A house filled with adventures

[This article first appeared in the Bloomington, Indiana Herald-Times (see http://www.heraldtimesonline.com/stories/2012/03/10/homes.a-house-filled-with-adventures.sto). Click on any photo to enlarge.]

The living room of the refurbished bungalow is filled with artworks, books and mementos of countless travels.

John Linnemeier has led an enviably free-spirited life. He’s a Vietnam veteran, a former oil rig worker, a longtime house painter, an investor, and a talented photographer. He has visited more than one hundred countries while traveling the globe. He’s the author of the highly entertaining memoir, “How an Average Man Lived an Adventurous Life.” But his home shows that he is by no stretch of the imagination merely “average.”

Red alert! The Starship Enterprise crashes into the wall above the fireplace.

When a visitor steps through the front door, the eye is greeted by a wonderful jumble of colors and shapes, books and statuettes. Built-in shelving covers three walls of the living room, and window seats are upholstered with colorful textiles. A large model boat and a dancing bronze Ganesha face each other in one corner; an African mask is eerily lit from beneath by unseen spot lighting. A new fireplace surround has replaced the original (removed long ago while the house served as a rental). Above the mantel, a model of the starship Enterprise is frozen in the act of crashing into the wall, which is painted in trompe l’oeil style to show the plaster wall breaking beneath the impact, exposing the bricks of the chimney beneath. A dialogue balloon above the explosion contains a furious epithet in Klingon.

Suspended at the top of the stairwell, an Indian ship, an airplane, disco balls and colored Christmas tree ornaments share airspace.

“We consulted an expert in Klingon before painting, “ John laughed.

He owned the home as a rental for twenty years or so before deciding to move into it.

John explained, “It was five bedrooms, and I turned it back into the original three-bedroom configuration by taking down a wall that had divided the living room. The neighborhood was very glad to see a real person moving back in.”

Some of the whimsical (and beautiful) objects have personal meaning for him, while others simply make him happy. Like the impish brass face fixed into the wall near the bottom of the fireplace, or the light fixture shaped like the Michelin Tire Man, or the six-foot-long wooden cargo ship suspended above the stairwell, surrounded by disco balls and golden Christmas tree ornaments.

The home is filled with mementos of John’s many trips abroad.

“I like eclecticism,” John said. “I collect things I like. I don’t care if they’re antiques or not. I just like them for their own qualities. I’m interested in cool-looking stuff, and boats are cool! I have seven or eight models of boats, without even being particularly interested in boats as such.”

John’s current décor was made possible by plasterer Hugh Hazelrigg, who fashioned the fireplace and added soft curves between walls and ceiling in an upstairs bedroom; Vince Edwards, who helped design the new fireplace and the pergolas; and carpenter John Williams, who did work throughout. Clarity Design built the handsome living room shelving to accommodate the owner’s objects d’art, countless books and travel journals.

Plasterer Hugh Hazelrigg created a new fireplace surround with overhead arch to replace the original, which had been destroyed years ago when the living room was subdivided to make two rooms.

“I always admired artists, but wasn’t able to create my own,” John said. “Then I realized that things like interior decoration, or photography, require an eye, but you don’t need to be good with your hands.” His photography contains interesting abstract shapes that upon closer view resolve themselves to be reeds reflected in still water, or the angular fractals found inside a halved red cabbage.

Light is important to John. Both the living room and the kitchen offer between five and nine different forms of lighting to suit any mood. The window seats were added specifically to lure people to the natural light coming in the windows. Upstairs, a small dressing room enjoys its own special window seat overlooking the pond below. This was specifically installed for the enjoyment of John’s wife Gail.

In the upstairs bathroom, the mirrored walls with niches for artworks dazzle the eye with their countless reflections.

In the upstairs bathroom, virtually all the walls are covered with mirrors and mirrored tiles. Reflections break into infinitely smaller pieces because of the mirrored niches that contain small art objects, duplicated endlessly by the glass walls.

Being so close to the university, the Linnemeier home is surrounded by other houses that have been converted into student rentals. Why did he willingly move into a student enclave?

“It’s a nice house,” John shrugged, “why not? I like students! I’ve gotten to be friends with several of them. My advice to anyone who lives in a student neighborhood is to get a white noise machine. They can party all night and you won’t hear a thing. You’ll see them the next day and smile, and you won’t have to call the cops.”

The front of John’s bungalow.

