This post is about my vintage sewing machine adventure of this past week. Actually, the inspiration for the adventure goes back some years, when I was doing family history and discovered on a census that my Great Grandmother Catherine Sandman Young had been, as a young woman of 16, a seamstress/dressmaker. She remained a seamstress all her life. In the beginning, she sewed uniforms for the Schuylkill Arsenal in Philadelphia. We don't often think about how clothing was made in the pre-industrial days of manufacture. Whole armies had to be clothed and women often were the main manufacturers of these uniforms.
Originally, in the Colonial period, fibers were farm grown and processed locally, turned into fabric (such as linen) at local mills, processed at Fulling Mills (you can see the ghostly reminders in the names of roads. There is a Fulling Mill Road near where my cousin lives in the Villas). Finished fabrics were purchased and cut and sewn by hand in the home, or in some cases in local cottage industries by tailors.
Most people had two sets of clothing, a work set, and a "Sunday go to Meeting" set.
Once, I sewed a costume by hand for a Coloial volunteer job I had. It takes a long time, even for someone who has long experience of sewing. There are statistics for this; it is estimated that a man's shirt could take about 10 hours to sew by hand. By sewing machine, the estimate was an hour and a half.
I am the fortunate inheritor of both my Great Grandmother Catherine Sandman Young's 1929 Singer Bentwood sewing machine, and her daughter's 1955 Singer 301A sewing machine which she gave to my mother and my mother passed down to me.
Two or three times over the past decade, I have wanted to fetch the 1929 Bentwood from the attic for various reasons, most recently I wanted to bring it to my Seniors' Group for a theme we had on family heirlooms. But I couldn't find it behind all the stuff in the attic and I am too old and creaky to manage those attic steps carrying something heavy, but a week ago, my sister went up with me and together we located it and she brought it down. Unfortunately the key to the Bentwood case was gone. it had been tied to the handle by a blue ribbon which disintegrated. We looked but couldn't find it.
I called my sewing machine repair man, Chuck McGowan, who has repaired my 1955 Singer 301A
for me a couple of times. Most recently he repaired it so I could work on a project for the Haddon Fornightly Annual Group Art Show in March 2023. I sewed a piece for that show and won the Founder's prize, $250 which covered the fabric and the repair and the replacement case that I bought from Chuck. The original case was fabric over cardboard, like old luggage, and it had fallen apart.
I was so excited to have the 1929 machine downstairs but disappointed not to have the key to open it. Chuck McGowan told me I would never find a replacement key because they are so often lost over time but that I might be able to get the case open if I had the right screw driver. I looked it up on YouTube and sure enough there were instructions on how to use a screwdriver to get the case open, but none of my screwdrivers worked. Another tip they had was to cut off a section from a wire coat hangar and beat it flat on your anvil. I had no anvil, so I went to my favorite local family owned hardware store and told them my story and they helped me find two screwdriver candidates. Happy ending - one of the two screwdrivers was long and flat and thin enough to do the job and I opened the case and Great Grandmother's machine was out in the light once again.
>p/>
I want to know everything all the time, so of course I began to do some research and found out, by serial number, that my 1929 was manufactured in Elizabethport, NJ, in what was, at the time, the largest purpose built factory in the world! I read the history of sewing machines (they go back to the 1750's, used for leather
I put in a call at a couple of antique stores and visited one or two with my sister. These tables used to be seen everywhere and they were popular for a time as gaardening tables. We all know how things disappear over time. These tables which were once everywhere, are now nowhere! But Antiques Emporium in Burlington City had one!
I don't drive far anymore because my vision is too poor for reading signs and I get lost. The gps doesn't help me for a number of reasons. But I decided I wanted that table - and there were complications. They could hold it for me if I bought it with a credit card but they no longer put a hold on items because people don't show up, so I tried to buy it with my credit card but they were having trouble with their new credit card machine. I decided to be brave and drive up there, with preparation in the form of written directions, and a pumpkin spice latte' I should be able to do it.
The weather this week was dreadful, torrential downpours, frozen rain, fog, cold and windy, but off I went. I did perfectly fine all the way to Burlington, up 295N in the rain, and exit 47B, but then a problem happened with 541 and I ended up lost in a gargantuan shopping center. When I finally found a road out, it took me to Mount Holly and I got so emotionally destablized I had to find a highway and go home (route 38). My former younger braver stronger self would have persevered, but I am not that woman anymore. I got old.
