Calico Fabric and Calico Balls

I am a lover of New England history and I’ve been happy to have worked sharing history with the public. I spent seven years in a living history museum teaching people about the 1840s. It was very important to wear appropriate period style clothing, so when I worked on the farm or in the kitchen or in the garden, I wore a calico dress with a calico apron. My post today is to give you a little insight about calico, and how it was a clothing necessity for working people and later how it was used to help the poor and even the soldiers in the Civil War.

Calico got its name from where it was first produced in the city of Kozhikode, India, pronounced Calicut in English, in the 11th century. Calico was the fabric, a course unbleached cotton fabric, sometimes even including bits of cotton seed husks. Calico fabric was printed with Indian designs were big and bold were imported to England as early as 1630. Soon the English were producing calicos, exporting them to America in the 1780s. It was at this time the definition of calico split. In America, calico came to mean the print on the fabric. In Europe, it continued to mean the fabric itself.

Cheap calico was made into clothing by the poor, but there was a range of calico fabrics that was suitable to clothe royalty.

I became interested in the subject after seeing a post on Facebook by Historic Northampton (Massachusetts) that included these photos of an antique suit made of calico. The photos below were taken by Bassett and Schyler Fohrhaltz-Burbank and used with their permission.

Per Lynne Bassett…”Okay, I will bet that you have never seen anything like this before! This crazy wonderful man’s suit was found in a box in the Shepherd House attic and cataloged a few years ago as a 1920s-30s colonial revival pageant costume. My jaw hit the floor when I saw it. In fact, it’s not a colonial revival costume, but an 1840s-1850s man’s suit for a calico ball! The calico ball was a fashionable party theme starting in the 1840s up to the latter part of the 19th century.”

Calico Balls or Calico Dress Balls

In her richly detailed article, “19th-Century Calico Balls,” in Mar/Apr 2018 issue of Early American Life, author Susan W. Greene shares her scholarship in historic costumes and textiles and blends them within a popular, little known activity of wearing calico to a fancy or community dance for charity or simple entertainment. I highly recommend that you find the article and read it in full. Check with your library or look for back issues for sale online.

Couples would wear matching calico fancy dress (or the man may wear some item of matching calico at his behest) which would be donated after the event to clothe the poor. Other balls or dances would sell tickets and the proceeds would go to a charity as well as the clothing worn. One very charming way to get younger people together for the first dance of the evening quite clever. The woman who made her calico gown for the evening made a small apron shaped article and secreted in a bag. The man would then take one of these small bags and match that apron to the dress wearer.

These dances or events continued for some decades, through war and peace and often a nostalgic recreation of the past.