What is in a name? Rediscovering the Forgotten Significance of “Clover Fields” and its Influence on Interior Decoration Decisions. Also, Wellness Tourism in the Early Nineteenth Century.
/As progress continues in implementing Cloverfields’ furnishing plan, Rachel Lovett discusses the subtle reasoning behind the look of the new floorcloths. In addition, family letters recount the Hemsley’s summer trips to Barren Creek’s mineral spring.
Bringing the Outside In: A Look at Cloverfields’ New Floorcloths
by Rachel Lovett, Furniture Consultant
In early America, floor covering use remained fairly minimal until the first half of the 18th century. Textiles were expensive and, therefore, most American floors were left bare, except for an occasional straw mat. Painted canvas cloths, now commonly referred to as floorcloths, appeared in early America in the first half of the 18th century. English designer John Carwitham published a book of floorcloth patterns in 1739, and it gained widespread popularity. His intricate and versatile designs became sought-after elements in interior decoration. Durable yet fashionable, by the mid-18th century, these floorcloths were ubiquitous in homes, commonly found in entryways and high-traffic areas, as the canvas was easy to clean.
Initially, these pieces were imported from England. However, after the American Revolution, the new nation started to embrace locally made goods, and floorcloths are a great example of this homespun enterprise. In Maryland, several newspapers, such as the Annapolis-based Maryland Gazette, had artisans offering a variety of painting services, including the making of floorcloths.
In 1767, Annapolitan Charles Carroll, known as “the Barrister” to distinguish himself from his father and son, ordered from London “2 Good Painted floor Cloths…made of the best and strongest duck [canvas] and Painted so as to bear mopping over with a wet mop and Put up Dry and so as not to be Cracked or to have the Paint rubbed off.”[1]
Floorcloths came in a variety of styles, ranging from plain and geometric to faux marble tiles. During the 18th century, there was an explosion of interest in the natural world that reflected society's growing fascination with botanical wonders. Textiles and decorative art items showcasing elaborate flowers and plants became immensely popular as a way to entertain your guests. These intricate designs not only delighted the eye but also transported the viewer.
Thomas Jefferson was particularly fond of solid green floor cloths. A solid green floorcloth is noted as being in the Presidential House under Jefferson’s term in his small dining room and Great Hall of Entrance, noting it had "the whole floor covered with canvass painted Green.” Jefferson also painted the entranceway at his home, Monticello, grass green.
Image 1: The Entranceway at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. Image Courtesy of the THomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc.
“Grass green is particularly significant for Cloverfields as the grounds possibly featured one of the earliest curated green spaces in Maryland.” — Rachel Lovett
Jefferson’s love of green floor coverings was inspired by famous American artist Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828) who did this in his own home. Their goal was to bring the outside in, a popular theme in this period. (A similar concept is expressed in the faux ashlar stone walls in Cloverfields lower passage and stairhall).
The decision to create green floorcloths at Cloverfields was inspired by a desire to be historically accurate yet subtle, to avoid detracting from the architecture, especially the faux ashlar stone walls in the lower passage, one of the house's most important architectural features.
Grass green is particularly significant for Cloverfields as the grounds possibly featured one of the earliest curated green spaces in Maryland. Although lawns are now a staple of the American home, English colonists did not find the lush green expanses we see today. European farm animals quickly decimated native grasses such as marsh grass, broomstraw, and wild rye. To create green spaces, settlers imported seeds from England, including clover, which is not native to North America. This practice was intentional and green lawns were accessible only to those who could afford them, making such landscapes a symbol of status and wealth.
George Washington referred to planting “English grass seeds” in 1785 at Mount Vernon. His contemporary Charles Carroll of Carrollton, Signer of the Declaration of Independence from Annapolis, Maryland, used white clover as ground cover in his yard.