The house is always evolving to accommodate new objects and new artworks. The decoration in the home reflects the important things in John’s life: whimsy, individuality, freedom, beauty.

“What the heck, we’re in the midst of this adventure of life, so live it up, and don’t be scared!” he said. “The most common regret of people who are dying is that they didn’t live their own lives, but lived instead as others expected them to. We should learn from this, so that on our deathbeds, we can say we gave life our best.”

He finished, “I feel happy each day when I sit here in this living room. I finally feel as though I have a house I could die happy in.”

 Read more about John’s self-published memoir at http://www.amazon.com/How-Average-Lived-Adventurous-Life/dp/1438912803.

 

“The Lady of Lost River”

A version of this story first appeared in the Bloomington, Indiana Herald-Times in June of 2011, http://www.heraldtimesonline.com/stories/2011/06/25/homes. qp-3931499.sto. This beautiful home is now for sale and might not retain the features seen in these photos for long. Click on any photo to enlarge.

“The Lady” has faced the road near Orleans for 140 years.

Halfway between Orleans and Paoli, at the side of State Road 37, stands a beautiful old Victorian farmhouse that passing motorists always admire. Surrounded by three old silver maples of immense size, this Orange County landmark is formally known as the Turner House.

“It was built by the Huddleston family, and came into my family in the late 1800s,” explained owner Joana Jones, who was born a Turner. “Four generations of Turners have lived here.” The Turners were dairy farmers and added elaborate Italianate brackets and window trim to the exterior of what had originally been a plain rectangular house. They also extended the house at each end with large floor-to-ceiling decorative bays with large windows.

The built-in china cabinet and fireplace are original; the cabinet also opens in back, on the kitchen side, to serve as a pass-through.

Ceilings are ten feet high, keeping the old home cool on hot summer days. Original features include transoms over every doorway, a unique china cupboard in the dining room that opens into the kitchen on the other side so dishes can be passed through, and a lovely staircase with the original balusters and rail.

“One of the best things about growing up in this house was playing hide-and-seek,” said Joana’s adult daughter Jordana. “There are about a hundred good places to hide. The basement is pretty infamous! If you’re little you can hide behind the curtains; when I was young I hid inside the bed among the pillows. There are lots of old wooden chests around the house that you can climb into. And the back stairway was great.”

Several generations of young family members have entertained themselves by sliding down the banister.

This second stairway is small and narrow, with a bend, rising from a closed door in the dining room directly to the master bedroom above. Another game was sliding down the banister rail; both Jordana and Joana laughed at the memory of playing on it as girls.

“You can really build up some speed on that railing!” Jordana said with a smile. “There are photographs of us stacked up on the banisters. The house was great also for sleepovers and dress-ups.”

The front door opens onto a long hall with the staircase; on the left and right are the living room and family room. Behind them are the modern kitchen and the dining room. An addition at the back of the house contains a study and a luxurious bathroom that replaced an earlier incarnation. Bear in mind that homes of this era did not originally have running water or indoor bathroom, so for many decades there was only a single bathroom (added in the early 20^th century) on the main level. An upstairs bathroom was added just before Joana’s mother was married, to save her the indignity of having to go downstairs in her wedding gown to use the bathroom there.

Bedrooms are furnished with quilts, satin coverlets, ornate curtains and floral wallpaper.

Joana inherited the home when her parents died, and moved there with her daughters. She thoroughly updated the kitchen and bathrooms, along with new plumbing, wiring and HVAC, giving the old home a complete new infrastructure and adding a third bathroom. The house had been white for decades; Joana painted it a soft salmon with contrasting colors on the trim and the Italianate brackets, in the style of the San Francisco “Painted Ladies.”

“You see these window and door openings in this one room?” she said, standing in the family room. “Each one represents sixty to eighty hours of work, stripping eleven coats of paint. When we stripped down to the wood we found shadows of dentils that used to run along the top, so we made new ones to match.” She added, “I thought this ‘old lady’ just needed a facelift, but she actually needed a heart and lung transplant.”

The original house was built before indoor bathrooms existed. Subsequent bathrooms are retro in style but modern in comfort.

Elaborate wallpaper and window treatments have been added. The home has a classic Victorian feel to it.

“Many of our furnishings today are so utilitarian that we need to add decorative elements to add interest,” Joana observed. “But Victorian furnishings are so ornate that nothing else is really necessary.”

