It’s like an artichoke, but with more food per plant
If the city of Manchester could fit inside a mill building, the Millyard Museum at 200 Bedford St. would be the one. Kristy Ellsworth, Director of Education with The Manchester Historical Association, will be hosting an Afternoon Tea with Manchester’s Matriarchs, an American Doll Program, on Sunday, March 10, at noon.
“It is a tea party,” Ellsworth said. “It is a high tea for all ages, really. Not specifically geared toward children.” This tea party will have eight tables celebrating women from Manchester.
“Every one of the eight tables will feature a different Manchester Matriarch from an important time in Manchester’s history, from Molly Stark all the way up to May Gruber, the CEO of Pandora,” Ellsworth said.
“All of the women will have their bios featured but also an American Girl Doll that will replicate their period-correct outfits,” Ellsworth said.
The event is the culmination of funds received from grants and a tradition the Millyard Museum has of putting together similar functions.
“For the last seven years we have been doing American Girl Doll tea parties for young girls as affordable events that focus on history,” Ellsworth said. These get-togethers “have become really popular,” she said. But “every time we had the smaller-scale tea parties we’d always get older women [who would say,] ‘I wish you would do this for adults because I don’t have any children to take.’”
This led to including more women and focusing on specific women from the history of Manchester.
“When we talk about the Revolutionary War doll, Felicity,” Ellsworth said, “on the way up to visit her grandparents in New Hampshire, she stopped in Manchester, and this is what was happening. So that’s kind of where the idea got sparked.”
One of the women showcased is Elizabeth Molly Page Stark, whose waymark in Wilmington, Vermont, described her as “wife of general John Stark, mother of 11 children, homemaker, patriot, and defender of the household.” In addition to Stark and Gruber, the other women included are Elena Crough, Elizabeth Bisbee Hunt, Mary Carpenter Manning, Samantha Plantin, Bernice Blake Perry and Maud Briggs Knowlton.
Stark’s American Girl Doll has been uniquely clothed.
“We have a small piece of Molly Stark’s wedding dress in our collection,” Ellsworth said. “We decided to — the curator and myself — decided to do research as to what her dress actually would have looked like. … so we recreated Molly Stark’s wedding dress based on the information that we had and research we had gathered.”
The tea will be a full-service high tea, catered by the former owners of Roots Café, with petit fours and finger sandwiches. The entire soiree will take place in the Elm Street Gallery and will last around two hours.
“We will have a time for the women to go around and collect … trading cards from each of the tables so that they will leave with a full deck of Manchester Matriarchs,” Ellsworth said. “Then we will just do a short talk about the process of choosing the women and highlighting some of their accomplishments.”
“Manchester is such a women-centric city, starting with the Mill Girls who were half of the workforce of the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company. So much of the story is female-driven — we just don’t tell it as often,” Ellsworth said. “I think it is really inspiring to young girls and to women to hear about these pioneers who sort of changed the history of Manchester and have kind of been forgotten or swept aside a little bit.”
New discoveries continue to happen.
“We have recently discovered in our collection one of Molly Stark’s dresses,” Ellsworth said. “It is the only one in existence that we know of, and it will be on display during the tea party.” The dress will be part of a new exhibit planned for April.
Afternoon Tea with the Matriarchs
Where: Millyard Museum, 200 Bedford St. in Manchester
Cost: $60 per person ($50 for MHA members)
When: Sunday, March 10, with seatings at noon and 3 p.m.
To register: manchesterhistoric.org