The earliest reference to the name “Clover Fields” in relation to the Hemsley property was October 10th, 1726, on William Hemsley’s (1703-1726) warrant to "resurvey several parcels into one tract known as Clover Field." [2]
In the 18th century, clover was a desired ground cover used to create meticulously curated landscapes. Given that clover is not native to America, the Hemsleys were likely planting white clover and choosing the name intentionally as a status symbol. The importation of clover was relatively new in the early 18th century, making the Hemsleys trendsetters of their time by incorporating this plant into their grounds.
Image 2: A Field of WHite Clover. Image Courtesy of the Florida Museum of Natural History.
European turf grass far surpassed clover in the late 18th century as leading citizens like Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and Charles Willson Peale embraced English turf grass with a mix of clover. They modeled their estates after great English country houses with velvet-like green carpets.
By 1780, seeds became more widely available, leading to the establishment of seed stores and greenhouses in cities like Philadelphia. These enterprises were largely dominated by the Shakers, a Quaker breakaway group, who were known for their expertise in horticulture and seed production.
While green spaces were available to the American market, it was primarily the elite who curated them until the mid to late 19th century. During this period, middle-class Americans began to take notice of the works of landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903), who created lush public parks such as Central Park in 1858. Similarly, the 1876 World Fair in Philadelphia educated Americans on how to create what we now call a lawn or yard. These green spaces soon became a status symbol, representing a well-maintained and prosperous home.
Unfortunately, today clover is often seen as a weed or, at best, a symbol of luck if one finds a four-leaf clover. However, clover has many merits: it is drought-resistant, attracts pollinators, and is easy to grow. Until the mid-20th century, clover was a staple in the ideal American green lawn, grown alongside turf grass. This changed when chemical companies invented herbicides and launched a successful advertising campaign to eliminate clover, a strategy that continues to influence how Americans view their lawns today.
While no records of floorcloths from 1784 have survived, Colonel William Hemsley’s 1812 inventory lists numerous green items, including a set of green-edged china dishes and a baize crumb cloth. Paint analysis also revealed vestiges of green verdigris paint on trim work in Col. Hemsley’s first-floor study. This suggests that Hemsley would have appreciated green floorcloths, aligning with his inclination to bring the outdoors inside, as demonstrated by the faux ashlar stone walls he installed in 1769.
Betsy Greene, a decorative painter from Baltimore, Maryland, was selected to create Cloverfields’ floorcloths. Greene has provided faux graining and floorcloths to some of the area’s finest historic house museums, including the Hammond-Harwood House Museum in Annapolis, Maryland, where she made the faux mahogany front door and entryway floorcloth.
Image 3: Artisan Betsy Greene. Photograph by Rachel Lovett.
Greene completed four floorcloths for Cloverfields, covering the front entry hall, study, hyphen entrance, and kitchen entrance. The chosen color, Sherwin Williams Tailpot Green, mimics the look of grass, and the natural coarseness of the canvas material enhances this effect. This design choice is reminiscent of the aesthetic that Thomas Jefferson would have appreciated, blending practicality with historical authenticity.
Historically accurate and inviting, these reproduction 18th-century green floorcloths serve both as a charming nod to the past and a practical addition for everyday use. They offer an easy-to-clean surface for wiping feet. At Cloverfields, they provide a functional benefit while enhancing the historic ambiance of the space, just as they would have two hundred years ago.
Image 4: The newly laid Green floorcloth in Col. Hemsley’s Study. Photograph by Rachel Lovett.
[1] Invoice to Mr. William Anderson, 24 February 1767, “Letters of Charles Carroll, Barrister,” MHM, 37 (March, 1942): 61.
[2] Queen Anne's County Circuit Court Patent Certificate 198 MSA S1204_202.
“Spring Vacation”: Examining the Origins of Recreational Travel
The Hemsleys did not vacation, nor did any of their friends. The term, and the concept as we know it, only became commonplace after the Civil War, first used in reference to wealthy urbanites who “vacated” the city during the summer. Increasingly, members of the expanding middle class took time away from home and business, seeking better health, self-improvement, spiritual fulfillment, or simply recreation.
