Warning: here be a picture-heavy post!
Spending a week in the Athenaeum Rectory Girl's school was actually a pretty wonderful experience for me. Other than a few instances which I'll brush on later it was a week of fun, art and new friends, as well as heat and mosquitoes. But the last two can hardly be helped!
We drove into Nashville the day before and stayed at a lovely bed and breakfast with a very amusing bathtub (amusing to C, at least, who thought that the shower nozzle was a phone at first!) That's where we got our first taste of the distinctly Southern brand of congeniality which I felt so much of during the trip. The proprietor just cared so much about our comfort..
The next day we made our way to Columbia. We had to get there early so mama could catch her plane back to Chi-town, so we had quite a lot of time to kill while in costume.
(We also got in trouble for going off campus to get cheese sandwiches. In our defense, they told us it was alright to go on a walk, but they didn't mention not to leave the yard...)
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| At the back porch! Ignore my petticoat, darp. |
The house was an absolutely darling 1830s mansion filled with lovely, original artifacts.
Our host family was as new to all of this as we were, and being that they just moved in, gave us the use of several of their huge rooms to occupy. And of course, we made quite a mess of them.
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| And this at the beginning of the week, too! |
It was usually between 80 and 90 degrees, though the building was air conditioned, so I got a good deal of use from my sheer. Even though it did get its fair amount of tears and stains, sigh.
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| Carriage rides! |
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| Dem ankles! |
We had four or five classes per day, such as needlework, crochet (which I learned that I'm terrible at,) singing, art, penmanship, etiquette and domestic work.
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| Kate's dress... I can't even... /jaw drops/ |
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| Sara being a cutie, per usual |
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| Look at all of my neat little 'e's, hah! |
On one of the days we took a brief tour of the cemetery plots where the original family was interred, though it was too hot to stay for very long.
But for most of our free time we hung out in the double parlor and goofed around and sang Disney songs and sewed - the hours spent there were the most enjoyable of the trip for me.
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| Archangel et Jocelyn's peace sign |
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| Church - the best place to goof off. |
Speaking of church, we went to church service every single day. For me as an agnostic that was pretty unusual, but by the end of the week I'd memorized the Te Deum and the Lord's Prayer and knew when to stand up and sit down and kneel on the little pillow or read out of our rad 1860s repro bible. It was quite a cultural experience!
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| Graces in the yard |
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| During the tea |
On the last day, before graduation, we visited Rippavilla, a gorgeous antebellum plantation. And just as if they knew my heart better than I knew my own, they brought us there to see an antique show. SO much love.
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| I didn't have too much time to take pictures... :c |
And then graduation and commencement, which were both wonderful despite my dress being exceedingly low cut (wearing a different corset than I drafted it over, erp.) My harp piece went off without a hitch and nobody tripped over the church stairs off of the dias.
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| The lovely Ms. Flautt! |
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| Yeah, Janet Jackson moment waiting to happen on my part. |
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| Broooooos! |
And all the menfolk were attentive. And kind. And tall. And I would have climbed them like a tree had I the chance. No lie.
As for the political part, it played a seemingly minor role. Mr. Orman's class on 'current events' was mostly factual with a few amusing gems like 'the North was settled by English puritans who didn't like to have any fun, the South was settled by brave nat'listic Scots-Irish Braveheart people.' But when the etiquette teacher read an excerpt from the Diary of Virginia Clay I nearly cracked a tooth grinding them so hard. It was an excerpt regarding James Hammond's plantation, which I HAVE read factual records of and it is NOT a little slaveocratic heaven like it was portrayed as. But in the part that she read Clay talks about how the happy little negro savages live in their happy little negro homes with their honky-tonk little negro culture, isn't it so cute! what would those savages do without us white people?
I mean, read any excerpt you want about life, art and culture in the 1860s. But read a section so drenched in racism and upholding that to be right, to demonstrate that slavery was a positive good(?!?) and I won't be able to take you seriously. At all.
But that was really the only problem that I had. I didn't much mind being walked around the ballroom by handsome, attentive men, if only because it was a change from the usual grunts back home. So there's that.
All in all, I'd do it again. I made a lot of new friends, and I feel like I'm in a little sisterhood of belles, and like Andrew Jackson I'm a huge sucker for secretive societies. All in all, a lovely time for a northerner down South!
The artifice itself is actually Douglas' tomb. It was started in '61 and finished around 1888 (due to cost difficulties.) It stood on the land where he had intended to build his grand Chicago estate, Oakenwald. Never did get around to it (thanks to typhoid and a history of alcoholism....)
We also had a lot of fun with the statues!
We set up in the lovely park around the memorial itself and ate little cookies and cucumber sandwiches and drank lots of bubbly!
The caretakers came up to us and complemented us on our outfits. Apparently they have period events around there and once or twice a year they have a Douglas reenactor! And I've been missing out on 7 whole years of going to see a punk rock' Stephen Dougas! But they promised to contact me and send me info and were generally very kind.
Anne came, as well! It was awfully nice to see her.
And we got a little jumpy by the end of the day, and what better way to honor an energetic woman-loving man than by flashing our drawers all about? (and nobody told me my hair was falling out! :c )
