Here's Something Victorian I Bet You Didn't Know...

Did you know that the Coca-Cola beverage was invented in the Victorian Era? I surely didn't, until the director of the museum asked me to research it. The original formula for Coca-Cola was created as a medicine to cure morphine addiction. The inventor of the original formula, John Pemberton, was a chemist who also served in the Confederate army. In April 1865, he was injured in the Battle of Columbus. Like most injuried soldiers of the Civil War, he was given daily doses of morphine for the pain (the addictive properties of morphine were not discovered in the 1860s). Also like most injured Civil War veterans, Pemberton became addicted to morphine. He started trying to use his chemistry skills to create a medicine that would cure morphine addiction. The original formula was actually a coca wine made from the coca plant and mixed with French Wine. However, when prohibition began in Atlanta in 1886, he was forced to change the formula so that it was non-alcoholic. That is when Coca-Cola was born. The name was settled on because it tells everyone the two main ingredients, coca and kola. Coca is a plant from which cocaine is extracted and kola is a nut from which we get caffeine.
The first advertisements for Coca-Cola sold the beverage as a patent medicine for 5 cents that was said to cure morphine addiction, headaches, and impotence. By 1888, John Pemberton had 3 different Coca-Cola mixtures on sale in drugstores across Atlanta. He sold the formula to 5 separate businessmen. However, the one who turned it into a worldwide phenomenon was Asa Candler who would later become mayor of Atlanta. Candler eventually bought the 4 other competing companies to become the sole owner of Coca-Cola.
The formula of Coca-Cola has changed several times over the years. They have created Cherry Coke, Lime Coke, Lemon Coke etc. Several different countries have even developed their own local tastes, but the 2 main ingredients have always been coca and kola nut. Once the addictive properties of cocaine were discovered, the fomula was changed to use the leaves of the coca plant after the cocaine had already been extracted, leaving only the flavor of the leaf behind in the beverage.
Now that the world has become very different from Victorian Era culture, Coke has become even more popular. In 2011, John Pemberton started his own Twitter feed. He now has 55,0o0 followers. The Coca-Cola Facebook page has thousands, if not millions, of fans. Coke sponsors athletes, movie theaters, and all other kinds of entertainment. It is no longer just a beverage, it has become a permanent part of people's lives and our culture.

Memorial Day

I love old cemeteries with shady magnolia trees and iron fences. Days like today - breezy and only about 80 degrees - are the best days to get out and wander down the aisles and paths. The dogwoods have long bloomed out, but their graceful limbs wave in the breeze, fanning those in need of respite from the heat. Robins perch atop gravestones, ornaments in themselves. Brown thrashers, camoflauged against the dark tree trunks, pick through the underbrush. A patch of Queen Anne's lace and the remnant of an old rose pop up here and about.
The older cemeteries truly are parks, and they are welcoming. Their aged beauty embraces, asks you to stay a while ~ much as you would stop before a piece of sculpture or an eye-catching painting in a museum. Art and poetry, sculpture and stained glass, even music I have heard in cemeteries. There are several locals that take to the quiet park settings to read and sketch and to play their music. I have walked and could see no one, but could hear the strains of a flute.
As a youngster, Saturdays usually included a stop at the cemeteries to tidy up the lots, replace greens and flowers and scrub the stones. It was also a time for me to let my imagination go - I would visit lots other than my family's (they were not very interesting). I walked up the stone steps and through the fence as though expected. I sat upon stones to chat with the small angels, leaving them with a handful of buttercups. I would look for my name (first name) on stones, and read other names, deciding if I would rather be named Edith or Emily or Virginia. I like Margaret the best, thank you Mama and Daddy.
On a recent visit to our newest cemetery (1902), I noticed how it had grown up, how it, too, was beginning to acquire that aged beauty. Oddly, that provided a sense of peace for me.
My family has been a powerhouse of women, women who remember, women who hand down the stories, women who protect the family history, women who retain the duty and honor of visiting the cemeteries. Memorial Day is not osberved only on May 30.

Springtime Fun

With the arrival of springtime, the museum has been in full swing preparing the house to receive visitors. The whole area is out and about going to the beach, taking bike rides, or going on picnics in the park. Now that we are all in the midst of our springtime events, I thought I would take this opportunity to let you all in on some Victorian picnic ideas. Typical Victorian picnics were not just a blanket and a picnic basket. Oh no, if you had servants picnics were a grand scale event. Imagine you lived in the country and had numerous servants at your disposal. You didn't have to carry the food, set up the tents or blantkets, or even walk to the appointed destination.

