Calico Frolic

Ladies and Gentlemen, please take partners! Join us for a Calico Frolic at 6:30 PM on Saturday, July 14, 2012, at the Steuben House, Historic New Bridge Landing, 1209 Main Street, River Edge, NJ 07661. Watch or join in old-fashioned country longways dancing to the musical accompaniment of Ridley and Ann Enslow on fiddle and hammered dulcimer. Dance Mistress Denise Piccino will instruct eager beginners in basic steps and movements at the start of the evening. Dancing continues until 9 PM, when guests may partake of Lemonade and other refreshments in the restored tavern in the adjacent Campbell-Christie House until 10 PM. Period dress is welcome, but not required. The donation is $15 per person and $12 for BCHS members. 

Dance selections will include: A Trip to Paris (Duple proper longways dance, 1711), Lafayette (An American longways country dance, 1799), Christchurch Bells (Duple proper longways dance, 1686), Prince William (a three-couple dance to a 1721 tune composed in honour of George II’s son), The Duke of Kent's Waltz (an English country dance first published in 1801), Mr. Isaac’s Maggot (Duple minor longways dance, named for an English dancing master, done to a hornpipe, first published in 1695), and British Sorrow (longways triple contra, 1807).

In its plainest form, calico was known as muslin. But the name also applied to cheap, lightweight and often colored cotton fabric, named for Callicut (Kozhikode), its Indian port of origin. By the early eighteenth century, European printing houses succeeded in imitating multicolored Indian fabrics, producing painted, woodblock printed and penciled patterns in cheerful designs. A 1793 inventory of merchandise stored and sold at the Zabriskie-Steuben House includes 116 yards of different calicos and 48 yards of Chintz, a glazed cotton fabric in bright floral prints. Women who could little afford fine silks turned calico into homemade finery, including gowns, bodices, petticoats, jackets and bonnets. These they wore to country “frolics,” which were light-hearted neighborhood gatherings, rich in opportunities for gossip and matchmaking, held before harvest or whenever a communal workforce engaged in barn raising, spinning or husking bees.

Experience History in one of the storied places where it was made! For further info on membership in the Bergen County Historical Society, a non-profit volunteer association, or our fundraising to build a museum, visit: http://www.bergencountyhistory.org.