The Sunflower Brigade

As a tourist-laden steamboat approached Huletts Landing on Lake George, young women wielding brooms marched onto the dock to the martial strains of a fife. The steamboat passengers raced to the rails to gawk at the warriors dressed in blue bonnets, blue blouse-jerseys “fitting like postage stamps,” white cross belts that seemed to “caress their svelte forms,” and white skirts “not all too short, nor yet too long.”

Noted American illustrator Henry Alexander Ogden preserved the whimsical scene in an engraving that splashed across the country on a page of on September 15, 1883. “A Summer Pastime, New York: Drill of the ‘Sunflower Brigade’…” showed every detail. The text accompanying the etching described how the captain of the brigade, a strawberry blonde “of the most bewitching tournure,” stepped out in front