Grace Helen Mowat and the Making of Cottage Craft

Grace Helen Mowat and

the Making of Cottage Craft

Grace Helen Mowat. Courtesy of the Charlotte County Archives

Grace Helen Mowat

and the making of

Cottage Craft

DIANA REES

with Ronald Rees

Copyright © 2009 by Diana Rees.

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form

or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording

or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher

or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright).

To contact Access Copyright, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call 1-800-893-5777.

Edited by Susanne Alexander and Lisa Alward.

Cover and interior page design by Julie Scriver.

Cover photos courtesy of Charlotte County Archives and Matthew Rees.

Printed in Canada.

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Rees, Diana, 1939-2007

Grace Helen Mowat and the making of Cottage Craft / Diana Rees with Ronald Rees.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-86492-532-9

1. Mowat, Grace Helen, 1875-1964. 2. Cottage Craft (Firm). 3. Knitting shops

— New Brunswick — Saint Andrews. 4. Arts and crafts movement — Canada —

History. I. Rees, Ronald, 1935- II. Title.

NK842.N38R44 2009         746.43’0971533         C2008-907199-9

Goose Lane Editions acknowledges the financial support of the Canada Council

for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry

Development Program (BPIDP), and the New Brunswick Department of Wellness,

Culture, and Sport for its publishing activities.

Goose Lane Editions

Suite 330, 500 Beaverbrook Court

Fredericton, New Brunswick

CANADA E3B 5X4

www.gooselane.com

This book is dedicated to the people of

St. Andrews and Charlotte County.

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Always Room for One More

A Come Out Young Woman

A Practical Schooling in Art

Wilderness Years

The Making of Cottage Craft

A Shop by the Side of the Road

Pottery and Linen

Disappointments

A Factory of Twenty Square Miles

Countess of Charlotte

Passing the Torch

Epilogue

Selected Bibliography

Photo Credits

Index

Foreword

Diana Rees came to St. Andrews from Saskatchewan in 1983 to own and operate the Sea Captain’s Loft, a store that sold, among other things, British woollens. She had been a librarian, but textiles and design were her first love. Below the Sea Captain’s Loft, on the immediate waterfront, was Cottage Craft, another store selling wool-lens, these supplied by local knitters, weavers, and embroiderers from Charlotte County. The business had been founded seventy years earlier by Grace Helen Mowat, a St. Andrews woman who, approaching mid-life, had also changed careers. Grace Helen had been a reluctant teacher who came home after more than a decade away.

After her retirement, Diana embarked on a biography of Nell Mowat (as she was known to friends and family) and a history of the cottage industry she founded. Her chief sources were Grace Helen Mowat’s correspondence and the recollections of people who had known her and her successors in the business, Bill and Kent Ross, or who had worked for Cottage Craft. Before completing the manuscript, however, Diana contracted a disabling and incurable disease. Guided by her, I wrote the final chapters. But this is Diana’s book; it was her conception, her research, and, except for some of the words, her writing. I tried to maintain her voice and her attention to detail, and where I failed, Lisa Alward, a skilled and sensitive editor, conducted repairs.

Had Diana lived to see the publication of her book, she would have acknowledged each of her many informants, and all those who generously made available material that she could photograph and use for illustration. Although she made notes on her interviews, and on the handcrafts and artwork in the houses and institutions she visited, inevitably some of the details died with her. To avoid the possibility of overlooking anyone who might have assisted Diana, I did not attempt a list. Those of you who helped her know who you are, and, having met her, you will know how much she appreciated your generosity. Thank you all.

— Ronald Rees

Cottage Craft today, St. Andrews, New Brunswick. Courtesy of Matthew Rees

Introduction

Following his first and only visit to St. Andrews in 1923, the celebrated Canadian poet and author Bliss Carman addressed Grace Helen Mowat in a letter as My dear Countess of Charlotte. They were longtime friends, but Carman, who lived in Connecticut, had never visited Charlotte County and had no conception of what a prominent figure Nell Mowat really was — not just in the county but throughout New Brunswick. He knew her as a talented but minor poet of regional verse, and as a writer of engaging letters, but her great achievement at the time of his visit was to have founded one of the most successful cottage industries in North America: Charlotte County Cottage Craft.

After a fitful career teaching art in New England and Nova Scotia, Grace Helen Mowat returned home to the Mowat family farm, Beech Hill in St. Andrews, where, as a single woman in her early thirties, with very little capital, she launched her cottage industry in 1913. Using wool from Charlotte County farms that she coloured with vegetable dyes at Beech Hill and had spun into yarn at a local mill, she began supplying weavers and embroiderers throughout the county with material from which to make blankets, bedspreads, bags, woven yard goods, and hooked and woven rugs. For items requiring a motif or pattern, her instructions were simple but firm: look around you and weave, hook, or embroider the colours, scenes, and activities that you see. Her objective was to tell the story of her place and her people; to reproduce in handmade woollen goods the colours, the contours and the life of Charlotte County and New Brunswick. She allowed nothing from catalogues and pattern books, and few raw materials that were not indigenous.

