Son of Pineapple

 

I hadn’t intended to revisit Myth #12, but several readers have written mentioning more pineapple myths that are off-shoots of the original one (that the pineapple symbolized hospitality in the 17th and 18th centuries). In a nutshell, the pineapple-as-hospitality idea seems to have started in the early 20th century. In earlier times, it was merely a decorative motif. 

One reader writes, “I was also told by the tour guide at Mount Vernon that the pineapple in the bedroom was a subtle suggestion that the guest was no longer welcome. Perhaps a parting gift?” Another wrote that a visitor told her that when a homeowner got tired of their overnight guest, they would leave a pineapple on the guest’s bed as a message to move on. 

Yet another said that returning sea captains would stick a pineapple on the fencepost or set it on the front porch to let neighbors know he was home and ready for hospitality. I’m sure there are more.

For an excellent, exhaustive, and I think definitive article about the pineapple, you can’t beat Michael Olmert’s “The Hospitable Pineapple” in the Winter 1997-1998 issue of the Colonial Williamsburg Journal which is, sadly, not available online (you can always write to Colonial Williamsburg for a back issue). Professor Olmert teaches at the University of Maryland and one of his specialties is the 17th and 18th centuries. Here is a passage from that piece: “And here is what we do not know about pineapples: that they had anything at all to do with hospitality in the 17th and 18th centuries. It’s hard to imagine a ship captain sacrificing something so rare and expensive and tasty as a pineapple by spiking it on his door, his roof, or his garden gate–as it says on the card that comes with the little brass pineapple bookmark sold today in gift shops.”

Bingo–it is the gift shops sales clerks and other salespeople who perpetuate this myth for the boost it gives to the sale of pineapple-themed merchandise. And frankly, today it is true! After almost a century of repetition, the pineapple has come to symbolize hospitality. But no one has yet been able to point to an example of that association in the 17th, 18th, or 19th centuries. 

 

Myth #104: Front doors were built extra wide so that a coffin could fit through. These were called “coffin doors.”

Jenna Peterson, the assistant curator and educator at Schenectady County Historical Society, wrote, “I’ve recently started working at a museum, and heard my docents telling visitors about our “coffin door.” According to my docents, who have no idea where the idea came from originally but were told it by another docent who was told by another docent, the door was built as wide as it was so that a coffin could fit through it. Is this a complete myth, or something I’m just not aware of? I’ve not done a tremendous amount of research into historic architecture, but what I have done has made no mention of coffin doors. I’d love to see it validated or busted!”

     

     The easiest thing to do, when confronted by a suspicious statement, is to ask, “What is the documentation for that?” Then you might suggest that, until they can prove the authenticity of the statement, they should leave it out of their tour commentary.

   

 I checked with a couple of my favorite architectural historians on this one, even though I was all but certain a “coffin door” was related to the “coffin corner” myth (see Myth #58: Niches called coffin corners were built into staircases to allow people to carry a casket downstairs and turn the corner.”)  Ed Chappell, an architectural historian who is Director of Architectural Research at Colonial Williamsburg, says succinctly, “I think the idea is dreamed up.”

     

Senior Architectural Historian and author Carl Lounsbury goes into more detail, calling this myth one of those “foolish things that gets passed along.” And he explains why.

     

“As to wide doors in houses, most were primary entrance doors–either double doors and slightly wider single-leaf doors ranging from around 3 feel 2 inches to about 5 or 5 1/2 feet . . . Their size–height and width were symbolic of their importance as main entrances. However, few doors inside the house were wider than three feet—usually 2 feet 8-10 inches into main rooms, smaller for closets.  Now, if the tellers of tales would only think about it, the only place especially wide coffins could go would be through the main doors, which perhaps led into a room, but often into a passage. If the coffins were especially wide, they would not fit through secondary doors leading into parlors where most of the dead were laid out. What little I know about early wooden coffins suggests that they were no wider the width of a person’s shoulders. I am fairly large–my shoulders measure about two feet in width. Add an inch here or there for fitting the body in the box and the inch on each side for the board width and you get a coffin about 2 ½ feet in width at its widest.  But the point is, nobody ever designed houses with funereal prospects in mind. They were designed for the ease and comfort of someone entering and leaving a room (upright) and, as noted above, in just proportion to the hierarchical significance of the space being entered: exterior doors, public room doors, secondary room door, and subsidiary space doors. I am not sure why otherwise intelligent people seem to embrace these preposterous notions. I have heard it hundreds of times in descriptions of various features in buildings: like cross and bible doors—Really? on Moses Myers [a Jewish merchant] House in Norfolk? I rarely try to correct them anymore, but simply ignore the blather.”

