A Fancy Store in New York City

Shopping

I've been looking for Fancy Repositories or Fancy Emporiums in the U.S--- needlework shops. I realize that I was too old fashioned in starting with Philadelphia where I didn't find much. Old fashioned because Philadelphia, once the largest city in the U.S., was by 1850 down to fourth in size. New York boasted 500,000 people, four times Philadelphia's population (and that was before they annexed Brooklyn). See a post of Philadelphia fancy shops here:
https://womensworkquilts.blogspot.com/2018/02/fancy-stores-in-philadelphia.html

Woman outside a hardware store in New York about 1870

With so many resident customers New York might be able to support some mid-19th-century specialty stores. The city was the center of retail and wholesale buying so out-of-town shoppers came to Manhattan too.

I read the papers.

In 1846 Henry Lawrence advertised his new

Fancy Needle-Work Emporium.

"Importers of zephyr wool, canvass, patterns, beads....selected by himself in Europe."

He was located on John Street near Broadway.

Berlin work chair seat embroidered over canvas 

with zephyr wool (light wool yarns)

Berlin work was a mid-century needlework fad.

Three years later Henry was with Lawrence Brothers at the same

location with the same stock:

"Zephyr and Fancy Wools, Perforated Boards..."

The Lawrences specialized in Berlin work supplies or needlepoint wools and cards. 

The customer base seems to have been wholesale buyers from rest of the country.

Berlin Work book cover partially embroidered on blue perforated cardboard

The Lawrences had some competition around the corner on Broadway from

Madame Alixe Doubet and her fancystore.

Broadway was the center of retail in Madame's day.

When fashion moved to Fifth Avenue, the shop moved too.

Alixe Pauline Jacquot Doubet Lauzin (?-1874) was probably a French immigrant. I found records of Madame Doubet's and later Madame Lauzin's shop from 1851 to 1886. She must have remarried after first husband Francois Doubet died between 1865 and 1872. He is listed in the shop but also as a glass cutter.

After Madame died in 1874 the shop continued under Miss A.E. McCarthy.

A receipt from the 1880s.

"Miss A.E. McCarthy successor to Mme Lauzin"

This customer Ms. Kimball was from out of town, Salem, Massachusetts. Among the items on her  bill: Ribbon, fringe and tinsel cloth & a cloth hamper (some kind of container to keep fabric?) for $9.

The shop also made up a pin cushion (for $5.50) and made up a red cushion (for $7) for her.

Beaded pincushion

We presume Ms Kimball did the embroidery and they finished the projects---a service needlework shops still offer.

Diggs's Lace Bonnet Store in Boston 1852. 

It looks just like Sarah's Fabrics in downtown Lawrence on a game day.

There are several things that fascinate me about these fancy shops.

 One---that they are so similar to our needlework shops today.

By 1860 Alixe and Francois were no longer living above their store

and she listed her business as French fancygoods

Two---I keep running into French immigrants. We forget how French this country was before the Civil War. We offered refuge to many fleeing for their lives. They tended to be the upper class (France did not have much of a middle class) and they were broke. They had to work. Even the future King Louis Phillipe who lived in the U.S. for four years worked as a teacher at one point in his exile. Their skills were minimal---just class, French connections, manners and good taste. Alixe Doubet parlayed that into a career in the needlework business.

Miss A.E. McCarthy's trade card. She offered

"All kinds of Embroideries, Monograms and Crests made to order.

Patterns and designs made to order."

Hand-painted Berlin work pattern of a Newfoundland dog, 

imported from a German state.

Collection of the Cooper-Hewitt.

Three---They drew patterns. "Patterns and designs made to order." Did they offer patchwork patterns too?

Carrie Hall: Entrepreneur

Carrie Hackett Hall (1866-1955) in "Colonial" costume, 

dressed for a lecture about quilts.

Carrie Hall made a living through sewing all her long life. She began as a dressmaker in Leavenworth, Kansas, probably in the 1880s. 

Carrie Alma Hackett about the time she

arrived in Leavenworth

She was raised on a homestead farm near Smith Center, Kansas and after teaching at a rural school there she moved to Leavenworth. With a population of about 20,000 and home to an important Army base the city supported nearly 90 seamstresses in the first decade of the 20th century.

"Dress Making Parlors on Third Fall

Madam HALL and Miss MALLOY, Modistes"

Carrie elevated herself as "Madam Hall, Modiste." Married twice, she seems to have been employed through marriages, widowhood and separation.

Street cars in downtown Leavenworth, about 1910

That could well be Carrie climbing on the tolley on the right. I interviewed

people in Leavenworth who knew her. One told me she rode the cars to

work daily, reading the race track news.

