This flour bin came from the Dave and Nina Cowan homeplace southeast of Greenland (Washington County). The ad is a page from the 1927 Sears catalog, showing a family proudly admiring their new kitchen cabinet complete with a flour bin much like the one owned by the Cowans. The ad describes an “easy-filling flour bin. Capacity, 50 pounds. Patented style lowering rods bring bin down to convenient level for filling. Has handy patent sifter.”
This circa 1900 needlework was sold as a ready-to-make kit. Sears and Roebuck listed similar items in their 1902 catalog as “sofa cushion covers.” The design to be embroidered was stamped on the front fabric; a back fabric was also part of the kit.
In the 1800s, before store-bought fabric became the norm, many a pioneer home had a loom where the woman of the house made the family fabrics. Shuttles like this handmade one carried yarns across warp threads, creating fabric.
Backwards “S” on the shuttle.
The shuttle most likely belonged to Temperance Caroline Searcy. (A backward “S” is punch-marked on the top of it.) Temperance, her husband Alfred H. Searcy, and their children came from Georgia to Arkansas in 1859, settling in the Friendship community east of Springdale where they farmed and raised hogs and sheep.
Temperance Searcy’s grandson, Lockwood, inherited his grandmother’s textile tools and other family heirlooms in the 1940s. Lockwood’s wife, Annabel Applegate Searcy, donated many of these pioneer era artifacts to the Shiloh Museum in 1968, the year the museum opened to the public.
Temperance Searcy’s grandson, Lockwood, inherited his grandmother’s textile tools and other family heirlooms in the 1940s. Lockwood’s wife, Annabel Applegate Searcy, donated many of these pioneer era artifacts to the Shiloh Museum in 1968, the year the museum opened to the public.