Reading the Man of Signs, or, Farming in the Moon

Image 1. "The Anatomy of Man's Body," from David Young, The Farmers' Almanac, and Ephemeris of the Motions of the Sun and Moon, the True Places and Aspects of the Planets, Rising and Setting of the Sun, and the Rising and Southing of the Moon, for the year of our Lord, 1848 (Ithaca: Mack, Andrus, & Co., 1847). Courtesy of the author.

One of the most common printed images of the first half of the nineteenth century was also the one of the most derided—often, treacherously, in its own caption. Right under his woodcut of “The Anatomy”—the image of a male body linked to the signs of the zodiac that began most American almanacs—the almanac-maker David Young wrote sourly in 1848: “It is thought proper to notice in this place, that in this enlightened age of the world, people in general place no confidence in these signs, nor the prognostics of the weather.” In this, as he certainly knew himself, Young was wrong. “There are many men at the present age, so far behind the times,” complained another author, two years before Young’s Almanac “that if they have a tooth to pull, a vein to open, a pig or a calf to castrate, a patch of thistles to mow, a bunch of white birches or scrub oaks to cut down, or a dose of physic to swallow, the chapter of signs must be consulted, and their connection with the body, or the plant ascertained before anything can be done.” At least one of these men, as demonstrated in the margin of the second image on the left, was using my copy of Young’s almanac.

If by the 1840s the Anatomy and the columns of calendrical symbols to which it was keyed had been an embarrassment to American almanac makers for more than a hundred years, they nevertheless still stood as required elements of the agricultural Almanac, the most stable features of a famously volatile and various form. One reason for their persistence was their importance to the practices of “moon farming,” which used astrological information to mark time and schedule agricultural tasks. The astrological tables were, as such, as important as the other (more recognizably utilitarian) forms of information that almanacs provided—critical elements of these objects that rural Americans hung from hooks on the wall, whose ripped pages they repaired with careful stitches, and, as above, whose margins they marked with signs of their own.

To contemporary historians, the first pages of an almanac can be frustrating to work with. It’s tempting to skip to the later sections—rich, if confusing, collections of texts that mingle seasonal poetry, jokes about Irishmen, and stories of canny farmers, with helpful information about circuit court session dates and the “Use of Sulphuric Acid as a Manure.” The first pages, by contrast, consist of the Anatomy, some astronomical calculations, and a twelve-page calendar packed top to bottom with unfamiliar symbols. When students in my classes seem to be identifying too much with seemingly “modern” nineteenth-century farmers, a short almanac “problem set” quickly restores their sense that they’re dealing with a culture alien to them.

Some of this seeming impenetrability comes from our lack of familiarity with the night sky. The anatomy refers, on one level, to perfectly visible astronomical phenomena that were rather more reliable than nineteenth-century clockwork. For farmers, the signs of the zodiac retained their concrete physical meaning: the east-to-west procession of twelve constellations through which the sun and the moon and the planets seem to move, imprisoned in the flattened disk of the solar system. Where our modern newspaper horoscope tells us about our birthdate in terms of the sun’s place in this sequence, breaking the year into twelve months, nineteenth-century farmers were primarily interested in the faster circuits of the moon, which moves across the whole zodiac every twenty-eight days, spending about two days in most signs. Almost all almanac calendars devoted a column to this cycle, allowing readers to determine the sign of the moon when the moon and stars were hidden by daylight or by the rotation of the earth. The anatomy connected this macroscopic physical phenomenon to the smaller cosmos of the human body, linking each body part to a corresponding sign—the two arms to Gemini, the twins; the breast to Cancer, the Crab; the “secrets” to Scorpio, the scorpion.

But what did the signs and the phases of the moon mean to moon farmers in the 1840s? In the almanac we have the tools of moon farming, but explicit guidance for the everyday use of these tools had been stripped out of almanacs in the eighteenth century, as the reputation of astrology declined. Our clearest accounts of the changing oral tradition of nineteenth-century moon farming in fact come from its most voluble enemies, the self-consciously scientific “improving agriculturists” who controlled the agricultural journals, and who made attacks on moon farming a standard genre of agricultural journalism.

Several consistent sets of rules can be pieced together through these hostile sources. The first set followed the waning and waxing of the moon—usually described in the columns of the almanac by a moon face marking each quarter. Some described analogies between the increase and decrease of moonlight and increase and decrease of substance on earth; thus, for example, pork cured in the light of the waning moon would itself dwindle to nothing. Others connected darkness to subterranean activity, and light to activity above ground. Potatoes, beets, and turnips should be planted in the old or declining moon; oats, corn, and wheat planted in the old moon would produce “roots, and no stalk, or seed.”

The second set of rules followed the anatomy itself, and relied on analogies between the plants and animals of the farm, and the human body. The moon’s presence in each sign, it was argued, brought an effusion of blood to the corresponding organ in the anatomy. Physicians had to avoid operating on these flooded organs to avoid hemorrhage; manipulating nonhuman bodies, farmers had to take similar issues into account. For example, when the moon passed into Leo, a sign keyed to the heart, farmers knew that cutting trees and vines would be satisfactorily deadly, but on the other hand, “wo be to the unlucky calf or colt, that happened to undergo castration when the sign indicated the forbidden region [Scorpio]” Other sign rules were less clearly medical. When the moon was in Virgo, “sometimes called the Posey Girl,” a committee investigating “Lunar influence in Agriculture” in the Southern Planter, reported disapprovingly and disbelievingly, “everything then sown or planted, will expend all its energy in blossoms on account of that girl’s propensity for flowers.”

Relatively simple, these rules are the ones I use in my classes, the easiest to grasp for both undergraduates and anti-moon-farming reformers. However, it’s clear from a few references that other rules surrounded other kinds of calendrical information. For example, the ascending and descending nodes of the moon (also known as the dragon’s head, and the dragon’s tail)—that is, its movement north and south of the path of the sun, and the direction of the moon’s horns, as well as the exact clock time of the full and new moon—were certainly used to make the weather predictions that some almanacs included and others left to their readers. Agricultural improvers rarely touch on these matters. Perhaps these rules were less commonly used, or artifacts of older practice; perhaps they were merely too complex for improvers interested only in superficial dismissal. It is possible, indeed, that much of the uniformity of accounts of moon farming came not from a still unified moon-farming culture but instead from the echo-chamber of anti-moon-farming rhetoric, bounced from exchange column to exchange column in the nation’s agricultural journals.

It is easy to look at the Anatomy and see unchanging tradition, perhaps even active resistance to modernity and the market. The Man of Signs, after all, reaches back to at least 1300, and some of the rules of moon farming can be traced back to classical authors, Pliny in particular. Improving farmers assiduously created this impression. Moon farmers, described as slaves of a tyrannical “Ancient Astrology,” fit well into a broader improving narrative of a battle against superstition. Complaints about moon farmers merged seamlessly into an even more common trope—that of the bull-headed, “plow-jogging” neighbor, mindlessly adhering to old ways in the face of the new kinds of empirical evidence.

Image 2. Calendar page, April, from David Young, The Farmers' Almanac, and Ephemeris of the Motions of the Sun and Moon, the True Places and Aspects of the Planets, Rising and Setting of the Sun, and the Rising and Southing of the Moon, for the year of our Lord, 1848 (Ithaca: Mack, Andrus, & Co., 1847). — Image 2. Calendar page, April, from David Young, The Farmers’ Almanac, and Ephemeris of the Motions of the Sun and Moon, the True Places and Aspects of the Planets, Rising and Setting of the Sun, and the Rising and Southing of the Moon, for the year of our Lord, 1848 (Ithaca: Mack, Andrus, & Co., 1847).

Bucking narrative convenience, however, almanacs and moon farmers regularly incorporated new scientific knowledge. Young’s Almanac of 1848 took into account not only the heliocentric universe, introduced to American almanacs in the mid-eighteenth century, but also the motions of a new planet called “Herschel” that had only been known since its discovery by William Herschel in 1781 (later to be renamed Uranus). Perhaps more importantly, even as improvers cast moon farmers as the enemies of improvement, moon farmers were improvising rules to govern improvers’ most prized scientific practices: growing fertilizing crops like clover and employing soil amendments like plaster of Paris. One improving lecturer complained that his moon-farming neighbors refused to allow cattle “to run on clover plastered during the full moon” since, “they will certainly burst, in consequence of the extending principle imparted to the elements of vegetation at this critical phase.” It is perhaps worth noticing that improvers and moon farmers, like modern veterinarians, recognized the tendency of cattle suddenly to inflate, a sometimes fatal malady cured then and now by a sharp three pointed knife stabbed into the fourth stomach, releasing trapped gas, which could be lit by a candle as it escaped. (Cattle really are more interesting than they look.)

According to improvers’ accounts, moreover, moon-farming neighbors defended their terrain with a market-oriented language of yields and profits. As new techniques emerged in the commercializing agriculture of the nineteenth century, moon farming extended to include them. Indeed, this blending of old and new methods was supported by improvers themselves, who, lured both by almanacs’ profitability and by their broad audience, themselves printed almanacs, complete with anatomy, signs, disclaimer, and instructions in improving practices, and advertisements for the Cultivator or the American Agriculturists.

Though I’ve been collecting rules and hints for several years, I don’t yet understand the cosmos that nineteenth-century almanacs describe. Indeed, I am sure that that cosmos, if it was even unified enough to call a cosmos, is no longer knowable, given the many prisms through which it has been refracted and distorted. However, assembling an imperfect picture of moon-farming practice, using rules learned from moon farming’s enemies, reaffirms that the dichotomy between “modern” and “traditional,” which has remained stubbornly evident in historians’ writing about rural Americans, wavers on closer inspection, even when looking at the Man of Signs.

Gems in the Pasture

Part I

The farm staff at Plimoth Plantation agonized over what to do. A main attraction of the living history museum is its assortment of heritage animals–cows, goats, and pigs painstakingly bred to resemble their seventeenth-century ancestors. But the rapid spread of foot-and-mouth disease among cloven-hoofed animals across the Atlantic presented a terrible threat. At the start of the English outbreak in February 2001, a dozen farms a day were reported to be infected; soon the number climbed to fifty. Up to ten percent of the visitors to Plimoth Plantation come from Great Britain, and many of them arrive within a day or two of landing at Boston’s Logan International Airport. The aphthovirus that caused the disease can live for thirty days and can be spread through the air–a sneeze will do the job nicely–or tracked in on shoes. When members of the plantation staff considered their situation in light of the ironclad agricultural policy in force both in the United States and in England, which calls for eradicating livestock known to have been exposed to foot-and-mouth, few options presented themselves. So in late March, just days before Plimoth Plantation’s village of 1627 was to come to life for the 2001 season, the museum’s 130 head of livestock were rounded up and removed to a modern breeding barn at the back of the property. Over the next few weeks, many of the animals were transported to foster farms in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont, where they would remain safely tucked away until the threat had abated.