When I got home, I told my sister, Sue, what had happened and she said she had Sunday off from work and would go there with me. More torrential downpour but with better directions from my friend Nancy, who lives up near there, we got directly to the Antique's Emporium, on High Street, which is one of my favorite places to visit. Back when I drove all over, I used to go there about once a month to stroll and browse. I have been there with most of my friends at one time or another too, and often we had lunch at the restaurant that faces the river and Burlington Island, which changes ownership all the time.
The Antiques Emporium is enormous and used to be an automobile manufacturing plant for Chrysler cars. The building was rescued from demolition and got a new life as an antiques mall with a cooperative of sellers. Two nice gentlement helped put the beautiful table which was exactly what I had been looking for, in the back of my car and we drove it home and set it up and placed the queen on top for display. I neglected to ask if anyone knew the age of the table. The price had been $125 with a 20 percent discount in February!
At home, I put my 1929 Singer on display and admired it, then I did some research. A group incuding Singer and a German Culture Association gathered the data and put together a spread sheet of all the Singer sewing machine models and the places and dates of their manufacture. It took them 5 years from 2000 to 2005 to create the database and post it online. This was enormously helpful.
Next, I did some research on my table and found two almost exactly like it for sale on e-bay and etsy from antique sellers. Both were from 1920's. One was more complete and had a $675 price and one was a bit less perfect and was for sale for $350. So I got a good price on my table and I was delighted that the table was the same age as my Singer sewing machine.
It felt as though I should find out the same information on my other machine which was old but I had no idea how old. My mother used it and I have used it. I used to sew all my own clothes and I sewed my daughters until she went to school.
It works perfectly with the occasional help of Chuck McGowan, repair man. My Siner 301A was manufactured in 1955 in Anderson, North Carolina as one of the Centennial models for Singer's 1851-1951 Celebration. Chuck McGowan had told me that it was the best model they ever made! He had worked in a Singer factory. Singer factories are all gone now in the US as of the 1980's.
Sewing machines are a big factor in the lives of women. Two inventions that changed our lives in the turn of the century were sewing machines and bicycles. Sewing machines gave us a cottage industry to make a living and bicycles gave us mobility and both were more or less affordable, althoug $60 for a 1929 Singer was a pretty hefty price. It was after all, the era of the Stock Market Crash and the beginning of the Great Depression. I wonder how Catherine Sandman Young found the money to buy that machine or perhaps her husband bought it for her before he died, or her family. Whatever means of affording it, it was her life-saver during the Depression. My Grandmother Mabel, her daughter, and she sewed their way into rent and food for the children since both were widowed.
Once in the Ocean City Historical Society Museum, there was a display of late 1800's summer dresses. The intricate detailing, beading, pleating, tiny embroidered details, lace trim, just mesmerized me and I wondered about the young women sitting at the table sewing these garments which must have taken days. They were also so fussy, I couldn't imagine how constricting they must have been, to keep them clean and to do anything in them, especially with the strangling corset underneath.
Anything women do always ends up in the press or in literature as in some way connected to impropriety and so it was with seamstress/dressmaker work. If you browse around the history of this trade inevitably it is alluded that it paid so poorly some seamstresses were forced into prostitution to make enough to live. Hence, popular history hints seamstresses had a slightly scandalous resputation. This makes me angry. Laws and economics were stacked to force women into near slavery and prostitution no matter what they did. You could be a wife, or a cook, or a servant or a dressmaker.
First the mills helped women to escape this dead end, then the sewing machines and inevitabley the sewing factories, as bad as they were, they allowed for some independence for a woman outside marrital bondage and after widowhood.
My Grandmother of the 1955 301A Singer, worked in Stainton's Deparment store in the winter at Ocean City and on the Boardwalk selling tickets at the amusement pier in the summer. She had moved to Ocean City to care for her mother, Great Grandmother Catherine who had suffered a catastrophic stroke. In her spare time, Grandmother Mabel hand-sewed quilts for all her grandchildren. I still have mine but I used them and they are in tatters. I think the quilts were her Art form.
Visiting with these machines is visiting with my female ancestors and it is looking into Women's History. It is also thought provoking in pondering how some things manage to stay in the family over a hundred years when so many other things fall away over time. It makes you think too about those who recognize the importance of some items in the social history of people, like those wonderful folks who compiled the database of serial numbers for the rest of us.
This post is only about sewing machines, but it happens that I also have a 1919 typewriter! I don't know where it came from or how long I have had it; I can't remember a time when I didn't have it! But that is a story for another blog post!
Happy Trails! wrightj45@yahoo.com
