In the 1850s, in fact just about anywhere, you wouldn’t have seen anyone wearing denim pants or overalls. That’s because they were still coming… in the near future. Jeans fabric was being worn by sailors, the name coming from the color and city in Italy where they were made, bleu de gênes, or blue of Genoa.
It was when an immigrant to America went West to California for the Gold Rush by the name of Levi Strauss. He brought fabric for tents and the like. When he arrived someone told him, “You should have brought pants.” So, after a little experimentation he came up with his still-famous denim jeans. [Denim coming from the place in France where the material was manufactured, serge de Nimes, in 1873 Levi Strauss and David Jacobs co-patented the pocket design and added rivets.
Up until a boy reached right about the age of four or five years, it was the custom to dress them just as girls dressed. Boys wore dresses, and their hair was often kept long. What we need to remember is that there were no protective pants to go over the diaper being worn. Dresses really did make it easier. When a boy was around four or five years old he started to wear pants. It was called being “breached.” Pioneer boys at this age may or may not have worn the short pants with buckles at the knee, but boys at the turn of the century to about 1930 usually did.
The “knickers” were buckled at the knees as mother wanted when she could see, and then as the boy wanted most often once out of sight, either above or below the knee. Both boys and men used buttons to close their trousers, as the zipper as we know it today didn’t come along until 1917.
The zipper had several names before receiving that name, and the idea was worked on for quite a few years also. Elias Howe in 1851 patented an “Automatic, Continuous Clothing Closure.” Next came the “Clasp Locker” in 1893 invented by Mr. Whitcomb Judson. It was a man from Sweden, Gideon Sundback, who came up with the “Separable Fastener” (1917) that designed what we use today. The title zipper originated with the B. F. Goodrich Company, who put Mr. Sundback’s Separable Fastener in their new rubber galoshes (boots).
Being allowed to wear long pants, as dictated by parents, was a rite of passage for boys. It meant coming into adulthood, and during this era before child labor laws and mandatory school attendance it often meant going out and finding a job. Especially in the 1850s, schools in no way played the roll that they do now. On the Bottineau Prairie in Minnesota there was no school to attend.
With Osseo, Minnesota, just beginning to take shape, any school held would have been of the type called a “subscription school” with a tuition fee per child. School would have been held when their was no farm work to do, during the winter months after crops were in, and also during the summer between planting and harvest.
When boys changed over to wearing pants, girls of course continued to wear dresses. During the second half of the 1850s, an Ambrotype Photograph might have been taken of a girl wearing a pioneer-era dress: A simple dress gathered at neck and waist with pantaloons extending to mid-calf.
The Ambrotype photographic process was patented by James Ambrose Cutting of Boston in 1854. It uses what is called a "wet plate collodian process," which creates a negative image on glass. When the negative is backed with black it becomes a visible picture--everything is reversed: the background looks black, and the image, dark on a negative, is what can be seen.
As the country moved into the 1860s and the Civil War began, women’s dresses became fuller with wide skirts, many petticoats and hoops around the bottom. Metal weights were used in the in the hems, similar to those that are still put into window drapes and curtains today. Women’s undergarments were fastened with “vanity buttons” made from bone, and corsets used bone strips similar in shape to a tongue depressor, for support and shape. We can wonder at how these women ever stayed upright for a whole day while doing their daily work carrying around all of that garment weight.
It didn’t matter who you might be, when weather turned cold everyone’s concern would be keeping warm. If you have ever lived on a farm or land with lots of space, you will know how cold the wind can blow when nothing stops it. The layered look, so stylish in the 1970s, was not a new idea. Back in the 1850s, however, layering was done for warmth. Men and women alike wore shawls out of necessity.
Quilts, considered an important part of our American heritage didn’t originate here, but the craft was certainly developed. At the very beginning of the 1850s most would have brought blankets for bedding because fabric loomed in large quantity for commercial sale was on the cusp, nearing production. Even when this happened, quilts for every day home use were usually created from fabric scraps and old clothing. Elias Howe and Isaac Singer went to court over who held patent to certain parts of the new Sewing Machine. In 1854 Howe won, and after royalties were shared.
The new sewing machine was an invention of large time-saving proportion for women of the day. The first “Family Sewing Machine” manufactured by Singer went on sale in 1858. Nearly half of all American households had a sewing machine by 1885, the cost being just under twenty dollars for Demarest’s New Family Sewing Machine.
It would have been a luxury on the Bottineau Prairie in 1858, but an article of furniture that almost any woman would have enjoyed was a sewing table. These were small tables with shallow drawers, sometimes with drop-leaves, to hold the necessities such as thread and needle, and often could be moved with ease because of the wheels.
We at Quality Music and Books in Osseo, Minnesota are in the process of moving our store to a new location. During the interim, please visit us online by clicking this link: www.QualityMusicandBooks.com. Thank you!
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