Fig. 1. Illustration from the Massachusetts Agricultural Register for Jan. 2, 1818. This cow, from the broad horned Norfolk breed and sired by a bull of the Bakewell breed, was considered extraordinarily fine and became known as "The Westbrook Heifer." The accompanying article states that "some advantages and indeed important ones, may be derived from introducing the improved breeds of other countries." Courtesy American Antiquarian Society. — Fig. 1. Illustration from the Massachusetts Agricultural Register for Jan. 2, 1818. This cow, from the broad horned Norfolk breed and sired by a bull of the Bakewell breed, was considered extraordinarily fine and became known as “The Westbrook Heifer.” The accompanying article states that “some advantages and indeed important ones, may be derived from introducing the improved breeds of other countries.” Courtesy American Antiquarian Society.

A few hundred miles to the south, the granddaddy of living history museums was in a similar quandary. Colonial Williamsburg, which is modeled on life in Virginia during the decade leading up to the American Revolution, is a community with full-time inhabitants who need to come and go at will. Its cows, sheep, and horses are fenced in, but they often greet visitors. Colonial Williamsburg’s overseers decided there was no practical way to control contact between animals and people, and they held their collective breath. Much the same strategy prevailed at Old Sturbridge Village, which depicts life in an agrarian community of 1830. The village, in Massachusetts just north of the Connecticut border, has two farms, one typical of a family of middling means and another representing the circumstances of a wealthy landowner. Over the years, the museum has moved toward providing a hands-on experience with the animals, and some visitors have even watched its ewes give birth to their young. “This year, with foot-and-mouth, we asked them not to touch the animals,” explained Rich Pavlick, who serves as project coordinator for agriculture. “Ninety-nine percent of the visitors were very understanding. One or two people were a little bit annoyed.”

Was the hand wringing really necessary? It is hard to argue the fears were misplaced. In the last quarter century, heritage animal breeding has transformed living history museums and challenged both the public and historians to reconsider colonial Americans’ animal world.

Part II No such thing as overkill

Although foot-and-mouth disease has remained common in large regions of the world, last year’s outbreak in England presented the significant possibility that the virus would reach these shores. And those familiar with several decades of efforts to save heritage breeds from extinction would aver that no amount of caution–especially in the museums that have been in the forefront of the movement–could be called overkill. Indeed, in certain circles, talk of the Wiltshire sheep, with its gracious, curved horns, or the Milking Red Devon cow, with its deep color and gentle nature, is just as passionate as wildlife advocates’ discussions of the peregrine falcon or the snow leopard. Farmers, scientists, historians, educators, and conservationists are banding together in the campaign to preserve as many as one hundred breeds of domesticated animals that were once as common as corn in August but are now perilously close to disappearing from our world.

Fig. 2. Milking Devon cows have a gentle nature. Photograph courtesy of James P. Sacks.

The extent of what was at stake when foot-and-mouth emerged this past spring can be taken as a testament to the preservationists’ success. As recently as the mid-1980s, when Plimoth embarked on its quest for animals that would reflect the qualities of their colonial counterparts, there was a fair share of skepticism about saving rare breeds. Yet today it is acknowledged that the accomplishments of the conservationists and their colleagues in the labs could be important to the safety of commercial livestock. In many instances, the gene pools of cattle, pigs, and sheep have been diminished as farmers have bred their stock with the sole aim of increasing productivity. This has resulted in compromised immune systems. If a commercial breed were to be hit by a devastating epizootic disease, the genes of a hardy rare breed could be used to help re-establish the immunity of a commercial one. At the Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine, scientists are looking into establishing a repository to hold semen, embryos, and cells for future studies. “I want enough genetic diversity in the library so that a whole breed could be revived at the same time,” said Dr. George Saperstein, a livestock veterinarian.

When Plimoth launched its search for breed documentation in 1986, researchers found little to work with; early settlers had left few specifics behind about the livestock that accompanied them from England and the Netherlands. What did exist were sketches in documents concerning the “division of cattle” in May of 1627, which ended the colony’s holding of livestock in common. The animals were described as “two black cows, a red cow, a white backt cow and four black heifers.” The Kerry cow, an ancient English dairy breed, and the Milking Red Devon were tapped to represent their black and red forebears. The plantation’s staff found that the Kerry was a near match for a black cow described by seventeenth-century British livestock authority Gervase Markham, who wrote that it had “hair like velvet, large white horns with black tips,” and added, “They are of stately shape, bigge, round, and well buckled together in every member, short joynted, and most comely to the eyes.” Sheep and hogs presented an even bigger challenge. The Wiltshire Horn sheep of colonial days was smaller and hardier than the modern type, which has been developed as a hefty meat producer with little or no fleece. Getting the right look, or phenotype, meant using more than one breed. The farming staff crossed the Wiltshire with the Dorset Horn, a small breed with a heavy wool coat. On the swine front, the Tamworth hog, a reddish-colored lean and hardy forager, was crossed with a European boar to produce the Iron-Age pig, which is covered in coarse hair and is one-third the size of its normal domestic counterpart. While farm records of the period contain little information about goats, they were a primary source of milk and meat for early settlers. To represent this tough little animal, Plimoth has imported and bred the Arapawa Island goat of New Zealand, an endangered breed that most closely resembles the now extinct Old English Milch goat.

Fig. 3. A Milking Red Devon cow enjoys a fall day in the pasture at Coggeshall Farm in Bristol, R.I. Photograph courtesy of James P. Sacks.

But Plimoth wanted its breeding program to be more than fleece deep. “In our quest for the most accurate recreation of a seventeenth-century type,” the farm staff wrote in 1993, “we must not lose sight of the importance of maintaining the genetic material found in these older breeds.” There is little question that the Kerry and Milking Red Devon were–and still are–in dire need of saving. The American Livestock Breeds Conservancy, a nonprofit group that strives to protect historic lines from extinction, rates each as “critical,” with fewer than two thousand animals alive. The sheep are better off–but not by much. The Wiltshire is termed “rare,” with fewer than five thousand in existence, and the Dorset, with twice as many alive, is in the “watch” category. As a result, the farm staff has devised a program in which the two breeds are crossed for looks and also are maintained independently in order to preserve their genotype. The same is true of the “rare” Tamworth pig and the European boar.

Plimoth’s program aggressively attempts to marry historical accuracy with the concerns of preservation. Other institutions have chosen simpler paths. Although Colonial Williamsburg has had domesticated animals since its founding in 1926, farm manager Elaine Shirley said the museum did not worry much about whether the animals were close cousins to their ancestors. When Williamsburg launched its rare breed program sixteen years ago, it had one thing in mind: preserving genetic diversity. In focusing on genotype, rather than phenotype, it managed, rather serendipitously, to introduce more historically accurate breeds into its population.

Around the middle of the eighteenth century, the breeding of livestock was dramatically changed by Robert Bakewell, an English agriculturist. Until then, livestock was either of a type common to a region or of no particular description at all. Bakewell bucked a taboo and inbred a type of sheep found in Leicestershire to accentuate certain desirable characteristics. In doing so, he hit upon the fastest way to livestock improvement and created the method of developing bloodlines that is still in use today. Bakewell bred what came to be known as the Leicester Longwool, a sheep with a barrel-shaped body, a thick coat, and high-quality meat. He went on to breed cattle and horses, and his schemes were widely publicized in English journals. Gentleman farmers in America who pored over those publications were intrigued. George Washington was among them, and he is known to have imported his own flock of Leicester Longwools. When Williamsburg launched its rare breed program, the Leicester Longwool had become extinct in this country. Once its greatest attribute, the Leicester’s long wool became its downfall. The fleece, greatly valued for hand spinning, did not work well in mechanized textile mills. At the same time, farmers raising sheep for meat began to favor well-muscled breeds that were smaller. They crossed the longwools with the smaller sheep to get a somewhat larger frame and in the process diluted the breed out of existence. Richard Nicoll, Williamsburg’s director of coach and livestock, took an interest in the Longwool, and the museum imported its original herd from Tasmania. Along with the Longwools, its program now features American Cream Draft and Canadian horses, American Milking Red Devons, and four types of chickens: Dorking, Dominique, Hamburg, and English Game Fowl.

Fig. 4. Dominique chicken and birds of less illustrious heritage peck in the dirt at Coggeshall Farm. Photograph courtesy of James P. Sacks.

Old Sturbridge Village, for its part, has stuck with its plan to breed animals back to the correct phenotype, rather than engage in a program that would focus on genotype. The strategy was intended to recreate the appearance of early American livestock, as opposed to increasing the number of animals whose genes matched those of rare breeds. A museum publication details nearly forty years of work, noting that cattle belonging to a typical farmer were of no identifiable breed and tended to be “red with middle-sized horns, a mixture of all breeds introduced in the colonial era.” The farm staff has crossbred Milking Red Devon, Shorthorn, Ayrshire, Guernsey, Hereford, and Lineback lines to arrive at what was once referred to as “native” cattle. In reading an article called “Barnyard Dynamics” from two decades ago, I got the impression that back breeding occasionally meant revisiting the personalities of these hardy, independent mongrels. “Some cattle are sold because they have undesirable traits,” the writer recounted. “Ruby disliked anyone with a long dress, Village milkmaids included, of course. Hannah was the athletic type who jumped fences. She was put into a jumping yoke designed to catch on the fence before the cow leaped. She jumped again, and this time took down the entire fence. She was sold soon after.”

Like Plimoth, Sturbridge has recreated the common sheep of its era by crossing the Wiltshire with the Dorset. But Salem Towne, a gentleman farmer of the early nineteenth century, whose lifestyle is depicted at the village, had little interest in such a flock. He was a progressive in his field and he kept a large herd of Merinos, which were first imported to America in 1793. A Spanish breed, the Merino had particularly fine fleece that was in great demand in the emerging New England textile industry. Because the modern type is larger and has a much heavier coat, the farm staff looked for a primitive counterpart with bare legs and dark, coarse wool; a feral breed native to Florida provided many of the unimproved Merino’s traits and was brought north.

