Children's Bedroom

Children’s Bedroom: The door badge is representative of those that were hung on doors upon the death of a child.

The draping of mirrors with crepe was a mourning custom.

In the corner, the wooden piece with the caned surface is a child-size cooling board.  Blocks of ice were placed in containers underneath the cooling board to slow the decaying process while the body lay in the home for visitation by family and friends before internment.

Before the age of cameras, portraits were done posthumously and with the advent of cameras, photographs were taken posthumously of children (and adults) – all were tangible, loving ways of keeping the memory of their loved ones alive.

The following is an entry from the diary of Lyman Beecher upon the death of his daughter from whooping cough.  Perhaps the pencil sketch portrait of the little one on the right was also done by his or her mother.

“When I perceived that we could do nothing, that the child must die, I told Roxana (the mother) to lie down and try to sleep.  She obeyed, and while she slept the child died, but I did not think it best to wake her.

On waking, there was no such thing as agitation. She was so resigned that she seemed almost happy.  I never saw such resignation to God; it was her habitual and only frame of mind; and even when she suffered most deeply, she showed an entire absence of sinister motives (guilt), and an entire acquiescence in the Divine will.

After the child was laid out, she looked so very beautiful that your mother took her pencil and sketched her likeness as she lay.  That likeness, a faint and faded little thing, drawn on ivory, is still preserved as a precious relic.”

Lyman Beecher, The Autobiography of Lyman Beecher, ed. Barbara M Cross (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1961, p. 127

The silk brocade cover, such as the one displayed on the cooling board, would have been provided by the undertaker for use in laying out the body.  Casket plates and a breastplate with the endearment, “Our Darling” engraved on them would have been used on children’s caskets.

The clothes, from the museum’s collection, that are displayed on the trunk are representative of the types of dresses that children, both boys and girls, would have been buried in.