CCOA Women's Club, America's Kitchen with Nancy Carlisle

Nancy Carlisle of Historic
New England

Visits the Canton
Council on Aging (CCOA) Women’s Club.            

By Elizabeth Schmellick  &  Agnes Hagan

The history of how the kitchen evolved for women and their families was described for club members by Nancy Carlisle, Senior Curator of Collections at Historic New England, formerly the New England Society for the Preservation of Antiquities. She is responsible for exhibition
development, research and writing and disseminating information about the museum’s 110,000 historic and decorative arts objects. She is the author of Cherished
Possessions: A New England Legacy, and co-author with Melinda Nasardinov of America’s Kitchens. Ms. Carlisle has written and lectured widely on the material culture of domestic life from the seventeenth century to the
twenty-first. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Bates College and a master of arts from the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture, University of Delaware.

Ms. Carlisle’s video presentation timeline held the interest of the CCOA Women’s Group as we traveled through time from the early settlers, to the present day. Days of going to the coal bin, cleaning flues, and replacing the oil can to make hot water, have vanished. There were stories of cook stoves and sod houses in the Dakotas; The Whistler’s Walk in the South, where slaves had to whistle as they came from the cookhouse to the main house to alert the owners of their arrival; and of the development of The Hoosier Cabinet, predecessor of the countertops and kitchens of today. The Cast Iron Cook Stove was an important part of life and a status symbol on the frontier lands, as they were hard to come by. Mary Ellen Olsen, a member of the
Women’s Club reminded us The Rising Sun Stove Polish Company was in Canton as far back as the 1880’s.

We traveled from General Electric’s role, to
Julia Child’s contribution, to men in the kitchen, and gained an appreciation of that evolution.

Thank you Nancy Carlisle for a wonderful trip
through America’s Kitchen’s from Hearthside to Convection.