Part III Small farm, bay view

The large museums have the advantage of deep pockets, which allow them to replicate their time periods in grand fashion, not only through their breeding programs, but also through their buildings, furnishings, equipment, and interpretive staff. Yet small museums, too, are raising heritage breeds, and in some ways may come closer to capturing the ambiance of life on an eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century farm. Tiny Coggeshall Farm in Bristol, R.I., raises Milking Red Devons, Wiltshires, and a handful of Dominique chickens, along with several “dunghill fowl,” as poultry of mixed breed were known. A short history of the museum explains, “The Coggeshall family began renting the farm in the 1830s, when Wilbur and Eliza came there to live. They were both descendants of John Coggeshall, a contemporary of Roger Williams and the first president of the Rhode Island colony. They had twelve children, some of whom lived on the farm into the twentieth century.” The farm actually represents the years predating the Coggeshalls’ arrival. Set next to Colt State Park, the forty-acre spread seems isolated, although it is not far from the main road leading into town. As I approached, I had a sense of what rural life in the Revolutionary era might have looked like. The farm is bounded on three sides by stone walls and woodland. It sits on a rise and offers a glorious view of Mill Gut, with the white-capped waters of Narragansett Bay beyond it. The day was blustery, and Luis Mendes, his red wool cap pulled down over his ears, could be seen in the distance herding five Red Devons. The sun reflected off the lustrous coats of these majestic animals as they came across a pasture enclosed by hand-split post-and-rail fencing.

Mendes has been Coggeshall’s historical interpreter for eight years, explaining to school groups and other occasional visitors that the animals provided food, fiber, and labor and were essential to a family’s existence. He and Walter Katkevich, the museum’s director, maintain the farm and carry on the breeding program. Mendes knows how to artificially inseminate the cows. “The semen comes on the Greyhound,” he remarked. The day I was at Coggeshall, thirteen sheep were in residence, mostly proud-looking Wiltshires. Several reposed beside a pen, while others peered out from between the slats. Mendes said that he and Katkevich were planning to part with either their bull calf or a steer and four or five of the sheep. I asked if the animals would be slaughtered. “I’m a vegetarian, so it makes it a little tricky,” he replied. Living history museums often find homes for the animals they cull from their herds, or they send them to petting zoos. But some are not appropriate for those situations. Ever wonder where your favorite gourmet restaurant got that delicious bit of chicken, beef, or lamb? It just might have been from a Dominique, Shorthorn, or Wiltshire.

Coggeshall also has two Guinea hogs, huge creatures with pointed ears and bristly hair. Once considered excellent for lard, they later fell out of favor, and the breed is now endangered. As his charges alternately snoozed and snorted in their specially built shed, Katkevich made note of their docile nature, but said he doubted that the farm had Guinea hogs two hundred years ago. They were brought over on slave ships and sent to the South. Bristol was a leading port for the slave trade, and Katkevich figured the hogs would show the town’s connection to that enterprise. Along with the original small red house, the farm now has two barns, a sheep pen, and several sheds. “We’re not trying to re-create an eighteenth-century farm. We represent a farm,” Katkevich said, noting that in the old days, there would have been one barn, if that, and a lean-to for the pigs. The sheep would have shared a pen with the cattle. Of course, all museums, large and small, would incur the wrath of the public–and perhaps feel the long arm of the law–if they attempted to keep animals in the exact conditions in which they existed two hundred or more years ago. Katkevich pointed out that back then, people lived with pain and early death, and livestock served a practical purpose. They were treated in ways that could not–and should not–be replicated for the sake of historical accuracy. “The oxen would die of overwork,” Katkevich said. “To be sentimental about your cattle was not realistic.”

In the colonies of the seventeenth century, domesticated animals mostly fended for themselves. They roamed free, and crops were fenced off. Calves and sheep were often picked off by wolves, though hogs were good runners, able to survive encounters with bears and rattlesnakes. As Percy Bidwell and John Falconer pointed out in their History of Agriculture in the Northern United States 1620-1860, “With such care the New England cattle early acquired through a vigorous process of natural selection a reputation for tough vitality.” Despite the harsh conditions, the numbers of livestock steadily increased, and the settlers devised a system whereby the animals grazed on common fields in the winter and early spring. When crops were in the ground, they were pastured outside of the village and tended by herders, while the working oxen, horses, and milk cows were kept nearby. Howard S. Russell, who traced three centuries of New England farming in his book A Long, Deep Furrow, noted that by the mid-1630s the town of Cambridge had set each Thursday as market day, when produce and animals were for sale. “For several years after 1635 farmers did very well, and when Stephen Daye set up his Cambridge printing press, the first booklet printed (1639) was that useful agricultural item, an almanac,” Russell wrote. Still, the farmers did little to improve conditions through the late seventeenth century and into the eighteenth. Fences were put up, but shelter and feed were lacking; during the harsh winters, snow would pile high on the animals’ backs. Oxen were used for plowing and hauling, but as they got older and slowed down, they were fattened and slaughtered for meat. During this time, farmers began to raise more sheep, in part because of government incentives seeking to reduce dependence on costly imported wool. Russell noted that in an effort to protect flocks, bounties were placed on wolves, and a dog that killed a sheep was treated as a murderer and hanged.

Even as colonists moved to protect their animals and develop markets, American Indians were finding their lives drastically altered by the introduction of cattle, pigs, and sheep into their environment. Indians subsisted according to the dictates of the season, hunting deer, moose, and beaver in the fall and winter. An Indian claimed to own an animal only at the moment it was killed. Colonists, on the other hand, took ownership of their animals and exerted total control over their lives. William Cronon, in his book Changes in the Land, wrote that the keeping of animals, combined with the raising of crops, drastically changed the New England landscape, and thus how Indians were able to live. The miles of fencing that farmers used to keep livestock from eating crops became the symbol for property ownership–and the English rationale for taking Indian lands. Moreover, the use of oxen to plow fields allowed colonists to convert acre upon acre to farmland. A system of roads cut through the countryside to bring produce to market.

It was not only the land that livestock affected. The ravenous appetites and ravages of swine, which reproduce rapidly and in great numbers, soon constituted a nuisance–and a danger–to the colonists, who exiled them to distant locations, often coastal areas and offshore islands. The animals wreaked havoc on oyster banks and other Indian shellfish gathering sites. They are said to have watched for the low water, as Indian women did, and competed directly with them for food. “Pigs thus became both the agents and the emblems for a European colonialism that was systematically reorganizing Indian ecological relationships,” Cronon wrote.

As colonists’ settlements grew, putting pressure on the ecosystem, Indians were forced to adjust to a different way of life. The white-tailed deer they had used for food and clothing largely disappeared, threatened by changes in habitat and competition from domestic animals. Cronon wrote that Indians were thus forced to live in “fixed locations on a more permanent basis. Earlier subsistence practices, which had depended on seasonal dispersal, were gradually being abandoned, with important ecological effects.” Living more closely together for longer periods of time put even greater pressure on their hunting and planting areas and encouraged the spread of infectious diseases, which were to soon take a devastating toll on their population. Alfred W. Crosby, in his 1986 book, Ecological Imperialism, summed up the situation this way: “If the Europeans had arrived in the new world . . . with twentieth-century technology in hand, but no animals, they would not have made as great a change as they did by arriving with horses, cattle, pigs, goats, sheep, asses, chickens, cats, and so forth. Because these animals are self-replicators, the efficiency and speed with which they can alter environments, even continental environments, are superior to those for any machine we have thus far devised.”

Fig. 6. Luis Mendes, left, and Walter Katkevich talk about their work with heritage animals. Photograph courtesy of James P. Sacks.

Along with their capacity for rapid reproduction, the animals arriving from Europe carried with them a variety of diseases and pests. A distemper of some sort killed hogs, and Russell told the story of a farmer named Clough who, in May 1635, found a dead one and examined its throat. Within three weeks he, too, was dead, along with three children from the area. Hog cholera was recorded in the middle of the seventeenth century, and an infectious sheep disease called “scab” later set off alarms among farmers. Bot flies killed horses, and rabies appeared for the first time in 1760, bringing death to dogs and hogs.

Change for livestock finally arrived at the start of the nineteenth century, when progressive farmers began approaching agriculture as a practical science and took an interest in Bakewell’s methods of selective breeding. In 1807, Elkanah Watson organized an agricultural fair with an exhibit of sheep under an old elm tree in Pittsfield, Mass. He believed their fleece would produce wool equal to the finest in Europe. Watson was delighted when he staged an event three years later that drew more than five hundred cattle and sheep. Between 1820 and 1840, representatives of all of the important English breeds of cattle, including improved Durhams and Shorthorns, were brought to the United States. These animals were well cared for and exhibited at livestock shows, which had quickly become annual events.

But the influences did not reach everywhere, and life remained wretched for many animals. Agricultural journals advised their readers on better methods and provided a vehicle for farmers to trade helpful hints. In the July 31, 1839, edition of the New England Farmer, and Horticultural Register, a Genesee farmer wrote that “there are many who have not yet learned the difference there is in the richness and flavor of eggs produced by fat and well fed hens, and those from birds that have been half starved through our winters.” He went on to suggest the right feed, including “an abundance of fine gravel that they may be able to grind and prepare for digestion the food they receive.” Another farmer asked the journal to reprint a cure for wounds on horses and cattle, “which alone has been worth more to me than ten years subscription.” A third offered a commentary on the “free martin,” a heifer calf born as a twin to a bull calf. The free martin had an anatomical abnormality and was never able to reproduce, but “works well in a yoke,” the farmer wrote. “Why the female of the ox family, when produced as a twin, should alone of all other animals, be incapable of reproduction, is one of those physiological anomalies left for future observers to explain,” he concluded.

Like the breeding practices that slowly gained currency, the approaches to disease that have carried into the present–the very strategies that were deployed in Great Britain just months ago and that caused such worries at the living history museums–hesitantly took shape. The policy of aggressively fighting infectious disease among livestock was first introduced in Massachusetts in 1859, when deadly pleuropneumonia was discovered in a cow in Worcester County that was traced back to a herd of imported Holsteins outside of Boston. The disease spread, and the Massachusetts legislature set up a cattle control board with broad powers to quarantine and destroy. Thousands of animals were slaughtered, and the disease was wiped out by 1867. Russell offered the view that those actions were to set the pattern nationally for control of foot-and-mouth disease, which appeared in Massachusetts in 1870, and for subsequent battles against bovine tuberculosis and other animal infections.

Roughly seventy percent of the American population lived on farms in the 1830s, but economic forces were pulling more and more young men and women away to mills, cities, and nonagricultural pursuits. That trend would continue throughout the nineteenth century, even as a steady stream of families pulled up stakes and headed west to more fertile soil and new lives, sending farming in the East into a gradual, inexorable decline. Fast-forwarding to the end of World War II reveals an America in which specialized production methods and increases in technology have made large, mechanized farms more advantageous. It also sets the stage for the opportunities and dangers that helped to create the burgeoning scientific and conservation movements that relate to heritage animals.