Joana has dubbed the house “The Lady of Lost River” because the river runs close to the property. This curiosity runs along the surface of the ground in places but vanishes several times to run underground.

Joana’s daughters are now grown. Both live in the Pacific Northwest, and she has a grandchild there. Joana oversees a non-profit (the Asian Children’s Mission) that requires frequent travel to Asia. Therefore she has made the painful decision to leave the family home for good.

“It’ll be hard,” said Jordana, her voice trembling. “I’m delighted to have my mother inOregonnear me, but it’s still hard to think there’ll be no going back. It’s sad to think that this may be my last time visiting here.”

Carved gingerbread in the gable end.

“I really hope that the new owners will respect the house and take care of it,” Joana finished, her eyes swimming with emotion. “One of the last things my dad said to me before he died was ‘Joana, take care of the house.’ That last drive out of the driveway will be hard, let me tell you. But I’m excited about starting a new chapter.”

See the Web site www.ladyoflostriver.com for more information and photos.

Why I Love My Weave-It, part two

This is an update of my previous post at http://housesandbooks.wordpress.com/2011/08/03/why-i-love-my-weave-it/ Click on any photo to enlarge. 

The Weave-It afghan on the back of the couch adds color to an already-colorful room.

After I acquired a vintage Weave-It last year, the time felt right to attempt to make my first afghan. The Eloomination website has many vintage illustrations of Weave-It projects including afghans (see http://www. eloomanation.com/projects.php), so I set to work making about 300 colored squares which I joined together into a checkered composition reminiscent of my first attempts in quilting years ago.

The colored squares were woven with medium-weight Mochi yarn, and the black squares with the wool-silk blend made by Manos of Uruguay. Although the yarns superficially looked like they had the same thickness, the black squares ended up much thinner and webbier than the colored squares, which made me nervous about the stability of the project. Each square was joined to the next using the “tail” of yarn left over from weaving. The piece was delightfully soft and yielding to the hand, a delight for those who enjoy the tactile pleasures of good yarn, but as the project grew in size and weight it began to pull the seams apart. The squares were made from knitter’s yarn and had a pronounced tendency to flex and stretch diagonally along the bias, which contributed to the overall instability. I ended by getting out the sewing machine to run lines of expanded zig-zag stitch along every seam in order to stabilize the piece.

I'm always cold at night while my husband is always warm. The Weave-It blanket can be used on one side of the bed without slipping off, thanks to its flannel backing.

Because I was still uncomfortable with the flexibility and unexpected heaviness of the piece, I feared that with constant use the outer rows would stretch out of place permanently. Therefore I gave up on the concept of “afghan” and went with “small blanket” instead. I backed it with flannel, tacked the layers together at the corners of every square like a “tied” quilt, and ran narrow seam binding around the edges. It seems to function well now with no stretching.

The variegated Mochi yarn created squares with nuanced shadings of color. Note how the Weave-It blocks interlock like 2-dimensional Legos.

This project ended up costing much more in materials than I had expected, but a knitter or weaver with a large “stash” of leftover yarn to use up would find the Weave-It a wonderful way to use up bits and pieces. Each square requires about seven yards of yarn.

Looking back at many of the vintage afghan patterns on Eloomanation, many of them featured embroidered patterns which probably served to stabilize the inherent diagonal stretchiness of a Weave-it block. Despite this one flaw inherent in the nature of a Weave-it block, I would like to make another blanket using this technique, a larger one this time to test how far I can go using the Weave-It.

The new blanket will have soft, rich colors like Monet's garden paintings. No checkers this time.

One would think that a heavier blanket needs to be stronger. I suspect that a queen-size blanket made with Weave-It blocks might require a broad non-Weave-It border made of store-bought cloth that would be attached around the outside edges to take the stresses of a sleeper pulling up or pushing down the blanket during the night. Alternatively, the backing might have to be made of something more substantial than flannel. I’d be interested in hearing from other Weave-It weavers who have made their own blankets.

A new home built from old parts

[This article first appeared in the Bloomington, IN Herald-Times, http://www.heraldtimesonline.com/stories/2012/04/07/homes.old-elements-make-unique-new-home.sto. The thing that particularly struck me was the fact that a completely new home could have historic significance. Click on any photo to enlarge.]

The home's distinctive two-story red portico is made from the steel skeleton of the old "karate building" on South Walnut (itself built as a car dealership in the 1920s).

