When Phoebe Preble wanted to play with her newly created doll, “Hitty,” Phoebe’s mother insisted that she needed a dress first. This dress, as described in the book, Hitty: Her First Hundred Years, was made from “a buff calico strewn with small red flowers.”
Six illustrations by Dorothy P. Lathrop in the book show Hitty wearing her very first dress of calico roses. When she was accidentally left behind at the Preble’s church, she spent a harrowing few days underneath a pew, frightened by a bat and hemmed in between a footstool and an illustrated Bible. I loved reading the part when she tried to get the attention of the sexton by making her pegged feet go “Clump! Clump! Clump!” on the floor. He was so frightened, he thought it must have been a ghost.
Of course, Hitty was soon reunited with her family and went on to have many more adventures. When spring came, Hitty gathered arbutus in the woods.
Time passed, and during Maine’s short summer, “all the flowers seemed to be trying to blossom at once.”
But it wasn’t long before Hitty was once again left behind, on a raspberry-picking expedition to the Back Cove. A crow tried to eat her, then lifted her up by the waistband and flew to her nest in the top of a pine tree.
In the nest, Hitty encountered three hungry babies almost ready to fledge. Their jostling finally pushed her out, and she fell onto a lower branch of the same tree.
Hitty was eventually spotted hanging from the tree branch, since the crow had built her nest in an ancestral pine near the Preble house. In Chapter 3, Hitty remarked, “Because my clothes had suffered so much from crows, rain, and sharp twigs I was unable to be seen much in polite society.”
Although Phoebe’s mother had promised to make Hitty some new clothes, that apparently never happened. When Hitty was next seen, she was rummaging through a sea chest made to hold her possessions on the ship, Diana-Kate. She was wearing only her chemise, petticoat and pantalettes, but her Calico Roses dress was clearly visible inside the trunk.
After many adventures at sea, Hitty was shipwrecked on a small island somewhere in the Indian Ocean. At that point her dress was “woefully tattered and faded.” And that is the last illustration of the calico roses dress.
I hope you enjoyed this spotlight on Hitty’s first dress. I used Spoonflower’s Cotton Poplin and my Calico Roses fabric to make a reproduction of the dress in the book. Hitty Sis was my model. I carved her in 2014 from a turned blank made by my father. She is made from poplar wood and painted to look like Ancestor Hitty in the Stockbridge Library.