In the postwar era, farmers began to focus on a few breeds that proved to be highly productive–and sometimes highly profitable–under controlled circumstances. The dairy industry chose the Holstein. The process of natural selection was set aside, and artificial reproduction techniques were introduced using semen from a select group of superior bulls. The animals have been repeatedly inbred to produce more and more milk. “You breed for feet, legs, bone structure, udder suspension,” said Steve Prouty, who ran a dairy farm in Hardwick, Mass., for fifteen years and then turned to produce. “Today, you can fill out a list of qualities and the computer can do the selection. They are able to tweak the traits more and more with each generation.” Characteristics such as a strong immune system have largely been ignored, however; instead, the animals are vaccinated against disease and loaded up with antibiotics. “We pickle them,” Prouty remarked. Saperstein, the Tufts livestock veterinarian, described today’s Holstein as a delicate machine. “It has always worried me that we are breeding animals that are less resistant to disease because we haven’t had to worry about it,” he said. This approach has produced an abundance of food at low cost, but it has come with a price: the decline, and in many cases extinction, of breeds well adapted to particular environments. “In my career I’ve seen the minor breeds disappear,” Saperstein reflected. “It’s sad. The Guernsey and Jersey cow were different. We domesticated these animals for our use. It’s our history, and we’re throwing it away.”

By the 1970s, around the time the nation was celebrating its bicentennial, such views had spread, and the early signs of today’s effort to save heritage animals were visible. The response from many connected with animal husbandry was dismissive. “For the first ten years, we were completely pooh-poohed,” recalled Dr. Donald E. Bixby, a veterinarian and executive director of the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy, which was formed in 1977. “The attitude was, ‘Why should we keep these old breeds? They’re obviously inefficient.'” As time passed, however, the livestock industry continued reducing the gene pool, and concern mounted. Gradually, with the support of the conservancy, backyard efforts initiated by people with a passion for a particular breed began to appear. By the mid-1980s, the living history museums had gotten involved and the movement had gained considerable momentum.

In 1995, Robyn Shotwell Metcalfe, whose husband, Robert, founded 3Com Corp., formed the Kelmscott Rare Breeds Foundation and Farm in Lincolnville, Maine. She had first become interested in historic breeds during a stay in England in the early 1990s. When the Metcalfes returned to California, she bought several Cotswold sheep and raised them in her yard. Later, the couple moved east and Ms. Metcalfe established Kelmscott, which raises Gloucestershire Old Spots pigs, Cotswold sheep, and Kerry cattle, among other breeds. The staff carefully documents bloodlines and preserves genetic material; as success is gained with one breed, the farm imports another. Kelmscott’s fundamental philosophy is that historic breeds have to be more than a hobby or the entire endeavor is doomed. The farm is no petting zoo, as a talk with Executive Director Craig Olson makes clear. It markets its meat to tony Manhattan restaurants and gets top dollar. “We harvest the wool, send the animals to slaughter,” Olson said. “That’s the only way to show that they can have economic viability.”

Two years after Kelmscott opened its doors, a group of livestock breeders that shared its viewpoint founded the New England Heritage Breeds Conservancy. Its aim? To foster the raising of historic breeds on sustainable farms, so known because the livestock are treated as part of a natural cycle and the methods employed have a minimal impact on the environment. Last year, armed with a half-million-dollar grant, the group formed a collaboration with Hancock Shaker Village, a living history museum in Pittsfield. The Shakers, who were known for efficiency and innovation, operated highly successful farms well into the twentieth century. Together, the two groups are assisting farmers raising heritage livestock and seeking out niche markets for their meat.

Fig. 7. Guinea hogs arrived in America on slave ships. Most were sent to the American South. Photograph courtesy of James P. Sacks.

In recent years, attitudes about conserving historic breeds have begun to harden–another sign, perhaps, that the movement is coming into its own. Not long ago, Pavlick, the Old Sturbridge Village agricultural coordinator, was shopping around for a Milking Red Devon. The prospective seller balked, fearing the line would be diluted by crossbreeding. The museum went on to make the purchase, but only with the promise that the pure bloodline would be maintained. “It has to do with relations with the rest of the world,” Pavlick explained. “With the dwindling genetic pool, it’s becoming more in our interest to maintain these rare lines. We’ll gain back some goodwill.”

Meanwhile, those in the heritage movement’s historical, cultural, and educational vanguard are finding more allies among those who specialize in science and public policy, and who see it as vital to save the beautiful and hardy heritage breeds in the tank as well as on the hoof; that way, material will be available in the event of a genetic mutation, in the aftermath of a devastating epidemic, or simply to breed a trait back into a commercial line. In the age of tainted mail and Osama bin Laden, the logic runs, it does not make sense to reject the idea of planning for the worst. The Office International des Epizooties, which keeps track of transmissible livestock diseases worldwide, places fifteen in the “most serious” category for economic and public health consequences, with foot-and-mouth at the top of the list. There are several dozen others, anthrax among them, classified as significant. No matter how quickly officials in developed countries move to wipe out potential epidemics, authorities warn, the threat of bioterrorism will remain real. “It will happen,” Saperstein predicted. “They could do it for fifty cents.” As a hedge, scientists have been urging the federal government to set up a national livestock “genebank” in which the frozen semen and embryos of rare breeds, and even cells for cloning, would be kept; the government has recently taken steps to follow through. The federal plans are expected to be complemented by other developments, possibly including Tufts’ genetic repository.

Part IV True-to-life scenes can be bloody

It is worth considering that, with all it has become, the movement to save heritage breeds was initially spurred by living history museums seeking to make the interpretations of their periods more authentic. Although many of the animals appear similar to their cousins of yesteryear, modern sensibilities would hardly allow an accurate interpretation of their life cycle. Each year, Old Sturbridge Village butchers a pig in early December. The animal is shot at dawn; its carcass is hung from a barn door to be bled and gutted, as would have been done in an earlier era. The staff warns visitors about what is going on. Adults often question the necessity for the killing, while children seem to have an innocent curiosity. “We explain that we do it for education because then, as today, people eat meat. Meat comes from animals,” Pavlick said. “If I could sum up our approach with one word: ‘tact.'” At Kelmscott, some animals are slaughtered, but that does not prevent the depiction on the farm’s Website of “Charlotte the Cotswold” and “Muriel the Old Spots pig,” both of whom can be “adopted.” Those succumbing to the pitch will not actually have to welcome the animals into their living rooms; rather, they will be helping to support the “very existence” of heritage breeds.

Fig. 8. Ewes peer at a Wiltshire ram from inside their shelter at Coggeshall Farm. Photograph courtesy of James P. Sacks.

Think of how it was two centuries ago. The stark contrast is brought home in one of the few autobiographical narratives to come down to us from someone who grew up on a small Massachusetts farm. His name was Asa Sheldon, and he could drive a team of oxen by the time he was seven. At nine, he was placed in servitude to a neighboring farmer and spent that spring plowing the fields with four oxen and a horse. His father made the arrangement again the next year for the price of a cow, and Asa eventually was bound out to the farmer until he turned twenty-one. He tells how one April during a snowstorm, he was sent after the sheep. He found a lamb that had been dropped in the snow and the farmer allowed him to retain it, with the agreement that if it survived, its ewe lambs would be kept for wool, while Asa could send the males to slaughter and hang onto the proceeds. “The coming season I exchanged my lamb for an older sheep, which brought me the next spring two fine ram lambs that were destined for slaughter,” he wrote. By dealing in sheep, he eventually saved thirty dollars.

On that windy day in Rhode Island, I found it intriguing to consider how perfectly the Wiltshires, Devons, and Dominiques could symbolize pieces of both America’s past and America’s present. Clearly, they are the breathing proof of an enterprise that is thriving and replete with possibilities. But it is more complicated than that. No matter how true to life historic animals may be, they will represent a different kind of treasure in the twenty-first century than they did in the previous ones. For with all that it may become, the heritage movement must be seen at least in part as an attempt to recapture what has been lost. “We feel we’re missing something,” said Prouty, the former dairy farmer. Dr. Eric W. Overstrom, an associate professor of biomedical sciences at Tufts, put a similar sentiment in different words. “Society has evolved to an increased understanding and a desire to have a relationship with animals,” Overstrom said. “We’ve achieved a level of comfort so that we can reflect on the value of animals in our lives.” If Overstrom is right, what has changed between Sheldon’s day and our own is largely a matter of meaning. Our ancestors on the farm certainly prized their animals, and they spent a great deal of time with them. Yet the role of livestock was straightforward, as vital to survival as it was to progress. Now the brutes of the field are valued at least in part for something that is less tangible, creating a tension that cannot be easily resolved by those who are seeking to ensure that rare breeds live on. Earlier generations accepted a reality that many of us have a hard time acknowledging: Charlotte may be cute, but she’s also mighty tasty.

Further Reading: Several invaluable sources cited above were Percy Wells Bidwell and John I. Falconer, History of Agriculture in the Northern United States 1620-1860 (Washington, D.C., 1941); Howard S. Russell, A Long, Deep Furrow: Three Centuries of Farming in New England (Hanover, N.H., 1976); William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England (New York, 1983); and Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (New York, 1986). Other material used for the historical portions and descriptions of historic breeds included Jared Eliot, Essays Upon Field Husbandry in New England 1748-1762 (New York, 1967); James Deetz and Patricia Scott Deetz, The Times of Their Lives: Life, Love and Death in Plymouth Colony (New York, 2000); and Joyce Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans (Cambridge, Mass., 2000). An excellent description of farming life in early America can be found in Yankee Drover: Being the Unpretending Life of Asa Sheldon, Farmer, Trader, and Working Man 1788-1870 (Hanover, N.H., 1988). Also used for background were issues of the New England Farmer, and Horticultural Register (Boston, published starting 1821); and The Rural Visitor and Old Sturbridge Visitor (Old Sturbridge Village, 1968-99). Websites consulted include those of The International Association of Fairs and Expositions and Iowa State University Animal Science Archives. Information on livestock diseases and animal genetics was obtained from J.K. Oldenbroek, ed., Genebanks and the Conservation of Farm Animal Genetic Resources (DLO Institute for Animal Science, 1999); and The Global Strategy for the Management of Farm Animal Genetic Resources (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 1999). Information was gleaned from Websites for the United States Department of Agriculture, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Department of Food & Agriculture, and the Office International des Epizooties. The Websites of living history museums and organizations dedicated to historic breeds contain a wealth of information. I consulted those of Plimoth Plantation, Old Sturbridge Village, Hancock Shaker Village, the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy; the New England Heritage Breeds Conservancy; the American Milking Devon Association; Davis’ Farmland; Kelmscott Rare Breeds Foundation and Farm; and Colonial Williamsburg. In addition, there are people to whom I am deeply grateful for their time and assistance, but who are not cited in the text because of space constraints. My thanks to Cindy Barber, assistant farm manager, Plimoth Plantation; Eric White, director of education and public programs, and Nancy Johnston, librarian, Old Sturbridge Village; Heather B. Ware, associate director of agriculture and education, Hancock Shaker Village and New England Heritage Breeds Conservancy; and Doug Davis of Davis’ Farmland in Sterling, Mass.