Semantics aside, many eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Americans found the practice of neglecting one’s responsibilities for the sake of rest and amusement morally suspect. For those unconcerned that “Idle Hands are the Devil’s Workshop” the cost and complexities of travel, along with a lack of reliable caretakers for the farm or shop, often presented overwhelming obstacles.
Exempt from opprobrium was what we now call wellness travel, which, as the accompanying article shows, was not synonymous with leisure travel. For millennia, people traveled to bathe in and imbibe mineral springs, hoping to cleanse away their infirmities. Results varied, of course, depending upon the water's composition and the disorder's nature.
The healing properties of Spa Belgium’s spring water became so famous that its name has since become eponymous with wellness resorts in general. Also achieving international fame were the thermal waters of Bath, England, used by the Celts, Romans, and Saxons before ambitious eighteenth-century developers turned the sleepy town into a playground for the wealthy. In terms of commercial success, probably none rivals the naturally sparkling water of Vergèze, France, bottled with great success by Dr. Eugène Perrier in 1898.
Image 5: King Bladud’s Bath, The Comforts of Bath, 1798. caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson clearly makes fun of the resort town’s wealthy clientele. Image from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in the public domain.
Natural mineral springs are common in many parts of the world, but only a tiny percentage evolved into significant tourist destinations.
On this side of the Atlantic, Native Americans from coast to coast frequented natural springs long before Europeans made them fashionable.
It was George Washington's frequent visits that brought fame to Berkley Springs, now in West Virginia. Incorporated as Bath by investors hoping to cash in on the fame of the English spa town, Washington’s regular patronage established the place as one of America’s oldest health resorts.
In 1799, Nancy Hemsley was invited by her friend, Mrs. Lawrence, to journey to Bath/ Berkely Springs, but recent mercury treatments had left Nancy too weak to contemplate such a long journey.
Historians consider these places to be the crucible of the vacation resort. Visitors to a mineral spring could only “take the waters” for so many hours a day. Inevitably, towns grew as entrepreneurs offered visitors additional amusements. Increasingly, the promise of entertainment and socializing eclipsed the popularity of the water. Saratoga Springs in New York became more famous for its horse racing, and skiing is the main draw at Steamboat Springs in Colorado, to name two of many examples.
Now a middle-class institution, the vacation is considered a right and necessary for one’s well-being, even if the destination does not include a trip to a mineral spring.
Meg Greeley, a Hemsley Descendent, and her family visited Cloverfields IN May. Photo by Sherri Marsh Johns.
Devin Kimmel of Kimmel Studio Architects Leads A Tour for the Cultural Landscape Foundation in April. Photo by Sherri Marsh JOhns
Cloverfields also welcomed visitors from the Archaeological Society of Maryland and the Maryland Metaphysical Society.
Travelling to Stay Well in the “Sickly Season”
In 1797, fearing an impending war with France and its impact on his investments, Col. William Hemsley postponed plans to purchase “a place to the northward…to retire to during the sickly season.” Since the mid-20th century, Americans have associated that with the cold- and flu-prone months of winter. In Hemsley’s day, however, at least for residents of hot and humid climates, the sickly season was certainly summer, which brought with it months of exposure to a variety of potentially life-threatening insect and water-borne illnesses. In 1807, Hemsley recalled the past summer as “a most sickly season [that] has proved fatal to many. Pere’n Tilghman and Hugh Sherwood both died on one day.” [1]
With Louis Pasteur’s Germ Theory more than sixty years away from discovery, physicians lacked a better explanation for the cause of infectious disease than the two-thousand-year-old miasma theory of Greek physician Hippocrates, who believed most sickness spread through contaminated air. Foul odors, of which there was no shortage in summer, provided a warning of an unhealthy environment.
