground and tell tales of the other terrestrial and underwater sites he'd worked on. He provided volunteers with an idea of the breadth of possibilities within archaeology and spun tales of some of the crazy things (good, bad, and indifferent) that can happen on digs.

I'm not sure John ever believed me when I told him how spoiled I felt having someone on-site who just made maps (and who would help walk volunteers through the process). And I never really believed him when he shook his head and grumbled at me when he dumped out yet another bag of non-diagnostic flat can metal. I will not forget John's contribution to the excavations at Wiawaka, nor his quiet mentorship.

John and I collaborating on something in Area 2.

You can read John's Obituary online here:
http://www.alexanderfuneralhomes.com/fh/obituaries/obituary.cfm?o_id=2363404&fh_id=13237

The Manufacture of Clothing Then and Now

Some early visitors to Wiawaka worked in the garment and textile factories of Troy and Cohoes, New York. The book, Maggie: Millhand and Farmer (Harrigan 2002) is an autobiographical description of life in and around these mills.

One of the Harmony Mills buildings, Cohoes, NY 2008. Photo by Daniel Case.

After being fired from her salaried job at the Harmony Cotton Mills, Maggie gets piece-work employment at Murphy's Mill: "I was paid for the pounds that I would wind off the tubes that came in wooden boxes from the jackspinner's frames. Taking the tubes of yarn from the boxes and placing them in the shelf of the winder where they were easy to reach and by keeping my ends running, it was an easy matter to take off a good day's pay.... On the same floor with the winders were the knitting frames, and also the brusher machine. All were run by young men, expert knitters and brushers. The men that worked the knitting frames would go over into the winders alley and take what combs we winders had filled, then knit the yarn into heavilyt irbbed cloth. The large rolls of cloth were put through a large machine called the Brusher; then a fluffy nap was brushed on it named fleeced lines cotton. Other workers would take it down on the elevator to the cutting room where it was cut, to be sewed into shirts and drawers for men and women, by girls and women who ran the sewing machines on the lower floor." (Harrigan 2002:69)

Compare the weaving of cloth and sewing of garments that took place in a single mill in the early twentieth century with the global involvement in the manufacture of a single T-shirt as reported by National Public Radio. In a fascinating report, they traced the manufacture of a shirt from the fields the cotton came from to final product: Planet Money Makes a T-Shirt.
 
Source:
Harrigan, Margaret Sheridan (2002) Maggie: Millhand and Farmer. Edited by Kathleen M. Gill. Peckhaven Publishing, Saratoga Springs, NY.

More on Georgia O'Keeffe at Wiawaka

Early on in my research on Wiawaka I found a newspaper reference to artist Georgia O'Keeffe having spent the month of June 1908 on the property. It seemed at the time that she stayed at what is now Wakonda Lodge, which at that point in 1908 was still owned by Spencer and Katrina Trask. O'Keeffe was one of several artists from New York City who were chosen, based on their skill, to spend time at what the newspaper article describe as Trask's property.

Click the image to see it larger.

Tonight, however, while transcribing one of the Wiawaka guest registers, I found the entry for Georgia O'Keeffe and several of the other artists. This suggests they may not have stayed in Wakonda Lodge but in Fuller House, Rose Cottage, Mayflower Cottage, or Pine Cottage. She stayed in Room No. 18, though there is no indication of which building that might have been. Further work with the guest registers and other archival documents may provide the answer...

Who Were These People? GIS and Wiawaka's Visitors

Back in January, I introduced GIS as a tool to help understand Wiawaka's history.  I will use this post to give some concrete examples of how this works.

Last summer, when I had the opportunity to do preliminary documentary research, I recorded some of the guest books. I wanted to explore who the visitors to Wiawaka were, and the guest books include information like the person's name, address, religion, how much they paid for their room, and how long they stayed. This information, coupled with information available in the census for their home-town (who they were living with, age, color, occupation, whether they owned or rented their home, whether they were literate or not, etc.) can paint a fairly detailed image of who visited Wiawaka. I used the sample data I collected to see what sorts of information GIS would reveal. Click on the images to make them larger and make the data easier to read.

The data I had to work from was a sample of one hundred guests who visited Wiawaka in 1931 (see Figure 1). Unfortunately, although the 1930 census has recently been made available, it has not been completely indexed for searching. New York is one of the states that has not yet been indexed, and I did not have time to manually search the census for individuals living in larger cities like New York City! So, I could not incorporate the census data in my trial run.

