Figuring out the archives

I’ve never done archival research before, so I hadn’t realized how difficult it can be to figure out where you need to look in order to find the documents you want. Before our class’s first trip to the archives, Dr. Nunn explained what finding aids are and showed us the ones for the Hower family records. Finding aids are very short, very general descriptions of what's stored in a given archive box or folder, and ideally, the contents of the archive box will match what is described in the finding aid, though sometimes documents get misplaced or mislabeled.  

The Hower family papers, which comprise the professional and personal papers of the three generations of Howers who lived in the house, are organized chronologically by person: so John Henry Hower’s correspondence is Series I, son Otis Hower’s correspondence is Series II, and Otis’s wife, Blanche, has her correspondence in Series III, while Series IV holds the papers of Blanche and Otis’s daughter, Grace. Then there are a few catchall/miscellaneous series and some subseries (such as Otis’s financial statements, which are a subseries of his collected papers in Series II).  Each series/subseries is then broken down into folders that are stored in boxes, and the folders have short descriptive phrases that give you a general idea of what’s inside. 

I was a bit overwhelmed by the finding aids for the Hower family papers because I didn’t know where to start. I’d been hoping there would be a box labeled something like “household accounts 1909” that would contain servant pay stubs, hiring papers, receipts for laundry, and anything else that might give me information about the people who worked in the house. However, the family papers are largely organized by person, so instead of what to start with, I first had to figure out who to start with.  

I knew that Blanche and Otis did a lot of large-scale entertaining at the house in the early 1900s and therefore must have had a lot of help, so I figured I’d start with them. But, I wondered, should I look in Otis’s papers or Blanche’s? As lady of the house, Blanche likely would have been the one to deal with matters concerning the servants, yet all her papers appeared to be related to her work in the community. Otis’s papers included general correspondence (filed by year and then alphabetically within each year), but would household account information be included in those papers? And if I chose Otis, what year of his papers would be most fruitful?

Keep in mind that there are boxes and boxes and boxes of documents, and each one must be retrieved from the stacks and carried to the reading room by one of the archives staff, so I wanted to choose carefully so as not to waste anyone’s time.

I ended up starting with a box of Otis’s general correspondence from 1906 just to see what kind of papers were filed in there. Most of what I found was unremarkable except for the novelty of seeing mundane bills, receipts, and business letters from 120 years ago.

I did find a letter from a man interested in the position of coachman for the Howers, and Otis replied that they were keeping their current coachman but invited the applicant to try again in a year.  The applicant, Chas. V. Cottrell, replied with a letter thanking Otis for his consideration. 

Finding the coachman’s application letter among a whole lot of repetitive and, for my purposes, irrelevant business documents made me realize that nearly all of Otis’s correspondence concerns outside interests: except for an occasional receipt for bulk orders of fish or bills for carriage repairs, there are hardly any documents relating to household concerns. A home the size of the Hower House would’ve required a lot of goods, services, and hired help in order to run smoothly, and it seems that there should be a lengthy domestic paper trail. So where were those documents? 

I snapped some pictures of the coachman’s letters and Otis’s response just for fun, but I left campus that day feeling like I hadn't found anything useful. 

On my next trip to the archives, I decided to try looking in Blanche’s papers. Initially, I had skipped over her series because the finding aids sounded less promising than Otis’s “general correspondence.” Blanche's series includes boxes of documents regarding her work on the Board of Education, her involvement in the running of the Akron Public Schools and overseeing the Hower Vocational School, and her work as a State Representative. There are nine folders full of speeches she gave for various events. There’s an entire box of her business correspondence from 1924-1929. I didn’t think I’d find anything about servants in those papers.   

But among all the professional documents, there was a single folder marked “Personal correspondence, 1927-1938.” Blanche lived from 1860-1953, so there are clearly a whole lot of her personal papers missing, but I crossed my fingers and hoped I’d find a household ledger or letters that would shed light on the servants’ relationships with the family members.  

Unfortunately, I didn’t find anything helpful for my project in the folder, though it was fun combing through Blanche's personal letters.  Archival work is good for nosy people.     

I’d also requested a box of Otis’s correspondence from 1905 as I thought that was the year the family had hired Valinda Hurley, a locally famous cook about whom Mark Price of the Akron Beacon Journal did a story in 2020. (You can read the article here.) The article does not give a date for when she was hired by the Howers, though it does mention that she advertised herself as available for work in 1905. 

