A code was cracked, but a mystery still remains with this antique Maine dress

Hard Telling Not Knowing each week tries to answer your burning questions about why things are the way they are in Maine — specifically about Maine culture and history, both long ago and recent, large and small, important and silly. Send your questions to [email protected].

Sara Rivers-Cofield had her eye on the Victorian-era silk dress at the Searsport Antiques Mall.

When she came to Maine to visit her parents in Searsport, she and her mother always went antiquing. As an avid collector of 19th and early 20th century fashion, the dress — from the 1880s, judging by the bustle — was right up Rivers-Cofield’s alley.

After going back and forth with the Vassalboro-based dealer, Rivers-Cofield bought the dress for $100 in late 2013. When she brought it home to Maryland, where she works as an archaeologist and curator, she began examining it, and found something quite curious.

In a hidden pocket accessible from the inside of the skirt, Rivers-Cofield found two fragile pieces of paper, on which were scribbled some puzzling words.

“Calgary, Cuba, unguard, confute, duck, fagan,” one line read, then, “Bismark, omit, leafage, buck, bank,” and “Smith, nostrum, linnet. Get none went.” Many lines were paired with time stamps, and each were checked off with a seemingly color-coded mark.

Was it code? Was it a vocabulary exercise? Was it nonsense? And what was it doing inside a hidden pocket in a 140-year-old dress in an antiques shop in a small town in Maine?

“You’d have to hike your skirt up in order to access it,” said Rivers-Cofield, who was born in Belfast but moved away at age five. “It’s a maneuver that a woman in the 1880s would never do in public. It was clearly something you’d have to access privately. It’s in a place where you could keep something safe.”

The only identifying information on the dress was a tag with the name “Bennet” handwritten on it, sewn inside the upper back. Rivers-Cofield posted the story and photos to her blog in 2014, and soon after, the race was on.

Word spread among cryptographers the world over about her strange papers. As the years went on, no one had any luck decoding it. Amateur cryptographers dubbed it the “silk dress cryptogram,” and some declared it among the top 50 unsolved encrypted messages in the world, alongside uncracked codes like the Voynich Manuscript and the Zodiac Killer messages.

The crack in the code finally came last year, from Wayne Chan, a data analyst at the University of Manitoba in Canada.

Chan, an amateur cryptographer, began researching telegraphic codes. Between the 1840s and the early 20th century, telegraphy was the primary way to get information to people quickly, before the widespread adoption of telephones. He had a theory that’s what the silk dress code was, but he had to find the correct cipher first.

After years of sleuthing, Chan finally tracked down an old telegraphic codebook from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and deduced that the silk dress cryptogram was written in telegraphic weather code, used at U.S. Army Signal Service weather research stations in the U.S. and Canada between 1870 and 1891.

Chan published a paper about the code in August 2023. The story has made national headlines, catching the attention of the New York Times and the Washington Post.

With the mystery of what’s on the papers finally solved, Rivers-Cofield is still left with nearly as many questions. Why did an obscure weather code end up in the dress pocket of a presumably middle-class woman in the 1880s? And how did that dress end up in Maine?

“It’s easy to imagine a middle-class woman in Maine in the 1880s having such a dress,” she said. “And it’s easy to imagine something like this dress getting sold off sometime in the 20th century, as people empty out their big 19th century houses of all their old stuff.”

Maybe the dress-owner was one of the few women of her day to have a job, transcribing weather data, and forgot it was there. Maybe, as friends of Rivers-Cofield have more romantically suggested, there’s disappearing ink on the papers, and there’s a hidden message to a lover written on there.

Maybe a child, hanging around their mother’s ankles, grabbed it off a table and put it in the pocket. Maybe the woman saved it to use as scrap paper for later.

And maybe the dress belonged to the daughter of a Maine sea captain or lumber baron, and hung in her closet for decades. Maybe it was sold to a community theater company as a costume. And eventually an antiques dealer bought it and put it in her booth in Searsport.

“I like to think this would be the perfect writing prompt for a short story assignment for high school students,” Rivers-Cofield said. “Tell us why this specific paper ended up in this specific dress pocket. You can imagine just about anything.”

Rivers-Cofield has reached out to sources in the Maine antiques world to try to find the identity of the person who sold her the dress, which she never caught. The Searsport Antiques Mall closed a few years ago. The name “Bennet,” found on the tag in the dress, doesn’t ring any bells for historians at the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport, who have reams of information on old Searsport families involved in the seafaring industry.

Rivers-Cofield likes to think that if the person who owned the dress and put the paper in the pocket could see all the fuss that’s been made, she might laugh.

“As an archaeologist, I can tell you that we are constantly imagining what the people who’s stuff we’re picking through would be thinking if they saw what we were doing,” Rivers-Cofield said. “It’s always on our minds when we are going through ancient trash or people’s everyday stuff. I would hope they would think it was funny.”

Do you have any information on the origins of this dress, where it might have come from, or how it ended up in Maine? Email [email protected] and we’ll pass along the info.