Making Memories in Early America

Abstract

In the opening of her book Memory's Daughters, Susan M. Stabile recounts how, in 1830, Deborah Norris Logan wistfully remembered her family's house that had stood for nearly seventy years on a street corner in Philadelphia only to be razed and replaced by the Second Bank of the United States. Logan lamented that when the house was destroyed, she lost some of her memories of the house and of her life in it too. She needed the physical structure of the house, its architectural style, the recesses of place and memory hidden in the rooms and spaces she knew so well. This material culture sparked Logan's most intimate and loving memories of the life she lived in the house and among the goods that filled it. More than that, those goods sparked her life remembered, giving meaning to her life as she looked back it across the plot of land on which her family's house had once stood. In many respects, Logan was practicing the kind of memory recovery that has come under increasing study by scholars studying the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.1 But Stabile takes that literature in a new direction by carefully examining how a coterie of women in the Delaware Valley constructed their personal memories through their mnemonic associations with material culture. These women aspired not to build the consensus that often defined a national, or public, memory but rather they aimed at accurately recreating a specific, more personal, kind of historical record (p. 4). To that end, they compiled and preserved their anomalous histories in genealogical commonplace books both to teach their daughters the family history and to secure the family memory. To assemble appropriate commonplace books, to put together those events and material culture that shaped a life lived so they could preserve a life remembered, the coterie focused on the local, the specific, and the domestic. The writers, however, knew that the process of compiling and of writing their commonplace books would always be incomplete. They hoped that their histories would be constantly added to, edited, changed, and indexed for future generations. Their histories, and how