I thought perhaps there’d be something about Mrs. Hurley being hired in Otis’s papers, so I requested the correspondence from 1905 and looked under “H” for Hurley.  Nothing.  I tried “V” for Valinda, but mysteriously, the V file was missing from the box.  I tried “C” for cook, but there wasn’t anything there either.  I didn’t know what else to try, so I just pulled out random folders, hoping to stumble on something like the coachman’s letter, but I didn’t find anything good.  

I left feeling like I’d wasted another precious 90 minutes of in-person research (precious because it takes some effort for me to get time on campus during weekdays, which is the only time the archives are open), and it was small consolation to remember that I can at least rule out Otis’s 1905 correspondence as a source for information.

Now that I have a better sense of what’s in Otis’s correspondence (and what’s not), and since I didn’t find anything pertinent in Blanche’s one folder of personal correspondence, I’m going to cast my net a bit wider.  I have a new list of boxes I want to look through (which will likely require at least four trips to the archives), but I’m most hopeful about a few boxes of cancelled checks.  A cancelled check won’t provide me with a whole lot of information, but at this point, I’d be thrilled to find any documents relating to household expenses, particularly if they include names of the domestic staff.

Getting started with the Hower travel letters

This research blog is my project for a class I’m taking at the University of Akron called “Menus and Manuscripts at Hower House.” When I heard that the University was offering a course about the Hower House that would involve finding and preserving their vintage recipes and accompanying dinner party menus, I had to sign up.  In this blog, I will document what I discover about the servants who worked at the Hower House while also recording the process of my research: I will discuss the sources I consult, what information I find, any problems I run into, my successes and failures, and so on.

The Hower House is an architecturally unique nineteenth-century mansion that is now a museum on the University of Akron’s campus. While much has been done to preserve the house and the family records, our Menus and Manuscripts class has taken on the task of constructing a cookbook from handwritten dinner party menus and family recipes.  Our class project is putting the recipes into the cookbook, and our individual projects involve researching subjects that will provide context for the recipes.  Over the course of the semester, we will make high quality scans of the recipes, transcribe them (to make them searchable on the web), and format and organize them for the book. In tandem with this work, we will also individually research contextual information for the cookbook from primary sources, including the Hower family papers (available in the archives at University of Akron) and the contents of the house itself.

I chose to research the Howers’ servants because so very little is known of the people who were cooking the meals and cleaning up after the family, yet their labor was crucial for the running of the house.  I want to find as many of their names and as much of their life stories as possible in order to shed light on who these people were. I hope that my work will ultimately contribute new material to the Hower House so that more information about the domestic workers will be available to museum visitors and researchers.

If you’re unfamiliar with Howers, their house, and how it became connected with the University of Akron, here are the very basics: in the mid-nineteenth century, John Henry Hower made his fortune by manufacturing agricultural machinery, and by 1871, he was wealthy enough to build the mansion that is now known as the Hower House, once part of the neighborhood of grand homes that made up the former “Gold Coast” of wealthy Akron industrialists. John Henry lived in the house until 1901, when he sold it to his son and daughter-in-law, M. Otis and Blanche Hower, and moved into a smaller place on Buchtel Avenue with his second wife, Rebecca.  Otis had already made his own fortune as an executive of the American Cereal Company, which later became the Quaker Oats Company.  However, Otis resigned from the cereal company in 1901 and went on to become president of the Akron Selle Company, which produced carriages, wagons, gears, and wagon parts.  Otis and Blanche lived together in the Hower House until Otis’s death in 1916, and Blanche took over as president of Akron Selle.  Additionally, she founded a trade school in Akron, got elected to the city’s school board, and even served a term on the Ohio State Legislature.  Along with her daughter, Grace (who founded the Weathervane Theater) and Grace’s husband, John Crawford, Blanche continued to live and entertain in the Hower House until her death in 1953.  John Crawford had already passed at that point, so Grace remained in the house alone until her death in 1973, after which the University of Akron took possession of the property in accordance with the wishes of Grace and her brother, John.  At that point, the house was in need of extensive repairs, and the University, along with a team of volunteers, took on the job of restoring the house so that it could become a museum.

