She found a hidden message in a vintage dress. 10 years later, she knows what it means

NPR’s Scott Simon asks Sara Rivers-Cofield about the mysterious note she found in the 1880s bustle dress she collected.

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

Bismark, omit, leafage, buck, bank. Sara Rivers Cofield was shopping in 2013 when she noticed a well-kept silk bustle dress from the 1800s and paid $100 for it. When she got home, she discovered the dress had a secret pocket and, inside, a note with cryptic lines like that – also Calgary, Cuba, unguard, confute, duck, fagan. What did any of those lines mean? Ten years later, she knows the answer. Sara Rivers Cofield, archaeologist and curator at the Maryland Archaeological Conservation Laboratory, joins us. Thanks so much for being with us.

SARA RIVERS COFIELD: Thank you so much for having me. It’s such an honor.

SIMON: Tell us about the dress.

RIVERS COFIELD: Well, I collect antique clothing as a hobby. I’ve always been interested in the past. I’m an archaeologist for a living, and I study people by the everyday things that they had. But, you know, in archaeology, we don’t typically find clothes. That doesn’t survive in the archaeological record, so it’s what I do in my spare time. I collect antique clothing, and I like that connection to the past. And this particular dress really spoke to me ’cause I didn’t have any nice 1880s bustle dresses in my collection. And now it’s turned into this huge story, which I had no idea it would be the future of this dress.

SIMON: You posted an image of the note on your personal blog. What happened?

RIVERS COFIELD: I posted it to my family, and I think somebody in my family posted it on Reddit, and then the code breakers got ahold of it. And somebody did guess all the way back then, 10 years ago, that it was a telegraph code. And when I looked into that, that seemed very likely. That totally fit exactly what the code looked like, why it was all marked off. But then the question becomes finding the right code books to break the code. And the real…