The History of “Fruit Paintings, 1903-1907” (RS 8/12/16)

By Evie McAllister

The University Archives at Illinois houses a collection of approximately 150 life-sized paintings of fruit. Created between 1903 and 1907, these paintings depict over 100 different varieties of apples and plums from multiple separate projects. One of these projects was a seven-month-long UIUC study on the effects of refrigeration on the longevity of fruit (Farm Home, 1904). In this study, the artist of the Agronomy Department at UIUC, Flora M. Sims appears to have painted a portrait of each fruit monitored by the scientists; in figures 1 and 2 below, the first depicts one of the study’s apples stored at 31° for 247 days, and the second depicts one stored at 35° for 231 days. The results demonstrated to local farming communities that refrigeration between 31° and 37° preserves fruit remarkably well.

Figure 1: Winesap Study 1, Fruit Paintings, 1904
Figure 2: Winesap Study 2, Fruit Paintings, 1904

This scientific study of fruit preservation occurred during the final decade of the second American Industrial Revolution, a time throughout which scientists were incentivized to develop technology that would improve industrial production. In July of 1902, Willis Carrier invented the “first modern cooling unit” (US Dept. of Energy, 2015). With this invention, departments across the U of I became increasingly involved in studies concerning cold storage preservation of produce. In December of 1902, the Horticulture Convention at UIUC featured a lecture titled “Results from Cool and Cold Storage Experiments” (Daily Illini, 1902). Farmers recognized that advancements in preservation technology would increase the shelf life of their produce and therefore extend its marketability far beyond harvesting season. With this in mind, many students joined in studies exploring aspects of refrigeration; research included finding the optimum conditions of cold storage, determining the efficacy of insulation materials, and similarly related topics (Daily Illini, 1904).

Artist, Scientist & Social Reformer: Flora E. Morris Sims

Flora E. Morris Sims was born on the 9th of March 1868, in Oakland, IL, to Reverend Nathan S. Morris and his wife, Matilda A. Morris (nee Patton). As a child, Flora attended Urbana High School where she pursued geometry, advanced English literature, history, composition and rhetoric, free hand drawing, zoology, botany, physiology, physics, and three years of Latin.

On the 16th of July 1889, Flora E. Morris changed her last name to Sims upon marrying Charles Blackburn Sims (Find a Grave, 2018). The couple had a son, Charles Blackburn Sims Jr., on April 26, 1892. This marriage was brief, however, and the couple divorced before Charles went on to marry Claire Sims Sims in 1898. Throughout the rest of her life, Flora retained her ex-husband’s last name.

Figure 3: Mrs. Flora Sims, Illio ‘01, 1901, p.77.

During the summer of 1897, when Flora was 28 years old, she enrolled for the upcoming Fall Term at UIUC. Her student records indicate that between 1897 and 1899, she primarily studied Art and Design under the college of Liberal Arts and Science. To diversify her coursework, she participated in two courses in the Animal Husbandry Department during the Fall of 1899. Although her official student records list her as having left UIUC in 1900, she is listed in multiple sources as a member of the class of 1901. It is possible that she completed her course work in the fall term of 1900 but participated in the following spring convocation.

In the Alumni Record files at the University Archive at UIUC, a couple of newspaper clippings that describe Flora’s time at the university were found. A clipping from May of 1900 describes her as having spent the “past year” “studying stock judging at the University of Illinois.” In an article from September 8, 1948, the day after her passing, a colleague shared that Flora “studied art on the campus for three years” and “specialized in the painting of horses, in which she won recognition of art critics” (News Gazette, 1948). During her time as a student, she assisted professors Davenport and Holden by creating large agricultural illustrations for their projects. A 1900 article from The Illini reports that for these two professors, Flora made one 6’x8’ illustration of corn cultures and one 4’x6’ illustration of a “horse in motion” (The Illini, 1900).