Boston Gazette 1770 detail showing coffins

       

          Historic house administrators can’t just ignore the blather (much as they’d like to!), because they have to deal with docents and guides who may be passing along myths like this one. Letting these things slide only gives them credibility. 

Myth # 81: Thomas Jefferson invented triple-sash windows when he was in France to avoid the French door tax.

Virginia Mizel, Director of the Edmondston-Alston House in Charleston, SC, asked: “Was there ever a door tax in the South as there was in France? We have heard Thomas Jefferson invented the triple sash window to avoid a door tax while he was ambassador to France. Some southern tour guides state the door tax was also in place in here, which is why many homes from the 1800s have triple sash exterior windows serving as both door and window.”

Thomas Jefferson is credited with many inventions, but the folks at Monticello have been able to identify only one: a moldboard plow.  He did not invent the triple-sash window. The original sash window originated in the 1600s. Jefferson did incorporate triple-sash windows on the first floor of his home, Monticello. These could be opened like a window or used as a door. (Another problem with the statement is that, although Jefferson did live in France for several years, he did not build any houses there.) 

So any relevance to French door taxes is moot. If there were a tax on doors in France, would someone please let us know? I have it on good authority that there is no such tax today. 

As for door taxes in America, see Myth #1 on closet taxes, #11 on wardrobe taxes, #30 on mirror taxes, #75 on window taxes, and #78 on second-story taxes. If any tour guide mentions a door tax, ask him/her to specify the colony or state and point to the legislation. I cannot find any examples. 

Mary Todd Lincoln Hoax

a portrait that isn't Mary Todd Lincoln

This seems more hoax than myth, but either way, it’s one that has been going on for almost a hundred years. The New York Times carried this story a few days ago.

The painting was purported to be one Mrs. Lincoln had made of herself as a surprise gift for the president, but before she could give it to him, he was assassinated. Turns out it’s another woman’s likeness, and the painting was retouched by a vaudeville actor, no less, in the 1920s and sold to Lincoln descendants along with the heart-wrenching story. The forger changed the hairdo to look more like Mrs. Lincoln’s and added a brooch that showed a picture of Abraham Lincoln. The scam earned him a couple hundred bucks. Art conservators who cleaned the painting discovered the over-painting and realized it wasn’t Mrs. Lincoln at all. For the whole story, see 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/arts/design/portrait-of-mary-todd-lincoln-is-deemed-a-hoax.html?nl=todaysheadlines 

Myth # 78: People built one-and-a-half story houses to avoid the tax on the second story.

There are so many myths that involve taxes–can you stand one more?

Taxes are a complicated subject–what’s new there? In early America, most of the government’s money came from import/export duties on liquor and slaves and from port charges. Colonists paid several sorts of taxes but no income tax and only occasional taxes on real estate and personal property. The usual tax assessments due from individuals were the parish tax, which paid for churches, clergy salaries, and aid to the poor; county taxes, which paid for courthouses, bridges, and ferries; colony taxes, which paid for public officials and the Capitol Building; and in some colonies, the old feudal quitrent to the king, who legally owned all the land. (Property owners were technically only renting.) These taxes didn’t necessarily occur every year and they varied over time. Most taxes were based on the number of “tithables” in the household (white males over 16 and all slaves over 16), meaning those with the most slaves and the largest families paid the most tax.

