LBCC Historical

05/30/2026

They were a thing! Mine is personalized but shaped and carved after originals. 👀

✨🙌🏼Today I’m making sure I have everything set for our upcoming 18th century beauty class and our women in apothecary and pharmacy lecture! 🧪🥼

Will we see you in NC Charlotte Museum of History - I hope so! 🥰

05/29/2026

Mail day today! Well… collections from this week! Always fun to see what comes in for our archives. 💌🥰💥

05/20/2026

New fun summer soap from Living in the Past!

It's been a while since we dropped a new soap!

Introducing our new "Summer Breezes" soap.

Check it out at https://livinginthepastllc.etsy.com/listing/4506925742

05/19/2026

⏰Last chance — registration closes TOMORROW! ⏰
Place: Charlotte, NC
Museum: Charlotte Museum of History

Join us for an evening of history, beauty, and hands-on discovery at the Charlotte Museum of History on Thursday, June 18th from 6:00–7:30 PM!

Event: The 18th Century Cosmetics Workshop is a 21+ experience where history meets beauty. Come learn what women actually put on their faces in the 1700s and why.

✨ Your ticket includes:
✦ A curated take-home cosmetic kit (valued over $100!)
✦ Two complimentary drinks
✦ Charcuterie & light bites
✦ A history lesson with cosmetic & apothecary historian Alicia Schult of LBCC Historical Apothecary

Tickets are $125. https://charlottemuseum.org/programs-events/events/

05/19/2026

💌 Mail day! Let’s 🎁 unbox together!
Handwritten recipes on scraps of paper that almost didn’t make it! 👀

🩺 One handwritten for a whooping cough remedy included: Salts of Tartar, Pulverized Cochineal, water, sweetened with loaf sugar.

Likely passed between ordinary people in Pennsylvania or the surrounding areas. Not a pharmacist or a doctor. Maybe a mother 👩 or neighbor who knew what worked.

💊 Dose for a child: 3 teaspoons, morning, noon, night. This is an example of history that rarely survives long enough to be documented!

In contrast from other types we collect like handwritten formularies and pharmacopoeias- they survive because they were bound, saved and treated as reference material.

But loose recipe slips like these- passed between neighbors and family members? They are different and more of a working document.
They got used, stained, folded, lost, thrown away. The survival rate is much lower precisely because nobody thought to preserve them! They were just life.

But now they will be preserved. That’s why we do this!!🙌🏼 🥰🎉

05/06/2026

Updates from Virgil's Fine Goods

Hello everyone! So sorry for disappearing— the end of April & beginning of May is a busy time around here (school coming to a close & birthdays to celebrate) and I've got my head above water now.

Thank you all so much for a fantastic Jane Austen Festival weekend! It was lovely to see so many people and get to visit with you all :)

The VFG website is up to date with inventory and I will be restocking patterns shortly. So if you don't see the size you need, never fear!

Keep an eye out for the newsletter on Friday if you want updates on what's going on behind the scenes.

Have a wonderful Wednesday 💕

05/06/2026

Ten + years of wear and still going strong!
✨ I just did a little live to show the process of refreshing my decade-old Regency gown.
After a fresh wash, starch, and iron, I’m performing some "surgical" mending.

I’ll be taking a small piece of fabric from an internal seam allowance to patch the underarms.

While the fabric is clean, time and wear have caused some discoloration—and in the 19th century, you didn't toss a hand-sewn garment for a small blemish; you patched, pieced, and persevered. 🧵

👉🏼 There is something super satisfying for me about using period-appropriate mending techniques to keep my historical gown in the rotation…. Cause let’s face it!
She is my favorite and my only for so so long! 🤣🤗

👉🏼Question: How often are you mending your kit? Do you patch your historical or costume gowns, or do you prefer to "wear the history" (stains and all)?
Let’s talk mending!

I have another fascinating video I want to post later today regarding storing my historical reenacting gowns in an original 18 century trunk-
👀🫣 wait until you see what happened 😱

🫤 This gives a fascinating look into what our ancestors may have had to deal with- more on that that later!

05/03/2026

I got side-tracked while putting together our next cosmetic class!! 🕵️‍♀️✨

👀 On the left: The famous Foundling Rouge - a token from the . On the right: A mystery treen from our personal collection.

The similarities in the lathe-turned concentric rings and the warm wood patina are typical for these small wooden containers (known as ‘treens’). They had a long history in the household and were even used through Victorian times for everything from s***f and shaving - to cosmetics and more. Many of them (I often find) were given new life holding nuts and bolts! But orignally they acted sort of like early compacts! 💄

Swipe to view a few in our collections! 🌸
It’s rare to find these with their contents intact, but we have one!
✨🤠🙌🏼

Is ours a face powder or a powdered rouge?

05/02/2026

👀 We Found A Medical Rebel Fighting for Victorian Women’s Health in the Archives. His Story Is Riveting 😱🕯️

A New primary source acquisition for the LBCC Historical Archive just arrived.

They had no idea what they were selling because it wasn’t in great condition... but here at LBCC Historical, some of our most important finds don’t come to us pristine!

Thinking of the folks at —this Bottum ledger feels like a missing piece of the 19th-century women’s health narrative.

We now have the “inside story” for the history books regarding Dr. A.L. Bottum of Westfield, Pennsylvania, because we just acquired his formulary (turned into a scrapbook) and his personal letter holder!

Why was he important?
History books say he was a successful local physician. But our findings prove he was more like a medical rebel fighting for the dignity of his female patients. He documented a lot! - most importantly—the diagnostic errors he saw happening in women’s health!

Misdiagnosed Women & Hysteria:
He kept a list of misdiagnoses. Women told they had “hysteria.” Women told to pray. Women sent home. He knew they were wrong, and he wrote it down, calling out the physicians who were ignoring the reality of women’s health in his writings and sent letters.

In his own words (1884):
“Many women today may take up their bed and walk—notably among women afflicted with female trouble, who will someday be cured by prayer.”

That isn’t belief, it’s sarcasm. He was doing something few attempted: being a doctor in 1884 and fighting to have women and their health taken seriously. He explicitly argued that telling women to “pray away” symptoms was a form of medical negligence for real, treatable conditions.
He even solicited cases that others refused, writing to doctors to tell them that current facilities were not built with women in mind. All of this was happening in rural Pennsylvania in 1884—a true advancement in the attention paid to women’s conditions.