First, being a good socialite, you would work out the details of the event with your cook to decide what you and your guests would eat. Next, you and your friends would organize where you would have your picnic and organize your servants to have the tents and blankets set up and the food laid out in proper style. Then, you would have your coachman drive you and your friends to the destination. After all, walking in the hot sun would definitely not be fashionable. Once you reach your destination and eat the food that has already been set up for you, all you have to do is lay about in the spring air.


If you had a larger party involved, there are many games and acitivities you could do after eating. One of the most popular Victorian picnic games is Blind Man's Bluff. A game which is played by blindfolding one person, spinning them around, and then letting them try to catch one of the other participants. The trick is that the other players have to stay within a certain radius to the "blind man". Once the blinded person has caught someone, he or she must guess who they have caught without taking the blindfold off. They can feel clothing, hands, and/or faces. If they are correct, then the person they caught has to be the blind man. If not, they remain the blind man until they guess correctly.


Even though Blind's Man Bluff is one of the most popular games at a grand scale picnic, there are other activities such as cards, horsebacking riding, cricket, or even dancing if you hired some musicians. The activities are really what make the picnic grand. Grand picnics were more for the upper class societies. Even still they were adventures outside rather than just eating outside as we do today. Picnics today are still great fun, but next time you go on a picnic just imagine how much better it would be if you got to spend the whole day playing and not have to do a bit of the work involved.

Ornament Traditions

Chirstmas at the Hunter House is upon us again. The house is busy with people figuring out ways to decorate the house to everyone's delight. Our decorations are unique since we always focus on the Victorian Era. This year is no different. Many people don't realize that a lot of our Christmas traditions come from Germany. As you may know already, Queen Victoria married Prince Albert. Albert was from Germany and brought many of the Christmas traditions with him when he came to England. To name just a few: the Christmas tree, the carol Silent Night, and Nutcrackers. This year we have decided to make our decorations all about German traditions. To kick things off, we will be having a German Christmas market in our house. This will be Saturday and Sunday, November 20-21. There will be local vendors selling their wares and German goodies available. One of the items available at the market, will be genuine Olde World Glass Ornamaents.

Glass ornaments are one of the biggest traditions of Germany. Blown glass ornaments have been made in Germany since the 1500s. It was in the Victorian Era in 1870 when they were first exported to Britian. America also imported German blown glass ornaments after F.W. Woolworth discovered them on a trip to Germany in 1880. In those days, the inside of the glass ornaments were made to look silvery by using either mercury or lead. As people discovered that mercury and lead were not healthy to use, they changed the inside to be a combination of silver nitrate & sugar water to protect the makers and the owners of the ornaments. The majority of glass ornament makers lived in an area in Germany called Lauscha.

The glass makers in Lauscha improved their craft for many generations, but the industry became in danger of becoming obsolete after World War II. Once the war was over, the Allied Forces divided Germany amongst themselves. Each country gaining power and control over one section of Germany. Lauscha is in East Germany, which became controlled by the Soviet Union. The Soviets believed that the traditions of Germany needed to be wiped out in order to ensure that they had learned their lesson after the War. Glass Blowing was one of many past times the Soviets sought to destory. The molds that were used to make the ornaments for generations were found and destroyed. Many in Lauscha hid the glass molds and still others that were trying to keep their family heritage escaped to Neustadt (a city in American occupied Germany).

Today, there remains a popular German glass company that still makes ornaments. The company is called Inge-glas ornaments or is often referred to as Glas Inge. It is named for a lady who remained in Lauscha Germany and managed to save nearly all of the glass molds her family had for generations before her. When her family escaped Lauscha and went to Neustadt, she stayed behind. She broke all of the glass molds she had in half. She would send a box full of one half of each mold to her grandson, which a note telling him they were toys. When the Soviets looked through her mail, they only saw her sending broken molds to her grandson to play with. Later, she would send the second half of each mold in the same manner. Her son and grandson would them put the molds back together. In this way, she helped save the German glass making tradition. Her son and grandson started making ornaments again and selling them both in Germany and abroad. Neustadt became the new center for German glass blowing.