Tucked into a corner of the Clear Creek Trail stands an amazing house filled with weathered metal beams, repurposed wood and limestone slabs. Its red two-story metal pergola catches the eye of passers-by, who stare at the building and ask each other, “What the heck is THAT?”

Inside, the dining area is set inside the massive framework of a steel gantry from a stone mill. The back door once guarded a bank vault. The 1930s elevator has an extendable brass gate. Windows from the old RCA factory and the Odd Fellows building are now elements of the interior design. The pergola outside is the steel skeleton from the karate school onSouth Walnut streetthat was demolished a few years ago.

The front door is framed by the beams of the 10,000-pound iron gantry from an old stone mill near Cascades Park.

Despite the presence of so many industrial materials, the home is spacious, airy and filled with natural light.

“This is basically a collection of the history ofBloomingtonandMonroeCounty,” explained owner Randy Cassady, of Cassady Electric. “It’s historic, and it’s preservation. We collected a tremendous amount of architectural salvage from demolition sites that was just too good to throw out. Once something is thrown away, it can’t ever be gotten back.”

Tamby, his companion, grew up in the white farmhouse visible from the front door. As a girl she had no idea that one day she would live on the site of the old Forburger-Harris stone mill in a house that she designed to showcase her significant other’s collection of architectural salvage.

“Randy had stored so much material in different places,” she explained, “that when we decided to build, we thought of incorporating it into the new home. And it just grew and grew.”

Randy and Tamby in their home. Tamby designed the home herself to incorporate elements from Randy's collection of architectural salvage.

“It was a huge amount of work,” Randy admitted. “It took a couple of years to get things going. We’d come out here to clear the land, and we’d sit and think about it. Tamby built a series of models. Our friend John Seeber helped motivate us and to recognize the beauty hidden within this once abandoned stone mill.”

The south-facing location enjoys a picturesque view of Clear Creek winding across the property. To reach the home you must ford the stream in a vehicle, or abandon your car and walk across a footbridge. The metal pergola outside has been painted the same color as the bridge on Clear Creek Trail, a stone’s throw away.

Ceiling trusses came out of the old Von Lee Theatre; at lower left you can see much of the gantry, with drive chain still in place.

“You should see it on a full moon!” said Tamby. “The shadows are awesome.”

The process of building the home was “like an adventure,” they both agreed. They can reel off the origin of virtually every element inside the home. For instance, their wooden ceiling came from countless 2-1/4” heartwood pine subfloor planks from the old RCA factory. The thick pieces were halved to emphasize the color of the wood before being attached to the curving ceiling. The half-round ceiling trusses came from the VonLeeTheater. The corrugated iron roof of the old storage building on the property was refashioned as the front of the breakfast bar, while the limestone pillars at each end were abandoned spalls found on the property. The textured glass of the kitchen cabinets fronts came from windows in the old Woollery mill. The cabinets were constructed by a craftsman in Fishers, Indiana who specializes in building wooden model airplanes.

This view from one of the two upstairs lofts shows the 1930s elevator from the Ryan Jewelry store on South College, with its expanding brass gate.

The gantry that encloses the dining area weighs 10,000 pounds and consists of enormous beams and gears. The drive chains that once powered the stone saw inside it are still in place. The mechanism came from the abandoned Tucker Stone mill in the Cascades Park area.

“Deciding whether to paint the interior steel was a big deal,” Tamby said. “We decided to leave it as it was, and just put a polyurethane sealer on it to protect the patina. We knew we couldn’t fake that.” The battle-scarred dining table beneath it had been discarded by the French Lick hotel but was perfect for the home’s industrial decor.

The master bedroom is lit by discarded storm windows from the Odd Fellows building.

“The elevator came from the Ryan’s jewelry building just south of Cartridge World,” said Randy. “We repaired it and got it working again.” The exterior lights hanging from the pergola were discarded by Assembly Hall. The upstairs bath fixtures are unused vintage 1956 showcase models from Bower Mechanicals onCollege Avenue, and the gleaming 1902 resurfaced tub also came from French Lick.

The front of the breakfast bar incorporates abandoned limestone spalls and recycled rusty roofing from the shed on the property. A large antique stove will soon be installed on the back wall. The gray door to the right is from an old bank vault.

Over the years Randy and John have filled several storage facilities with salvaged items, all of which had been discarded by other people. It’s useful to have access to large machineryand strong men with creative minds and invaluable skills. “Redneck engineering!” Randy said with a grin.

