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.”