The Jamestown Weekly Alert declared it the social event of the week--the basket social hosted by the ladies of the Methodist Episcopal Church, using a vacant business space as venue, in late September 1884.
The hosts made the room ready and attractive and, before the arrival of guests, it was graced by “an abundance of handsomely constructed baskets well filled with the delicacies of the season from all parts of the continent,” as the Alert described them, “each basket containing supper for two which the gallant gentlemen present purchased at good prices and divided the contents with some lady of the assemblage, leaving her with the basket as a souvenir of the feast.”
“Mr. I. C. Wade was pressed into service as auctioneer for the occasion,” we are told, “and succeeded in disposing of the baskets at boom prices notwithstanding the financial depression of the times, the prices ranging from fifty cents to three dollars, the general average being about two dollars, and the aggregate receipts for the evening amounting to about forty dollars.”
The editor names all the ladies in charge of arrangements, and then adds the local color. It seems one of the ladies had packed a splendid supper into the bottom of a large cheese box, wonderfully decorated, and then on top of the supper packed a heap of raw turnips, beets, cabbage, and rutabagas. The purchaser, Mr. E. S. Miller, was dismayed on first opening the box, “but still,” the editor recounts, “after lifting out a small cargo of these uncooked productions of the James river valley be came upon the best basket of delicacies of the evening,” and expressed delight both with the supper and with the prank. The affair concluded, to universal satisfaction, at 11 pm.
The passages I just quoted are intriguing in two respects. First, the language indicates a need to describe and explain the event, evidence that the basket social, also known as the box social, a commonplace of American folkways in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was not yet a commonplace in Dakota Territory. The ladies of Jamestown were pioneers. Theirs was not the first box social in Dakota Territory--I have found accounts of some as early as 1883, none before that--but the box social clearly was new to the Jamestown scene. Someone there had experience with it back east, or heard of it, and decided to introduce the custom to the Jim River valley.
In addition, the affair was non-standard as to a key, accepted element of basket socials across the country. It lacked the flavor of, shall we say, flirtation, or romance, possible true love. The scheme commonly was for the ladies to prepare baskets, artfully ornamented and thoughtfully filled, but unidentified as to preparer. Then the men bid on the baskets, supposedly without knowledge of whose was whose, and then dined with the packer of the basket, who disclosed her identity only after conclusion of the auction. Perhaps this was a little too risque for the Methodist ladies to countenance.
Fifty years ago I played in the pit orchestra for a community theater production of Rogers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma. You may not remember, but I certainly do, that the box supper is a significant plot device in that Broadway musical. Our handsome hero, Curly, rents a fancy rig and invites the lovely Laurey to ride in style with him to the box social. She declines. At the social, the bidding for Laurey’s box between Curly and his rival, Jud, introduces deadly conflict to the story.
Rogers and Hammerstein reckoned that the box social would connote Americana to audiences, and they were right. It turns out that Dakota Territory, too, was a hotbed of box suppers, some of them enlivened by hijinks, although no known fatalities. Bidding commences in my next column.
-Tom Isern
