Romance on a Toboggan

Toboggan Party, glass negative, ca 1910-1915. Source: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.

The social aspect of tobogganing with friends is an enjoyment that can be experienced on snow or in water. Today's post shows images of winter tobogganing, with water tobogganing images to follow at a later date.

In today's modern world the sport of tobogganing might be considered too childish for adults with hectic lives, but a century ago, it was used as a social event for all ages, and especially as a romantic pursuit at a time when chivalry, chaperones and decorum often stood between two interested parties. 

In Sketches from America published in 1870, John White states "...a toboggin is made to hold at least two persons, as in the practice of the sport these two persons are usually of different sexes..." He goes on to explain that the person who steers the toboggan is at the back and can choose the snowbank he wishes to end up in when he upsets the craft and tumbles into the snow with his seat mate of choice. How clever.

Tobogganing, Quebec, 1863. Credit: Library and Archives Canada, Acc. No. R9266-919 Peter Winkworth Collection of Canadiana

Tobogganing certainly was an event enjoyed by all levels of society, including Lady Dufferin, viceregal consort of the 1872-1878 Governor General of Canada, who held toboggan parties on the grounds of Rideau Hall. (For more on composite photography, see my post here.)

"The Toboggan Party", Rideau Hall. This illuminated composite photograph is from Lady Dufferin's personal album. c 1872-1875. Source: Credit: William James Topley/Library and Archives Canada/PA-008492

Around the same period, Outing: The Gentleman's Magazine of Sport, Travel and Outdoor Life, Vol IX Oct 1886-1887 states that, "At present every Canadian city has its toboggan clubs with their elaborately built and prepared slides." The article, Snow-shoe and Toboggan by Newell B. Woodworth, goes on to say that in November 1884, the Saratoga Toboggan Club in New York had the first designated slide in the United States, as opposed to untended natural hills and slopes. 

Saratoga Toboggan Club at their custom-built, members-only toboggan slide, ca 1884-1885. Courtesy of the Saratoga Springs Public Library

By 1886, the Saratoga club slide had been moved to the Glen Mitchell Hotel where it became the longest in the nation running with almost 2,000 feet of iced surface.

Boston, Mass. had an informal toboggan run in Franklin Park prior to 1904 when a large slide was created to provide the public with an alternative sport to ice skating.

Toboganning [sic] scene at Franklin Park, Boston, Mass. C1904 Panoramic. Source: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.

In Burlington, Vermont, the Charles H. Emerson & Co. manufactured wood products including his patented STAR toboggans, promoted as being, "The Best Flat Toboggans Made". 

[Advertisement for Star toboggans, showing people sledding in daylight] / Phoenix Litho. Co., Chicago. C1886. Source: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.

Near Wilmington, Delaware, the Winterthur Museum is a good place to look for snow images, including these next two showing the social aspects of tobogganing.

[Tobogganing for all ages, undated.] Courtesy, the Winterthur Library, Winterthur Archives

[Tobogganing by horse, undated.] Courtesy, the Winterthur Library, Winterthur Archives

Since I've shown you enough photos of the bottom of a toboggan slide, what about one from the top? Taken during the 1922 Ottawa Winter Carnival, the toboggan slide ran alongside the drained Rideau Canal locks and down to the Ottawa River. If not a participant, the best vantage point was on the stone terrace of the Chateau Laurier which was also the launch point of the slide. 

Rideau Canal Toboggan run, Ottawa Winter Carnival, 1922. Credit: Canadian National Railways/Library and Archives Canada

Tobogganing on an iced slide of this magnitude would be exhilarating, don't you think? 

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Anita Mae Draper's historical romances are written under the western skies of the Saskatchewan prairie where her love of research and genealogy yield fascinating truths that layer her stories with rich historical details. Anita's short story, Here We Come A-Wassailing, was a finalist for the Word Guild's 2015 Word Awards. Her novellas are included in Austen in Austin Volume 1, The American Heiress Brides Collection, andThe Secret Admirer Romance Collection. Readers can check out Anita's Pinterest boards for a visual idea of her stories to enrich their reading experience. Discover more at:
Website - www.anitamaedraper.com
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Put on that Party Dress!

***Leave a comment at the end for a chance to win a new book!

Feedsack dress, courtesy National Museum of American History

By Marilyn Turk

The Christmas festivities are here and we reach back into our closets for that holiday wear that only comes out in December. For many of us, it’s the only time of the year we wear red.

Children are decked out in their special jolly clothes for church or to take pictures with Santa. Little boys may be seen wearing ties and vests while little girls twirl in satin, taffeta or velveteen.