This article originally appeared in issue 2.3 (April, 2003).

Pamela H. Sacks is a writer based in Worcester, Mass., and a contributing editor to Animals magazine.

The Search for the Cure

The quest for the superlative American ham

No food in colonial Anglo-America declared gustatory adequacy at the world table more forcefully than ham. Travelers to the English territories, such as Rev. Andrew Burnaby, declared American pork superior in flavor to any in the world. With the establishment of the republic, the ingenuity of a population of artisanal food producers fixed upon improving the most estimable of American products, ham. Eminence in the sociable world of the agricultural societies, distinction in the market place, and victory in the food contests at the burgeoning world of fairs stimulated innovation in the curing of hams. Here we will chronicle the articulation of two schools of ham production: the dry-cure sect, who would increasingly view themselves as purists and traditionalists, and the wet curists, who regarded themselves as experimentalists in taste, economy, and scientific agriculture, yet whose pork brined in a barrel was the staple of the common household.

Antiquity conveyed the ur-cure, the primordial method of preserving meat. Salting and drying meat prevented the decomposition of flesh because moisture is a requisite for most bacterial reproduction and salt (sodium chloride) draws moisture from flesh. Unfortunately, sweating meat in rock salt turned muscle tissue gray and tough. It was discovered, however, that certain types of rock salt—salt with impurities—kept meat red and somewhat moist. This impure form of salt—called saltpeter—was sought out and admixed with salt for meat preservation until the Middle Ages when smoking was added to salt and saltpeter to impart flavor and to counter insect depredations. The method practiced by Europeans at the time of the settlement of Jamestown—common to Westphalian ham and Jamon de Iberica—was the “three s method”: salt, saltpeter, smoke.

Ham modernity dates from the erection of what Wolfgang Shivelbusch has called the first global drug culture—the oceanic trading system that made the exchange of sugar, spice, tea, coffee, and chocolate the engine of the world system. Only after the explosion of the world sugar supply occasioned by the consolidation of the Brazilian cane plantations in the sixteenth century was the commodity cheap enough for trial and error in the kitchen and smokehouse. Indeed, there was decidedly a sugar moment in Western cuisine, when sucrose was added to everything as the pangustatory element. When added as the fourth s to the ancient cure, sugar mellowed the harshness of salted flesh. Sugar-cured hams became the bedrock of American porcine cuisine.

Ham constitutes the thigh of a back leg of a hog. The thigh has three large cross braided muscles, now designated the inside round, outside round, and sirloin tip. The shank end in traditional hams was cut through at the joint with the skin left on. The butt end was cut in roughly at the hip. Certain of the fat was trimmed. A more modern way of trimming a whole ham leg shortens the shank and trims the skin and fat from that end.

Ossabaw pigs at Caw Caw Creek Farm in South Carolina. Photo by Emile DeFelice.

Ever since Hernando DeSoto brought his thirteen hogs into Florida, swine have flourished in North America. The earliest breeds did not resemble today’s industrial pink pig. Indeed, the first settled hogs, the Iberico Black hog, the Old English breed, do not resemble their breed descendents, the Spanish Black and the Hampshire. Of these early types there is only one extraordinarily rare example left in America: the Ossabaw Island pig, a mottled descendent of the pigs that Spaniards loosed on the islands of the Caribbean and along the southeastern coast. One population survived into the twenty-first century on Ossabaw Island off the coast of Georgia. Slow-growing, irritable, and the most efficient fat-producing mammal known to science, the breed has become the fascination of biologists working on obesity studies. Because of its harsh habitat, the wild Ossabaws themselves rarely become bulky. But the fat they do produce marbles the muscle, and since fat is the source of ham flavor, the Ossabaw ham is the most extraordinary delicacy in American porcine cuisine. Emile DeFelice of St. Matthews, South Carolina, periodically produces Ossabaw hams and chops at his Caw Caw Creek Farm. To secure one you will have to vie with two New York chefs who amuse themselves by bidding every pig into a stratospheric region that gives nosebleeds to even the well-heeled pork connoisseur.

In Anglo-America the institutionalization of swine breeding occurred in the early 1830s when a group of Kentucky farmers imported a group of Hampshires from the border of England and Scotland. The rise of industrial-scale butchery in Cincinnati in the late 1820s had prompted a consciousness in market farmers about regularization of their swine herds as a means of competing with industrial pork. Distinguished breeds, they claimed, provided a better quality ham but could not be the product of industrial meatpacking. Shortly thereafter the first Berkshire pigs, with their enormous girth and mellow flesh, were brought into Ohio. In the quest for the ideal ham, the breed of the hog being butchered and prepared was a consequential matter. Sometime in the twentieth century it ceased to be, so now, even among producers of artisanal country hams there is little inclination to search out those heritage breeds that first won renown for New World hams. And is there anything more ludicrous than the present day barbeque contests in which contestants are prohibited from supplying meat that might be more sapid than those of their fellows? The organizers give everyone the same hybrid pink pig. It’s all about the sauce, the rub, the heat—it has nothing to do with meat.

Testimonies about the quality of New World ham date from 1688 when Rev. John Clayton, reporting to the Royal Society his observations on the commodities of Virginia, declared the meat as good as any to be had in Westphalia. This is a far more informative claim than it might appear on the surface, for it reveals much about the mode of preparation. Traditional Westphalian ham is made from hogs fattened with acorns from the oak forests of western Germany and then dry cured and smoked over a cold fire of beechwood and juniper boughs. The original Virginia ham derived its flavor from an acorn mast and dry curing. It was smoked. This is worth noting because during the eighteenth century there would be disagreement about the proper feeding of pigs and a related alteration in the method of curing.

William Byrd (1674-1744), the Virginia gentleman who championed an ethic of agricultural improvement, criticized the habit among country farmers (typified, for him, by the lazy North Carolinians described in his Histories of the Dividing Line) of letting hogs roam free in the forests to graze on roots and acorns. The semi-wild hog developed stringy muscle from its robust wandering life, and the farmer lost the benefit of its manure. Byrd would keep his pigs penned and fed on dung heap scraps. But with this diet, the meat of his animals, while more tender, risked becoming less palatable. What mattered more, taste or economy? In the nineteenth century critics began to opt for taste: “I am satisfied that it is ‘not good economy’ to endeavor to make manure from hogs by keeping them up in a pen. I am convinced that ten bushels of corn, fed on a clean board, will make as much good solid pork, as fifteen fed on a dung heap—and with this additional recommendation, that the pork is perfectly sweet and entirely free from that nauseous flavor which is so peculiar to pork kept in a filthy state, and having their food administered to them in dung or litter.” Feeding hogs on corn was pioneered in Pennsylvania at the end of the eighteenth century. In Virginia, where the taste of the mast-fed pig haunted the gustatory imagination, traditionalists followed the old country practice of letting swine loose in the woods. The practice continued until the early twentieth century when peanut mast was found to instill in pork something like that piquant yet mellow flavor infused by acorns.

Every method of curing—dry or wet—used salt, and since antiquity the purity of the salt posed a problem. In the early nineteenth century, three sources had begun vying for the dollars of those who aspired to the production of superior hams. Liverpool salt, imported from England, had been a staple of American commerce since the development of the Cheshire rock salt beds in the 1690s and was used largely in the salting of cod from Massachusetts to Newfoundland. Its purity and durable reputation made it the favorite salt of eighteenth-century American ham curers and butter makers. In the South, salt from the Turks and Caicos islands in the Caribbean possessed similar repute. From the late eighteenth century, various domestic salt works began vying for the trade. Two managed to build strong reputations during the 1820s and 1830s. At lake Onondaga, New York, salt works were erected in Liverpool and Syracuse. Their product was derived from the boiling of lake brine into flavorful crystal. On Turkey Island, Florida, a mined salt dome provided southern markets with fine salt through the 1830s and 1840s. But for many country folk, purchase of premium salt often proved too costly. Locally produced salt, however, presented a familiar problem: strange tastes arising from impurities, usually sulphate of magnesia and lime, nitrate of soda and muriate of magnesia. What to do?

Place a peck of salt into a large kettle with just clear rain water enough to dissolve it; boil it and skim off every particle of scum that rises to the surface. Then dissolve one ounce of carbonate of soda in four ounces of water, put it in the kettle and stir it well; then boil again for ten minutes, taking off all the scum that rises; then strain the brine through several folds of flannel. A considerable quantity of earthy matter will be found in the bottom of the kettle, and that is the cause of the impurity. After this straining, a small quantity of muriatic acid must be added to the brine to neutralize the soda; say half an ounce or so; then the brine is to be put back into the kettle and boiled again till it chrystalizes, or it may be put into a shallow wooden vessel and the water evaporated in the sun. Boiling is the quickest method. As soon as the salt is re-chrystalized, it should be washed by putting it in a clean basket, and throwing a bucket of perfectly pure water over it and letting it drain off rapidly; then dry. In this way, salt perfectly pure may be obtained.

Saltpeter, while essential for the preservation of hams, proved equally if not more important as an ingredient of gunpowder. In June 1642 the General Court of Massachusetts ordered every town to erect a shed and “make saltpeter from urine of men, beastes, goates, hennes, hogs and horses dung.” Thomas Paine’s first publication in America was a magazine article instructing persons in the manufacture of saltpeter . . . for ammunition. A translation of Lavoisier’s “L’art de fabriquer le salin et la potasse” was published anonymously (pirated?) for American use sometime at the end of the eighteenth century, and by the end of the Revolution (and the concurrent decline in demand for gunpowder) saltpeter had become a widely traded and readily available domestic commodity.

Putting chilled, freshly butchered hams in salt was the only part of the process that did not suffer alteration in any of the schools of dry-cure preparation. European tradition usually had the slaughter of winter meat occur on St. Martinmass Day, November 11. But because of the importance of cool weather in the curing of hams, it took place substantially later in the American South: December in Virginia; January in the Carolinas. The fresh-butchered meat had to be cooled to about forty degrees Fahrenheit when salting was begun. Traditionalists would follow salting with the other two s‘s of the “dry cure”: saltpeter and smoke. The proportions varied, but J. Q. Hewlitt’s formula of one thousand pounds of meat, three pecks of Liverpool salt, and four pounds of saltpeter presented a norm. The hams were packed in tubs or casks. These were often perforated to allow liquid to drip out during the minimum of three weeks sitting. At the end of the salting period, during which fresh salt was often added to the tubs, the ham would be extracted and the salt coating washed off. Hewlitt then smoked the hams in a closed room using green hickory chips. It was important that the smoke be cool, so as not to cook the hams. Temperature in the smokehouse was not to exceed human body temperature. At the end of February the hams would be sewn up in bags for protection.