From 1891 to 1898, Flora worked at UIUC as an Art and Design instructor (University of Illinois, 1897). After this period, in 1902 she became the official artist of the university’s Agronomy Department, retaining this title until 1914. For this department, she created soil survey maps that were the first of their kind in Illinois. She also created “Animal Charts” for the Dominion Department of Agriculture at Ottawa and for the Provincial Department of Agriculture at Halifax (The Illini, 1900). Throughout her career, she was often invited to give lectures and “chalk talks” across the Midwest by the Literary and Scientific circle of the Chautauqua and Lyceum Bureau (News Gazette, 1948; Urbana Daily Courier, 1910).

Outside of work, Flora kept herself busy with many projects related to the civil rights movement and her church. She dedicated much of her time to her church, the First Methodist Episcopal Church in Urbana, and was highly involved in their chapter of the Woman’s Home Missionary Society. She often filled positions on the chapter’s executive board and directed the group in playlets. Flora also frequently filled the role of Sunday school teacher. Later in life she became an honorary trustee of the church. Aside from churchwork, Flora served a term as the State Chairman of the Illinois Federation of Women’s Clubs and volunteered as a member of Cunningham Children’s home board.

On September 7, 1948, after an 11-month long battle with illness, Flora passed away at 80 years old. She was survived by her sister and son and interred in Mount Hope Cemetery.

Flora E. Morris Sims is remembered through her contributions to the Agronomy Department and her late-life efforts assisting Urbana’s Half Century Club as their secretary, during which she researched the history of Urbana and published a club brochure in 1947. Her work for the university is best recorded through the many newspaper articles from the Courier and Daily Illini that admire her work and through a series of paintings housed at the University Archives of UIUC. Series 8/12/16, “Fruit Paintings, 1903-1907,” contains life-sized paintings of plums, cherries, and apples that she illustrated alongside an unnamed individual, who signed their art only as “CNB.” It appears the paintings depict fruits at various stages of decay and were part of an agricultural study regarding the longevity of fruit.

Although a Courier article from September 8, 1948, found in the University Archive’s holdings cites her as an artist best known for her paintings of animals and sculptures, none of these artifacts are housed at the University Archives. If any of these pieces still survive, their locations are unknown.

Figure 4: Chas. Downing study, Fruit Paintings, 1904

The Unidentified Artist

While the vast majority of these works were painted by Flora Morris Sims, approximately 5% of them were painted by an unidentified artist who only signed their work with what appears to say “CNB,” as depicted in this close-up scan of an illustrated Charles Downing plum (fig. 4). Furthermore, while it appears that Flora labeled the back of each piece in pencil, marked with her signature S’s and D’s, approximately 20% of all the paintings are unsigned. This leaves an estimated 25% of the collection attributed to anonymous artists.

Works Cited:

Daily Illini. (1902, Dec. 16). “Fourth Annual Convention. That of Illinois State Horticulture Society.” Illinois Digital Newspaper Collections. https://idnc.library.illinois.edu/?a=d&d=DIL19021216.2.7&srpos=2&e=——190-en-20-DIL-1–txt-txIN-cold+storage+experiment—-1902—–

Daily Illini. (1904, Feb. 1). “Engineering Experiments. Some of the problems which are being studied.” Illinois Digital Newspaper Collections. https://idnc.library.illinois.edu/?a=d&d=DIL19040201.2.14&srpos=1&e=——190-en-20-DIL-1–txt-txIN-cold+storage+experiment—-1904—–

Farm Home. (1904, June 1). “Cold Storage for Farmers.” Illinois Digital Newspaper Collections. https://idnc.library.illinois.edu/?a=d&d=FFH19040601.1.3&e=——-en-20–1–txt-txIN———-

Gardens of Memory841. (2018, Nov. 21). “Charles Blackburn Sims.” Find A Grave. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/194877342/charles_blackburn-sims

The Illini. (1900, May 23). “Flora M. Sims, Animal Artist.” Daily Illini. https://idnc.library.illinois.edu/?a=d&d=DIL19000523.2.7&e=——190-en-20-DIL-1–txt-txIN-flora+sims———

The Illini. (1899, Nov. 15). “Discussions by Representatives of Various Institutions.” Illinois Digital Newspaper Collections. https://idnc.library.illinois.edu/?a=d&d=DIL18991115.2.4&srpos=2&e=——189-en-20-DIL-1–txt-txIN-flora+sims———

News Gazette. (1948, Sept. 8). “Mrs. Sims, Artist Half Century Club Leader, Dies.” Illinois Digital Newspaper Collections.