Image 1: Cloverfields’ Rose Garden is in full and fragrant bloom. According to Miasma Theory, foul odors spread disease, while pleasant-smelling plants offered protection. Photo by Sherri Marsh Johns.
Advancements in medical treatment based upon the scientific method were on the horizon, but physicians continued to practice “evacuatory medicine,” also first advanced by Hippocrates. The exact prescription depended on the disease but invariably required a rebalancing of the patient’s four essential humors—blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm—a process achieved through a variety of mostly unpleasant and sometimes harmful practices.
By the early nineteenth century, Col. William Hemsley and his third wife, Nancy, were no strangers to illness. Their health issues, of course, were not due to an unhealthy miasma surrounding Cloverfield. Based on the description of their symptoms, it is likely both suffered from chronic malaria, then known as bilious fever.
Image 2: Robert Seymour’s 1831 “Cholera Tramples the Victor and the Vanquishd Both,” published in McLean’s monthly sheet of caricatures, shows disease as a deadly skeletal cloud. Image: U.S. National Library of Medicine, Public Domain.
Derived from the Latin “mal” and “aria,” meaning bad air, the name itself is an affirmation of miasma theory. In reality, malaria, like many other diseases, including yellow fever, spreads through the bite of an infected mosquito. Unlike yellow fever, which is a viral infection, from which the patient recovers (or dies), malaria is caused by the plasmodium parasite. If left untreated, the parasites multiply in the host’s liver, destroying red blood cells and inducing fever, chills, aches, anemia, and jaundice.
In chronic malaria, symptoms come and go with varying severity as the immune system responds or the parasite goes dormant. The disease again becomes acute with the return of hot weather and new bites by infected anopheles mosquitoes. Rates of malaria, yellow fever, dysentery, and other illnesses caused by pathogens in food and water also spiked in summer and reached epidemic levels in crowded areas.
Image 3: Prior to the mid-nineteenth century, Doctors routinely bled patients to release disease, as shown in this 1804 cartoon by James Gillray. Image U.S. National Library of Medicine, public domain
Nancy Tilghman Hemsley’s always delicate physical condition worsened after her marriage to William in 1797. Her high fevers, severe abdominal pain, and debilitating weakness made the family fear for her life on more than one occasion.
The family doctor (and William’s son-in-law), Dr. James Troup, was a graduate of the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh, Scotland, then a leading medical school. For Nancy, Dr. Troup prescribed the accepted course of evacuatory treatments, including bloodletting, blistering, emetics, and doses of mercury (both ingested and applied topically), none of which brought his patient lasting improvement.
By 1802, William reported Nancy rarely enjoyed three consecutive days of good health. One wonders that she had any! Arguing she was too sick to travel, persuading her to leave Cloverfields in summer became an annual struggle.
Image 4: The states of Maryland and Delaware from the latest surveys (1799) showing the locations of cloverfields, in queen anne’s County and Barren Creek, in Somerset County (now Mardela Springs in present-day wicomico county). The sixty mile carriage ride took two days to complete.. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress
“From the time we crossed the Dover Ferry until we got here we had to fight the mosquitoes with bows to keep them out of the carriage…” — Col. William Hemsley to William Tilghman about the journey to Barren Creek.
William’s formerly robust health started to decline when he reached his sixties. In November of 1808, he delayed a trip to Philadelphia explaining “ my seasonal complaint has reduced me low.” Already experiencing fever and stomach problems, a painful attack of gout left him barely able to walk. Notably, gout, caused by elevated blood levels of uric acid, is another side-effect of chronic malaria.
During the summer, William and Nancy sometimes joined friends and family at Barren Creek, a tributary of the Nanticoke River, in what is now Mardela Springs, on Maryland’s lower eastern shore. A spa town of sorts since at least the 1790s, colonists learned about the curative qualities of the spring water from the local Nanticoke Indians, who touted its healing powers and had frequented it for centuries.
