Child's Spoke-Backed Highchair
Date1880s
Credit LineGift of Mr. L. A. Gilbert, Capreol, Ontario, 1961
Object number1961.107.026
Label TextWilliam Hovey Blinn (1881-1909) used this highchair when he was a baby. Blinn died of typhoid fever just before his 28th birthday. Hovey’s cousin, Leonard Abram Gilbert (1906-1970) donated the highchair to Museum London in 1961. He explained that “…there has been no one left interested in [Hovey] since his mother died, almost a 100 years old, a few years ago, after outliving both husband and son for forty or more years.”
Many of the objects in Museum London’s history collection are the last tangible links to people long dead. As is the case with this highchair, sometimes the story associated with the object reads as a cry from the heart: Please don’t forget! What can we remember about Hovey? Born on October 30, 1881, to Helen Gilbert Blinn (1855-1954) and Chauncey (sometimes “Chancy”) Blinn (1843-1914), in his early adulthood Hovey was a farmer. On his death certificate, he is described as a “merchant.” On December 24, 1901, Hovey married 27-year-old Nellie Evelyn Teall of Vienna, Elgin County. They had no children. A widow for nearly 10 years, Nellie married American Leonard Von Proyen in May 1919 and died some 30 years later in 1949.
Hovey began to feel unwell on or around September 4, 1909; his death certificate indicates that he had been ill for 21 days. He had contracted typhoid, or Salmonella typhi, through food or water contaminated by the feces of an infected person. His early symptoms would have been lack of appetite, headaches, diarrhea, generalized aches and pains, high fever, and lethargy. During the last four days of his illness, Hovey experienced a complication of typhoid fever: intestinal hemorrhaging. This was the immediate cause of his death on September 25, 1909.
At the time Hovey became sick, doctors and nurses treated typhoid with diet, bed rest, and medicines and baths to reduce fever. For an intestinal hemorrhage, treatment involved bed rest, the application of ice to the abdomen, the elevation of the foot of the bed, and the administration of morphine. As Hovey’s case illustrates, this treatment was not always effective. Immunization against Salmonella typhi had been developed in 1896 but was not widespread. Antibiotic treatment did not become available until 1948.
Hovey’s mother who died in 1954 truly was the last one to be really interested in him for what could Leonard, only three years old when Hovey died, remember of his adult cousin? But now we have all learned a little something about Hovey, too. Now we know that he lived and loved and was lost too soon. I think Leonard would have liked that.
NameHighchair