The couple’s respect for their community’s history is impressive.

“Each piece by itself might not be historic, but when you collectively put the pieces together, you get a feel for our community and our heritage,” Randy observed. “There’s nothing wrong with tearing down a piece of junk, but there could be one good piece in it that deserves to be saved. We put together something that meant something to us. We’re very proud of it. It celebrates where we came from, and what we hope will always continue. And it’s home.”

The steel portico or pergola was not itself used as the basis for the new home because it was too large. It provides architectural emphasis for the much-smaller new home behind.

What will the new Modernism look like?

The village maidens of the original 1913 "Rite of Spring," danced by the Ballets Russes.

Everyone is familiar with the story of the riot that broke out at the 1913 Ballets Russes premiere of “The Rite of Spring.” The modernist choreography by Nijinsky introduced movements that were completely novel and strange: dancers moved heavily, turning their feet inward, pigeon-toed, instead of lightly with toes out, according to long custom. Igor Stravinsky’s clashing, dissonant music was filled with unfamiliar tempos and sounds. No wonder that the audience felt confused and challenged, having shown up expecting well-mannered dancers in tutus and tights, pirouetting to pleasant orchestral sounds.

"Nude Descending a Staircase." Much of contemporary art still owes allegiance to Duchamp and Dada.

1913 was also the year of the infamous Armory Show in New York City, which introduced Americans for the first time to European avant-garde art. Works shown at the show included Duchamps’ “Nude Descending a Staircase,” which one outraged art critic referred to as “an explosion in a shingle factory.” Teddy Roosevelt himself declared “That’s not art!” Nonetheless, Cubism and Dada would inspire generations of artists to come. Many of the artists of the Armory Show are considered masters today: Duchamps, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Munch, Picasso, Kandinsky, Rodin and Rousseau.

Literature in 1913 was a hotbed of new ideas and innovations. James Joyce was working on “Ulysses,” T. S. Eliot was writing “the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Proust published “Swann’s Way,” Ezra Pound was writing verse. The writers, artists, and musicians working around this time are still famous today. It was one of the greatest outbreaks of creativity in Western history.

Les Demoiselles D'Avignon was painted in 1907 by Picasso. This image confirmed the presence of an ongoing revolution in art.

We commonly assume that the 1800s ended when the 20th century began. But in reality, the Victorian era lingered on for about a decade while the new century got on its feet. The 1910s represented the true beginning of the modern 20th century, with its innovations, shocks, defiances and creativity. Out went the horses and buggies, the corsets, top hats, tea gowns and gloves. In came automobiles, the Turkey Trot and the Foxtrot, women with bobbed hair, free love, Cubism, Dada, the Fauves, free verse, freedom from all the old constraints.

2013 will be the hundredth anniversary of the Armory Show and “the Rites of Spring.” We are poised at the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century. What will the new version of modernism for the 21st century look like and sound like? It’s certainly already present here around us and perceptible to those who have been paying attention. Many people believe that it will involve a blossoming forth of innovative new computer technology that will extend into the various branches of art, literature and music just like the last round of Modernism did. The Computer Age will also transform medicine and the practice of science. But can it leave as lasting an effect as Picasso, Stravinsky and Duchamp, or will it fall short? Some of us will embrace the new paradigm, but others will turn away like the elderly Victorians did at the Armory Show, waving their hands in consternation and objecting “That’s not art!” In just a few more years, the emerging patterns and trends will become clear, and that will be when the 21st century truly supersedes the 20th.

 

On the love of chickens…..

My beautiful Hamburg hen, Humbug.

Some people are dog people, while others are cat people. There are also chicken people.

Years ago our neighbors acquired chicks and launched an urban flock. I watched with fascination, and wrote an article for the newspaper about people who keep chickens. A year or two later I got my own chicks and became a chicken person myself.

Keeping chickens opens your eyes to many things. In our society we are accustomed to people making jokes about their stupidity, or jesting about killing, eating and even tossing them, but there is nothing intrinsically ridiculous or mirthful or idiotic about a chicken. Those who believe that chickens are risible and absurd creatures have either never lived with them or have encountered them only in a context of raising them to kill, rather than caring for them as pets.

Spots and Little Gray bathe in loose soil at the bottom of the driveway. Spots was an Ancona and was the alpha-hen who occasionally crowed like a rooster.

