Description:
Woman's day dress in white, tufted cotton dimity with white-on-white embroidery around the hem, which had a small piece of paper attached to the dress: "Embroidered dress of Betsey Dwight, aunt of Mrs. Byron Smith, about - 1800." In 1847, Byron Smith (1825-1922) of South Hadley, the son of Erastus Tennant Smith (1789-1863) and Rebecca Barber Smith (1789-1838) of Groton, Connecticut, married Nancy Dwight (b.1825), the daughter of Justus Dwight (1781-1835) and his second wife, Eliza Marshall Dwight (b.1798) who married in 1818. It is not certain who "Aunt Betsey" was. It may be a distant cousin, Elizabeth Dwight (1784-1816), the daughter of Ebenezer Dwight (1738-1814), a farmer in Hatfield, and Bethia Truesdell (d.1826) of Williamsburgh, Massachusetts, who married in 1783. Elizabeth Dwight died unmarried on June 9, 1816, at the age of 32. It is likely that the dress was worn between the years 1805-1810 from the size of the bodice, the raised waistline and the use of decoration on the hem. The high waist and the vertical lines represent the influence of the "classical revival" in which woman wanted to resemble Greek and Roman pillars. The finest effect was achieved by wearing the thin cotton over a colored silk dress to enhance the texture and design of the embroidery. This rare example of " tufted dimity," which was woven specially for this dress, was produced on a loom using special wire rods inserted into heavy warp threads to create loops or tufts at regular intervals. Near the hem, there is a section of loops placed very closely together over a section of nearly three inches where the embroidery appears, which has been woven without the textured effect created by the weft threads to make a smooth surface upon which the embroidery was worked. The material was probably especially woven to accommodate the addition of the white-work embroidery and the finished-off scalloped edge.
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https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=HD+2001.45.1 |
