What can the fabric from six dresses and a curtain tell us about 150 years of one family’s history? As it turns out, quite a lot.
Within the CHS archives lives a clue to six generations and 150 years of a family’s past: a small board with seven swatches of fabric lovingly attached. Six of the fabrics are from wedding dresses and the seventh is a curtain fragment. Each piece was labeled with the name of a bride, her groom, and their wedding date. The swatches of fabric were handed down and finally assembled as a unique family record.
The fabrics reflect the world in which each bride lived. Widow Mary Prentis Coit married her second husband, Dr. Ebenezer Gray, in 1728, wearing a tan satin-weave silk befitting her social status (the widowed wife of a physician marrying another physician). Twenty-seven years later, about 1755, their daughter, Mary Gray, married sea Captain Russell Hubbard in a similar satin-weave silk, this time of deep brown.
As the 18thcentury progressed, light cottons and linens replaced heavy satin-weave silks as the most popular fabric. Mary’s daughter, Martha Hubbard, wore a dress of printed white cotton fabric when marrying lawyer David Wright in 1786. The dress fabrics then skip a generation. Martha Wright, daughter of Martha Hubbard Wright and wife of Steuben Lay, is represented by a piece of homespun curtain.
Lydia Lay married John Starr in 1842, a mere two years after Queen Victoria wore a white dress for her wedding, propelling white to the most popular of wedding colors. Lydia married John wearing a stylish white wedding dress.
The last two fabrics represent the weddings of two of Lydia and John’s children: daughter Elizabeth, who married Yale graduate Reverend Doctor John DeForest in 1874; and son Reverend Edward Comfort Starr, who married Emily Shew in 1878. Both Reverends served in the Congregational Church, and Rev. Dr. DeForest served as a missionary in Japan for many years.
Although this keepsake provides much information, close study reveals that this information may sometimes be inaccurate or misleading: John DeForest was born John Hyde but changed his name to honor the man who sponsored his education. Martha Hubbard married David, not Daniel, Wright, as stated on the panel. Family memories are not always totally reliable, but family records such as this still lead to a fuller understanding of the past.