A modern school of dry curing developed during the colonial era when spices (pepper, sugar, and red pepper most frequently) were scrubbed into the meat after the salting and during the smoking. While sugar boosted flavor, pepper boosted the survivability of the ham. Both red and black pepper deterred the infestation of meat by the dreaded trinity of insects—the cheese skipper, the larder beetle, and the red-legged ham beetle. Of these the skipper (Piophila casei), a small two-winged fly with striped abdomen, inspired most anxiety, for its larvae could reduce salted hams to slimy rot in a short time. Because the larvae can withstand human stomach acid, ingestion may further lead to the colonization and injuring of one’s intestines. Hence the imperative to balk the fly’s depredations on ham was and is great. Both the skin side and the cut side of the ham were liberally doused, but the cut side received the most attention. Smoking alone could not counter the pests.

Smoke was, however, the element of ham flavor considered the sine qua non. Both dry curers and the more ambitious briners smoked their hams. While hickory remained the favored wood of the majority of meat processors, experimentalists employed a range of fruit woods and oak. Only the resinous conifer trees were declared off limits, because of the bitterness their smoke imparted to meat.

Wet curing hams in brines tended to proceed in one of two ways. Either one salted the ham as one would in dry curing and then soused it in pickle with eventual smoking optional. Or one pickled the ham from the get go and then smoked it. Method one was the poor man’s path, followed because one could leave the meat in the barrel without worrying about insect infestation for months or until one scraped the bottom of the pork barrel sometime in summer. The October 19, 1803, issue of The Lancaster Hive supplies a recipe typical of this approach. “Take about a tea spoonful of powdered salpetre, and rub it well on the skin side of each ham, and let it remain for two or three hours—then take fine salt, and mix with it as much molasses as will make it the colour of light brown sugar; with this rub the hams well all over, and then pack them up in a tight cask with their skin side downwards, put a weight on the whole, and let them remain for eight or ten days—if the hams exceed twelve or fourteen pounds each, a little more saltpeter may be added—after eight or ten days, take out the hams and drain them, then take the liquor from the cask, and add to it sixteen gallons of cold water, to which add as much salt as will make the pickle bear an egg, one pound of saltpeter and two pounds of brown sugar-boil this liquor, and skim it well when boiling—and when cold, pour it over the hams, and let them remain in it for three or four weeks, according to their size; then smoke them.” The majority of practitioners, even in the colonial era, opted not to smoke, leaving their pork in the barrel.

The second method became the favorite of contest curers, producing hams for state fairs. Wet curing produced a moist ham, suffused to the bone with sweetness. Perhaps the pinnacle of this approach was achieved late in the antebellum period by the Maryland farmwife, Mrs. D. Brown, who won contests throughout the Chesapeake region. She could even best Virginians with her “Maryland Ham—Ne Plus Ultra.”

Maryland Ham—Ne Plus Ultra (1858)

Take a single pound of Pepper, four times as much of Salt:
Two ounces of good Allspice, and a quart of Barley Malt;
Potash, about two ounces, Salt Petre twice as much;
One pound of good White sugar, which feels sandy to the touch;
A little common Soda, (to make the lean more mellow,)
And prevent the fatty part of meat, from becoming yellow.
Put these in filtered water, (five gallons is enough)
And boil them altogether—what a precious mess of stuff!
Skim off the foreign matter as it is not fit to eat,
When you will have the brine, for one hundred pounds of meat.
You need not stop to cool it, it is all the better hot,
But pour it, sans ceremonie, directly from the pot;
There let the meat for thirty days, lie soaking in this brine,
(but just add a small nutmeg, and a pint of Glycerine.)—
Then take it from the pickling tub, and wash it in cold water.
Next hang it up to smoke ten days, “leastwise” I think you ought to;
Burn Maple, Oak, Corn-Cobs or Tan, most any wood will do;
The old fogy song, ’bout Hickory wood, I don’t believe is true;
Don’t smoke whilst wind comes from the east, or southeast or the south;
For take my word that meat will taste quite bitter in the mouth;
But choose it north, north west or west, your meat will then smoke right,
And not present, as t’other would, a very ugly plight;
You then will have an article, that will the palate tickle;
I’m sure you will agree with me, that ’tis a pretty pickle.
You think the next thing to be told is how to keep it good;
That surely is not difficult, if once ’tis understood—
Sew up in canvas and suspend, but not quite to the skies,
You’ll keep it thus secure against, the Rats, Mice, Bugs, and Flies.
Now don’t you think this last is plain, as plain as plain need be,
I think it is so very plain, a blind man it would see.

Early Americans sought for cures and found four: two dry, two wet. The ancient country ham, dry cured with salt, saltpeter, and smoke contested with the modern manifestation in which sugar and pepper were added to the rub. The common wet cure, in which ham was salted then pickled, became the poor-household’s staple. A more elaborate method, of brining and smoking, emerged in the contest world. It was this path that would be developed by meat packers into “city ham,” the moist-sweet haunch of commerce.

Farmers, Tenants, and Capitalists

In Farm, Shop, Landing, a sprightly book about the mid Hudson River Valley counties of Columbia and Greene, Martin Bruegel has boldly entered into the long-running debate over economic development and the so-called “market revolution” of post-Revolutionary America. Breugel argues that the primacy of the market—where supply and demand determined price and where farmers and artisans strove for profit over security—emerged in the Hudson River Valley during the early nineteenth century, when waged labor, agricultural specialization, long-distance markets, and industrial development began. Before then, farmers ran diversified farms because they wanted a sufficiency, wanted to produce enough to feed their families and to swap with neighbors and storekeepers for what they could not grow or make.

Bruegel builds his case through a wealth of detail about farm operations, commerce, and industry garnered from both literary and quantifiable sources. He has thoroughly researched manuscript collections, newspapers, court records, tax digests, and probate records. Far from adopting the style of a cliometrician, Bruegel peoples his book with the stories of men and women struggling to comprehend economic changes occurring all around them, gradually changing their behavior, forming new voluntary associations, and building new (classical) liberal ideologies to defend their innovations.

I find the evidence, but not the arguments, of Bruegel’s book persuasive. The evidence suggests that a market economy and society emerged in the Hudson River Valley long before the late eighteenth century, when Breugel begins his book. The economic changes Bruegel finds demonstrate something different—a transition to capitalism, complete with the formation of classes of bourgeois factory owners and merchants, petty-producer farmers, and debased proletarians. To show the utility of such a framework, I will briefly analyze the region’s political geography, forms of local and market exchange, economic development, and patterns of political conflict.

The political geography and settlement patterns of the Hudson valley made a big difference in the forms and timing of economic development found there, as Bruegel would be the first to recognize. The area contrasted greatly with nearby communities in western Massachusetts and on Long Island. Although the first European inhabitants arrived early in the seventeenth century, substantial Euro-American settlement did not occur until the mid-eighteenth century at the earliest. The reasons are not hard to discover. Greene County, half the area Bruegel studies, was hilly, even mountainous, hardly ideal territory for farmers seeking to cultivate grains with hand tools and wooden plows. Great landlords who refused to sell land to would-be farmers dominated the other, potentially more productive half, Columbia County. Conflicts between landlord and tenant broke out repeatedly, starting in the 1750s and not ending until the 1840s, where landlords finally lost their feudal rights. This political geography retarded economic development until the middle decades of the nineteenth century, leaving the region far behind New England.

Bruegel draws a compelling picture of farmer exchange in the late eighteenth century. Like farmers nearly everywhere in North America, those in the Hudson River Valley, whether freeholders or tenants, strove for safety first. They created and sustained a “borrowing system,” to use John Mack Faragher’s felicitous phrase. Given the precarious conditions of life—warfare, floods, droughts, pestilence—they sought first to feed and clothe their families and then to produce small surpluses to trade with neighbors or at the marketplace. As a result, only a tiny number of farmers sold grain or other goods bound directly for distant or foreign markets. Both men and women exchanged labor with neighbors, particularly at harvest and house raising, but through the year as well; they swapped goods without demanding regular payments.

Face-to-face interpersonal relations took on far more importance in this society than abstract, impersonal economic relations, symbolized by commercial paper (whose origin might be unknown) or distant banks. Even merchants were caught up in these intense personal relations, each demanding that they know the character of those with whom they traded. Close (not necessarily conflict-free) relations permeated the culture as well. Men insisted that others recognize their integrity and honor, and if they did not, fought or took them to court. Noisy rituals of shaming—skimmingtons or rough music—commonly occurred when middling folk wanted to distinguish themselves from their debased inferiors, especially when a woman or man of low character married.

This portrait of eighteenth-century Hudson River Valley society rings true but it is incomplete. Class conflicts, such as the anti-rent rebellions, permeated the region, beginning in the 1750s, and exploded during the Revolutionary Era and the 1790s. Rebels sought to overthrow the manorial system, replace manorial government with their own courts, and during the Revolution, tenants everywhere in the region along the Hudson chose a different side than their lords, whom they loathed. These rebellions never become a major part of Bruegel’s analysis of economic development (or the lack of it), despite his acknowledgment of their importance and his publication of a major article in 1996 in the Journal of American History on the topic. Instead, eighteenth-century farmers and tenants, in Bruegel’s telling, as well as great landlords usually supported a hierarchical society (one of ranks or orders), where inferiors obsequiously deferred to superiors and where superiors patronized inferiors.

In addition, Bruegel minimizes the level of commercial activity in the region, insisting that few households participated in the market. Farm-gate prices for commodities like wheat, he contends, failed to follow New York City prices until sometime in the nineteenth century (his evidence is from 1824), when they had converged. But his data are hardly conclusive, for he provides no eighteenth-century farm-gate price series.

Breugel’s evidence suggests that nearly everyone participated, directly or indirectly, in commercial markets, where supply and demand determined price, even if few farmers sold goods directly. First, the borrowing system depended upon commercial markets to operate, for everyone needed some minimal cash, available only through commercial transactions. Second, farmers’ surpluses did regularly reach New York City (and beyond); tenants, in particular, sold their wheat to their landlords (their leases demanded it) and poorer and middling farmers probably followed suit, selling to wealthier neighbors who then sent grain downriver. Third, Bruegel exaggerates the significance of face-to-face relations for merchants. All merchants, no matter how small, had to pay for the goods they bought with commercial paper, usually on a short timeframe. They could afford to carry farmers year in and year out and provide “book” credit, which allowed gradual repayment, only if they, like merchants elsewhere in early America, instituted a two-price system, where cash customers paid far less for goods than those who needed credit.

