How Much Moxie Do You Have?

The idea of “Throw-back Thursday” seems to be gaining popularity on the internet, especially on sites like Facebook (if you haven’t, please like the Museum on Facebook!) where users post old photographs of themselves and their friends each week.  While our blog comes out on Tuesday, not Thursday, we do like to think that every day is “Throw-back Thursday” at the Scottish Rite Masonic Museum & Library, since we are devoted to studying and preserving history.  In light of this theme, this post features two bottles from a small collection of Moxie bottles that we received as a gift in 2001.  The “throw-back” part also comes from the fact that we hosted an exhibition in 1993 called “When America Had a Lot of Moxie: A History of America’s First Mass-Marketed Soft Drink.”  Moxie pre-dates Coca-Cola, which was first available in 1886.

Dr. Augustin Thompson (1825-1903) of Lowell, Massachusetts, developed Moxie.  Thompson was born in Maine and served in the Union Army during the Civil War.  After the war, he studied medicine at Hahnemann Homeopathic College in Philadelphia.  Around 1867, Thompson moved to Lowell to open a medical practice.  Soon after, he began developing a recipe for what became known as “Moxie Nerve Food.” 

The bottle at left dates to the 1880s or 1890s when the drink was still marketed as “Moxie Nerve Food.”  Thompson began selling his remedy in 1884 or 1885.  When he applied for a patent in 1885, he explained that it was “a liquid preparation charged with soda for the cure of paralysis, softening of the brain, and mental imbecility.”  The drink caught on in New England and sold widely.  In 1886, one of Thompson’s sons, Francis E., and Freeman N. Young, constructed the first Moxie Bottle Wagon – a horse-drawn four-wheel cart with a replica of a Moxie bottle on the back (see some pictures here).  Many variations were subsequently made and the bottle wagon became one of Moxie’s chief advertising gimmicks.

Moxie continues to be sold up to the present day – see the bottle from 1963 at right, which was bottled in Needham Heights, Massachusetts, in a bottle from the Glenshaw Glass Company in Pennsylvania.  However, it has been many decades since the company was able to claim that it cured any medical conditions.  Today, it is considered a great-tasting, refreshing beverage by its fans, although they also acknowledge that it is an acquired taste.  Are you a fan?  Do you collect Moxie memorabilia?  Tell us about it in a comment below.

References:

Q. David Bowers, The Moxie Encyclopedia: Volume 1 – The History (Wolfesboro, NH: The Vestal Press, 1985).

Frank N. Potter, The Book of Moxie (Paducah, KY: Collector Books, 1987).

Top: Moxie Nerve Food Bottle, 1880-1900, unidentified maker, United States.  Gift of Peter G. Huntsman, 2001.051.4.  Photograph by David Bohl.

Bottom: Moxie Bottle, 1963, Glenshaw Glass Company, Glenshaw, PA.  Gift of Peter G. Huntsman, 2001.051.2.  Photograph by David Bohl.

New England Cuisine at the Museum

Don't break out your lobster bibs quite yet! No, we are not offering a grand buffet of New England cooking classics. However, we have the next best thing in store for you.

On Saturday, May 28, at 2 PM there will be a really fun Lowell Lecture that you won't want to miss. Kathleen Fitzgerald and Keith Stavely will relate the tale of "Pressed Heads, Pottages, and Pippin Tarts: The Surprising Story Behind a Typical Diner Meal." Authors of Northern Hospitality: Cooking by the Book in New England (2011) and America’s Founding Food: The Story of New England Cooking (2004), Stavely and Fitzgerald will treat us to a culinary tour that traces the precursors of franks and beans and apple pie, as well as other traditional New England foods. Their talk will be illustrated with images of some of the foods they have prepared and served in their home.

The author team has a wealth of experience as speakers, having presented at international conferences, at numerous historical societies, libraries, and museums, and to a variety of community and professional groups. Through lively presentations and sprightly give-and-take with their audiences, they bring the hidden history of New England foodways to light, along the way showing how a region's food practices can illuminate its broader social and cultural history.

Stavely is a writer and scholar whose interest in the Puritan influence on American and English culture has resulted in a number of critically-esteemed books and articles. He has been a Guggenheim and American Council of Learned Societies fellow and a winner of the Modern Language Association Prize for Independent Scholars. Fitzgerald worked for five years as a college chaplain and for eight years as a coordinator of a soup kitchen. Except for one brief stint in an academic library in Ohio, she has worked for over twenty years as a public librarian in urban settings in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. She is currently a librarian at the Newport Public Library.

This free public lecture is funded by the Lowell Institute and complements the exhibition Night Road: Photographs of Diners by John D. Woolf. After the lecture, please join us for a book signing. Copies of both Northern Hospitality and America’s Founding Food will be available for purchase, thanks to a collaboration with an independent bookshop in Winchester, Book Ends.

Please call the Museum at 781-861-6559 if you have questions about this public program.

