There are a number of items in the Giles County Historical Society’s Museum that really capture people’s curiosity. One such object is the Victorian hair wreath made from hair of the Hughes sisters of Wabash. Though a little creepy by today’s standards, making wreaths and jewelry of hair was quite common for middle- and upper-class women in the mid- to late-1800s.
Women typically had a container called a hair receiver on their dressing tables that they would fill with hair collected when they brushed their hair. The hair could then be wound around wires to form various types of flowers. Hair colors and flower textures created variety in the completed “fancy work.” The wreaths were usually made in a horseshoe shape with the most recently made flowers placed in the center at the bottom of the wreath and moved upward as new flowers were made. As hair wreaths were often made from the hair of deceased family members, it makes sense that the most recently deceased would be at the center of the wreath. Rather than being a mourning wreath, it appears that the Hughes sisters made this wreath from their own exceptionally long hair - in the Historical Society’s collections is a photograph of Minnie Hughes with hair described as 4 feet 8 inches long. Minnie Hughes later married Dr. Frank Anderson, Wabash’s doctor and keeper of the community’s telephone switchboard. The Anderson’s granddaughter, Ernestine Boothe, donated the hair wreath to the Historical Society.
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