Chickens have great dignity as they stalk their yard, feathers gleaming in the sun, pointed combs quivering. They are inquisitive creatures, social and very aware of their surroundings. Because of their origins as shadow-dwelling jungle fowl, they see light frequencies that we cannot recognize. The iridescent feathers of my black hen were probably a gleaming and glorious ultraviolet that I was unable to perceive. Hens recognize human friends and canine enemies. My old flock used to greet me with cheers when I appeared on the back deck, dashing back and forth excitedly on the other side of their fence, calling to me. Two of that flock used to fly up onto my shoulder and perch there with obvious pride that they had attained a higher level than their heavier and less-agile fellows. Whenever I gardened, I would let them out of their enclosure to help me dig (they would seize the worms that I uncovered). When I was done, they would follow me willingly back to their enclosure and let me shut them up again.

Little Gray was named while she was still a fluffy little gray chick, and never acquired an adult name. We could never figure out whether she was a Minorcan or a White-Faced Spanish.

They basked in the sun. They did “chicken-yoga” by stretching one leg backward and extending the wing on that same side in parallel to the leg. They scratched at the ground to make cool, dusty wallows. When the 17-year swarm of cicadas emerged; the entire flock combined ate less than a cup of grain for several weeks, preferring to swallow the insects whole, head-first. They loved the mulberries that fell onto their enclosure from the tree above. They had moods, like people do; they delighted in fair weather, were alarmed by snow and became grouchy during heavy rain. They stood on tiptoe to peer at dry leaves that had become embedded in the walls of their enclosure. They chased each other good-humoredly around and around the coop (once during this play, one of the hens reversed direction and jumped around the corner at the one that was chasing her, with the chicken equivalent of “BOO!” causing a flurry of feathers and squawks from the started pursuer).

Each of the birds had a very distinct personality. For the first time in my life it became obvious to me that the meats we eat come from creatures that are sentient and have personalities. The only reason I didn’t become a vegetarian, as I was tempted to do, was because I was already living with too many significant food restrictions, and ruling out meat protein would be sentencing myself to a near-starvation diet. This saddened me and resulted in my eating much lower on the food chain: more fish, virtually no red meat. (It’s likely that fish also are sentient and have personalities…but I have to draw a line somewhere, alas.)

This prize-winning Silkie was featured at the Monroe County Fair, 2010.

But keeping chickens in the city was illegal. A friend and I “outed” ourselves to the city, saying: ”Look at us, we are good citizens, and we keep chickens. Please legalize our pets so we don’t have to break the law.” The city listened, and passed an ordinance allowing small flocks of city fowl. The ordinance, however, was so strict that I could not continue keeping hens and had to dissolve my flock.

The new chicks, like the old hens, are heritage breeds from Murray McMurray hatchery: a Delaware, a Silver Leghorn, a Gold-Laced Wyandotte, a Red Cap and a Hamburg.

After a gap of some years, the city recently tweaked the chicken ordinance again. I am delighted beyond description to be able to keep a flock again. For years I have missed the cheerful sound of clucking hens in the back yard. I am happy to report that at this minute I have five heritage breed chicks living in a big box beneath a heat lamp in the basement, and we have built a weathertight coop in the yard inside a new predator-proof enclosure. If this unseasonably hot weather continues, the chicks will be outside in their new home very soon.

We hung wire fencing on the sides and top of a canopy framework, with a kennel gate at the near end. The coop is boxlike, with a shingled shed roof and doors that open outward for easy access and cleaning.

An outstanding woman from a small town of the 1800s

Maud Showers at 16. This is her wedding photo, courtesy Jim Holland.

In honor of Woman’s History Month I write today about Maud Showers, a farmer’s daughter from Indiana, born in April of 1863. Her existence was the single biggest surprise I uncovered while researching my book Showers Brothers Furniture Company: The Shared Fortunes of a Family, a City, and a University, which will be published later this spring by Indiana University Press. (See http:// www.iupress.indiana.edu/product_i nfo.php?products_id=155680 and also http://www.amazon.com/Showers-Brothers-Furniture-Company-University/dp/0253002036/ ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_1)

Showers Brothers furniture company, one of the largest furniture factories in the nation during the first two or three decades of the last century, was located in Bloomington, Indiana. It lasted for nearly 90 years under four generations of family control, and ceased operations in the late 1950s. Thousands of men worked for the various Showers factories over many decades. But over the long passage of time, an important fact was completely forgotten—beginning in 1887, one of the partners at Showers Brothers was a young woman and suffragist, Maud Showers. Married at the age of 16 to one of the three Showers brothers, Maud had no advanced schooling. When her husband died unexpectedly of a fatal bacterial infection caused by tonsillitis, she was only 23, a single mother with three little children. But the day before her husband died he made out a will leaving her his one-third interest in the furniture company. She would remain a full partner for almost 25 years more.