Credits:

Courtesy of Katheleen Fitzgerald and Keith Stavely

Courtesy of Katheleen Fitzgerald and Keith Stavely and the University of Massachusetts Press

Keep Within Compass, or, A Tempest on a Teapot

 

 

 

 

 

This transfer-printed teapot from the late 1700s is not only charming, it also communicates an important social message. Through slogans and illustrations, it reminds both husbands and wives to abide by a moral code of self-restraint and to “keep within compass.” The prints on each side of the teapot—one featuring a man; the other, a woman—depict the rewards of proper behavior versus the dangers of temptation. A large central image, contained within a compass’s legs (“within compass”), presents an idealized view of the perfect life in the late 1700s.  Around each of these main illustrations, four vignettes provide cautionary tales of the ruin that awaits those who eschew a virtuous life.

In the large vignette on one side, the well-dressed gentleman, bags of money at his feet, is surrounded by bountiful fields, a large mill, and men working on his farm. On the other side, the fashionable lady is similarly surrounded by her elegant home, a trunk of pretty things and her loyal dog. Both sides also feature the proverb, “Keep within compass and you shall be shure to avoid many troubles which others endure,” as well as the brief admonitions, “Fear God. Know thyself. Bridle thy will. Remember thy end.” The vignettes around these central images show dangers that an imprudent person could easily fall into, including ruined reputation, prison, and shipwreck—a metaphor for lost fortune. Biblical sayings—“The end of the upright man is peace” and “The virtuous woman is a crown to her husband,” respectively—appear below each image.

A large percentage of the Museum's collection relates to Freemasonry and other fraternal organizations, so we found the iconography on this teapot familiar. The compass is a central Masonic symbol, representing restraint, but this teapot’s manufacturers may have selected it because its meaning of self-control was familiar to society at the time. The images on this teapot appear to be inspired by, though not directly copied from, a pair of prints made in 1786 by London printmaker Carington Bowles (1724-1793), also in the Museum’s collection, reproduced here. These prints may in turn have been inspired by two series of prints by William Hogarth, “A Harlot’s Progress” (1732) and “A Rake’s Progress” (1735), which depict the downfall of a formerly innocent woman and man through drink and seduction.

In the late 1700s, when this teapot was made, tea-drinking was a socialactivity. According to 1700s French lawyer Méderic Louis Élie Moreau de St. Méry, in America “friends, acquaintances and even strangers are invited” to join the family for tea. How you set your table told your guests something about your financial standing, taste and place in the world. So this teapot not only reminded the family to be honorable people, it also conveyed a message about the family’s moral character to their guests—that they valued—and perhaps aspired to—the morals that the prints' designers highlighted. The Museum’s Public Programs Coordinator, Polly Kienle, selected this teapot to include in the exhibition, "Curators' Choice," which features the staff's favorite objects from the collection. Of this teapot, she said, “I wonder what kind of teatime discussions this pot triggered between the couple who owned it.”

References:

David Drakard, Printed English Pottery: History and Humour in the Reign of George III, 1760-1820 (London: Jonathan Horne Publications), 1992.

Rodris Roth, “Tea Drinking in 18^th-Century America: Its Etiquette and Equipage,” United States National Museum Bulletin 255 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution), 1961.

 S. Robert Teitelman, Patrica A. Halfpenny, and Robert W. Fuchs II, Success to America: Creamware for the American Market, featuring the S. Robert Teitelman collection at Winterthur (Suffolk, England: Antique Collectors’ Club), 2010.

 Photos:

“Keep Within Compass” Teapot, 1796–1801. Attributed to Ferrybridge Pottery, Yorkshire, England. Museum purchase, in part through the generosity of Helen G. Deffenbaugh, in memory of George S. Deffenbaugh, 2008.040a-b. Photograph by David Bohl.

 “Keep Within Compass” Prints, 1786. Carington Bowles (1724-1793), London, England. Museum purchase, 98.007a-b.

Lecture on Classic Diners, Saturday, Nov. 20

If you have ever eaten at a diner--and who hasn’t?--the upcoming Lowell Lecture is for you! We are excited to welcome guest speaker Richard J. S. Gutman, director and curator of the Culinary Arts Museum at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, RI.

He will join us on Saturday, November 20 at 2 p.m. for an illustrated presentation entitled “What Is It about Diners? More Than a Meal, That's for Sure!” Mr. Gutman, about whom Yankee magazine said, “Nobody knows more about these classic eateries,” will elaborate on the staying power of the American diner, based on 40 years of eating and research. He has consulted on more than 80 diner restoration projects across the United States and in Europe. The leading authority on the history and architecture of diners, he has published several books on the topic, including American Diner Then and Now (2000) and The Worcester Lunch Car Company (2004). Long-time visitors to the National Heritage Museum may fondly recall two exhibitions he guest-curated with Kellie  Gutman: “American Diner: Then and Now” (1995)  and “Summer Camp” (1998).

This free public lecture is funded by the Lowell Institute. It is held in conjunction with the new exhibition, “Night Road: Photographs of Diners by John D. Woolf."

Photo credit: Courtesy of Richard J.S. Gutman