Figure 1: Sample entry page from a Wiawaka guest book. Courtesy Wiawaka Holiday
House Archives, Rensselaer County Historical Society, Troy, NY

Loosely using Fyfe and Holdsworth's (2009) study of small-town hotel guest registers from other locations in New York state, I ran analyses of the home residence data of 100 of Wiawaka's 1931 guests. The very limited sample that I used provided some interesting suggestions about Wiawaka's guests in the early years of the Depression. Please note: these results are extremely preliminary! More in-depth analysis is needed to draw any conclusions, but I did see enough with this data to convince me that I will be using GIS in my analysis. Here are a couple of examples of the analyses I looked at.

Using GIS, I mapped the location which each of the 100 sampled 1931 visitors listed as their home residence in the guest book. While each location shows up only once on the resulting map, each location may (and often does) represent more than one visitor.

Figure 2: Where visitors came from, and their 1931 "Center of Gravity"

1) Measuring the visitors' "center of gravity." I asked the GIS program to calculate a value known as the central feature of the points, or locations, that I mapped (see Figure 2). This shows the average location of all the points, taking into account both distance from each other and the number of individuals from each place (a location with many Wiawaka visitors, therefore, would have more influence or "pull" on the central feature than a location with only one Wiawaka visitor). The central feature for the sample of one hundred 1931 visitors was located just south of Troy. This, in and of itself, is not terribly interesting. However, by calculating the central feature for many years worth of Wiawaka visitors will show if, and how, the geographical demographic changed. For example, if the central feature for the 1920 visitor data is located further south than that for 1930, it will indicate that, in 1920, more people visited Wiawaka from New York City and vicinity than from Troy. To me, this data is interesting if it shows shifts and if it shows no shifts -- the implications of a changing demographic or one that stays the same are equally interesting.

Figure 3: Proximity of visitor residence to Wiawaka.

2) Proximity of visitor residence to Wiawaka. I used the GIS program to draw rings around Wiawaka at 50-mile increments so that I could see how far people were traveling to visit (see Figure 3). While Fyfe and Holdsworth found that most of the visitors to their hotels came from within a 50 mile radius (2009), this was true only for 30% of the sampled Wiawaka visitors. Curiously, there was a concentration of visitors coming from the ring representing a distance of 150 to 200 miles from Wiawaka, including people from New York City and northeastern New Jersey; Scranton, Pennsylvania; and Ithaca and Rochester, New York.

Figure 4: Mapping Wiawaka visitor residences and railroad lines.

3) Influence of the Railroad? Changes in transportation routes and technology have been used to explain changes in visitor patterns at sites, including hotels. These include road improvements, railroad lines, canal access, and later in the twentieth century, changes in automobile technology. To see if transportation routes may have played a role in the pattern of visitors to Wiawaka (especially perhaps to explain that large group traveling between 150 and 200 miles) I plotted the home residences of Wiawaka visitors on a map showing rail lines (see Figure 4). Interesting: all of the 100 visitors sampled from the 1931 guest register lived in a town or city along a railway line. The 150 to 200 mile distance from Wiawaka may represent the distance/travel time that visitors are willing to travel by rail to spend a few days at Lake George.


Sources:
Fyfe, David A. and Deryck W. Holdsworth (2009) Signatures of Commerce in Small-Town Hotel Guest Registers. Social Science History 33(1): 17-45

Noted Architect Linked to Wiawaka

In researching individuals associated with the Wiawaka Board of Directors, I found mention that Mr. Charles S. Peabody helped design the new boat house that was completed during the 1916-1917 season.(1) This boat house is still in use at Wiawaka; with it's bright red color and curved entryways, it serves as a recognizable landmark both from the lake and overlooking Lake George from high up on Prospect Mountain.

Wiawaka boat house, designed by Charles S. Peabody. Photo by Megan E. Springate.

Charles S. Peabody was an American Architect born April 8, 1880 in Brooklyn. He graduated from Harvard University in 1903 and enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, graduating in 1908 the second highest in his class of three hundred. Peabody worked for the architectural firm of Ludlow & Peabody of New York, well known for public buildings including churches, hospitals, and college buildings as well as skyscrapers. Charles S. Peabody was decorated by the Greek Government for his work designing a Temple of Youth in Athens, Greece commissioned by the Greek Government, the Greek Church, and a group of American philanthropists.(2)

Other buildings designed by Charles S. Peabody (several of which are on the National Register of Historic Places) include:
The Lake George Club
The Royal C. Peabody Estate (Wikiosco), Lake George
A "daring" plan for Brooklyn's Civic Center
Sheldon Jackson College in Sitka, Alaska

