Craft, from Colony to Cure:The Scott Sisters of Elverhoj & Vassar College
Within a few years of their arrival in Milton, the sisters established a cabin studio dedicated to textile production and taught art tapestry weaving during the colony’s annual summer school. Elverhoj was established as a shareholder cooperative, with founding members owning (notably unequal) shares, though the women of the colony appear to have been omitted from ownership. Like S { 12 } the other members of the colony, Bessie and Henrietta trained across an array of craft media and techniques—bookbinding, metal work (including jewelry making), leatherwork, and batik.
By August 1913, news articles promoting the colony’s summer school promised classes in tapestry weaving by Pauline Fjelde, a Minneapolis-based, Norwegian-American weaver. However, Fjelde family records indicate that Pauline joined Elverhoj in this capacity in the summer of 1916. Before arriving at Elverhoj, Fjelde studied weaving at Gobelins in Paris before heading to Norway to practice Norwegian billedvev (or, picture weaving). Bessie and Henrietta Scott studied privately with Pauline Fjelde during her time at the colony. It is likely that Fjelde also introduced the sisters to her tapestry design-partner, Norwegian painter Thorolf Holmboe.
By 1917, during the colony’s fifth summer season, the sisters were described in a Poughkeepsie Evening Enterprise article as “Miss Henrietta and Bessie Scott, sisters of James Scott, weavers, who live in a cottage by themselves and ply their hand looms making tapestries from Norwegian designs.”
The Scott sisters’ most noteworthy early tapestry, strongly influenced by weaver Pauline Fjelde, was also designed with Thorolf Holmboe. The tapestry was exhibited at the Boston Arts and Crafts Guild in October 1916 and highlighted in reviews of the tenth annual exhibition of The National Society of Craftsmen in New York City:
The Scott sisters, whose marvelous tapestry was at the exhibition of the National Arts Club last season, are at the art colony and very busy. The tapestry in question showed polar bears and other arctic animals on the ice and the color of the crystal surface, the atmosphere and the contours of the animals are brought out with great skill.
Craft as Cure
The sisters’ craft careers were shaped by the tumultuous decades of the early twentieth century: their time in New York spanned women’s suffrage in the state, World War I, the influenza epidemic of 1918, numerous public health campaigns against tuberculosis, the Great Depression and World War II.Bessie was at the colony for almost a decade when she began taking occupational therapy training in the early 1920s, through Arthur Wesley Dow’s newly developed Teachers College programs; and sister Henrietta remained active with the colony for nearly twenty years. Yet their artistic careers at Elverhoj are not well documented.
It is unclear whether Bessie Scott had the opportunity to study directly with Professor Dow, though it is certain that his oversized influence shaped every course she took at Teachers College. Dow’s “Art Service in War and Peace,” written in 1919, must have been personally impactful for Bessie. In it he asks how the artist-craftsperson could best serve the most urgent needs of their community’s returning wounded or disabled soldiers. After coursework through Teachers College, Bessie began working as an occupational therapist at the new Bloomingdale Hospital in White Plains, New York.
It may be that Bessie’s turn toward occupational therapy was fueled by the anguish of witnessing her brother James’s condition when he returned from Army deployment after World War I. James was left with lifelong physical and emotional burdens as the result of his war service.
Bessie Scott studied with a number of under-documented women weavers—most had strong connections to the Arts and Crafts movement in the northeast—most, like Bessie, would put weaving into service as occupational therapy.
During this time, Bessie had also become active within local Dutchess County women’s organizations, many of these grew out of local suffrage movement efforts. Bessie Scott’s career is particularly illustrative of the reform agendas of the Progressive movement in the United States, and of the foundational ties between the Arts and Crafts movement in the Northeast and the newly emergent profession of occupational therapy in the U.S. in the decades after World War I.
Craft as a Civic Good
Elverhoj quickly established a presence within the city of Poughkeepsie, across the Hudson River from the colony in Milton. Elverhoj crafts were featured and sold in The Peacock Shop at the E. S. Leggat & Co. department store (at 19 Academy Street). The new Peacock Shop Tea Room, opened in early 1915, was designed by, and featured painted friezes and fixtures made by, the members of the colony. During its short years of operation, the Peacock Shop played an important role for the artists of the Elverhoj colony, further anchoring the colony to Poughkeepsie and Vassar College and providing a sophisticated city venue for the artists of the colony to exhibit and sell their work. Later, the Elverhoj Shop would open, offering the colony its own Poughkeepsie showroom and marketplace.The Vassar College craft studios in Blodgett Hall were established in response to requests by the Student Curriculum Committee for more recreational activities on campus. Appeals to Vassar President Henry Noble MacCracken resulted in basement studio space being set aside as one of the “laboratories” of Blodgett Hall. A practitioner was sought to oversee the studios and offer craft instruction to interested students. In 1929, Bessie Scott was hired for this new position and was “given the privilege of faculty residence and membership.” Siblings James and Henrietta assisted Bessie with readying the campus studios for instruction.
