Tresses of the Fraunces Tavern Museum Collection

Tresses of the Fraunces Tavern Museum Collection
by Megan Villa

Depictions of George Washington, renowned general throughout the Revolutionary war and the first President of the United States, can be found throughout the galleries at the Fraunces Tavern Museum and frequently among the Museum’s collection. Visitors can also view intimate personal effects of Washington, including a lock of his hair. This installment of the Object of the Month, Digital Projects Intern Megan Villa investigates the significance of such personal mementos and explores how these few strands of hair have elevated Washington’s status in history.

Though keeping a lock of someone’s hair may seem strange today, hair relics were widely popular even before the colonial era, and the tradition of keeping the hair of those who were admired was kept up until the beginning of the 20th century.[1] In fact, many people exchanged hair with loved ones in a locket with a miniature picture, or as an embroidered piece of jewelry to be worn with affection. These pieces of jewelry are often associated with traditional mourning rituals, and they changed along with fashion trends. Throughout the centuries, the tradition of holding on to a loved one through their locks remained as a form of connecting one’s past with the present.[2]

During the 16th and 17th centuries, items associated with a certain person, place, or event were commonly collected and displayed in cabinets of curiosities. These collections largely displayed religious artifacts, such as bone fragments from saints and wood chippings from Noah’s ark or the true cross. These relics, as Teresa Barnett explains, “were presumably valued largely because, in the tradition of the religious relic, they transmitted some of the sacred power of their origins, not primarily as reminders of ‘history.’”[3] Though these items tend to lose their overall commemorative value and perceived sacred power over time, such ephemera have the power to transport viewers to a specific moment in history.

Deborah Lutz argues that there are three distinct classifications for such relics: “the holy relic, the ‘celebrity’ artifact, and the memento of the everyday person.”[4] In the case of Washington’s hair, these lines are blurred. Friends of Washington obtained strands of his hair, among other personal effects, which became family heirlooms. Massachusetts congressman Peleg Wadsworth wrote, "When I beheld the inestimable relic, a lock from the head of the venerable Sage, a thril of Awe & reverance ran thro my whole frame ... but - it shall be preservd for posterity.” The hair would later be passed down to his grandson Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.[5]

Objects associated with Washington’s legacy—including his hair—will carry meaning for generations to come. But the preservation of actual strands of his hair elevates Washington from a mere historical figure to someone to be revered. On view in the McEntee Gallery, George Washington’s hair can be admired (along with one of his teeth) in a traditional mourning locket.

Footnotes

[1] Sarah Duggan, “The Curious Mourning Tradition Involving Human Hair,” The Historic New Orleans Collection, October 30, 2018, https://www.hnoc.org/publications/first-draft/curious-mourning-tradition-involving-human-hair.

[2] Sarah Nehama, “Jewelry Containing Hair,” Massachusetts Historical Society, https://www.masshist.org/features/mourning-jewelry/containing-hair.

[3] Teresa Barnett, Sacred Relics Pieces of the Past in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

[4] Deborah Lutz, “The Dead Still among Us: Victorian Secular Relics, Hair Jewelry, and Death Culture,” Victorian Literature and Culture 39, no. 1 (June 2010): pp. 127-142, https://doi.org/10.1017/s1060150310000306.

[5] The story and correspondence related to this strand of Washington’s hair can be found on the Maine Historical Society’s Maine Memory Network website https://www.mainememory.net/sitebuilder/site/191/page/450/display.