Digital Extra

 Helen A. R. Metcalf (1830-1895)
Expo inspires school for 'useful arts'

  By CAROL McCABE
Journal-Bulletin Staff Writer

On May 10, 1876, Helen Adelia Rowe Metcalf was in Philadelphia when all the bells of the city -- even the Liberty Bell -- began to ring. The clangor announced the opening of the Centennial Exposition, the nation's first world's fair.

Mrs. Metcalf, 46, was the wife of Rhode Island woolen manufacturer Jesse Metcalf. She was a mother of five, a Sunday school teacher and an organist. She had gone to Philadelphia to help arrange Rhode Island's exhibit, 1 of 38 state displays at the fair. As the turnstiles began to whirl, she mingled with the throngs touring 450 acres of exhibits of progress in agriculture, horticulture, manufacturing, machinery, science and the arts.

More than 30,000 exhibitors represented 50 nations. Fairgoers gaped at newfangled bicycles, telephones, kitchen ranges, ready-made shoes and the world's largest steam engine. They tasted exotic treats: bananas and ice cream sodas.

One especially popular exhibit was the Women's Pavilion. While some of its displays reflected traditional domestic interests -- an Arkansas woman had sculpted the bust of a beautiful girl entirely out of butter, "kept on ice to preserve its subtleties" -- there was evidence of changing roles in a country where women already accounted for 20 percent of the work force. Women demonstrated machinery and their own inventions.

Also popular were the foreign exhibits, later credited with stimulating tremendous new interest in design and interior decoration in America.

Inspired by what she had seen, Mrs. Metcalf returned to Providence convinced that the country should be doing more to educate young people -- and women in particular -- in practical design.

She proposed using the $1,675 remaining from the centennial committee's Exposition funds to found a school.

That sum made possible incorporation of the Rhode Island School of Design on March 22, 1877. The first class included 43 students, most of them women. They and those who followed came to learn "useful arts, as, for example, designing for calico printers, for jewelers' designs, for carriage and furniture making."

As her family became the school's major benefactors, Mrs. Metcalf spent 17 years as chairwoman of RISD's committee of management. She was a hands-on manager who hired and fired, ordered supplies, cajoled patrons.

"She was very often at the school watching over both teachers and methods of teaching, stopped beside the students and encouraged them in their work, was anxiously concerned about the furniture and the best arrangement of it," according to a history of RISD by Elsie Bronson.

Mrs. Metcalf also "would take a hand at cleaning on occasion or call in her children and friends to help decorate for a party, for she was tireless in devising ways of entertaining and enlightening persons who contributed to the school or might do so."

Eventually her daughter Eliza, Mrs. Gustav Radeke, took over the reins and served at RISD until 1929.

At the end of the 19th century, though, it was Helen Metcalf who molded the school. She handled finances, made policy and debated such issues as the advisability of using live models in drawing classes. But although Mrs. Metcalf didn't hesitate to advise on the curriculum, there's nothing to suggest that she ever wanted the school to teach butter sculpture.

Sources: Archives of the Rhode Island School of Design; Journal-Bulletin files; History of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Biographical, published by the American Historical Society; The Americans: A Social History of the United States 1587-1914, by J.C. Furnas, Putnam's; Victorian America: Transformations in Everyday Life 1876-1915, by Thomas J. Schlereth, HarperCollins; The Concise Dictionary of American History, Scribner's.

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