Skeel Reboot
David Gregory Pihl
Rufus Skeel’s daughter had a name. I am convinced of it. When Mrs. Skeel called the family to dinner, she probably hollered some proper noun or other, in an effort to get the attention of her daughter.
Go ahead and search for her on the internet. You will find only mention of the Knight Brothers, and their friend Rufus Skeel (who had a dry goods store). As a footnote, it is mentioned in many accounts that Rufus Skeel’s daughter was the person who made the signs. That’s it. That’s the only mention she gets.
It’s truly sad how little effort people put into researching, teaching, and even remembering the stories of people who have shaped the world that we now live in. Not even Berkshire Hathaway has the resources to track down the name of this brilliant little girl. Granted, Victorians thought that a child should be seen and not heard…
I went to the public library once, and pulled down an entire bookshelf onto a table. I began to pore through the pages of numerous anthologies and encyclopedic reference books. The Fifty Greatest Americans that Ever Lived. The 100 Women who Mattered Most. The Greatest Inventors of All Time. You get the idea. I left the library completely crestfallen. Not one single person in any of those books was on my “home team.” There was not one single Mormon, or even anybody with a significant connection to Utah listed in those pages.
The list of individuals who rival my great uncle’s impact on world history number in the dozens, not hundreds. Not even John Moses Browning made the cut? I was angry, to say the least!
That very day I embarked on a journey that has led me to compile lists of names. Hundreds of people on my “home team” who changed everything. And none of you know any of their names. Virtually nobody does nowadays.
Someday I’d like to write a book about these people. Not because the people mentioned in all those other books are unimportant. On the contrary, I suspect you could probably dig up an impressive list of forgotten inventors from just about any major US City. I would love to read about them. I’ve merely focused on my own “home team” because their information is all around me. And because I believe their stories need to be told.
Our Voices Magazine is an online magazine that focuses on women, the everyday challenges they face, and the issues that they care about. I’m not a woman, so I guess you can’t exactly say I’m a part of your “home team.” Nevertheless, I bring something to the table that I hope Our Voices’ readers will all find valuable. I have a passion for unearthing stories of people who changed the world when nobody was paying attention.
While my primary focus has been on uncovering the names of forgotten Utahans, Mormons, and Utah Mormons, I love a good story as much as the next person. And if it’s okay, I’d like to share a few stories about people from the “home team” of Our Voices Magazine readers (well, the targeted demographic audience anyway).
If you’ll allow me to start with Rufus Skeel’s daughter, I’ll try not to bore you too much with the minutiae that I so often get tangled up in.
In my estimation, Miss Skeel is an important part of our collective history. Before Avard T. Fairbanks taught automakers how to play with modeling clay; Before Francis James Barraud created one of the most recognized (and beloved) logos in the entire world; Before Joseph Christian Leyendecker turned Cluett Peabody & Company into an industrial powerhouse; Rufus Skeel’s daughter introduced many Americans to the concept of corporate branding.
After many years of telling her story to passengers in my shuttle van, I decided to roll up my sleeves and do a little research. What do we really know about her? I’ve been sifting through documents for over a month, trying to uncover details about this elusive young lady. I have a lot of hunches to offer you, but very few hard facts. H. L. Mencken’s myth about Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub has been debunked a thousand bazillion times, and yet the story continues to be taught as historical fact. I know all too well about the possible consequences from speculating aloud about this sequence of events.
But after all, which is worse? Should I tell the story and get a few details wrong; or should I join the legions of people who have forgotten about Miss Skeel altogether? Please forgive me if I choose the first of these two options. I think Miss Skeel deserves better.
We have stood for a very long time on the shoulders of giants. We have congratulated ourselves for being the most technologically advanced society in all of human history. Yet we fail to consider how we got here, and where we came from. In essence, we have forgotten who we are. Forgetting the name of Rufus Skeel’s daughter is merely a symptom of this worrisome collective amnesia.