University of Illinois. (1897). Course Catalog – 1897-1898. UIHistories Project. https://uihistories.library.illinois.edu/cgi-bin/rview_browsepdf?REPOSID=8&ID=8054&pagenum=291

Urbana Daily Courier. (1910, May 11). “An Urgent Meeting”. Illinois Digital Newspaper Collections.

US Department of Energy. (2015, July 20). “History of Air Conditioning.” Energy. https://www.energy.gov/articles/history-air-conditioning

Binary Stars: Computers and Astrology in the Michael Erlewine Papers

 

By Jonas Kromer Yela

Although this catalog cover says “2000,” it is actually from 1998, showing the excitement people felt about the imminent arrival of the new millennium. This may have held particular significance for astrologers, for whom dates and times are of paramount importance.

What comes to mind when you think of the history of computing? Turing Machines? The ILLIAC? Microsoft? What about astrology? The newly processed Michael Erlewine Papers document the role of astrology in the history of home computing and software development. Michael Erlewine was an astrologer, computer programmer, entrepreneur, and musician. His papers were donated to the Social Science, Health, and Education Library’s (SSHEL) Mandeville Collection of occult sciences, of which astrology is a strength, and are now housed in the University Archives. Read ahead to learn more about Erlewine’s fascinating life and work.

Erlewine grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and lived a somewhat bohemian life in early adulthood, playing folk music, hitchhiking with Bob Dylan, and playing in the Prime Movers Blues Band with his brother, luthier Dan Erlewine, and a young Iggy Pop on drums. In the early 1960s, Erlewine began studying astrology, and eventually became the house astrologer at Circle Books, his brother Stephen’s “metaphysical bookstore” in Ann Arbor.[1]

A hand-drawn birth chart for legendary jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald. Erlewine likely produced this chart for research purposes – it is unlikely that Fitzgerald was a client.

For the first several years of his astrological career, Erlewine produced charts by hand, manually consulting ephemerides (tables of the positions of celestial bodies) and log tables. [2] In the 1960s, computers were large mainframe machines that took up entire rooms and were only owned by universities and large corporations. The technically savvy user, like the astrologer Gary Duncan, whose papers are also housed in the Archives, could access these machines using a technology called “time sharing” that allowed multiple users to remotely access computing resources, but this was better suited to projects involving large amounts of data.

The 1979 Circle Books Calendar, featuring the Commodore PET home computer. Debuted in 1977, the PET boasted 4kb of RAM and stored programs on cassette tapes. This calendar included instructions on programming calculators in the back, inaugurating the age of digital astrology.

Astrologers like Erlewine would have to wait until the advent of microcomputers and programmable calculators in the early 1970s. Several astrologers, like Rex Shudde (a.k.a. James Neely) and Robert Hand, began programming on these machines as soon as they hit the market, making astrologers among the first groups of people to make use of personal computers. Erlewine first got into programming using a Hewlett-Packard programmable calculator. He got his first personal computer, a Commodore PET, in 1977, and founded Matrix Software the same year.[3] The PET was featured on the cover of the 1979 Circle Books calendar, which also included a guide on astrology calculations for programmable calculators, marking a significant shift in the way astrologers performed their work.[4]

This Friends and Lovers software package from 1987 was among Matrix’s first forays into consumer software. The package contains a user’s manual and floppy discs for IBM computers.