In the first week of our class, Professor Hillary Nunn showed us some Hower family letters that had been scanned and transcribed to make them searchable, and she suggested that we begin our research by looking through them.  The letters were written by Blanche and Otis Hower to their daughter, Grace, while they were traveling through Europe in 1914, shortly before the outbreak of WWI.  I searched the letters for terms like “servant,” “cook,” and “clean,” and I ended up finding a few mentions of people that were likely domestic employees right off the bat.

In February of 1914, Blanche wrote home to Grace, “How is Flossie and Tisch and Mrs. Logston? It takes a wise person to keep peace around different temperments. You can if you will. I hope Flossie and Tisch can clean the 3rd floor before we get home. I have talked to her about it,” (letter from the S.S. Canopic, 2/7/1914). Apparently, Flossie and Tisch were maids since they were supposed to clean the third floor (which is where the Howers gave large dinners when they entertained).  Mrs. Logston was likely a housekeeper or cook as women in those positions often went by “Mrs.” regardless of whether they’d ever been married.  The fact that Blanche thought to ask after her domestic employees while she was traveling suggests she had at least a fairly good relationship with them.  Her comment about “hoping” that Flossie and Tisch would be able to clean the third floor before she got home, rather than demanding they clean it, indicates a compassionate awareness of their workload. At the time, servants were often viewed as being akin to automatons, but Blanche acknowledges that they have their own feelings and personalities (the “different temperments” among which Grace, as acting lady of the house, must keep peace).   

Grace must have written back to Blanche about some drama at home because a month later, Blanche wrote to Grace, “Do not care about Georgette - if she acts as she did with us she will not stay long. be good to Flossie and tell her she can not believe evrything she tell her. She has made trouble with evry one she ever worked with,” (letter from Florence, Italy, 3/7/1914).  Georgette was likely a former maid that used to work for the Howers and, apparently, was still managing to aggravate Flossie. Blanche’s comments about Georgette (“Do not care about Georgette [...]. [B]e good to Flossie and tell her she can not believe evrything she tell her.”) indicate that Blanche cared about the servants’ emotional health and wanted to make sure they were not unduly stressed.  At the end of the letter, Blanche again asks after Tisch and someone named Mrs. Lugostine (“How is Mrs. Lugostine? And Tisch. [...] Give my love to each and all.”).  Since “Mrs. Lugostine” is named with a title, it is probable that she, like Mrs. Logston in the first letter, would have been a cook or housekeeper. Yet it seems unlikely that, based on the size of their household, the Howers would have employed both a cook and a housekeeper, though it is possible.  It’s also possible that Mrs. Logston and Mrs. Lugostine were the same person as the Howers were fairly lax in their spelling and grammar when writing home. 

Finally, in the last letter to mention servants, dated a week later, Blanche speaks of Flossie again: “I have been thinking so much of home [...].” How is Flossie? Give evry one my love,” (letter from Menton, France, 3/14/1914).  I could find no other travel letters that mentioned possible servants, so perhaps Blanche specifically asked after them in February and March because her trip was nearly over and she was preparing to go back to Akron.  Blanche consistently links the servants with the comforts of home when she asks after them, which could indicate that she appreciates them in the same way she appreciates her furniture or her other belongings; yet they also seem to be included each time she asks Grace to give everyone her love, which suggests that she also cared about them as people in her life.  

As demonstrated by her advice to Grace about managing the servants’ temperaments, Blanche’s interest in them was at least partly paternalistic and self-serving in that she was trying to maintain the smooth functioning of her household, but any interest in the lives and relationships of servants was not a given for ladies in Blanche’s position, especially as domestic employees inhabited such a strangely liminal space. They worked, and sometimes lived, in their employer’s home, which would inevitably lead to awkward encounters and strangely intimate knowledge of one another.  Wealthy families attempted to counter this necessary physical closeness by erecting obvious visual and psychological boundaries between themselves and the people who worked for them, which I will write about in a future post.

Finding servant names in the travel letters made me feel optimistic about what I'd be able to find in the archives the following week: surely there would be much more information to discover in the boxes and boxes of family documents awaiting me! You can browse the travel letters for yourself by going here and clicking on “Hower Family Travel Correspondence.”