If you have an Inge-Glas ornament, it may be marked with a star crown. This emblem was stamped on every ornament they made until 2000. In 2000, they set up distribution sites in other countries besides Germany and did not keep the same emblem. Today, there is not an emblem on any of their ornaments. However, they remain a collector's item. Each year a new ornament is created to represent the traditions of today.

I'm Feeling Sad

Some days it feels as though there is a problem or a crisis in the lives of everyone I know. What a huge pity party we could throw! Then there are days when everyone I know is just rolling along, living their lives, things are good.
Life is good, so many say, and I will agree. However, I have just discovered that a special gal died fairly recently. I must have been out of town, or our newspaper perhaps did not carry the obituary as she was living in Richmond, Virginia.
It is hard to dscribe the sadness I felt when I realized that author Emyl Jenkins passed away in April. It was not sadness so much for me, but for us, all of us who read her writings and would continue to read them, looked forward to more to read. For all who called her friend, or even acquaintance.
I had the pleasure of meeting and working with Emyl as she wrote Southern Christmas. The Hunter House Victorian Museum is featured there and it was a treat to spend several days with her. We had the opportunity to share our lives, our stories and our love of The South; we found we were kindred spirits.
Emyl was gracious and generous; she was humorous and hospitable; she seemed almost family to me.
Her warm and gentle spirit will be missed in this world. I still feel sad about that, but if we will, we can carry forth her spirit.
If you have not had the chance to meet Emyl through her books, especially Southern Christmas and Southern Hospitality, do! If you love old treasures, read her appraisal books, and her fiction Stealing With Style set in and amid antique treasures.
I am so thankful that Emyl walked through my door and briefly into my life.

Shakespeare: The Victorian Idol

William Shakespeare is arguably the most quoted and most immortal writer in all of history. He wrote most of the phrases we use even in the course of today's speech. To name of few, the green-eyed monster, the long and short of it, and give the devil his due. Shakespeare wrote during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, a woman with significant power. As a result his plays have female characters that are strong willed, free thinkers, and often times rebellious. When Queen Victoria ascended the throne in 1837, England had another powerful woman at its helm. A woman who was not bound by the same social rules as an everyday, average woman. In Shakespeare, Victorians found willfull and strong female characters that mirrored their monarch. They loved the idea of Shakespeare's independent women. One Victorian writer was so enthralled by these characters that she imagined their lives before Shakespeare wrote about them. She even wrote a book, Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines, which became a popular book for young girls. The editors of the time period also tried to preserve the "innocence" of a young girl and thus produced editions of Shakespeare's plays where any phrase that could offend or ruin a young girl was removed.

Not only did young people like the master bard's plays, writers of the Victorian era looked to the works of Shakespeare for guidance and inspiration. For many, the draw of Shakespeare's works came from the fact that his plays cover such a wide range of genres and human emotions. His works show not only tragedy, history, and comedy; but also love, betrayal, revenge, murder, fantasy, sorrow, etc. It wasn't until the Regency and Victorian eras when the idea for the novel became a reality. Those that wrote the novels we remember and respect today, often copied or quoted Shakespeare throughout their works. Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Herman Melville are three widely famous authors that used Shakespeare as a guide. In Jane Austen's first novel, Sense and Sensiblitiy, Marianne Dashwood quotes Shakespeare's sonnet 116 to describe her love for Willoughby. Marianne uses this sonnet to justify her decision not to hide her feelings in anything she does. Later in the novel, the same sonnet is used to describe the loss Marianne feels after she is set aside by Willoughby. Charles Dickens fashioned his characters using Shakespeare's model for character devlopment. Many of his characters are satirical or parodies for the social occurences in his time. The title for his work Twice Told Tales is a quote from Shakespeare's King John. Lastly, Herman Melville's character of Captain Ahab is often referred to by critics as a Shakesperean tragic character. In his works, Melville wrote almost like a playwright by using sililoquies instead of dialogue. Other writers also quoted Shakespeare in their work, but to list them all would take a really long time. But to give you a general idea as to how often the bard was quoted in this time period, let me tell you that George Bernard Shaw called literature and society's dedication to Shakespeare "Bardolatry".