I don't have a full run of Wiawaka Annual Reports, but the ones I do have show Charles S. Peabody serving on the Advisory Board between 1923 and 1933. His wife served on Wiawaka's Board from at least 1913 through 1940.(3)

Charles S. Peabody died on September 10, 1935 at his summer home on Lake George.(4)


Sources:
(1) Wiawaka Holiday House (1917) Wiawaka Holiday House Annual Report 1916-1917. Wiawaka Papers, Box 2, Rensselaer County Historical Society, Troy, New York.
(2)  archINFORM (2011) Charles S. Peabody.
(3) Wiawaka Holiday House (various) Wiawaka Holiday House Annual Reports 1913-1940. Wiawaka Papers, Boxes 1 and 2, Rensselaer County Historical Society, Troy, New York.
(4)  archINFORM (2011) Charles S. Peabody.

Working Conditions

What were the living conditions of the women who worked in the textile factories in Troy and Cohoes who visited Wiawaka? What were their family circumstances? Their working conditions? What were there lives like, and how did Wiawaka fit into that?

One of the important aspects of their lives and identities was their work in the factories. What was working in a textile factory like in the early twentieth century? (Troy was known as "Collar City" as the place where removable collars were invented and manufactured in huge numbers.) I don't yet have specific information about the Troy factories; but below is a discussion of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City by Dr. Robyn Muncy, who teaches here at the University of Maryland in the History Department. Her discussion describes the working conditions in the factory (which she describes as an example of a "good" factory for the time) and in textile factories in general. She also talks about the women's lives and how they were perceived in the labor movement.  Though there is no mention of labor relations or the specific working conditions of the factory women in the Wiawaka records that I've looked at, this was the environment in which the women worked and in which Wiawaka was organized.

If you click through to watch this on YouTube (here), you'll find links to the rest of the discussions and presentations at this conference held on the anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. If you're not familiar with the fire and it's effects, you can watch the other videos and read more about it at the following excellent sites:

Remembering the Triangle Factory Fire 100 Years Later (1911-2011) by the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University. An interactive website presenting many different aspects of the Fire and the people it affected.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire Trial by Douglas Linder of the University of Missouri-Kansas City. This website explores the events in the legal context of the trial that followed.

About the Triangle Fire by Robert Pinsky of the University of Illinois. This site provides a brief history, and then presents both an eye-witness and photo-essay account of the events (be aware that the dead are present in some of these photos).

Threads of Wiawaka

This video is a short introduction to Wiawaka. I love the early photographs and am fascinated by the segments of early motion picture film taken at the property.  Enjoy!

If the video gives you grief, you can watch it directly at YouTube.

Artist Georgia O'Keeffe at Wiawaka

In 1908, Mary Fuller bought several acres of land adjoining the Wiawaka property to the north. This parcel was the location of a two-story Adirondack-style building that Katrina Trask built circa 1905 and used to house visiting artists. Katrina named the property Amitola; the building is now known as Wakonda Lodge. The visiting artist residence is a precursor to Yaddo, the Trasks' artist retreat which remains in operation in nearby Saratoga Springs, New York.

Several famous people are reported to have spent time at Amitola, including the artist Georgia O'Keeffe. In 1998, when the National Register of Historic Places nomination was written, no proof of her visit to the site was known.

During preliminary research for the Wiawaka Project, documentation of Georgia O'Keeffe's stay at Wiawaka was found in an issue of American Art News dated June 13, 1908 (Vol. 6., No. 31). An image of the article is below, with the sections mentioning Georgia O'Keeffe highlighted (click on the image for a larger, readable version):

News about the Art Students' League, American Art News, June 13, 1908 (Vol. 6., No. 31)

In the spring of 1908, Georgia O'Keeffe, then 21 years old, won a general scholarship to the Art Students' League in New York City for her untitled oil painting of a dead rabbit with a copper pot. That summer, she was one of twenty Art Students' League students to spend a month at Wiawaka. That fall, she stopped painting, convinced that she could never compete artistically with others in the realistic style. Four years later, she began painting again after taking a class that introduced her to a more expressionist approach to painting, and she went on to create a spectacular body of work.(1)

Georgia O'Keeffe, Untitled (Dead Rabbit With Copper Pot), oil on canvas, 1908. Collections of the Smithsonian Institution, Control No. IAP 82380053. Photograph of the painting by Peter A. Juley and Son, Smithsonian American Art Museum. (2)

References:
(1) Georgia O'Keeffe Museum.
(2) Search Results: O'Keeffe Rabbit