Several years ago we digitized artwork found in the personal papers of the Freauff family and presented a digital collections spotlight showing a few examples of artwork from the collection, which can be read here. Recently we have begun digitizing additional material from this collection and would like to highlight a pair of interesting items found during this process.

Another example of artwork produced by a member of the Freauff family can be seen above. This is a letter sent by Herman T. Freauff (1844-1930) to his parents, Eugene Alexander and Agnes Clara Freauff on April 14, 1859. He sent the letter from Montmirail, France, and in it he included a small but detailed sketch of the cathedral in Strasbourg, France. This romanesque and gothic building was constructed between 1015-1439 and is easily recognizable by its asymmetrical facade [1]. Interestingly the cathedral’s 466 foot octagonal tower, clearly visible to the left in the drawing, made the cathedral the tallest building in the world for more than two hundred years, between 1647-1874 [2].

Shown above is the first page of another letter, also sent by Herman T.Freauff to his parents, this time in June, 1860,  which demonstrates a now little known writing technique in that it is a crossed or cross-hatched letter. This is a practice where the writer would write on a page normally and then rotate it 90 degrees and continue writing, resulting in text running both vertically and horizontally on a page. Typically this was done to save money on paper and reduce postage [3] by maximizing how much could be included on each page and fell out of use as paper became less expensive, postal fee structures changed, and with the introduction of the typewriter.

[1] A second spire was included in the original plans but ultimately never constructed.

[2] It gained this title when the spire of St. Mary’s Church, Stralsund, Germany was destroyed by fire and was surpassed by St. Nikolai’s Church in Hamburg, Germany.

[3] At this time postage was often based on the number of pages and/or their size.