Although she was schooled in the applied and decorative arts in London and New York, Nell Mowat’s aims were not narrowly aesthetic. At the very practical Woman’s Art School of the Cooper Union in New York, she learned that art must pay. The approval of sophisticated urban buyers and of her peers in the arts and crafts world was important to her, but her overriding objectives were social and economic. As well as making a living for herself, she wanted to improve life for farm families in Charlotte County. Handcrafts, she stated plainly, were a cash crop, as important as oats or barley, that drew on the skills accumulated by generations of farm women. Sold through retail outlets in St. Andrews, and by mail order, her hand-crafts injected cash into a rural economy that was chronically short of it. So determined was Nell to prevent the drift away from the farms that for a decade she badgered the Colonization and Development Department of the Canadian Pacific Railway in Montreal, and the Dominion Department of Agriculture in Ottawa, to provide the seed, equipment, and expert knowledge to initiate and support the growth of flax in the county. Some of this flax fibre would have been spun and woven by her craft workers but her main motive was to provide Charlotte County farmers with a cash crop. She also tried valiantly, but ultimately failed, to found a pottery using clays from the district that would have employed youth in and around St. Andrews.

In her middle years, with Cottage Craft well established, she turned to writing. She produced a book of children’s poems that drew high praise from the Canadian writer Sir Charles G.D. Roberts as well as Bliss Carman. She also wrote an unashamedly romantic and, in terms of its effect upon popular perceptions of the town, influential history of St. Andrews. In retirement, she wrote a novel that became the maiden publication of the University Press of New Brunswick in 1951. That same year, nominated by Sir James Dunn, and backed by Lord Beaverbrook, she was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws by the University of New Brunswick.

As visitors to St. Andrews know, Cottage Craft continues to attract loyal customers. In 1945, Grace Helen Mowat entrusted the business to Kent and Bill Ross, sons of a former student and good friend. Kent and Bill were succeeded, in turn, by Kent’s sons, first Jim and then Evan, the current proprietor and manager. The shop, a converted lobster plant that on windy days in summer is skirted by dancing skeins of coloured wool, tied to a low fence of nautical rope and cork floats, perches above the shore in St. Andrews’s waterfront market square. It isn’t the same shop that Nell Mowat made and, with tide and time and changing tastes, the products have altered somewhat, but her spirit inhabits it.

Most biographies depend on the keeping and safe storage of written records. Following the practice of her family, Nell kept every letter that was ever written to her and to these she added those saved by her parents and grandparents. There is some evidence that Nell culled some of the letters that were not flattering to her — she was not without ego or enemies — but when she died in 1964 she left a treasure trove of letters and papers. In 1979, these letters, and, later, letters written by her aunt Helen to her aunt Susan Mowat in San Francisco, were acquired by the volunteer founders of the Charlotte County Archives in St. Andrews. Duly accessioned, catalogued and microfilmed they are a prized and invaluable collection, spanning most of the first two centuries of the town’s history.

Editor’s note: While Grace Helen Mowat was a lively writer, her grammar and spelling were often quite loose when hurried. To make the quotations from her letters more readable, light punctuation has been added.

Colonel David Mowat, Grace Helen Mowat’s grandfather, circa 1855.

Courtesy of the Charlotte County Archives

Always Room For One More

I can fancy dear little Nellie roaming about in her Father’s domain by herself & as there are no venomous reptiles to hurt or molest her, she may, I suppose be left to enjoy her solitary rambles among the woods & wildflowers …

— Letter from Eliza Parker to Isabella Mowat (June 9, 1804)

When Eliza Parker wrote this affectionate vignette to her niece Bella in 1884, she left a telling portrait of her great-niece, nine-year-old Grace Helen Mowat. During her solitary rambles, Grace Helen, familiarly called Nell or Nellie for most her life, was sending her own roots down among those of the trees and wildflowers on her father’s farm. As an art student and teacher, she would live away for many years, but Beech Hill, just outside St. Andrews in the south west corner of New Brunswick, was her only true home. The farm, town, and surrounding countryside, were the setting and the support for her main venture in life: Cottage Craft. The subjects, patterns, and motifs for her locally made crafts were all drawn from the farms, fields, and villages of Charlotte County, a milieu so deeply important to her that she could not have settled in any other place.

Nell was a much-wanted only child, born on January 31, 1875, when her father, George, was forty-nine and her mother, Isabella Campbell Mowat, forty-three, but it is unlikely that she was ever a spoiled one. She came into a busy farm household that already sheltered three generations. Her grandfather, Colonel David John Mowat, then eighty, was enjoying retirement on a farm he had helped clear in his youth, and which was now being worked by George, his eldest son. Only two years before, the last two of the Colonel’s seven daughters, Bessie and Susan, had left the family home for marriage or employment. One of his two other sons, David Wyer Mowat, had moved to Michigan — which still had large trees — where he could continue to work in the lumber industry. The remaining son, Charles Edward Mowat, had recently acquired his own farm at Bayside on the St. Croix River, a few miles above St. Andrews.

