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January 2011
By one of those happy accidents that nourish historians and magazines of history, an antiques dealer, sorting through the contents of the attic of a house in Mahopac, New York, in 1962, came across two notebooks that had apparently belonged to a Union soldier in the Civil War. She promptly bought them. One of the volumes contained copies of letters; the other, in a different hand, had a title page written in elaborate calligraphy, as shown at the left. This volume was a memoir, copiously illustrated with water color drawings pasted onto the lined pages of the notebook.
Throughout the summer and fall of 1898 a lady named Margaret E. Cody, aged seventy-five or there-about, was a reluctant guest of the county jail in Albany, New York. Mrs. Cody’s preferred residence was in Denver, Colorado, where she and her long-deceased husband had once been leading citizens.
“I am one of the pioneers of Denver,” she said proudly. “I helped to make that city what it is.”
For a lady of her distinguished background Mrs. Cody was in a most distressing predicament. She was awaiting trial on a charge of having attempted to blackmail George Jay Gould, the eldest son of the financier Jay Gould, who had died six years earlier.
1. Cathcart sails for Spain. Some account of his puerile adventures in the Revolution. He is captured by pirates, hauled to Algiers, and set to work for the dey. Rich garments and poor food. He suffers humiliations and is thrice subjected to the bastinado.
On June 30, 1785, Algerine pirates sailed from their North African harbor to intercept a pair of richly laden Portuguese merchant ships bound for Lisbon from Brazil. The vessels, however, did not arrive as scheduled, and the brigands had to content themselves with consolation prizes—Portuguese fishermen, Genoese freighters, and, worse luck, American traders.
The man on the preceding page is mounted on a bicycle made by Colonel Albert A. Pope. An ex-soldier and shoe manufacturer, Pope spent a good deal of time at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition pondering an English “ordinary” (large front wheel, small back wheel). After the show he commissioned a mechanic to build him a bicycle on the English model. The result—a seventy-pound behemoth costing $313—was probably the first real bicycle built in America. Pope saw vast possibilities in the unwieldy machine and forever abandoned the manufacture of shoes. But building a bicycle and finding somebody to buy it were two different things, and Pope had to set about winning over the public. He fought his way through a cloud of patent-infringement suits, published the first cyclist’s handbook in 1881, offered cash prizes to doctors who would write persuasive tracts about the physical benefits of cycling, established a nationwide chain of agencies to sell his “Columbia” at a fixed price, and promoted cycling clubs. One of the first of these organizations, the Springfield Bicycle Club, held its inaugural meet in 1883 (right).
Few of the Drakes’ contemporaries had summer homes, but virtually everyone who had a house had a porch, and that is where middle-class America spent the summer. On the porch, which often ran around three sides of the house, the men could sit in shirt sleeves through the hot evenings while the family-played Parcheesi, listened to patter songs on the gramophone, and watched the occasional water wagon trundling by, laying the dust on the street. The Drakes spent their summers at Keuka Lake, but here, too, the porch was the focus of their lives; it was there that the piano was installed, along with the aquarium and the parrot. Today people are demolishing the porches that were built on their homes during the second half of the nineteenth century, thereby restoring the original architectural form of the houses but at the same time sacrificing one of the greatest pleasures of summer.
There can be no question of Martha Drake’s pride in her splendidly furnished Victorian nursery (opposite). Martha’s childhood coincided with the apogee of the American dollhouse. She has two of them, as well as a china tea set, a tea table, and a miniature bed. The trolley is obviously a homemade vehicle and must have been a pallid source of amusement compared with Laurita, the parrot. But, for all these wonders, there are days when everything palls, even at Grandfather’s (center); across the lawn and the ages comes the cry “What can I do now?”