Today I heard Joyce Ladner in a public radio interview about the civil rights movement. She also described this thing I call “collective amnesia”—This contempt for the people upon whose shoulders we all stand. I didn’t recognize the pop culture icons she referenced in the interview, but it was clear that she felt dismay over the way the younger generations use the “n-word”, especially in their music. The African-American community owes a debt of gratitude to Ladner, and to many of her friends and heroes from the American civil rights movement of the 1960’s. It is easy for me, an outsider to the African American community, to look at the situation she describes and shake my head in disgust. I don’t have a dog in this fight, so I can look at this situation objectively.
I have yet to find evidence that anybody has spent five minutes researching the identity of Rufus Skeel’s daughter. The internet is awash with sloppy research, and with copy-and-paste-plagiarism, and every site that discusses her place in history lists her merely as Rufus Skeel’s daughter. It’s as though she is thought to be an unimportant footnote in the history of corporate branding. Where are the History Detectives when I need them?
Now before I get too far afield, I want to make it clear that I don’t necessarily buy into any claims that we men folk are to blame for the way that women have been ignored by historians. Nor do I buy the argument that men don’t value the contributions made by great women of the past. Please reconsider this tired old rant, and look at this thing rationally.
First of all, it would be impossible to catalog all the great things your great grandmother accomplished in her lifetime. Now multiply your great grandma’s good deeds by the number of people living today who also had a great grandmother. Now consider the fact that those people who descended from amazing great grandmothers probably had amazing grandmothers, and amazing moms, and so forth. It would be impossible to catalog the good deeds of all the great women who ever lived. May I humbly submit that it is the job of your local newspaper to publish a condensed list of highlights in the obits column, and not the job of the Encyclopedia Britannica? If the encyclopedia is predominantly concerned with the great deeds of us men folk, perhaps it’s because creating a comprehensive list of our good deeds is a fairly trivial task.
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it is not just men who undervalue the great women of the past. It’s all of us. It’s especially us city dwellers; and to be quite blunt about it, the primary culprits are city-dwelling-womenfolk. You ladies don’t value the things that your great grandmother’s generation valued most. You badmouth the heavy tights, the bloomers, the high buttoning boots, and the clothing styles that covered everything from neck to wrist and from neck to ankle.
You openly mock the emphasis Victorian women placed on keeping a perfect house, on being a companion and helpmeet to their husbands; on the amount of time that was spent cooking, cleaning, washing, and folding.
You collect antique quilts and antique butter churns, and then you go to the store and buy butter (and ready-made clothes) that Victorian women would have scoffed at.
No, they would not have scoffed at the idea of purchasing ready-made goods, that’s not what I’m saying. Our modern department stores would have been a marvel and a wonder to most Victorian women. But they would have been dumbstruck by the poor quality of the goods on offer in our stores today. Sixty dollars for a shirt that consists of two side seams and six or seven buttons? What sort of fool would pay that price for something that any lady worth her salt could sew a thousand times better (and in her sleep at that)?
I can still hear my Grandpa laughing at the people I hang out with nowadays. They drive miles and miles to a place where they can walk in place on a treadmill, or do yoga, or sit and meditate. I just saw an ad for a new treadmill that plays videos of a country road while you walk. To every other generation but mine, this is the textbook definition of lunacy.
We city folk all think we are somehow “above” doing farm labor. He was always stunned by that kind of hubris—by the lack of respect for the generations that preceded us… people who worked incredibly hard to provide our generation with a chance to go to college.
We show them disrespect by taking those sacrifices for granted. But far, far worse are the people who not only take those sacrifices for granted, but who turn around and look upon previous generations with contempt. Do you see what I’m getting at here? It was not Victorian man who disrespected your great grandmother. That allegation can just as easily be laid at our own feet.
Go ahead and trivialize everything your grandmother worked to achieve in her lifetime. Scowl at the way she slaved over that hot stove to feed her family, day in and day out. Roll your eyes with disbelief at the back breaking labor involved in churning butter, washing clothes, cleaning house, etc. etc. etc. But please understand that if you devalue your grandmother in this way, you also forfeit the right to complain about the fact that women of the past are never given their due. It’s just that simple.
