A Rose Blanket: Response to Readings

There are so many things in the world today that we overlook not realizing that if we take some time we might find some history in them. Things such as architecture, the objects inside of the structure along with landscape. These things can provide us with information of the way people lived, what they did, and how or why they did things.            

I found it to be quite shocking and interesting when reading “The Architecture of Racial Segregation: The Challenges of Preserving the Problematical Past,” by Robert Weyeneth and “White and Black Landscapes in Eighteenth-Century Virginia,” by Dell Upton. The reason I find it to be shocking and interesting is because this is the first time that I thought of how architecture and landscape have the ability to be objects of study and help us learn about history, especially the topic of segregation. Both of these articles discussed the different ways in which architecture and landscape segregated blacks and whites. For instance on plantations the main house was for the white owner and the other smaller buildings around the main house were used for slaves for either work or their living quarters. By studying all of these objects we can get a glimpse of how both whites and blacks lived on a plantation. The things that were used in these buildings can help us identify how life was different for whites and blacks. Not only is a plantation example but also at the time the Jim Crow Laws were enacted and “separate but equal” was considered to be fair we can see that by certain architecture, objects in these structures, and landscapes that everything was not equal and fair. That is an important part of our history but one many do not like to bring up or talk about. However, the evidence of these objects speaks more than written documents.

Going back to the 1800’s objects that were used in homes and/or businesses explain to us a lot about history as well. For example, the spinning wheel. The women of New England used the spinning wheel to create clothes, fabrics, and other “fancy works” that were used in that time era. The object that I studied in the book The Age of Homespun, by Lauren Thatcher Ulrich was a rose blanket. The rose blanket was becoming quite popular and they were being seen and sold all over the country due to production factories with power machinery. However the particular blanket in this book was a homemade one determined by the fact that there is a center seam, which identifies it was homemade. The person who created this blanket had probably seen friends or neighbors with one but couldn’t afford to buy one and therefore made one. This makes me wonder if the wedding gown I am researching was homemade because the women couldn’t afford to buy one. Therefore through my research I will be looking to find similar wedding gowns made in the 1850’s that were produced in a factory by machinery. This will be able to help me perhaps understand the reasoning for creating the homemade wedding gown the way it is.