Most Mennonite women living in 19
th century Waterloo County were expert "plain sewers" long before they were into their teens. Clothing was all sewn by hand by the women of the household and of course there were countless other textile items for household use also sewn by these women, among them bed hangings, bedding, storage bags, table cloths and towels. Many of these latter household linens were marked with the maker's name, occasionally a date, and a number, a system that facilitated identification and rotation. For this, the young needleworker also learned the art of counted cross-stitch embroidery, which allowed her to form, in fairly simple fashion, numbers and letters on the handwoven linen. There was little need to develop needlework skills much beyond this level for these were practical women and their homes reflected their philosophy of utility, frugality, humility. Ostentation and decoration did not form part of their everyday experience.
One single item of their households, however, may have penetrated the barrier between utility and art and ventured into the realm of fancy needlework - the embroidered towel. Made from long narrow panels of handwoven linen, these towels were embroidered with decorative shapes and symbols, trimmed with elaborate insertions and fringes and stitched with the maker's name. As the finest example of the hausfrau's fancy needlework skills, and often the only one, the embroidered towel was prominently displayed on the sitting room door where it could be examined and admired by Sunday visitors.
The important position the embroidered towel held in the hierarchy of Mennonite household furnishings is difficult to explain. Certainly as a decorative form its origins can be traced back several hundred years to Europe, particularly to Germanic areas where it became popular during the Renaissance. In Hesse, decorated towels were displayed on Easter and Pentecost and for weddings. In Westphalia they were hung on walls for family gatherings such as funerals. Generally referred to as a
Paradehandtuch or
Prunkhandtuch, literally, a "hand towel for show", the towel was also called a
Turlappen (door cloth) in Alsace, Baden and in the Palatinate. In these areas where much of the migration to Pennsylvania originated, embroidered towels appear to have had a distinct regional use; as the term "door cloth" indicates, they were hung on the door to decorate the room of which they were a part. This is the use that seems to have prevailed in Pennsylvania and in Waterloo County. But why this purely decorative art form survived and even flourished among the Mennonites when other forms of embellishment were shunned as symbols of worldliness and vanity may never truly be understood.
Embroidered towels were generally the work of young women made during the period of intense sewing activity leading up to their marriage. They were hence a treasured part of the bride's
Ausschteier, usually bearing her maiden name and a date relating closely to the date of her marriage. A few towels survive in Waterloo County collections that were made later in life. Such was the case with Catharine, Joseph Schneider's eldest daughter, who was born in 1799 in Pennsylvania. Her "show" towel bears her married name Catharina Shantz and the date 1836 which would suggest that it was completed nineteen years after her marriage to Joseph Shantz when Catharine was 37 years old. Catherine was just eight when the family took the long journey north and when she married in 1817, she and husband Joseph would have had challenges setting up a household in what were essentially pioneering conditions. There would have been little time to follow traditions that strayed from the functional.
If adolescence for Mennonite women was a time for the development of self-mastery and self-control leading into adulthood, then the decorated towel was an acceptable medium for this development. Girls perfected their skills, improving as they went along and the diversity of techniques they mastered are revealed in the towels that have been preserved by their descendants.
The predominant type of embroidery used by these women was counted thread work, primarily cross-stitch. Using the grid supplied by the warp and weft threads of her linen towel, the needleworker counted the threads she crossed to keep her stitches a uniform size. Geometric forms were the result since curved lines could not be achieved but ingenious shapes and figures could still be worked up on the grid including fanciful flowers, animals, birds, trees, even human figures.
Used less frequently on show towels was a second type of embroidery called free-form. Counting threads was unnecessary. A shape was traced or drawn onto the towel and a variety of stitches ie. stem, chain, satin etc., were used to outline the form and to fill in the detail. More realistic patterns could be achieved in free-form than with cross-stitch and early 19
th century examples owed much to English crewel embroidery. Later ones, however, appear to have been influenced by Berlin woo lwork designs popular after 1850 and were sometimes even executed in wool, rather than the preferred linen, cotton or silk.
Another needlework skill exhibited in decorated towels is drawn thread work. In this technique a counted number of threads were removed from the linen fabric either only from the weft or from both the warp and the weft leaving an open grid or lattice. The remaining threads were bound together and designs were embroidered on them with white yarn. Panels of drawn thread work added to embroidered white towels looked particularly striking contrasted against the colourfully painted doors on which they were hung.
Wool-Worked Basket Detail
No towel was complete without a decorative fringe produced either by unravelling threads of the towel material itself or by applying a separate fringe which could be made either by hand or by machine. Self fringes were plain or knotted, some extremely elaborate and as long as eight inches. Fringes that were made separately were sometimes applied with an insertion of fine needle lace or a twisted insertion called fagotting, a decorative stitch which was also used to join selvedges together for bed and table linens and to decorate and strengthen neck openings of dress shirts.
The knowledge and practice of embroidering a hand towel, as a folk tradition, was passed from mother to daughter generally without the benefit of practice materials. Design elements were exchanged between friends and female members of the family and these were sometimes worked out on small preparatory linen samplers before being transferred to the towel proper. These small test pieces have seldom survived and certainly never enjoyed the status of the embroidered samplers stitched by Dutch and English needleworkers and those of other European cultures. There has been no evidence uncovered to date to suggest that Waterloo County needleworkers "saved" designs for future use on squared paper much as local weavers must have done in recording weaving drafts in hand-made pattern books. Certainly, the charting of embroidery designs on graphed paper was an old tradition in Germanic culture, one which was brought to Pennsylvania by early settlers and which reappeared several decades later in hand-coloured printed paper patterns. These latter commercial products were developed about 1804 in Germany by a Berlin printer and marketed as Berlin work. They were an instant success and by the 1840s, printed patterns were flooding the market in Europe and America accompanied by brightly-coloured woollen embroidery yarns.
There is little doubt that Berlin wool work influenced the style and execution of some embroidered towels in the County after 1850. Realistic plant forms and flowers copied from printed patterns began to appear on local towels, for example, and a preference for wool yarns over the traditional cotton or linen was more frequently demonstrated. By the end of the 19
th century, the availability of printed patterns and of punched cardboard grounds for embroidery had predictably changed the art of embroidery forever. The Mennonite embroidered towel met its demise at that time and needleworkers adapted other decorative art forms "for show" to visitors on those special Sunday afternoons.
Bibliography
Burke, Susan M. and Matthew H. Hill,
Pennsylvania to Waterloo: Pennsylvania-German Folk Culture in Transition: Friends of Joseph Schneider Haus, Kitchener, Ontario, 1991.
Gehret, Ellen J.,
This is the Way I Pass my Time: The Pennsylvania German Society, Birdsboro, Pennsylvania, 1985.
Hersh, Tandy and Charles,
Samplers of the Pennsylvania Germans: The Pennsylvania German Society, Birdsboro, Pennsylvania, 1991.
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