Corn Palaces and Butter Queens: A History of Crop Art and Dairy Sculpture

3. Butter Cows and Butter Ladies

5 3 3 Butter Cows and Butter Ladies There has been placed this week in the Woman’s Building, an exhibit extremely unique. The Dairyman’s Association might claim it as their own—for its material; the art gallery has nothing in it more graceful. —New Century for Woman, July 22, 1876 Visitors to the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia saw much to amaze them, but one item that drew their attention was a bas-relief portrait, Dreaming Iolanthe (Figure 3.1). The head-and-shoulders rendering of the heroine of a popular nineteenth-century lyric drama was repeatedly praised as “the most beautiful and unique exhibit” at the fair.1 Unique it was. A farmwife from Helena, Arkansas, Caroline S. Brooks (1840–1913), had sculpted the bust in butter. Using one milk pan to hold and frame the sculpture and a second filled with ice to keep the butter cool, she managed to preserve the delicate, perishable material for the several months it was on display. Brooks’s Dreaming Iolanthe is the earliest recorded example of butter sculpture being exhibited at an international fair, but it would not be the last. This Arkansas farmwife popularized an art form that eventually developed into a major advertising feature for the dairy industry. Caroline Brooks, Butter Pioneer Given that Caroline Brooks is such a significant figure in the history of butter sculpture, a close look at her background and experiences is warranted. Born in Cincinnati in 1840 as Caroline Shawk, she was raised in middle-class circumstances and educated at the Saint Louis Normal School.2 In 1863, a year after her graduation, she married Samuel H. Brooks, a young man she knew from Cincinnati. The couple lived first in Saint Louis, then in 54 Figure 3.1. Caroline Shawk Brooks’s famed butter sculpture Dreaming Iolanthe was on display in the Women’s Pavilion at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. Author’s collection. BUTTER COWS AND BUTTER LADIES 5 5 Memphis, where Samuel worked for the railroad before enlisting in the Union Army in the Civil War.3 After the war, the couple bought a farm near Helena, Arkansas, where they had their only child, a daughter named Mildred.4 For an 1876 article in the New Century for Woman, the official newspaper for the Centennial Exposition’s Women’s Pavilion, Brooks said that, like most farmwives, she did the sort of work “that you never get through with from year’s end to year’s end.” It was common for farmwomen to be in charge of the butter making and to sometimes mold their butter into decorative shapes using wooden butter molds. Brooks, too, had this duty; but in 1867, rather than mold her butter, she started to sculpt it. It was a difficult year on the farm: the cotton crop had failed, and she was eager to supplement the family income and thought the butter sculpture might draw customers.5 As she described her process, she first shaped a roll of butter into a shell; then she tried some animals, and finally some faces. Her friends greatly admired them—and readily bought them. But after about eighteen months of making butter sculpture, she put it aside for several years.6 In 1873, Brooks began to experiment again and modeled a bas-relief image of a woman’s head as a contribution for a church fair. Her proud husband carried the butter portrait seven miles on horseback to get it safely to the fair, where it brought in enough money to fix the church roof.7 One individual who saw it there, Col. H. A. Littleton of Memphis, was so impressed that he asked Brooks to do a sculpture for him. They agreed on Mary, Queen of Scots, as the subject, and several months later the finished portrait was put on display at Littleton’s offices. According to one Memphis newspaper, “Great numbers of people visited to see the wonderful work of the sculptor’s art wrought in frozen butter.”8 Another reporter thought the work so good, he recommended that “the talented lady should drop the butter paddle and take up the mallet and chisel.”9 Brooks’s interest in butter art was further stimulated later that year when a friend loaned her a copy of the Henrik Hertz lyric drama King René’s Daughter (1845).10 She said she had a choice that day: read...