Your grandmother may not have changed the world with some invention, or by delivering some memorable speech that gets taught in every elementary school. But I guaran-darn-tee you that she changed the world of people within her sphere of influence. Not just her children, but also her husband, her friends and neighbors, her extended family, and yes, her grandchildren. You. She shaped and influenced the world that you live in, and you have a duty to pass along some of that influence to your own posterity.
This point was driven home many years ago, when I met a man who attended high school with my great aunt Helga. The man was none too complimentary about her looks and comportment. In fact, his description made me think she was probably quite homely—and may have even had water on the brain, or some such thing. People didn’t diagnose mental illness and neurological disorders back in Helga’s day. They just accepted that something was not quite right about her, and left it at that. She died an old maid. A spinster in a world where the notion of dying alone was the most terrifying thing a young woman could possibly imagine. Parents and teachers used this fear as the single most powerful motivational tool ever invented. “If you don’t master the art of penmanship (elocution, etc.), you will never find a husband.”
Anyway, not to belabor the point, Mr. Smart went on to extol Helga’s virtues for half an hour. If there was somebody in the city of Holliday who needed help putting up their fruit, Helga was instantly there beside them. If somebody was having a baby, Helga adopted the family in until mom could function again on her own. She wasn’t a midwife, not in the way we use the term nowadays, but she became a surrogate mother to the children, and a de facto midwife in times of crisis. Rowley Smart practically deified my great aunt, as he heaped praise upon this simple woman that I barely even knew.
We can’t discuss great women of the past if we don’t first agree on what that term really means. If my aunt, with all her apparent flaws, was able to make a difference in so many lives, then doesn’t that qualify as greatness?
I’ll get off my soap box now. But before I do, please allow me to acknowledge the fact that Rufus Skeel’s daughter provides an excellent example of the sort of thing you feminists have been ranting about for all these years. As I said, it is my predisposition to disagree with the assertion that great women of history are categorically ignored by our male-dominated society. But Rufus Skeel’s daughter stands as a testament to the fact that I am wrong, and the feminists are right. If we have forgotten her name, then how many others like her are we likely to find if we just start digging?
I guess that’s why I wanted to start this series of histories with the Skeel story.
As far as I can tell, Miss Skeel was nothing like the movers and shakers you have read about. She was not a famous author. She didn’t paint the Sistine Chapel. She wasn’t a self-aggrandizing publicity hound, always trying to steal the spotlight from would-be rivals.
I don’t believe Miss Skeel was seeking fame or glory when she painted those first logos. Nor do I believe she was motivated by greed. My best guess is that the young lady in question was just trying to be helpful. Helpful to her dad, the shop keeper, no doubt, but also helpful to the women of the community who were functionally illiterate. I suspect they had a lot of customers who were part of New York’s burgeoning immigrant community.
Anna Skeel was Rufus Reed Skeel and Sarah Patton Henry Skeel’s eldest daughter. If the various timelines are to be believed, then she was about ten years old when this all went down. Anna would have been old enough to paint without lots of adult supervision. She was probably taking painting lessons, if her upbringing resembled that of other young Victorian women I’ve read about. And if I’m right, then it makes sense that ten-year-old Anna would have been keenly aware of the issue of illiteracy.
Look, Victorian women did not have an easy life. Cooking and cleaning were hard enough, but you were also expected to make clothing for all of the family members. Not to mention helping out in the field when it was harvest time! If you look through old, Edwardian-era newspapers, one thing about the advertisements is kind of disorienting at first. Why are there ads for the spring wardrobe stuff in the September issue? If you look again, you’ll notice that the items being advertised are not ready-made garments. They are patterns for clothes you might want to wear when springtime comes around. And if you start now, you just might have them ready in time.
Notice I said “Edwardian-era” newspapers. There were tons of ads in the early 20th century that targeted female consumers. But in the 1840’s. this idea was practically unheard of. If women can’t read, then they have to rely upon the man behind the counter for virtually ALL of the information you need about stuff you’d like to purchase. INCLUDING THE PRICE!
You’ll probably never know what that feels like, but I can tell you from personal experience that it’s not always easy to depend on strangers for help with every purchasing decision. You see, I lived in Japan for a couple of years, and I read Japanese at just above preschool level.