During her career as a dressmaker she worked with at least two of Leavenworth's department stores and was probably nearly as successful as she liked to tell reporters. Her income went for a large house called Maplehurst, supporting two ill husbands (successively) and permitting her expensive hobbies such as book collections on Shakespeare, Abraham Lincoln and fashion. She may also have had a gambling problem. With two prisons and an army base Leavenworth had a reputation as just the kind of place a dressmaker could find a bookie.

Ready-made dresses from the 1928 Sears, Roebuck & Company catalog

After World War I the dressmaking business declined as inexpensive, mass-produced clothing in more casual style became the norm. Small's Department Store closed in 1928. Services of dressmakers like Madam Hall may have been needed for lavish weddings and formal occasions, but fewer fancy events occurred as the Great Depression changed the social fabric of the country. By the time the stock market crashed she was 62 and in need of some income.

Carrie realized she could turn one of her hobbies into a new career. She'd been stitching quilt blocks in the late 1920s. Being an obsessive collector she aimed to make one in every pattern. 

Most of her blocks are in the Helen F. Spencer Museum of Art

at the University of Kansas

The periodical publishing world was flooded with quilt patterns from about 1926 to 1940. She later wrote she little realized "the magnitude of the undertaking," but she made more than 850 blocks before she abandoned the task in the mid-1930s.

The Tonganoxie Nine Patch

Tonganoxie is a town 20 miles from Leavenworth, Kansas

Madam Hall developed a lecture about the history of quilts illustrated with her blocks. During the Great Depression she drove to nearby Kansas towns with the quilt patches packed in a suitcase and wore a Colonial dress of her own design. Another marketing idea: Creating an original block named for the town where she was speaking.

Sunflower

As her knowledge of quilt patterns grew she found herself conversing on the subject frequently with friends who, perhaps exasperated with the topic, suggested she write a book. The suggestion lay dormant until she discussed the topic with another Kansas quiltmaker, Rose Kretsinger. They found they had each been considering such a project and decided to collaborate. 

Photography by Mary Ellen Everhard must have cost 

quite a bit.

The quilt book, Carrie's index to patterns with a history of quilting by Rose, may have been another money-making idea, but it was the Great Depression. Little money seems to have accumulated in anyone's accounts.

The deluxe first edition---maybe 10 printed.

I do think Carrie (and probably Rose) paid a printer to publish the first edition of The Romance of the Patchwork Quilt in America in 1935. The Caxton Printers in Caldwell, Idaho, seems to have done subsidized books at the time. To add to everyone's financial problems Caxton burned to the ground in 1937, probably destroying many books authors had paid for. And she had a serious house fire the following year.

Once the book was out Carrie donated the quilt blocks to the art museum at the University of Kansas.  By the time she sent the last group she was 71; she no longer needed them for quilt talks as she felt traveling the circuit was too tiring.

Ben Hur's Chariot Wheel

Her finances were in terrible shape at the end of the thirties. In 1941 Carrie Hall was forced to leave Leavenworth due to a financial scandal. She had long had difficulty handling money. She'd borrowed  from friends and from the accounts of the clubs of which she was treasurer. The organizations demanded repayment when losses were discovered. Carrie at 75 with no cash assets sold her book collections, her  house and rental property and moved to Rigby, Idaho, ostensibly to stay with a newly widowed sister for the summer. But she never returned to Leavenworth.

She soon asked the art museum for the temporary return of her quilt blocks as she intended to make "a few bright colored quilt patches" and give a few quilt talks to start off a quilt business for her sister in Rigby. Sister (probably Agnes) needed the money, she confided, and she knew making quilts would help her sister's morale. She did not mention her own finances. Money may have been a life-long difficulty but morale was never one of Carrie Hall's problems.

She next turned to a new career using her knowledge of costume and sewing expertise. She began selling figures dressed in period costumes. The business, based in her last home in North Platte, Nebraska in the 1940s and '50s, prospered for several years.

See an article on Carrie's doll dresses by Laurie Baker in Doll Collector magazine:

https://issuu.com/antiquedollcollectormagazine/docs/german_wooden

Carrie, with her usual enthusiasm and craftsmanship, made hundreds of dolls. She remarked on working sixteen hours a day, but allowed that she no longer was chipper after a long work day. In late 1945, even after a serious illness, she talked of plans to enlarge and hire employees.

She died on January 5, 1955 at the age of eighty-eight of chronic heart disease. She was buried in the Smith Center cemetery near her family homestead.

Carrie Hall was an entrepreneur, an entertainer and a heck of a seamstress---many of us quilts professionals today have followed in her footsteps.

Without the embezzling----and no gambling. Both very bad ideas, Carrie.

Here is a link to the quilt block collection at the Spencer Museum:

http://collection.spencerart.ku.edu/eMuseumPlus?service=ExternalInterface&siteId=1&module=artist&objectId=17405&viewType=detailView&lang=en&actionListenerClassName=ch.zetcom.mp.presentation.tapestry.util.customCode.ActivateDetailTabPos2ActionListener

Cardinal Points may have been one of Carrie's own designs.