When Nell arrived, her mother, Bella, was also caring for her invalid brother-in-law, Arthur Julian, the husband of her sister Grace Campbell Julian, who had died in 1869, and for the Julian’s daughter Ethel, aged eleven. Grace Julian must have been the victim of a lingering illness because Ethel, according to a letter from Nell’s Aunt Helen to Susan Mowat, had been Bella’s charge ever since she was born and had lived at Beech Hill since her mother’s death. She was, in effect, an older sister ready and waiting for baby Nell who, when Ethel’s father died two and a half months later in April 1875, was probably the source of some consolation and distraction.

The land that would become Beech Hill farm belonged to Nell’s great-grandfather, Captain David Mowat. Captain Mowat was a sailing master for the merchants William and Robert Pagan at the time of the founding of St. Andrews in 1783, and like them, he was one of the original land grantees of the Loyalist settlement. On the town plot granted to him, on Water Street, he built a large house (subsequently an inn) where he and his wife Mehetible Calef Mowat lived with their eleven children. In addition to the Water Street lot, he purchased some forested land about a mile north of the town. Captain David died at sea in 1810, and not long afterwards came the political unrest that led to the War of 1812 between the United States and Canada. Mehetible had experienced similar unrest when, as a child of Loyalists, she fled with her mother from Ipswich, Massachusetts, to safe British territory in the Bay of Fundy. In 1812, she needed no persuading to move away from the exposed shore to the forested land her husband had bought some years previously. Her older sons had already cleared some of the land and built a barn, and on the crest of the sloping ground that gave onto Passamaquoddy Bay, they built a solid farmhouse that would be occupied by Mowats for the next 150 years.

Nell and her father, George Mowat, circa 1890.

Courtesy of the Charlotte County Archives

By the standards of the time and place, Beech Hill’s one hundred and fifty acres provided a modest living. Its soils, like those of the rest of region, were thin and stoney and most suited to pasture for livestock; by 1871, four years before Nell was born, on hundred acres had been cleared for pasture, and twenty-five acres mown for hay. The cereal crops were barley and oats and these, combined with pasture and hay, supported three driving and work horses, eight milk cows, six beef cattle, and sixteen sheep. A field crop peculiar to the region was turnips; the farm produced 180 bushels of them that year, some of which would have been stored for feeding cattle, and the rest shipped from a wharf at nearby Chamcook and sold for cash in the Boston market. (Turnips were one of the few non-perishable vegetables in the days before refrigeration.)

Adjacent to the house at Beech Hill was a vegetable garden and orchard, an acre plot of potatoes, a pigpen, and a dozen beehives. Bella Mowat kept chickens and geese, and she regularly sold eggs, a steady if small source of cash. In 1871, according to the Dominion Census, she also churned 600 pounds of butter, while George collected 120 pounds of honey from the hives, sheared 100 pounds of wool, and cut twenty cords of firewood. Nobody went hungry at Beech Hill, but as on any small Maritime farm, actual cash was never plentiful. When younger members of the family went away to work they sent money home if they could spare it, or they saved and paid for large purchases such as a new tailored suit for their father, an overcoat for brother George, or a sewing machine for sister Susan before she herself went away to work.

An additional source of cash at Beech Hill were the summer vacationers who boarded with the Mowats. City folk relished wholesome farm fare and the cool, clean air of Passamaquoddy Bay. While Nell was still an infant, a regular visitor to Beech Hill was Mrs. Weldon, wife of a Fredericton judge. One year, after returning home in late August, she wrote to Bella, "The first greeting here was the smell of drains. You who are so accustomed to your fresh sea air have little idea of the stuffiness of inland places. I am not nearly so well & each day am obliged to drop something of the scrumptious fare I indulged in with you … Thanking you much for your great kindness to me & for the most charming days I spent in your happy home. Mrs. Weldon’s comments tell us something of the cheerful atmosphere at Beech Hill and help to explain the development of St. Andrews as a resort. In summer, the Bay of Fundy whose massive tides constantly bring up cold water from the ocean depths, is a giant air conditioner that at the turn of the twentieth century drew visitors from the stifling cities of eastern Canada and the eastern seaboard of the United States. The summer influx to St. Andrews, a pattern familiar to Nell from her earliest years, was to have a major bearing on the course of her later life. The immediate effect, however, was that she was showered with many kisses for Baby" in letters thanking the Mowats for their hospitality. One year, when her husband, the judge, came to preside over the county court in St. Andrews, Mrs. Weldon even found room among his legal paraphernalia for the fabric and a pattern for a dress for young Nell.

Tea party at Beech Hill. Courtesy of the Charlotte County Archives

An old Scottish nursery tale tells of hospitable Lachie MacLachlan and his wife and ten bairns who, during a storm,