When Hillary Nunn began researching Blanche Hower, former matriarch of Hower House, the University of Akron English professor knew little about the woman whose opulent home sits on the northern edge of campus. But after delving into the University of Akron’s archives, Nunn began to form a more complete picture of Blanche.
“She was such an amazing figure, given how she started out and where she wound up in Akron society,” Nunn said. “So it was amazing to see that trajectory, because most people just think of her as a woman who was very privileged [and] able to be a socialite. I mean, that seems like who she is, until you discover that she was also very much involved in government and education in Akron. … And the idea of her running such a household — you really do get more respect for the idea of what it takes to organize a project like a household.”
Born in France, Blanche was married to Milton Otis Hower, a prominent Ohio businessman who worked in leadership at The American Cereal Company, which later became part of Quaker Oats. The couple relocated to Akron from Chicago in 1901 and moved into Hower House with their two children.
The running of Hower House was the impetus for Nunn’s spring 2022 class “Menus & Manuscripts at the Hower House.” A 2021 exhibit at Hower House Museum featured recipes the family used for dinner parties. At the time, the Hower papers were spread across two university locations. Some were in the archives and some were at the Hower House Museum.
Class transcribes recipes and menus
Nunn, whose research includes recipes from the Shakespearean era, realized this presented an accessibility issue for researchers. This led her to propose a class focused on creating an online searchable database of the menus and recipes from Hower House. Nunn will discuss the class’ work at an event Tuesday, Feb. 13, as part of the University of Akron’s “Rethinking Gender” series.
The class of 11 students transcribed 92 recipes and menus, all of which are now available to view online. Many of them are undated, but Nunn said the majority come from the early 1900s to the 1930s. The recipes and menus offer a glimpse into the running of a large, wealthy household in the early 20th century.
As Nunn explained, the recipes and menus were a starting point for students to do their own research. For Rachel Roberts, that meant delving into the cooking methods and tools of the time period, specifically the cast iron wood-burning stove.
“We think about these cast iron pans that we have, and they’re pretty heavy. But imagine an entire oven that was made out of cast iron,” said Roberts, who graduated in May 2022 with a Master of Fine Arts. “You notice if you go there in the kitchen, it’s one of the rooms that has the biggest windows, and probably some of the only windows that opened pretty wide, because it probably got very hot in there.”
Menus and Manuscripts: Researching Blanche Hower in the Recipe Archives
Jean Hower Taber Student Union
Room 316
Tuesday, Feb. 13 at noon
Roberts even made one of the recipes from the archives, Helen Hower’s Corn Soup, using a friend’s wood-burning stove. (Helen was Blanche’s sister-in-law.) The end result: very good, but very time consuming.
“There were no thermometers. There’s no way to tell what the temperature was. So you had to always be near it. You couldn’t really walk away for very long. You had to keep stirring it because it could get burned on the bottom,” she said. “Besides making kindling for the actual fire, you had to think about afterwards, there’s all this ash in there, and you have to wait for it to cool off in order to get rid of it in order to cook the next day or to cook later.”
Hower House dinner parties were about making connections
Other students in the class delved into some of Blanche’s other papers: her letters. “We got a feel for the humanity of these personalities from the past,” said Mixby Dickon, who graduated last spring with a Master of Fine Arts. “She would regularly correspond with people who had sent her horseshoes as good luck charms. There were also some letters complaining to the city department regarding some rose bushes that were inexplicably trimmed by city workers. They were her rose bushes, and she was not happy about it.”
By the end of the class, students had a greater understanding of Blanche. She was a strong supporter of education and women’s suffrage. Nunn said many of the lavish dinner parties the Howers hosted were no doubt about making connections. She referenced one dinner in 1908 given in honor of the Circuit Court judges. “I don’t know what they were trying to do there,” Nunn said. “Because anytime you get all the judges in one place, you probably want to talk to them about something.”
When Blanche’s husband died in 1916, she became president of his company. She also became involved in politics, running for the Akron Board of Education in 1929 and later serving as a state legislator in the 1930s. She was known as the “Mother of the 91st General Assembly.”
“She made many of the students in the class rethink what they thought politics looked like, because she was involved in so many causes that they immediately got behind,” Nunn said. “They were thinking that she was a very progressive person, and then they realized that she was on a Republican ticket, and they had to rethink, what does it mean to be a Republican? What does it mean then versus now?”
Nunn continued, “It was an interesting way to get a sense of what Akron itself was like during that time period, because there was so much going on. The politics of the day were so complicated, and she gave us a sort of view into it, a lens into politics that we wouldn’t otherwise have had.”
