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Open Doors II — Dec. 1869

"Open Doors. II" Hearth and Home, 4 Dec. 1869.

Open Doors II — Dec. 1869

The mention of eatmint gave me a hint as to my next adventure. Half an hour’s ride on one of the suburban railways brought me out into the open country, into the neighborhood of brick kilns, and summer-gartens, and a towering wooden edifice, which served as a beacon to all the country round, styled Varden’s Varieties, to which a yellow sign-board bade us welcome, with promise of clams, catfish, game in season, and music. Turning to the left of Varden’s and skirting a clump of Pollard willows, I came to a narrow patch of ground of about two acres fenced in and fronted by a squat little wooden house. The boards of the porch were snow-white, the windows shone. Over all the cleanliness came an overwhelming smell of onions and herbs. Above the porch was a sign, which bore in the queerest of hieroglyphics,

HERBS,

and a queer little Dutchwoman, who herself looked like a hieroglyphic worked in worsteds, came out nodding and smiling. Mother Kiehl. Now, every body in the northern part of Philadelphia knows Mother Kiehl, in her little donkey-cart, her wrinkled face, and blue woollen hood, surmounting  a background of celery, pot-herbs, or flowers. I set Sarah Johns’ case before her—a woman, with no capital but strength and will to make money; how was money to be soonest made out of such capital?

“Mein way it not quick, but it is sure. Und die gelt grows wie die herbs.”

Reduced to English, Mother Kiehl’s story is briefly this: Left penniless with four children, she hired this house, and about a quarter of an acre, for the same rent which she would have paid for a couple of rooms in town; planted sage, thyme, sweet marjoram, clary, all the garden herbs; planted about the porch early—blooming flowers; while they were growing, kept the wolf off by sewing; the herbs, carefully dried, she sold to the botanical druggists: the flowers, which cost her nothing, tied in pretty natural bunches, the children sold readily at ten to fifteen cents a bunch to people unwilling or unable to buy the costly, wire-stalked bouquets of the florists.

The next year she hired another vacant quarter of an acre, planted celery, early lettuce, the rarer kind of raspberries along the fence, but the larger part of the space in herbs. The market for them is sure, especially for sage, with both druggists and pork butchers. As soon as she had saved twenty-five dollars, she bought a donkey and cart and so carried in her produce, not to market, but to the houses of certain well-to-do customers, who were ready to pay higher than the market price for choice berries, or lettuce and celery just out of the ground. She had been employed in this business for eight years and owned the house and ground—property which, when Varden’s Varieties will give place next year to blocks of city houses, will make her a comparatively rich woman.

The price of her principal staple, sage, ranges from twenty to thirty-five dollars per hundred pounds at wholesale prices; retail sales, in small quantities, bring her in eighty dollars per hundred pounds. The other cultivated herbs command from ten to twenty dollars, for the same amount at wholesale price.

Now, Mother Kiehl’s experiment may seem to Sarah Johns but a repetition of that of a thousand other small horticulturists; but I think there are points of difference, in which lie the secret of her success. First, she was content to let her business grow slowly—the ground she worked never being more than she and her children could manage alone. Secondly, she made a specialty of a few things, studied their culture thoroughly, and contrived to associate her name with them. No herbs are so carefully or well prepared for the market as hers, or command a higher price; and “Mother Kiehl’s celery” is bespoken a week beforehand for state dinners by many an anxious housekeeper. Thirdly, she carefully avoided all hucksters, greengrocers, or middle men of any sort, thus bringing her goods into market at the third or highest price, instead of the first and lowest. It is easily practicable for any woman to thus make a “connection” with private city families who will be willing to pay high for vegetables with the undeniable dew of the morning on them. Lastly, having put her hand to the plough to make money, she made it, with every minute of her day and inch of her ground. The very walls of the house were covered with the fragrant honeysuckle.

“I plants the sweet-smelling,” she said. “People buys for the smell.”

One shivers a little at the idea of selling the perfume of a flower—but what would you have? As Sarah Johns says, “One must live.” And Sarah Johns, and women like her, will surely understand with finer and freer sense the fragrance of the honeysuckle, and any other ways in which God touches us in this beautiful world of His, when they have found in it some way to bring decency and meat into their houses, and content into their lives.

Once more back in the streets, I was suddenly conscious of my own stupidity. What was the use of groping for obscure chances for women, when yonder, just facing me, was a building where all that money, skill, or patient effort could do have been tried for years to open new ways for them? I cross hastily under the stately trees of Penn Square, and ascended the high steps of the

SCHOOL OF DESIGN.

Here surely were doors enough opened. Let us see how many women chose to enter, and how it fared with them inside.

Houses have personalities as well as men; the idiosyncrasy of this house is work. If labor is worship, here assuredly is the ecclesia pressa [1] of that sort of devotion. Five minutes’ walk through the busy, orderly rooms has precisely the same effect on an ordinary mortal as the meeting with a reformer possessed with some great ideas as with a demon; all our lazy days gone-by, all our useless, pleasant, dear ways of wasting time rise, sudden sins, waiting their turn to be whipped of justice.

The principal of the academy is a man who recognizes the demand of my poor friend Sarah Johns as the most imminent need of the age. The woman who does not work in his creed has not justified her right to live. Work is the rule; wifehood and maternity the possible accidents. Novel and song writers should have but one neck, in his theory, that they might hang the sooner. The stern utilitarian sat in his office, surrounded by plaster casts of the gods of old Greece, but I fancied they had a cowed and beaten look—they had so long mistaken their office! Pan[2] held out his pipes obediently as a pattern for drugget,[3] and Venus[4] waited to be copied as a figure for vestibule-paper!

“But where is the difficulty?” I asked, after an hour’s despondent discussion of the subject. “The scheme for aid here is a grand one, and grandly carried out. The pupils crowd to the school, and the work is waiting for them outside. Where is the cause of desent?

“In the pupils themselves, madam. Women will not work as men do—because—“

“Because what?”

“They expect to be married!”

There was something pathetic in it after all. It was the old story of a reformer giving his life to enforce a great idea, and perpetually baffled by human weakness.

Or human nature?

We had no time to discuss that question. But I fancied a smile on the face of the old heathen deities about him. What if they did serve as conduits for gas-pipes nowadays? They belonged to all time, and had fathomed the eternal secret of men and women so much better than we!

Notes

  1. Ecclesia pressa is a theological term used to describe the oppressed church.

  2. Pan is the Greek god of shepherds, flocks, mountain wilds, hunting, and rustic music.

  3. Coarse woolen fabric

  4. Venus is the Roman goddess of love, beauty, fertility, and prosperity.

Key Words

designer, herbalist, women's work

Creator

Emily Dolan

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