I could find no mention of taxes on a second story in the colonies of  Virginia, Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Georgia, after having searched online databases of those colonies’ laws. (If you are not aware of this resource, see http://libguides.bgsu.edu/content.php?pid=65781&sid=486039 to find links to the laws of the 13 colonies.) I plan to check the remaining colonies–a tedious task–as the week progresses, but I do not expect to find any mention of a tax on the second story.

A one-and-a-half story house is just a one-story house with a finished attic for extra living or storage space. As the director of research at Colonial Williamsburg wrote so succinctly when this myth surfaced back in 1968: “One-and-a-half stories are simply cheaper to build than two.” 

Myth # 76: You can tell the age of a brick building by noting the glazed headers.

Bruton Parish Church tower built 1769 with glazed headers

Examine the bricks and learn the date–or so says this myth. If you see glazed headers, you know the buildings is older than 1750, because a law was passed in 1750 against burning hardwood. Hardwood is necessary to make fire hot enough to glaze bricks in a kiln. (A header, by the way, is a brick turned so the short end faces out instead of the long side.) 

It is not possible to date a building this way. “I have seen plenty of buildings built after 1750 with glazed bricks,” says Matthew Webster, Colonial Williamsburg’s Director of Historic Architectural Resources. It is true that hardwoods burn hotter. “Softwoods burn fast,” he says. “Hardwoods create a better and sustainable high heat.” But it is the potassium contained in hardwoods that helps the sand in the brick vitrify into glass.

“It’s not the heat necessarily that is required for glazed bricks,” explains Jason Whitehead, supervisor of Colonial Williamsburg’s Historic Masonry Trades and Brickyard. “It’s the potash that is released from hardwoods such as oak and hickory that then builds up on the bricks and reacts with the clay. This combo creates the glazing seen on the bricks that are making up the fire tunnels in the bottom of the kiln.”

Besides, there was no colonial law against burning hardwoods. “I have never heard of or seen evidence of any law forbidding the burning of hardwoods in brickmaking,” says Whitehead. Hardwoods gradually became scarce in colonial America because of their desirability in both England and the colonies. From the earliest years, English colonists burned hardwood to produce potash, used in making glass, for export to England where few hardwood trees remained.  

 

Myth # 75: Builders of early American houses built few windows to avoid paying the window tax.

Yawn . . . another bogus tax. Let’s all say it together: There were no taxes on — uh, hang on a minute . . . 

There actually was a tax on windows! Toward the end of the Revolutionary War, Virginia passed an emergency tax on homeowners based on the number of windows in their houses. (Hening’s Statutes, vol. 10, p. 280.) It was to last three years and it only counted windows with glass, which eliminated the lowest economic cohort that would likely have had only shutters because they couldn’t afford glass. However, this was a war measure, not a regular tax, so most historians discount it, insisting that there were no taxes on windows. I was unable to discover whether this war-time tax was ever collected, since the war ended shortly thereafter and it was, presumably, no longer needed. Also, this law pertained only to Virginia. Here’s the law:

“A tax or rate of one shilling for every glass window shall be paid by the proprietor of each inhabited house within the commonwealth in the month of September 1781, and so on in each of the three next succeeding years.” The law goes on to list other taxes, calling them “urgent necessities of this commonwealth” due to the war. 

This could be the basis for the persistent window tax myth. An online search of other colonies’ compiled statutes through google books yielded no other examples. Not all records of colonial laws are available online, but the ones I could access–Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and South Carolina–did not mention windows. I think it’s pretty safe to say there were no taxes on windows, except for that one little, temporary, exception in Virginia.  

Myth # 71: Women in early America were not allowed to use the front doors of taverns.

Wetherburn's Tavern in Williamsburg

This myth probably began when people assumed that practices from the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth originated in colonial days. 

 True, women in the colonial period didn’t go to taverns all that often, but there are documented instances of women spending a night in a tavern while traveling or dining at a tavern with friends or family. Balls, lectures, and other entertainments were occasionally held in taverns, and women certainly attended those. When women did enter taverns, they came through the front, side, or rear door, whatever was most convenient. 

