Mowat, Grace Helen

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Mowat, Grace Helen

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Dates of existence

1875-1964

History

Nell, or Nellie, as she was known for most of her life, grew up on Beech Hill farm just outside Saint Andrews. She was born 31 January 1875. After attending Charlotte County grammar school in town, she spent a winter at the Richmond School of Art and Music in London. But it was the practical rather than the fine arts that drew her and later she enrolled at Cooper Union in New York, a school that trained both designers and teachers of art and craft. For Nell, teaching followed: in Augusta, Bermuda, and Halifax. But the classroom didn't satisfy and in her mid-thirties, unmarried and with very little money, she returned to Beech Hill after the death of her mother.
Sensing a market for the home made and the handcrafted in 1913 she commissioned three farmwomen to hook rugs under her guidance. The rugs sold quickly at a craft shop in Montreal. To the other farmwomen she recruited, her instructions were simple. Use only natural materials and for subjects look to the life and landscape of Charlotte County. No lotus flowers or birds of paradise and no designs from magazines and catalogues, and nothing seen in shop windows. Nell's mantra was a couplet from a poem by Charles Goodridge Roberts “See the beauty that clings in common forms, and find the soul of unregarded things.”
Her shop front was the parlour of Beech Hill Farm, her workshop a large shed behind the house where she and the indispensable Boyd Merrill washed and dyed wool fleeces collected from the farms. Her drying racks were chicken wires strung on poles. After carding and spinning at a mill in St. Stephen, and more washing and softening at Beech Hill, batches of knitting and weaving yarns were delivered to Cottage Craft's seventy crafters. Their products sold at home and across the continent, and in 1919 Nell had to move, first to a large building on Water Street and then to Chestnut Hall, now the Ross Memorial Museum. In 1920, the business grossed the equivalent of half a million dollars.

Cottage Craft survived the Depression but wartime austerity, gas rationing and the closing of the Algonquin Hotel were damaging. Nell sold Chestnut Hall and moved to a small shop on Water Street. At the end of the war, now seventy, she sold the business to Kent and Bill Ross, talented young ex-service men and the sons of a trusted old friend. The purchase price was a token amount of cash and the guarantee of small monthly payments to Nell for the rest of her life. Cottage Craft's new home was a refurbished lobster plant in Market Square.
Nell’s vision would continue to influence the lives of many and inspire the arts and craft movement in Charlotte County for decades to come
Nell was a celebrity. She had a showcase at the British Empire Exhibition in London, started a pottery at Chestnut Hall, badgered government into supporting flax growing on Charlotte County farms, and to celebrate rural life and culture she organized a series of successful summer pageants at Beech Hill. She also wrote poetry and stories for children, a romantic history of Saint Andrews, and sketched and painted. She started the Music, Art and Drama Society—the hugely successful ‘MAD Club’. In 1951, the University of New Brunswick, urged by Lord Beaverbrook, awarded her an honorary degree. Nell died in her 90th year at her beloved Beech Hill. Her friend Bliss Carman, the renowned poet, affectionately and rightly dubbed her the “Countess of Charlotte”. She died in February 1964 at her home Beech Hill.
Her own family history played an important role in her writing. In one of her best works, The Diverting History of a Loyalist Town: A Portrait of St. Andrews (1932), she traced the development of St. Andrews up until 1932. Her other books include, Funny Fables of Fundy: and Other Poems for Children (1928), The Tories' King: George III and the Seeds of the Revolution (1976), A Story of Cottage Craft (1958), The House that Hurricane Jack Built (1954), and Broken Barrier: A Romance of Staten Island and the Province of New Brunswick (1951).

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St. Andrews, New Brunswick

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