An archaeologist by trade, Sara Colfield, 46, has always loved to collect vintage clothing as a hobby. Both in her work and spare time, she seeks to understand the lives of people now long gone.
Buying the Dress
After her parents had retired to Searsport, Maine, Ms. Colfield traveled from her home in Maryland to see them. There, she made the cryptic discovery.Visiting her folks during Christmas of 2013, Ms. Colfield and her mother were rifling through wares at a local antique shop in Searsport. That’s when the unique vintage dress came to light.
Discovering a Coded Message
Shortly after purchasing the dress, she realized there was a secret pocket that could only be accessed when the dress was hiked up. On investigation, the pocket was found to contain a paper with a message that somehow hadn’t been damaged, even after being inside the article for well over a century.Ms. Colfield and her mother scrambled to decipher what the message said, but it seemed nonsensical. They were bewildered by it.
“I started reading. It didn’t make any sense at all,” Ms. Colfield told the newspaper.
The words were obviously some kind of code containing combinations of words, including: “Bismark, omit, leafage, buck, bank, miss, nostril, linnet, ink.”
A Challenge to Codebreakers
The process of trying to break this particular code apparently involved many historical nuances that made it seem impossible. It was thought that the code was a form of 19th-century telegraph message.“It turns out that during this time of the telegraph, the code books were often proprietary … So, if you’re in the mining industry, you had your own code book, if you’re in the train industry, you have your own code book,” Ms. Colfield said. “Finding the right codebook is a total needle in the haystack. And I just kind of assumed that we would never find it.”
Unbeknownst to her, though, the codebreaking community on Reddit that had been introduced to the puzzle from her vintage dress wouldn’t give up so easily.
Solving the puzzle had been accepted as a challenge by the dedicated codebreakers, she said. And they weren’t going to let this one go.
Cracking the Code
The man from Manitoba let her know that he had cracked the code and was publishing a paper on the discovery. After several years and one initial failed attempt, Mr. Chan discovered that the original content of the message was, actually, a weather report for Carol, Illinois, dated May 27, 1888.
Connecting With the Past
Ms. Colfield says she now gets asked if it disappoints her that it was just a weather report. And she points out that, to the contrary, that’s exactly what excites her about archeology and collecting vintage textiles as a hobby.“On one hand, I don’t care what the weather was that day,” Ms. Colfield said. “On the other hand, I do care.”
She said, “I fundamentally care, and I have devoted my whole career and my hobby to understanding the daily life of people in the past. So that’s what archaeology is: we take people’s trash, tiny little things they left behind.”
Although many aspects of the dress still remain shrouded in mystery—where it came from, whether it was simply recycled paper, who wrote it—the investigation into some hidden aspects of life has fueled the interest of a whole community.
For Ms. Colfield, uncovering some little details of humanity from the past has been most fascinating.
“They become artifacts, and then we need to understand people’s daily lives,” she said. “And, really, what could be more fundamental to people than knowing what the weather’s going to be?”