One article in the Vassar Miscellany News described the scene at the Blodgett Hall craft studios, where: “a quiet protest against the machine standardization of products has its headquarters.” There, the sisters offered students and community members instruction in numerous crafts, including weaving, printmaking, leatherwork, pottery, jewelry, and bookbinding.
Biographies for Henrietta and Bessie, published in local newspapers and professional newsletters, were the most fruitful documents for piecing together details of their lives at Elverhoj and later. The Scott sisters’ efforts in Poughkeepsie received significant local newspaper coverage, reflecting their sustained support of an interwoven network of service organizations (including the Women’s City and County Club, the Junior League of Poughkeepsie, the American Association of University Women, the YWCA), and to key women sustaining those efforts.
Through the sisters’ early involvements with these Poughkeepsie and Dutchess County–based organizations, craftwork became an active, civic good to be shared beyond artists’ circles with all members of the local community.
In the early 1930s, Bessie Scott and both siblings would help to coordinate a series of fundraisers, lectures and exhibitions with the Women’s City and County Club, supporting local hospitals and occupational therapy programs. In December of 1931, Eleanor Clarke Slagle, director of occupational therapy for New York State mental health institutions (and founder of the pioneering Henry B. Favill School of Occupations at Jane Addams’ Hull House) was a noted speaker in a series of meetings conducted by the Club. Bessie Scott was also an invited speaker for this four-part program.
In December 1933, the Scotts again assisted the Women’s City and County Club craft sale. It was the first of at least two events to feature the work of students of Bessie Scott from Vassar, work by Eleanor Roosevelt’s Val-Kill Industries & Val-Kill Looms, and handicrafts created at the Hudson River State Hospital.
Bessie and Henrietta each attended the Penland School’s Weaving Institutes in North Carolina (between 1934–1938). While there, the sisters studied traditional vegetable dying, flax spinning and advanced weaving methods. Upon her return, Bessie shared this knowledge with her students in the Vassar studios.
By February 1934, Bessie Scott was described within local Poughkeepsie & Vassar papers as instructing the “community weavers” of Val-Kill Looms and coordinating exhibitions of their work for display in the studios at Blodgett Hall
On February 14, 1935, a three-day exhibition sponsored by the Junior League of Poughkeepsie opened in the auditorium of the Luckey, Platt & Company Department Store. Bessie Scott (“of Vassar”) was one of the professional advisors to the league, along with Thomas Barrett, Jr., who coordinated the exhibition as a follow-up to the earlier showing of painting and sculpture by Dutchess County artists and residents. These exhibitions are notable for being the first community art exhibition in Dutchess County (aside from those affiliated with Vassar College) and for ultimately leading to the formation of the Dutchess County Art Association. Brother James Scott would become DCAA’s president a few decades later.
In the spring of 1935, Bessie Scott assumed a post with the New York State Commission for the Blind (NYSCB), appointed as “designer and advisor of industrial art work for the blind.” She stepped down from her position at Vassar, so sister Henrietta took over managing the studios and classes there. Henrietta, too, took over hosting and instructing the community of weavers from Val- Kill Looms after Bessie’s departure.
When Vassar closed the craft studios in 1941, Henrietta began offering classes in metalwork, fiber arts and bookbinding at the Poughkeepsie YWCA. In October 1942, Henrietta Scott Miller’s arts and crafts courses there were canceled owing to shortages of materials (metals like copper and pewter, also leather, wool, and linen thread) caused by the war. The sisters had run Vassar College’s first craft studios in the basement of Blodgett Hall for over a decade; Bessie from 1929–1935, then Henrietta from 1935–1941. Despite careers in craft and craft instruction spanning three decades, no known examples (or even photographs) of work by either Bessie or Henrietta Scott have yet been found. It is fitting to be retelling a significant part of the sisters’ stories here in Poughkeepsie, particularly at Vassar College. The city and campus were, I believe, the intellectual, civic and creative centers that shaped the lives of the sisters’ and further enriched their long careers in craft.
Leslie A. Melvin
Manager of Academic Technology Services
Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson