"After the ceremony of the minister was over, the ceremony of the crowd began": The Evolution of the Skimelton, a Rural New York Wedding Tradition

"After the ceremony of the minister was over, the ceremony of the crowd began":The Evolution of the Skimelton, a Rural New York Wedding Tradition Thomas S. Wermuth (bio) The Poughkeepsie Journal published this notice in its "Weddings & Marriages" section on June 20, 1947: Mr. and Mrs. Lorenzo Acker of Myers Corners, who were married last Saturday were given an old fashioned skimelton and party by neighbors and friends Wednesday night. The Couple were taken for a ride around the neighborhood and then through the streets of Wappingers after which all returned to the Acker home for the party. Games, music, and dancing were enjoyed followed by the refreshments. "Old fashioned skimeltons" are largely forgotten today, but the social pages of newspapers up and down the Hudson River Valley once contained many announcements and accounts of them. But what, exactly, were they? From the newspaper reports, skimeltons were friendly surprise parties for newlyweds. Offered by neighbors and friends, they took place a few days after the wedding, often shortly after the couples returned from their honeymoons. Different and separate from a wedding reception or party, a skimelton was commonly held late at night—midnight or after—outside the newlyweds' home. Neighbors might rouse the couple from their sleep by ringing bells, banging pots and pans, and blowing horns. Sometimes guns were fired. The ceremony might include hayrides, serenades, music, dancing and refreshments. Essentially, a skimelton was the way a village celebrated a new marriage and welcomed a new couple into the community.1 [End Page 260] Nevertheless, this seemingly benign and festive twentieth-century bit of post-wedding revelry began as something much different and more explicitly threatening. Its origins lay in the nineteenth century, when skimeltons were employed not to celebrate, but to mock unpopular or incongruous marriages. As such, it was a charivari-type ritual aimed at those who violated the customs and norms of their communities. Although the word charivari is French, almost every European country had some sort of similar ritual of misrule that targeted, among others, abusive husbands, adulterers, and domineering wives. But one of the primary targets of the charivari was an unpopular marriage. People of the town or village, sometimes in costume or disguise, surrounded the home of the "offending couple," banging pots and pans, blowing horns, and singing. Generally, these events were not punitive; a demand of a fine or treat was put forward by the charivari crowd in order to end the affair.2 In Europe, the charivari served many functions. On the one hand, the ritual was aimed primarily to control behavior that might not be illegal but was seen as a threat to the community's social order. Depending upon the severity of the offense or the target, the charivari could range from a performance of "rough music" to a violent physical attack. But even if the goal of these rituals was to punish or censure, they were also carnivalesque events that included music, parades, street theater, and night-time revelry. Historians have observed that these activities and the festival-like atmosphere they created often helped to strengthen community bonds.3 European immigrants brought their charivaris with them to North America and recreated the ritual throughout Canada, the Mississippi [End Page 261] Valley, and the American South, as well as the Great Plains and West. Although called "charivari" in Canada, the ritual went under a long list of names in various parts of the United States—shivaree, serenade, belling, horning, and tinpanning, among numerous other regional variations and inflections.4 The skimelton (also known as skimmington) was a form of charivari unique to the Mid-Atlantic region. It was performed in a limited geographic area centered in New York's Hudson River Valley, and from there spreading into northeastern New Jersey and just over the New York border into northeastern Pennsylvania and southwestern Connecticut. Unlike European charivaris, which might target a whole range of misbehaviors, the targets of nineteenth-century skimeltons were first and foremost unpopular marriages: a widow or widower remarrying (or any remarriage, for that matter); a substantial age difference between bride and groom; someone marrying a partner from outside the village; or just an unpopular groom...

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