 |  |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||
|
About Us Twenty-five years ago Joseph's Coat opened its doors in the old Baptist Church of Peterborough as a fabric and quilting business. The day was auspicious in the Chinese calendar, as 8/8/80 has lots of eights. Such a lucky number means a good day for new enterprises. Linda Marsella and Shelley Osborne have been principals in the business from the start, combining Linda's knowledge of quilting and Shelley's of custom dressmaking and Folkwear Patterns in a shop that was a gathering place for creative sewing classes for many years. The pair sponsored annual fashion shows at the Folkway in the eighties for customers to show off their skills. Marsella and Osborne discovered they had a common dream of a fabric store back in 1979. "I thought it was just a pipe dream, as no good retail space would ever open up in Peterborough, when suddenly Shelley called me from Ted Leach's office at the old Monadnock Ledger in the old Baptist Church and announced one of the first floor retail spaces was available. A few weeks later, we opened the doors with the fresh smell of newly carpentered shelves and too few bolts of fabric on them!" The first customer was Maureen Menard, pregnant with daughter Sarah who later became thier first high school employee, followed by Erika and Gail MacDonald, Marisa Westheimer, Adie Krulis and Charlotte Bowman. Sewing classes for men, women and children filled up free weeknights and Sundays, many taught by Connie Lebel, master seamstress and tailor then at Mascenic High. Susan Lord developed a specialty in Seminole patchwork classes. Osborne mastered fine Victorian lace inset work. Marsella taught the children's classes, learning to tell the kids to "give it gas." Internationally known guest instructors like Virginia Avery, mother of Dublin's Steve Avery, gave workshops in art quilting. Meanwhile, staff including Margaret Groesbeck retired from South Meadow School, and weaver Connie Gray of Antrim, have been with Joseph's Coat for some twenty-five years, following its transition from selling fabric to PeaceCrafts made by cooperatives worldwide providing fair wages and training for artisans in need. The transition to PeaceCrafts followed Marsella's overseas work in developing women's crafts as a revenue source in Asia, simultaneous with the demise of the small independent fabric store in America thanks to the growth of superstores selling the same cloth below wholesale. On New Year's Day of 1999, fifteen area fire departments worked around the clock pumping 1 million gallons of water from below the frozen Contoocook in minus twenty degree weather to extinguish the fierce fire that had broken out at 11am at the old Baptist Church. Ted Leach, editing videos of the last performance of Amahl and the Night Visitors by the New England Marionette Opera Theatre in the soundbox, discovered and escaped the blaze, which gutted the historic building and threatened the whole downtown. While most of the stock was a total loss, Joseph's Coat was able to donate thousands of smoke-damaged yards of fabric to the same Monadnock Quilter's Guild which it had helped start. The fabrics had to go through a special washing process with chemicals several times to remove the smell and then were used in the guild project to provide quilts for children's hospitals. Salvaged and washed puppets (many children were distressed to think of their favorite puppets injured, but amazingly none was even scorched) were donated to the local daycare centers and preschools. While most everything was damaged, a wedding dress on layaway in a plastic bag survived without even a hint of smoke! Meanwhile, much of the stock had fallen into the basement when the floor gave way. Salvage couldn't proceed until April because everything was frozen solid and ripped when touched. Miraculously, the signature cherry-wood oval mirror was salvaged and became the link to the new Joseph's Coat, around the block at 15 Depot Square, reopened within six months with a PeaceCraft (Fair Trade, wages and training for artisans worldwide) orientation. The shop is known today for its comfortable Flaxx and Marketplace clothing for men and women, rare fabrics from India and Africa, rugs, folkart, gifts, jewelry and puppets of the world.
With the change in stock, the owners appended "PeaceCrafts" to the name and out front an extra sign of a Picasso-like peace dove holding a threaded needle. The mission of the store is now to raise awareness of how local buying choices, even those made by schoolchildren, affect people in the third world - whether that be in an American city ghetto, Appalachia, Bombay or Kathmandu. Many products have a special Monadnock connection, via returned Peace Corps volunteers who bring them to Marsella and Osborne for marketing advice. A year after the fire, Marsella dreamt of opening the museum of which Joseph's Coat would be the natural museum store — and so was born Mariposa Museum of World Cultures across the parking lot, devoted to reaching the child in everyone so that all can experience other beliefs and traditions of the world in an atmosphere of peace and curiosity instead of fear. Says Marsella, "The world will know more peace when we all realize we are one, global citizens citizens all. We try to teach this through sharing joy — art, dance, music, costumes, foods of many cultures." Any profits from Joseph's Coat PeaceCrafts support Mariposa Museum, and the staff helps stock the museum store with peacecraft items suitable for the budget of third graders on a field tour. From its inception, Joseph's Coat has encouraged cooperation among the merchants of Peterborough, figuring our businesses will thrive or fail together. It was active in the first Downtown Our Town retail merchants group some twenty years back, which produced the group logo still used in the Chamber of Commerce downtown page and the annual rack leaflet of "What's Happening in Peterborough," recently issued by Peterborough Marketing Initiative. A stalwart of First Fridays, Joseph's Coat also sponsors its own integrated (gender) preschool softball team through Peterborough Recreation Department. Go Back to Top |
|
||||