But what did people wear in the Depression? What festive clothes did they have? Many mothers couldn’t afford store-bought clothes, so they made their children something new to wear out of something they already had – like flour sacks.

By the time I came along, the store my grandmother ran was no longer in business. However, it was attached to her house, so I strolled through the mostly-empty store looking into vacant glass cases and bare shelves. That’s the first time I saw it. On one shelf there was a stack of fabric in various prints. I liked the prints, but when I touched it, it was rough and stiff. My mother explained to me that they were old flour sacks that people used to buy from Grandma to make clothes.  I looked at Mother like she was crazy and said, “I wouldn’t want a dress made out of that scratchy stuff!” Mother laughed and told me it wasn’t too bad after it had been washed a few times. I doubted it would ever be soft like my clothes though.

And yet, in the Depression, people were just happy to have something new. Women made shirts for boys and dresses for girls out of the material that flour and other goods came in. Even feed sacks were used to make a variety of household items like curtains, quilts, towels, and even underwear and diapers!

When the flour mills found out how the bags were being reused, they began making the bags in color and then added lively prints. Manufacturers even pasted on paper labels so they’d be easier to remove than the stamped-on labels. By the 1930’s, manufacturers competed with each other by hiring artists to design the prints. The trend was great marketing, and more companies that sold their products in sacks caught on. Women often chose their flour, sugar, beans, rice, cornmeal, feed and fertilizer, based on which fabrics they liked the best.

Not only were women being thrifty, they were helping the government during a cotton shortage.  After the war, rural women showed off their homemade fashions by competing in national sewing contests. Farmers often found out they had more feed sacks than they could use, so they were able to sell them back to the store to be resold. I wonder if that’s where my grandma got hers?

Magazines and pattern companies took advantage of the sack popularity and published patterns specifically for feed sack prints. Directions were even given for using the strings from the sacks in knitting in crocheting.

And it wasn’t only poverty-stricken families wearing these garments. A 1942 estimate showed that three million women and children of all income levels wore them.

However, as technology advanced, largely due to the war itself, many items were no longer packed in cloth bags. Paper and plastic was cheaper to produce and more sanitary and rodent-proof, and a new man-made material called rayon appeared on the market. Cloth bags practically disappeared, and clothes made from them disappeared as well.

Did you ever have a flour-sack dress or know someone who did?

A multi-published author, Marilyn Turk writes historical fiction about the coastal South. Her fascination for lighthouses spawned her popular weekly lighthouse blog @pathwayheart.com, and inspired her upcoming Coastal Lights Legacy series and her Lighthouse Devotions. Her novel, A Gilded Curse, will be released March 2016 from Heritage Beacon Fiction, an imprint of Lighthouse Publishing of the Carolinas.

Leave a comment (and your email) for a chance to win a copy of our brand-new book, Lighthouse Devotions.

May you have a very blessed Christmas!

CHRISTMAS DURING THE 1920s

ANNE GREENE here. 

The 1920s ushered in significant changes in American life. Most Americans acquired their first radios and automobiles and achieved the highest standard of living in the nation's history.

The celebration of Christmas changed as well. President Calvin Coolidge celebrated with the first national Christmas tree in the White House. He lit the sixty-foot fir in an impressive ceremony in 1923.

Cotton ornaments, inexpensive and unbreakable, enjoyed great popularity. By the late 1920s, however, Americans imported spectacular glass ornaments from Germany. In the 1920s, advertisers standardized the popular image of Santa Claus, originally created by German-American cartoonist Thomas Nast.

The Friend Telegraph on December 11, 1925, remarked in an editorial entitled "How Times Change": In Christmas seasons gone by, it was not considered good form for a young man to give his best girl articles of wearing apparel. To do so indicated that her people neglected to clothe her. A man’s gift had to be an album, a toilet set or something along that line.

In the 1920s Christmas giving grew more sensible giving the recipient gifts they could use. People bought more for the home. Rather than pictures and mementos, a chair, a new rug, dishes or silverware, labor-saving devices and even new-fangled cooking utensils became favorite gifts. “Give a woman something serviceable to wear or something she can use in her home and you gladden her heart. Give a man something for his auto, or something he can wear besides neckties, and you win his thanks.”

The 1920s became the age of flapper fashion and jazz music. New fashions in art and architecture, from art deco to modernism jumped into fashion. Frank Lloyd Wright built his ultra-modern homes. In 1927, Lindbergh made the first flight across the Atlantic. Hot toys included die-cast metal toys, the Raggedy Ann doll, and, toward the end of the decade, the yo-yo.

