Candace Wheeler: the Mother of American Interior Design
Candace Thurber Wheeler was born in 1827 in rural Delhi, New York. She and her siblings grew up as "not only traditional, but actual Puritans, repeating in 1828 the lives of our pioneer New England forefathers a hundred years before" – Abner and Lucy Thurber were strictly religious, raising their children according to Biblical precepts and disallowing them from reading fiction. Living on a farm in the early nineteenth century, the family was required to craft many of their necessities, such as cheese, butter, candles, preserves, cured meats, sausages, pickles, and clothing, but beyond this, Abner's abolitionist sympathies caused him to ban items created with slave labor from the house (and to help fugitive slaves north to Canada). Instead of buying white sugar, the Thurbers tapped maple trees and boiled the sap to make maple sugar; rather than purchase cotton fabric, they grew and processed their own flax, and spun and wove it into linen cloth.