 The custom of a separate ladies’ entrance seems to date from the Victorian era. Some nineteenth-century urban American hotels had a ladies’ entrance and a ladies’ waiting room in an effort to appeal to that market segment. Conventional wisdom has it that women were seldom seen in bars, and it is true that some “wild west” saloons prohibited women from entering at all. But many bars and saloons, whether in cities or in the western territories, accommodated working-class women with a separate entrance that served three functions, according to “saloon scholar” and history professor Madelon Powers [Women and Public Drinking, 1890-1920; History Today, Feb. 1995].

“First, it permitted them to enter inconspicuously and minimise public scrutiny of their comings and goings, an indication that even those bold enough to patronise saloons remained sensitive to the disapproving glances of their more conservative neighbours and peers. (On some occasions, men wishing to avoid public notice would also use the side entrance).

Second, and perhaps more important, women’s entry through the side door eliminated the necessity of their running the gauntlet through the establishment’s front room — the barroom proper — which in this era was still undisputed male territory with its stand-up bar, spittoons, moustache towels, brass footrails, and other symbols of ‘masculinity emancipate’, in the words of journalist Travis Hoke. Adventuresome though most saloongoing women were, they were not agitators; their aim was sociability, not social equality, and their stepping out did not include stepping into bar areas where they were not welcome.

Finally, the side door for women afforded them quick and convenient access both to the far end of the bar, where they could purchase carry-out alcohol, and to a second chamber in many saloons which was known as the ‘backroom’, where they could feast on free lunches and beer, socialise with their dates, attend social events, or watch small-scale vaudeville productions. By means of the ladies’ entrance, the saloon trade both facilitated and circumscribed women’s participation in saloon culture.” 

This sign was put up in 1934 in Troy, NY.

Myth # 67: Ceilings were lower back then because they kept the heat in.

(Heard by Sara Rivers Cofield on a historic house tour.)

This is a fact, not a myth–at least, it is true in the northern colonies/states. Lower ceilings decrease air space and so concentrate the heat from the fireplace in a smaller number of cubic feet. That’s why in the South before air-conditioning, houses were often built with high ceilings, so the heat would rise and leave the lower portion of the room a little cooler. And in the North, before central heating, ceilings were often built lower. 

Builders had all sorts of clever techniques to help keep a house cooler or warmer, techniques that are usually ignored or forgotten today when the thermostat instantly adjusts the temperature. To keep cool, they might site the house to face prevailing winds, put windows opposite one another to allow cross breezes, or build exterior fireplaces and chimneys rather than interior to dissipate the heat, build separate kitchens to keep the all-day cooking fires away from the main house, use central hallways with doors at each end to encourage a breeze, and build tall ceilings and large windows. As heating and cooling costs rise, we may well see a return of these techniques in new homes. 

Myth # 66: In the winter, itinerant portrait painters would work ahead, painting canvases with bodies and backgrounds, but no heads, so that come summer, they would have only to fill in the subject’s head.

Such a good idea! Stay home during the winter months and paint a stock of canvases with bodies and backgrounds, then ride out in the warmer months to find clients who could select a body and pay to have their head painted on it. A real time saver for both artist and sitter, right?

But there is no evidence for it. No artist or sitter mentioned in dairies or other written records that this practice occurred. No unfinished, headless portrait painted by an early American folk artist has been discovered in an attic or storage shed. (And the few unfinished portraits that do survive inevitably include heads.) No physical evidence, like overlapping paint layers at the neck or head, has been detected on existing portraits. Nonetheless, museum guides say that someone in the group inevitably asks about this whenever folk art portraits come into view.

It makes sense to us today, and it seems to explain the similarities in the clothing and backgrounds of some American folk art portraits. However, in portrait painting, artists typically start with the most important feature—the head—and work the rest around that. 

Because there are many examples of portraits that are highly similar in body and background, the myth spread. Scholars such as E. C. Pennington (Lessons in Likeness, 2011) and museums like the American Folk Art Museum, Cooperstown, the Columbus Museum, and Colonial Williamsburg point out the lack of evidence for this practice.