A Leap Year Ball, Providence, 1892

Moving from the American frontier back to the east coast and into increasingly amusing descriptions of leap year events, here's a very upscale event held in Providence, Rhode Island, on Monday, February 29, 1892, and reported in The Providence News on Tuesday, March 1.  This was a much more glittering affair than the frontier balls in Montana and Wyoming.  According to the article, subscriptions to the ball cost $25 for eight invitations, and the German (cotillion) favors cost an estimated $900.  In today's terms, that is around $700 for the tickets and an eye-popping $25,000 for the favors, which were always an opportunity for conspicuous consumption among upper-class society.

The ball was held at the brand-new Trocadero (1891), which, according to Providence's inventory in 1980 for the National Register of Historic Places, was a restaurant and dancing parlor owned by local businessman Lloyd Tillinghast, who also provided the ball supper, served on "small and beautifully decked tables" by waiters brought in from Boston and New York.  The Trocadero no longer stands, alas.  Two bands were engaged: Reeves' Band and the "Hungarian band of New York", who alternated playing. 

Sadly, no dance list was included in the article, but the cotillion was described briefly:

Miss Goddard and Miss Gammell, who arranged the ball, led the cotillon.  At least eighty couples participated and the figures and the favors were greeted with equal admiration.  Flowers, ribbon bows and streamers, bells, odd bits of jewelry and bright-hued balloons were among them.

 

Having it led by two ladies was a leap year role-reversal.  Normally a cotillion (or favor-German) would be led by a gentleman, with or without a lady partner.  Short manuals were published offering guidance on how to perform this task, and good leaders were in demand.  It's not clear whether they two ladies alternated leadership or whether they led as a couple.  Eighty couples (at least!) is an enormous and not very practical number for a cotillion, in which, typically, only a few couples dance at once.  Depending on the length and quantity of the figures, perhaps the absence of a dance program is because there were no dances other than the cotillion, and most of the time was spent in conversation while waiting for one's turn to dance.

Considering the amount of money spent, the list of favors does not seem all that impressive, unless the jewelry was more than "odd bits".

Other leap year elements included

(1) an all-male receiving line, the gentlemen graciously curtsying to their guests until they grew too tired to continue:

Mr. Grinnell, William Goddard, Gen. Dyer and H. O. Sturgis stood in a row and received.  Perhaps they won’t mind if it be set down that early in the evening they, as gracious hostesses, courtesied to their guests and were a charming spectacle.  Fatigue, however, compelled them at a later hour to relax their efforts in this praiseworthy direction.

(2) the delivery of bouquets of flowers to gentlemen before the ball; the author went into detail about the surprise of the gentlemen and their efforts to learn how to manage bouquets:

The ball began with the messenger boys who delivered the flowers. “For Mr.—“, they would say, as the white capped maids answered the bell.

“For me!  What the unmentionable can I do with it?” Peeping Tom, or the messenger boy, might have heard if the poreres had not been to well drawn to drown the notes of the bouquet’s reception.

“Carry it, of course.  Let me show you.  Don’t you know you play lady this evening?”

By evening they had learned, and bore their long stalks of lilies and masses of red, red roses with the grace that rewarded an hour or more of previous painful discipline.

The implied size of the bouquets lends credence to the idea that there was relatively little dancing at this ball.

(3) the ladies crossing the dance floor by themselves; ladies doing so or gentlemen not being allowed to do so is mentioned regularly in leap year ball descriptions.

(4) commentary on the dress and flowers of the gentlemen, rather than the ladies, and some gentlemen carrying fans:

...the escorted sex is the only one of whose toilets it is good form to make mention.  Let it be said, therefore, that Mr.— wore a cascade of carnations extending from somewhere in the neighborhood of his coat collar to below the waist line; that a manly form was noted with most becoming adornment of seven large boutonnieres; that one of the successes of the evening was Mr.—’s magnificent bouquet of house leeks, picturesquely suspended from his arm by a polished hitching chain; that Mr.— was quite the star of the ball with his armful or orchids, as you thought them at a distance, but discovered on closer approach to be Japanese dolls, well embowered in ferns.

Many of the gentlemen carried fans; all improved their opportunities in the matter of flower-wearing, though one enthusiast found the weight of his La France roses quite too much for him and disposed them artistically among the mantel decorations.

The original article may be found at Chronicling America.