A Christmas Budget in the 1920s purchased such items as:

A Persian rug: $40.00

Winter overcoat: $18.50

Fountain pen: $2.50

Silk hat: $7.50

RCA Radiola: $115.00

RCA Radiola with loudspeaker: $150.00

One-pound box of chocolates: $6.50

Ladies’ silk umbrella: $10.00

Toy tool chest: $1.55

Juvenile model bicycle: $48.75

Girls’ ice skates: $5.00

Beautiful jointed doll with wig, dress, shoes, and stockings: $1.95. 

Victrola brand phonograph: $99.80.

One of the most popular dances, the Charleston, lent its name to a dress completely covered in fringe, that would move and shake along with the body's movement, revealing the legs. This embroidered or shawled dress invaded all of high society. These were the Fitzgerald years, and many of the period's actresses wore these fringed dresses in either short or long versions. This would make a popular Christmas gift.

In the News in the 1920s:

Prohibition Made Its Presence Felt:

Shortly after the Volstead Act went into effect, federal authorities issued an announcement that America’s newspapers included in the Christmas Eve edition: The use fermented wines for sacramental purposes during religious services is forbidden.

At an elite Christmas party attended by Charming H. Cox, the governor of Massachusetts, prohibition agent Harold Wilson seized four bottles of White Horse Cellar whiskey. A major scandal ensued, and the bottles disappeared under mysterious circumstances.

Headline of an article in the December 5, 1926, Providence Journal, urged procrastinating wives to show more thought during the holiday season. The article is accompanied by an illustration of an unnamed acquaintance who dreaded Christmas and spent the holiday in bed, with ice-bags at her head and feet.

Christmas Advertising in the 1920s:

(In 1897 Francis P Church, Editor of the New York Sun, wrote an editorial in response to a letter from an eight year-old girl, Virginia O'Hanlon. She had written the paper asking whether there really was a Santa Claus. It became known as the Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus letter.)

So by the 1920's the image of Santa had been standardized to portray a bearded, over-weight, jolly man dressed in a red suit with white trim.

Santa suggested the newspaper reader enjoy the following for Christmas dinner: Tradition dictated fowl, cranberry sauce, and mince pie or Christmas pudding, plus the usual items not absolutely required by rule, such as stuffing with the fowl, and rich giblet gravy, sweet and Irish potatoes, some kind of salad, fruit cake and Mincemeat pie. All these items could now be purchased at your local grocers.

Christmas Traditions in the 1920s:

Home-made Christmas cards became popular. They were often unusual shapes and constructed with foil and ribbon. These cards were too delicate to send through the post and people delivered them by hand. A gift of Christmas cookies accompanied the card.

The tradition of hanging the Christmas stocking was thought to arise from the following story: A poor man had three daughters. He was so destitute, he didn’t have enough money for a dowry, so his daughters couldn't marry. (A dowry is money paid to the bridegroom by the bride’s parents on the wedding day.)

One night, Nicholas secretly dropped a bag of gold down the chimney and into the house. The bag fell into a stocking that had been hung by the fire to dry! This meant the oldest daughter had a dowry and could marry.

The same gift was repeated later with the second daughter. Determined to discover the person who had given him the money, the father hid by the fire until he caught Nicholas dropping down a bag of gold. Nicholas begged the man not to tell anyone what he’d done, because he didn’t want to bring attention to himself.

But soon the news got out, and when anyone received a secret gift, he thought that Nicolas gave the gift. Because of his kindness, the church proclaimed Nicholas a Saint.

Besides the many unfamiliar Christmas songs filling the air, Jingle Bells, Winter Wonderland, and Let It Snow, Let It Snow were popular. And, of course, people sang the Christmas Carols we all know.

Christmas really was not so different from the way we celebrate Christmas today.

Which one of those 1920s gifts would you have given the man in your life? Leave a comment for a chance to win Anne’s newest release, MARRIAGE BY ARRANGEMENT.

ANNE GREENE delights in writing about wounded heroes and gutsy heroines. Her second novel, a Scottish historical, Masquerade Marriage, won the New England Reader Choice award, the Laurel Wreath Award, and the Heart of Excellence Award. The sequel Marriage By Arrangement released in November, 2013.  A Texas Christmas Mystery also won awards. She makes her home in McKinney, Texas. Tim LaHaye led her to the Lord when she was twenty-one and Chuck Swindoll is her Pastor. View Anne’s travel pictures and art work at http://www.AnneGreeneAuthor.com. Anne’s highest hope is that her stories transport the reader to an awesome new world and touch hearts to seek a deeper spiritual relationship with the Lord Jesus. Buy Anne’s books at http://www.PelicanBookGroup.com. Or http://www.Amazon.com.

Visit http://www.anneswritingupdates.blogspot.com for information on writing an award-winning novel.