If Maud had been a detriment to the company, her two brothers-in-law, James and William Showers, would have bought her out to get rid of her. Instead, they recognized the fact that she was an outstandingly intelligent person with excellent organizational skills, and they drew up formal partnership papers and welcomed her as their partner, allowing Maud to take the place of her husband with the firm. She remained active with the company for nearly 25 years, and served as vice president on its board of directors when the business incorporated. Maud was an activist and organizer for the cause of women’s suffrage, which in the late 1880s was debated in many states and on a national scale, and she helped bring the famous Susan B. Anthony to town to speak for the cause of women’s suffrage. Maud drew up a petition to the Indiana legislature demanding votes for women and took it to the factory with the request that the workmen sign it (only one refused!). The Equal Suffrage Club to which she belonged was quite large and indicated the progressiveness of the community at that time.

We think of Victorian women as tightly corseted, prone to fainting, physically helpless, and powerless due to the lack of the vote. What I found to be the norm in Bloomington was something completely different: an entire generation of women who worked ceaselessly to relieve hunger, filth, disease, and homelessness. Maud was an indefatigable organizer who went on to help obtain a Carnegie Library for Bloomington. She also organized Bloomington Hospital, funding it largely through a series of public carnivals and bake sales, and she served for the remainder of her life as an officer on its board. Maud and the other Showers women lobbied for improved public hygiene at a time when unpaved roads were covered with horse manure, people burned garbage in their back yards and used privies, and wells provided water that was contaminated by effluvia. She was the only woman member of one of the first development teams in town (The Real Estate Association) and she invested in rental housing, which had always been in short supply until that time in Bloomington. She also served for much of her adult life on the board of directors of Bethany Park, a Chatauqua-like summer camp for grownups run by her church in nearby Martinsville. Maud went on to marry two more times. She traveled widely, including to “the Holy Land” and to California, and she seems never to have stopped to take a breath.

The thing that strikes me most is that although Maud is mentioned constantly and admiringly in the newspapers of the 1880s and ’90s, she was largely unnoticed in her later life as she aged and her obituary omitted much of what she had done in life. All memories of Maud’s business and social accomplishments were forgotten over time by her community and even by her own descendants. Attitudes about the proper sphere for women’s activities devolved during Maud’s life, so that women’s accomplishments of the 1800s were viewed with disapproval by the citizens of the early 1900s. Bear in mind that our entire notion of “the housewife” is a 20th-century construct that bears little reality to the daily life of a Victorian woman. They were indeed expected to raise the children and provide the daily menus,  but they were also expected to work outside the home on behalf of their churches and communities to improve the public welfare. They could — and did — function as businesspeople in what we think of as a man’s world (two other Bloomington widows of considerable wealth were also active in business at that same time following the death of their husbands). But this acceptance of women’s activity appears to have suffered a sea change during the early 1900s. Although Showers Brothers hired women workers to do men’s work at the factory during World War I, the company fired them all in 1921, not long after women had finally won the right to vote. Suffrage appears to have triggered a horrible and decades-long nationwide backlash against women’s opportunities. By the 1920s the home was firmly viewed as the proper sphere for women, not manufacturing or business. The emancipated “New Woman” of the 1880s and 1890s was a thing of the past by then, and the nation became the worse for it.

Betty Friedan’s book “The Feminine Mystique” investigated “the problem that has no name” — the vacuity and frustration of being a full-time homemaker. Maud would not have understood that concept, because she never experienced anything like that in her own life. Based on the example of all of the Showers women (not just Maud), the life of Victorian wives was not limited to the four walls of the house but was bounded instead by the entire breadth of the community and the nation beyond. Wherever there was something to be improved, or a need to be filled, these indomitable ladies formed a team to address the problem, rolled up their sleeves and got things accomplished. Maud is a shining example of a Victorian woman from a small town in the Midwest who selflessly used her opportunities and energies to benefit and improve her community.