A commercial, market society, then, had come to the Hudson River Valley long before the nineteenth century, and the market revolution, if there ever was one, took place in late medieval England. Yet Bruegel documents, persuasively, massive economic change in the region, particularly in the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s. The proportion of farmers selling goods (wheat, other grains, hay) to merchants increased markedly; specialization took hold, with farmers abandoning grain production (western New York and the Ohio country grew it more cheaply) for herding, dairying, and haying; farmers hired more and more wage laborers, both at harvest and for longer terms of six months or more; textile mills (at first, with weaving outwork), tanning operations, and brick-making factories opened. As economic development proceeded, the utility of the borrowing system diminished. Farmers still swapped goods and labor, but more and more middling farm folk participated in market relations, buying food and cloth and acquiring manufactured goods they had never been able to afford before.

Economic development (as well as population growth) led to increased land prices; higher land prices, population growth, and in-migration probably led to relative land scarcity and encouraged the growth of a class of wage laborers (at first mostly young) as well as increasing the wealth of the middling sorts. Such changes in productive relations, cemented by the attack on feudal tenures (actually, the increasing demands of landlord for capitalist ground rent) by a “liberal” and capitalist-leaning faction of the ruling class, sustained, in my view, an ever growing capitalist revolution.

How can we explain such developments, and particularly their timing? Economic transformation began in New England perhaps two decades earlier than in the Hudson River Valley. The long-term, and disastrous, effects of tenancy go a long way to explaining the timing of economic change. Prominent Yorkers had complained long before the nineteenth century that tenancy retarded population growth and economic development. Tenants, as Breugel indicates, understood the problem differently: they would improve their holdings only when they actually owned them and could reap the fruits of their own labor. Their labor (not some feudal legal doctrine) gave their land value, and they deeply resented the expropriation (of both product and labor time) of their output. (A Marxist would define such behavior as “exploitation,” the taking of surplus value). The destruction of fratricidal civil war during the Revolution set back economic development even more. The expansion of population into less hospitable freehold areas and the expropriation of some (Tory) estates after the Revolution opened up new land for development, while—at the same time—the growing manorial population demanded freeholds (sometimes violently). Such a confluence of events, Bruegel’s evidence suggests, created and sustained capitalist development.

I seriously doubt that Bruegel would accept my spin on his evidence. He adopts definitions of commerce and class that come out of Max Weber’s sociology; I tend to a more Marxian exposition. Yet no matter what framework one adapts, Farm, Shop, Landing does raise significant questions about the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, ones others might research. Bruegel, for instance, does not distinguish the behavior of tenants and freehold farmers, assuming similarities instead. Yet the analysis here suggests that differences ought to have occurred, with tenants engaging in less developmental activity, less often adapting specialized agriculture than their freehold neighbors of similar wealth. Nor does he directly connect the tradition-bound behavior (shaming ceremonies, the strong borrowing system) he observes to the persistence of the manorial system.

On the first several pages of Farm, Shop, Landing, Bruegel opens up the question of capitalist development. He demonstrates that the word “capital” did not appear in the region until around 1800 but by the 1830s and 1840s came to represent the impersonal relations of a market society. Following Bruegel’s lead, early Americanists should turn to the issue of capitalist development, whether dubbed a market revolution or a transition to capitalism, in other regions of early America.

This article originally appeared in issue 3.3 (April, 2003).

Allan Kulikoff, the Abraham Baldwin Distinguished Professor in the Humanities, department of history, University of Georgia, has had a long interest in early American rural societies, publishing three books—Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake (Chapel Hill, 1986); The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism (Charlottesville, 1992); and From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers (Chapel Hill, 2000). He is currently working on three book-length projects: Reinventing Early American History, The Making of the American Yeoman Class, and The Farmer’s Revolution.

Unraveling the Silk Society’s Directions for the Breeding and Management of Silk-Worms

At a slim forty-seven pages and mere twenty centimeters high, the weightiest thing about the 1770 book, Directions for the Breeding and Management of Silk-Worms: Extracted from the Treatises of The Abbé Boissier de Sauvages, and Pullein, with a Preface giving some Account of the Rise and Progress of the Scheme For encouraging the Culture of Silk, in Pennsylvania, and the Adjacent Colonies, is its title. This visually undistinguished octavo is small and plain, with no images or diagrams. Only a single printer’s ornament on the title page—a horizontal chain common enough to be used by printers from Boston to Charleston—graphically enlivens its text. Yet this visually unassuming book is vividly illustrative. This slender volume discloses wide-ranging connections among science, commerce, politics, gender, religion, and print culture in the eighteenth-century British and French Atlantic worlds that coalesced around the making of silk, or sericulture.

Not all roads lead to the Mohawk Valley, but they used to.

It was pouring as I made my way towards Albany, some 194 miles along Interstates 91 and 90. The trip took about four hours all together, thirty minutes more than I’d anticipated. I arrived late: it must have been four o’clock as I wound my way along the Mohawk River’s south side, past a shabby motel, a restaurant or two, decaying storefronts (one sign read “Sir William’s Antiques”), and up a winding incline through one small neighborhood and then another. At last I could see him standing above me as I approached, a twentieth-century statue that might have commemorated Washington or Jefferson, so conventionally “colonial” did he look from a distance. Beyond the statue now, and up the drive and to the house itself: Johnson Hall, the largest and most stylish place for miles.

In its current setting, the house overwhelmed me with its remoteness. But if today it stands apart from the world, in a dying industrial town, Johnson Hall once stood at the center of much that was worldly about early America. For much of the seventeenth century and three-quarters of the eighteenth, the Mohawk Valley occupied one of the busiest trade corridors in North America. Furs and foods of all sorts; the spiritual paraphernalia of Protestantism and Catholicism; weapons; the stuff of everyday life (pots, pans, hoes); European “luxury items” (tea, sugar, cloth); Indian and white captives en route to fates as various as they were unsettling–all of these made their way up and down the Mohawk River, along its connecting tributaries and thence to Canada, Albany, New York City, or to Britain, or France, or the West Indies. And most of them passed through Johnson Hall.

The house is pleasing enough from the outside, but its interior really captivates. I had read various eighteenth-century accounts and knew that within the hall’s eight rooms, scattered across its horizontal surfaces and upon its walls, the man depicted in the statue had displayed English silver and ceramics, tomahawks and moccasins, wampum of every shade and ritualistic function, and Mohawk-language editions of the Book of Common Prayer, among further wonders. But for whom, and to what end? Once upon a time, I knew, there might have been seven hundred natives in evidence at any given moment, sometimes as many nine hundred–in the cobblestone courtyard, in the garden, in the house; at dinner, over tea, playing billiards on the second floor; talking among themselves or with any number of British aristocrats who made the house a stopover on their whirlwind tours of North America.

I stayed on in Mohawk country for two days. My conversation that first night with the curator, Wanda Burch, and her husband, over wine in the warmth of their late-Victorian, seems in retrospect to have resembled any number of Mohawk Valley nights in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when people gathered to gossip and rehearse the many stories they had heard about scurrilous happenings at the house itself. Our surroundings merely enhanced this sense of continuity between the centuries. Outside darkness reigned: no streetlights to speak of, no traffic, the wind gathering force. My hosts, I discovered, had been living with the house for two decades. They had much to tell; and as the midnight hour drew near, I began to despair of knowing the place in full, if at all. Where would the story begin, and with whom? With a blind man imported from Ireland to regale Johnson’s guests with the sound of his harp? A swashbuckling Dutchman who plied Mohawks with rum, only to kidnap and exhibit them in London’s alleyways and gin houses? A sword-wielding bastard son called “Wild William”? The cast of characters grew as the evening progressed.

But always in my mind I returned to the house–the long shadow it had cast not only in Mohawk country, but also in London and Paris. It struck me as the perfect vantage point from which to survey all that had led its owner there, and all that had followed. So it would be a house story, a book about the domestic and diplomatic worlds that coexisted side by side within Johnson Hall. Few places in American history have been so much to so many: a house for parents and children; a workplace for slaves and servants; and, for the Indians who journeyed there from as far as Nova Scotia and South Carolina, an embassy, a store, and a clearinghouse for news. With the possible exception of Monticello, no early American house offers such an extraordinary perspective on racial mingling over time. The questions came fast and furious, the answers less so. But the point of my project became apparent soon enough. I would repopulate this historic site as best I could; I would write a dissertation about family ties forged across the so-called “cultural divide.”

Fig. 1. Guy Johnson's 1771 map shows the location of Johnson Hall, in the heart of Mohawk country. Map by Guy Johnson to his excellency William Tryon Esqr. From E.B. O'Callaghan, The Documentary History of the State of New York (1851). Courtesy of the New York State Library, Manuscripts and Special Collections Branch. — Fig. 1. Guy Johnson’s 1771 map shows the location of Johnson Hall, in the heart of Mohawk country. Map by Guy Johnson to his excellency William Tryon Esqr. From E.B. O’Callaghan, The Documentary History of the State of New York (1851). Courtesy of the New York State Library, Manuscripts and Special Collections Branch.

Johnson Hall still stands, forty-five miles northwest of Albany, in the easternmost corner of what used to be Iroquoia, on an elevation that descends southward to the northern bank of the Mohawk River, four miles below. It belongs now to the state of New York. But for eleven years between 1763 and 1774 it occupied a state unto itself: at Johnson Hall, “shelter” and “civilization” assumed forms never before taken. Indians wandered constantly through its rooms, and so did Europeans and their descendants. And if what came of all that wandering has been notoriously difficult to fix upon the page, this much is transparent: always centermost (indeed, center stage) was Sir William Johnson (1715-74)–immigrant Irishman turned English gentleman, His Majesty’s Superintendent of Indian Affairs, Mohawk sachem; collector of Indian “curiosities,” cultivator of plants and persons, founder of a métis dynasty. And, not least, builder of the hall.

Historians of architecture would call the house “late Georgian,” for on its face it resembles any number of mid-eighteenth-century British and North American houses with balanced facades and symmetrical floor plans arranged around an axial hall. But the history of Johnson Hall’s rooms, and of their use, is anything but typical. Built in 1763 (at the end of one war) and abandoned in 1777 (during another), Johnson Hall may well have been the most notorious late-Georgian structure in British North America–a house known to Washington and Jefferson and Franklin, a house familiar to Londoners and Parisians too. Here, it was said, there lived a freewheeling war hero and adventurer who mixed so easily with the Indians that he dressed and painted his face as they did, revered their traditions, spoke in their tongue, and bedded their women. How peculiar to white outsiders it must have seemed–and how bewitching–this decorative and diplomatic universe inhabited by Sir William Johnson, his Mohawk “paramour” Molly Brant, their eight children, and by the large native population that sought companionship within the house, as in its surrounding garden and fields.

