In my last post, I mentioned an
old singer treadle sewing machine, owned by my great-grandmother, Lula Rich
Carter. Thinking about the machine made me nostalgic, and I decided to
restore it and put it back into service. This has occupied a great deal of my time
over the last few days. My husband casually asked, "So what's the
story with this old machine".
As is often the case, this story
starts off with two people who fell in love....
Addison Carter & Lula Rich
Carter
As told by Kathryn Carter Brown
October 1993
These two wonderful people started their life together in a
potato house. Now a potato house was a
little “A” shaped building constructed on top of the ground. It was covered in straw with dirt packed on
top. There was a small door -- just
large enough to crawl through. It was
called a potato house because each year when the sweet potatoes were dug, they
were stored in there for the winter.
When Addison and Lula decided to get married on September 8,
1915, there were no potatoes in the house.
Because they had decided to slip away together in secret, they came up
with a plan. Lula was to pack her
suitcase and hide it in the potato house the night before they eloped and Addison would pick it up before the morning.
On the night of September 7th, Addison
crept secretly to the potato house to pick up Lula’s suitcase. He got down on his knees to crawl in and the
first thing he felt was a shoe! He
thought that Lula’s father had discovered their plan and was waiting for him in
the potato house. Addison thought he was in
big trouble. He got out of that potato
house faster than he went in and left the suitcase behind.
After he calmed down a bit, Addison
finally got up the nerve to go back in again.
What he found was that his future wife had so many clothes that she
could not fit them all in the suitcase.
She had tied her shoes onto the handle!
* * *
In 1918, Lula purchased a used Singer Treadle sewing
machine. It was a model 127 and was manufactured in Singer's
facility in Elizabeth , NJ
Singer Factory in Elizabeth, NJ
When I was a small child, I would visit my grandparents and
I was fascinated by the treadle. The oak
veneers were chipping off the top, and the leather belt which drove the machine
had long since broken. It is unknown how
long the machine had been idle before I took an interest. On one visit, I pestered my family to the
point that they asked my mother's cousin to come over and fix the machine. He came over one evening, installed a new
leather belt and the machine worked just fine.
I was thrilled. My new favorite
past time at my grandparents' house was sewing on this old treadle machine.
In 1983, my grandfather passed away and my mother and her
siblings gathered to distribute the household possessions. My mother asked if she could have the sewing
machine for me. No one objected, and I'm
now very privileged to own this machine.
My father and I restored the cabinet and metal frame in the summer of
1983. I stripped and refinished the wood
and metal parts of the cabinet, my dad installed a new oak veneer on the top. There is a deep gouge in the cabinet, and I did not repair it. My mother believes
it was carved by her brother, Addison, who passed away in 1955 from a firearm
accident. He was seventeen years old.
I used the machine until 1988, when I purchased a new
Bernina sewing machine. I eventually
removed the old singer machine from the cabinet.
The cabinet traveled with me as I moved first to Pennsylvania and then to California .
The machine remained in my parents attic
for over 20 years. This past
Thanksgiving, we boxed up the machine and shipped it to California . It's been on my workbench for almost two weeks,
and I'm very close to getting it back into service. I've started calling it "Lula", in memory
of the remarkable woman who sewed for her family for many years.
"Lula"- partially disassembled and before any cleaning.