As the Victorian era came to an end in 1901, the novel was in its glory and authors were continuing to quote Shakespeare in their work. As the novel progressed into silent movies and later into films, Shakespeare's plays and sonnets remained the pinnacle works to adapt. Over the years, there have been countless productions of his plays on the silverscreen. However, recently there has been the idea to take Shakespeare to a younger and cooler audience. Leading to adaptations that have Macbeth taking place in a restuarant; Othello taking place in a high school; Romeo & Juliet with handguns; and The Twelfth Night at a boarding school socceer field. I guess what you can take away from this posting is that no matter what time period comes next, Shakespeare's works will stand the test of time somehow. Every generation since he lived has bent his work to their own cultural inclinations.

As a side note, this blog was inspired by our Shakespeare on Love picnic. It will be held, Tuesday evening, July 13 at 6:00pm. We still have places available - please call the museum for reservations. 757-623-9814.

Picnics and Parades ~ An Old Fashioned Memorial Day

Today it seems as though Memorial Day is the beginning of summer, rather than the summer solstice on June 21. Memorial Day marks the opening of pools and beach rentals. That is not the way our grandparents and theirs observed the day.

Memorial Day or Decoration Day was a day filled with parades and picnics. The entire town or city followed the marching bands and military units into the oldest of cemeteries. There they listened to music and speeches and then made their way to their family plots and unfurled a blanket and unbuttoned the picnic hamper.

The cemetery was almost a public park with natural areas and scenic vistas and a variety of sculpture. It was designed to be peaceful and quiet, well except for those bugles and trombones on parade days. Memorial days were most likely the busiest of visiting days in the cemetery.

With all of the festivity and then the work of tidying up the lots and placing flowers on the graves, visiting with neighbors, sustenance was a necessity.

In Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management (1859), Isabella Beeton wrote of picnic menu items including: sweetened stewed fruit with plain pastry biscuits, cold plum pudding, cold meats, pigeon pie, lobster, fresh jam puffs, baskets of fresh fruit and cheese. She also includes breads and butter for tea. Beverages should include ale, wine, brandy, lemonade and soda water.

She warns of items not to be forgotten: cork screws, a bottle of vinegar, a stick of horseradish and a bottle of mint sauce. And of course, wine glasses, teacups and saucers and lump sugar and milk. (This info comes from a wonderful reference by Susan Williams: Savory Suppers and Fashionable Feasts: Dining in Victorian America)

The Victorians used convenient hampers and even make-shift ones of boxes, partitioned on the inside into compartments. Today it is much the same; all manner of baskets and hampers and totes can hold our picnic items. If you are in the market for a new tote of sorts, check out Picnic at Ascot, Inc. They have back packs and collapsible market baskets. The Impulse Wine and Cheese Set consists of: 2 cotton napkins (5 designs from which to choose), 1 corkscrew, 1 wood cutting board and one cheese knife. It closes up into a neat 8 1/2 X 12 packet and weighs, empty, one pound. The neatest item I saw was an ice cream tote!! Now you can take along your half-gallon of Bryers and it'll stay cold! No need for an ice cream maker.

One of the most popular picnic items today must be fried chicken. If you want something other than fast food fried chicken, here's a recipe ~ the secret is soaking the breasts overnight in buttermilk and frying in your grandmother's seasoned cast iron skillet. This comes from the humorous book Some Day You'll Thank Me For This: The Official Southern Ladies' Guide to Being A 'Perfect' Mother by Gayden Metcalfe and Charlotte Hays:
6 chicken breasts buttermilk 2 eggs 2 cups whole milk 2 cups flour
salt and pepper to taste pinch of garlic powder 1/4 t. baking powder
fat for frying ( Crisco, vegetable oil or combination)
Soak breasts overnight in buttermilk.
Beat eggs and milk; dip chicken in mixture.
Combine flour, seasonings and baking powder in a brown grocery bag and shake to mix.
Shake the chicken one piece at a time until well coated.
Heat enough of the fat in the skillet to almost cover the chicken.
When you drop the chicken in, the fat should sizzle.
The art if frying chicken involves the grease, which must not burn the chicken but cooks it at an even, medium-hot level.
Do not crowd the chicken when frying.
Turn only once, when golden brown on one side.
Remove from the skillet and drain on a brown grocery bag that has been covered with a layer of paper towels, approximately 20 minutes.

It's not fast food, but I can smell it frying now!