That meant I had to ask somebody else what it says on those generic white boxes full of discounted food items. Whether I could afford it or not, I had to buy the more expensive stuff. The stuff with a recognizable brand logo printed on the front of the package, and a photo of the cooked noodles printed underneath. And if at all possible, I had to buy the food that had a graphic on the back of the package depicting a clock with fifteen minutes grayed out.
Having been functionally illiterate for two years, and living outside of my mother’s house, I think I understand the problem that Anna Skeel was trying to solve.
And solve it she did! You’re going to slap yourself on the forehead in disbelief when I tell you this, but the best solutions are usually the simple, obvious solutions. Great inventions often come from the mind of somebody who asked the right question. I know this sounds counter-intuitive, but think about it this way: you can’t solve any problem until you recognize or understand it.
Anyway, here’s the deal; Rufus Skeel owned a dry goods store. Depending on which account you read, Mr. Skeel’s dry goods store was in a variety of places. So I did some checking and discovered that a guy named Rufus Reed Skeel owned a chain of dry goods stores, as well as a dry goods wholesale company, and a couple of boats that he carried supplies in as he moved them from place to place. I’m guessing he’s our guy. And if so, it only makes sense that people have assumed his dry goods store was in Rhode Island, and not in up state New York. He probably owned stores in many locations, and local lore might include memories of stuff that people bought down at old Rufus Skeel’s store downtown. Right?
Skeel’s Daughter, presumably Anna, is credited with the idea to paint various fruits and attaching the paintings to the bolt ends of fabrics sold in the dry-goods store. Why fruit? I can think of two reasons. There are a few books in Google’s massive library that include mention of Rufus Reed Skeel’s apples. I gather these apples came from his own orchards,and that they had been entered into a contest. You know, the sort of contest you’d expect to see at the state fair. Reason number two is much simpler, and is probably the likelier explanation. What first year art student in 1840 didn’t start their lessons with an assignment to paint a bowl of fruit? The stereotypical “still life” painting always contained at least one fruit in it. Right?
There seems to be a consensus among the various sources I’ve found for the basic story line. The young Miss Skeel painted varieties of apples, and attached these paintings to the bolts of fabric from the B B & R Knight cloth mills. Again, the articles that mention Skeel’s daughter seem to leave the reader thinking that Robert and Benjamin Knight had a little loom powered by a water wheel. You get the sense that Robert Knight and Rufus Skeel were pals, and that the Skeels had Mr. Knight over for dinner one night. Skeel’s daughter was in the front room, and was supposed to entertain the guest while the dinner preparations were completed. You get the impression that Skeel’s daughter showed Mr. Knight what she was doing in her art lessons, and Knight struck upon an idea to use the paintings for his company logo.
Honestly, that’s what I thought I had read, and that’s the story I’ve shared for many years.
Turns out the Knights were a pretty big deal. By 1903 they were thelargest cotton manufacturer in the world. I’m not sure how long it took them to become so prosperous, but Anna’s paintings probably had a pretty major role in their eventual success. Keep in mind that Anna didn’t do a single painting and run down to the nearest Kinko’s. She and her sisters probably painted hundreds, if not thousands of apples, and applied them to bolts of cotton fabric from B. B. & R. Knight’s various cotton mills. At first this was for the benefit of the dry goods store, but eventually the Knights contracted hammered out an agreement with the Skeels so that the paintings of fruit would be an exclusive feature of the output from the Knight company’s mills.
All you can say with a high degree of certainty, is that the B. B & R. Knight firm was the first company in US history to create a trademark for an apparel brand. In 1871, when the Trademark office opened, the Knight Brothers were there to apply for a trademark. They contracted with Anna Skeel to paint a bowl of fruit for them, which they trademarked as the “Fruit of the Loom.”
I’ve been digging through various genealogical resources, and I’ve found a lot of other details about the Skeels if anybody is interested. The Knights went bankrupt in 1935, and sold the rights to the Fruit of the Loom logo to an underwear manufacturer. Oddly enough, most underwear is made on a knitting machine, and not on a loom.
Go figure.
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