icon for Home page
icon for Kid's Home page
icon for Digital Collection
icon for Activities
icon for Turns Exhibit
icon for In the Classroom
icon for Chronologies
icon for My Collection

Online Collection

DEERFIELD'S ORIGINAL CRAFTS SHOW NEXT WEEK.

Pottery Seen for First Time--Painters Have Fine Show.

Deerfield's versatility will be well shown next week. Either an exhibition of local industries or an historical pageant would be quite enough for one week in most town of its size. Both will be presented here, the exhibition beginning Tuesday and lasting until Saturday afternoon; the the pageant the last three days. The two have no connection except that they are contemporary.

The annual exhibit of crafts promises to fully sustain the reputation it has gained in the last 10 years. The Village room, proving to be too small to hold all the displays of recent work, several of the individual craft shops will also be open to show their products.

Miss Ellen Miller and Miss Whiting are not here in person, but there will be a large and important exhibit of the blue and white needlework at the Miller house, at the "Sign of the Wheel."

Mrs. Thorn will show her own weaving of colored linens in both free hand and conventional patterns at her home just south of Miss Miller's.

The Deerfield painters will be across the way at the Harrow studios. This year's collection includes paintings by Willis Adams, Elbridge Kingsley, Will Hutchins, and Huc Mazelet Luquiens.

The Village room north of the old Brick church will be filled with crafts. Both the Deerfield and the Pocumtuck basket makers will have here a large display of baskets and boxes of every sort, raffia, reed, palm leaf, willow, pine-needles, rushes, sweet grass. Anything that grows can apparently be woven into some pleasing and novel shape by the clever Deerfield women. The walls will be hung with woven fabrics. The weaving grows in importance and beauty every year. The rag rugs with which it began are still here in good force.

Miss Arms will have some of her wool rugs, woven somewhat like Navajo blankets, of Kentucky homespun wool, dyed by the mountain women with "yarbs."

Mrs. Hawks has lighter weight bed blankets of wool with free hand decorations in color, and both cotton and linen bedspreads, etc., with knotted designs, all woven in. Mrs. Hammond's bags and belts and spreads are of linen, woven with double harness, like the old coverlets and Swedish work.

The Allen photographs are farther up the street at the usual rooms. The year's new prints are chiefly Deerfield fields and folk with a few pictures of Quebec.

The pottery, the latest addition to the crafts, is a little farther on, in the old Stebbins house. Mr. Thomas has worked out a combination of local clays which gives a distinctive product to be known as the Deerfield pottery signed "D. P. T." It has a matt glaze in soft, low toned colors, green, blue, dull yellows and browns, in all the subtle variations and combinations to which fire and clay lend themselves.

Mrs. Ashley and her daughters will have their own basketry in their basket shop near the north end. Mrs. Ashley has a new example of her large landscape baskets, and a varied assortment of smaller ones in rye straw and grass as well as raffia, in pretty soft colors and graceful designs.

Mrs. Henry's well-known netting and tufted work will be in her house at the north end. Some genuinely old bed spreads which she has recently secured will also be on exhibition.

The plan of having the exhibits somewhat scattered has the advantage of distributing the visitors also. The distances are not long, and each place will have a conspicuous poster.

(c) Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, Deerfield MA. All rights reserved.
Contact us for information about using this image.



label levels:

Colonial Revival art in all forms had a home in Deerfield, Massachusetts, in the early 1900s. The Society of Deerfield Industries, an organization of local artisans dedicated to reviving traditional handicrafts, held a yearly exhibition and sale. The show was spread throughout the town's main street, filling the 18th- and 19th-century houses. The exhibition included painting, photography, and a variety of traditional crafts including weaving, needlework and basketry, all of which were useful in decorating an early 20th century house in the latest style.

 

top of page

"Deerfield's Original Crafts Show Next Week"

publisher   Greenfield Gazette and Courier
date   Jul 9, 1910
location   Greenfield, Massachusetts
height   10.0"
width   2.25"
process/materials   printed paper, ink
item type   Periodicals/Newspaper
accession #   #L02.104


Look Closer icon My Collection icon Document Image icon Detailed info icon


ecard icon Send an e-Postcard of this object



See Also...

"Art and Industry at Deerfield"

"Original Deerfield Workers Show Skills at Crafts"

"Expansion of Deerfield Arts and Crafts"

Pottery Vase


button for Side by Side Viewingbutton for Glossarybutton for Printing Helpbutton for How to Read Old Documents

 

Home | Online Collection | Things To Do | Turns Exhibit | Classroom | Chronologies | My Collection
About This Site | Site Index | Site Search | Feedback