Image 5: Unpleseannt and usually ineffective Evacuatory medical treatments also included Emetics and Enemas. Image U.S. National Library of Medicine, public domain.
In July of 1806, the couple endured a sweltering two-day, sixty-mile journey by carriage in the company of countless biting insects to Barren Creek. “From the time we crossed the Dover Ferry until we got here we had to fight the mosquitoes with bows to keep them out of the carriage…” complained William Hemsley to his brother-in-law. He continued, “We have suffered more than can be conceived. And now they are so thick here I am fearful your sister will not stay more than a day or two.” [2]
With the arduous journey behind them, the Hemsleys settled into the local boarding house and set about consuming the famed vomit- and diarrhea-inducing water. The trip sounds like a dreadful ordeal, but Barren Creek’s clientele, which included wealthy and discerning patrons, some traveling from as far away as Philadelphia, gave positive reports.
The elder William, again writing to his brother-in-law remarked, “Will Hemsley has been here eighteen days and has given the waters a fair trial and he has a very good opinion of them in removing bile, and he has been informed that in disenteria [sic] and all complaints of the bowels they have a wonderful effect, so that I am in hopes Mrs. Hemsley will derive great advantage from drinking the water.” Presumably, she did as the following August she returned. “A few days being at the spring Mrs. H. thinks will secure her against a bilious fever…” penned William to his brother-in-law. [3]
While Barren Creek’s springwater was not a panacea, neither was it a placebo.
Given the down-right dangerous medical treatments prescribed at the time, it is easy to question the wisdom of consuming Barren Creek’s peculiar springwater. The place name even sounds like a health warning. Now, with the knowledge that mosquitoes transmit malaria and a host of other diseases, the trip sounds all the more likely to sicken than to heal.
Was Barren Creek’s spring water curative? The answer is probably a qualified “yes.” The spring contains sulfur, a naturally occurring element known to have wide-proven medical applications when ingested and applied topically, though toxic when consumed in large amounts. Sulfur-based drugs are among the earliest class of manufactured antibiotics and are still prescribed to treat a wide spectrum of conditions as minor as acne and as deadly as septicemia. Sulfadoxine replaced quinine (traditionally served with gin as a health “tonic.”) in treating malaria. Will Hemsley, Jr. would not have been surprised to know that sulfa drugs are effective against dysentery.
In 1903, Dr. P. B. Wilson, a Professor of Chemistry at Baltimore University School of Medicine, found that the spring also contained high levels of iron, which is used supplementally to treat anemia and traces of other elements with known medical applications. While Barren Creek’s springwater was not a panacea, neither was it a placebo.
Image 6: Mardela Spring Water bottles. Image courtesy of the Barren Creek Heritage Museum.
In the 1890s, new owners rebranded the spring and town as Mardela Springs. Investors started bottling the “medical water,” which they sold by the case, with a label featuring a Nanticoke Indian and promises of efficacy against “all diseases known to man.” [4]
However, a preference for beaches and antibiotics, compounded by the Great Depression put the little spa town and the bottling company out of business. The springhouse and hotel (now a private residence) remain. If you find yourself on Rt. 50, heading to the beach to escape the miasma, detour to visit the Barren Creek Heritage Museum, operated by the Westside Historical Society, and learn more about one of Maryland’s oldest summer travel destinations.
Image 7: The springhouse, built circa 1865 and renovated ca 1995, covers the spring head. Image Courtesey of the Barren Creek Heritage Museum.
[1] Col. William Hemsley to William Tilghman, Queen Anne's County, July 17, 1797. William Tilghman Correspondence, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
[2] Hemsley to Tilghman, July 27, 1806.
[3] Hemsley to Tilghman, August 13, 1807.
[4] Paul Touart, Maryland Inventory of Historic Properties form, Mardela Springhouse (WI-80), February 2, 1998.
Image 6: The stone-lined bathtub in berkely springs reportedly used by George Washington. Image From Federal Highway Administration, Public Domain.