The rise of personal computers also created a consumer market for astrology software. When Matrix began, Erlewine was producing programs for professional astrologers to use in their work and distributing these for free on tape cassettes.  But as personal home computers became cheaper through the 1980s and machines from Apple, Commodore, IBM, and Radio Shack found their way into people’s homes, Matrix began producing programs for the consumer market. The Matrix catalogs in the Erlewine papers show the company branching out from the professional software market (“Make money with your home computer!” exclaims the 1985 catalog) to making astrology software for amateurs to explore what the stars held in store for them (“Computer-assisted astrology has never been easier, or more fun!” promises their 1987 catalog[5]). Products like Friends and Lovers, Lucky Lotto!, and Biowriter could tell you of your fortunes in romance, the best time to gamble, or the cycles of your body’s own energy, respectively. A similar shift took place in the first decade of the 21st century: as the expansion of the World Wide Web turned the computer into a fixture in many American homes, Matrix further expanded its catalog of consumer software and increased its consumer marketing efforts.

A photograph of the Heart Center’s library reading room and dining room.
A photograph of the meditation room at the Heart Center in Big Rapids, MI.

Erlewine was a central figure in the astrology world beyond his work in software. He and his wife Margaret founded the Heart Center in 1972 as a “communion center,” a place for astrologers and people of various spiritual persuasions to gather, share ideas, meditate, and study. The Center operated out of their home and eventually moved into a house next door in Big Rapids. Here, the Center began building an exhaustive collection of texts and other media on astrology (this collection was also donated to SSHEL and can be searched in the library catalog). With the knowledgebase of the Heart Center Library, the Center became a nexus for astrological study and spiritual life, hosting a number of famous astrologers and Buddhist teachers over the years.[6]

Erlewine dabbled in poetry as well, collecting his works in a collection titled “That’s All She Wrote.”

In 1991, Erlewine founded the All-Music Guide, an ambitious project that sought to provide an online database of all recorded music. Initially housed under the Matrix umbrella, AMG branched into movies, books, and video games before being acquired by Alliance Media Group in 1996.[7] Erlewine left AMG shortly thereafter, and around the same time took a hiatus from Matrix. He returned in 2008, and a few years later, the company merged with Cosmic Patterns Software and continues to operate to this day.[8]

This post only scratches the surface of this broad and fascinating collection. The Erlewine Papers consist mostly of the records of Matrix Software and Erlewine’s other business ventures, including correspondence, research papers, project notes, newsletters, software packages and manuals, and much more. If you are interested in learning more about computers and astrology, or how Matrix and the Heart Center became significant vehicles for a broad range of astrological research, you can request these materials from the Archives and come to see them in our reading room.

 

Images curated by Chloe Attrell and Jonas Kromer Yela.

[1] Tenzin Nyima, “Interview with Astrologer Michael Erlewine,” Matrix Software, December 23, 2008. https://www.astrologysoftware.com/community/interviews/michael_erlewine.html

[2] Nyima, “Interview with Astrologer Michael Erlewine.”

[3] Nyima, “Interview with Astrologer Michael Erlewine.”

[4] The Michael Erlewine Papers, record series 35/3/419, Series 1, Sub-series 7, Box 11, Folder 2: Circle Books Calendars, 1979-1990.

[5] The Michael Erlewine Papers, record series 35/3/419, Series 1, Sub-series 3, Box 8, Folder 27: Matrix Catalog, 1988; Series 1, Sub-series 3, Box 8, Folder 28: Matrix Catalogs – “AstroTalk”, ca. 1987-1992

[6] Michael Erlewine, “The Heart Center – A Mandala (23 Photos),” Spirit Grooves Archive, July 11, 2010. https://michaelerlewine.com/viewtopic.php?f=323&t=2715&sid=9a2b1e21a0cbd95b9ce2765e21748248

[7] The Michael Erlewine Papers, record series 35/3/419, Series 1, Sub-series 1, Box 6, Folder 7: Alliance Group Matrix Purchase Terms, 1996

[8] “A Brief History of Matrix Software,” Matrix Software. https://www.astrologysoftware.com/about/about.html