Those approaching from the river, or the south, would have arrived at the front door; those approaching from the woods, or the north, would have arrived at the back–and found themselves standing in a small cobblestone courtyard. A Palladian window still dominates this rear view; it is Johnson Hall’s single most conspicuous concession to formal British architectural style. From the second floor, where Johnson and his friends drank and played billiards late into the night, you can look through the window onto an empty cobblestone courtyard in which hundreds of Indians used to gather.

Rather than the attached dependencies traditionally seen on similar houses in Britain (and elsewhere in British North America), this house has flanking dependencies: free-floating stone “wings” detached from either side of the main structure. Although not unattractive, and certainly not uncommon in Indian country, these miniature fortresses with their multiple gun portals hew closely to a siege aesthetic, designed as they were for the family’s defense in case of attack. They remain today, unsettling reminders that desperate measures and sturdier shelter were sometimes called for far from Britain’s familiar shores.

In the eighteenth century, the phrase “Johnson Hall” designated a seven-hundred-acre estate, not merely the house that was its cultural hub. William Johnson had begun settling Palatine German families there as early as 1754, on an eighteen-thousand-acre tract acquired from the Mohawks. To satisfy their needs, and to fulfill his obligations as their protector and landlord, he built for them a town in 1763. He called it Johnstown. Early travelers through the place would have seen various outbuildings already standing or, if not, in various stages of construction: barns, a blacksmith’s shop, kilns for brick making, a caretaker’s house, an Anglican church, a graveyard, a grist mill, a small island in the nearby creek, a jail (or “gaol”), a parsonage, a potash factory, a sawmill, a school, slaves’ quarters, a wash house. A two-and-a-half-acre garden was always the object of favorable comment. The list of “improvements” goes on, and the overall effect would have been impressive–one of sound, motion, expansion, civilization. A far cry, to be sure, from the scenes of primitive living glimpsed here and there along the way: a fitting manifestation of Britain’s reach–an empire within the Empire.

But no matter. To any white person traveling there from Britain by way of Manhattan, and from Manhattan by way of the Hudson and Mohawk rivers, Johnson Hall stood at the margin of Britain’s empire, an outpost of civilization, or so it seemed, in a landscape seemingly bereft of all that civil people held dear. However well traversed and densely populated, the Mohawk Valley scarcely qualified as urban. Objects reflecting the tastes of London, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston may have meandered their way to Mohawk country, courtesy of the sailing vessels that linked Albany to the wider Atlantic world; yet despite its well-deserved reputation as one of North America’s busiest trade corridors, the Valley remained a backwater to most who hailed from anywhere vaguely refined. If the journey had been long and difficult at times to bear, so much the better: several nights in the North American outdoors–on pine needles beneath a forest canopy or, if you were lucky, in an Indian’s house–could make castles of cottages.

To the builders of Britain’s brick and stone palaces, the country houses that extended for miles across the countryside of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, it couldn’t have looked like much. By their ostentatious standards, Johnson Hall was indeed a modest house. There were no ballrooms here, no antechambers upon antechambers, no retinues of servants and footmen. Even if he could have afforded one, such a vast house would not have suited Johnson’s needs or tastes. But in the end, the contours of the house itself are much beside the point, because what made Johnson Hall grand and unforgettable in the eyes and minds of its British visitors was precisely what put them off–its setting. Even Sir William Johnson, a man devoted to publicizing the Mohawk Valley as stable, populous, and economically viable, insisted on welcoming his guests “to this Wild place.”

The power of place is a difficult concept to take stock of, especially when the place in question is 250 years old and its original occupants long since dead. But the affectionate place that Indians reserved in their heart for Johnson Hall is not in doubt. From the hands of its master and mistress, and from its many storehouses, native peoples took what they needed to survive and craved to be seen with: frying pans, razors, and “Fine Wrought Pens,” among other wonders of the British marketplace. They came for food, shelter, smallpox inoculations, and, for those who required one, a decent burial. Warren Johnson observed in 1760 that his brother’s establishment at Fort Johnson (the predecessor to Johnson Hall) boasted “More Custom . . . than any Inn in England.”

Johnson Hall did better, because it was grander. And for the Indians that meant regular exposure and physical proximity to a parade of worldly goods. It meant participation in an expanding repertoire of domestic rituals made possible by creamware teacups and saucers, decanters, wineglasses, pickle plates, and forks of all sorts. Far from being worthless “trinkets,” these objects carried a great deal of symbolic weight for those who used and owned them; they fostered among some Indians a genuine, continually evolving sense of membership in the empire.

Where that sense of belonging originated, and how it was nurtured, remains for me the biggest question of all, as well as the toughest one to answer. But amid a dense tangle of motives that bound some native peoples to the struggles of their oppressors, the power of this place loomed large. The sort of amalgamation of British and native styles of life first glimpsed at Johnson Hall guided the course of Mohawk aspirations long after Johnson’s death in 1774. Trapped, historians have argued, between a rock and a hard place, the Mohawks and most of their Iroquois brethren chose the more familiar of two evils; they gambled in aligning themselves with Britain, only to pay with their lives and their land.

Those with intimate ties to Sir William Johnson and to the biracial establishment he maintained at Johnson Hall saw it differently. For them–a special group, a gentry class of sorts–the American Revolution more nearly resembled an assault on their (predominantly British) style of living than the white man’s war it has been made it out to be. The War of Independence looks rather different from the threshold of Johnson Hall than it would from, say, Mount Vernon or Monticello, especially when we place Johnson and the Mohawks at the front door. These were the lords of the manor. Indeed, the great irony here is that certain Iroquois peoples living in what is now upstate New York were not only unapologetic Loyalists, but also richer and more polished than many of their white neighbors. In Mohawk country, “patriotic” zeal and white rage were not merely the consequences of land scarcity among settlers; they were a violent reaction against the Indians’ obvious material fortune. Which is to say that class resentment may well have been a more potent catalyst to violence than ethnic hatred.

How anyone might go about recovering for a wide readership the Loyalist sentiments of Indians who left few written records requires serendipity and imagination, frequently in heavy doses. The more time I have spent wandering the rooms of Johnson Hall and standing in the Mohawks’ clapboard Anglican chapel (built for them by Johnson in 1767), the less I have become convinced of the written record’s ability to shoulder the full burden of my interpretive and explanatory tasks. Because Johnson’s capacity for self-reflection was less developed than we of the early twenty-first century would prefer, his correspondence sometimes obscures more than it reveals about how he perceived himself, much less his feelings for all the Indians in his life. In the absence of any word from Johnson or the Indians, I have found myself turning again and again to the house itself–and to the objects that fostered and sustained conviviality therein.

Johnson Hall was more than just a funky place to visit with Indians who sometimes dressed as well, and sometimes better, than Anglo-Europeans. It was a place where the idea of what it meant to be a British subject was tried, tested, and ultimately enlarged to accommodate native peoples. If it is true that being British in the eighteenth century required a great deal more than a fancy suit of clothes and a certain facility with the king’s tongue, then just how, exactly, might one go about becoming British? This is not a simple question, yet for some Indians it was an urgent one. Britons living in North America (as elsewhere in the expanding Empire) demonstrated their allegiance to the Crown in ways as mundane as they were various. They fought wars, they built houses of stone and mill-sawn lumber, they tended livestock, they fenced and defended the acres they farmed, they prayed in Anglican churches and read from Anglican prayer books, they toasted the king’s health, they drank tea from British ceramics and Chinese porcelain, and they wore British fabrics.

Some Mohawks did too. They participated as exuberantly in the spiritual, martial, and domestic rituals of empire as did their British neighbors. Often they participated more exuberantly, and with an ardor that surprised Britons and Indians alike.

Unless they are also archaeologists, or simply collectors, historians of early America rarely find themselves in the company of objects; and this is too bad. To ask readers to contemplate the symbolic and social value that accrues to material possessions in any culture is to make the past tangible–and vibrant, and relevant, and interesting to wrestle with. In the silver communion vessels sought by the Mohawks and sent to them by Queen Anne in the 1710s, we have just one instance of a native population finding in the British much to admire and emulate. Indeed, Sir William Johnson merely elaborated on a tradition of collaboration and mutual affection established long before his own appearance in the New World. If not for Molly Brant’s grandfather, celebrated in his day as one of “four Indian kings” to meet with Queen Anne on a highly sensitive diplomatic mission in 1710, the silver never would have come. After his London journey, things were never the same in Mohawk country. He and his three compatriots returned from their audience with Queen Anne to inaugurate one of the most extraordinary alliances ever forged between native peoples and a colonizing power, an alliance as spiritual and cultural as it was martial.

The silver communion vessels given to the Mohawks by the Queen remain in Iroquois hands today, saved as they were from rebel thieves during the Revolution and taken to what is now Six Nations Reserve in Canada, home to the only royal chapel in North America. The church that became the chapel was founded by none other than Molly Brant and her son George, her second son by Sir William Johnson. But we can look elsewhere, far from Canada, for evidence of Britain’s lingering influence upon the landscapes and peoples it once ruled. The world of Johnson Hall did not die with Johnson’s death, or with the Revolution, or with the exile of Loyalist Indians to the reservations that haunt our country still. While the founding generation haggled over of the Treaty of Paris and began building a country, another generation of British colonial administrators, cultural chameleons all, could be found adapting the hybrid spirit of Johnson Hall to another part of the empire–India.

Further Reading: Much of Sir William Johnson’s correspondence is collected in Milton W. Hamilton et al., eds., The Papers of Sir William Johnson, 14 vols. (Albany, N.Y., 1921-65).

Among the best secondary sources are Colin G. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities (Cambridge, 1995); John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America (New York, 1994); Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America (Ithaca, N.Y., 2000); Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1992) and Looking East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, Mass., 2002); James H. Merrell, Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier (New York, 1999); Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge, 1991).

This article originally appeared in issue 2.3 (April, 2002).

Kirk Davis Swinehart, a doctoral candidate in American studies at Yale, currently holds the Mellon Research Fellowship in American history at the University of Cambridge. This essay derives from his dissertation, “This Wild Place: Sir William Johnson among the Mohawks.” In the fall, he will join the history department at Wesleyan University.

Reading the Man of Signs, or, Farming in the Moon

Further Reading:

Gems in the Pasture

The Search for the Cure

Further Reading:

Farmers, Tenants, and Capitalists

Unraveling the Silk Society’s Directions for the Breeding and Management of Silk-Worms

Further Reading

The Sideboard Takes Center Stage

Further Reading:

“If I had ye gift of tongue”: The Obsession with Keys in the Seventeenth Century

The Dickinsons of Amherst Collect

Further Reading:

Benjamin Franklin Slept Here

Indians, Objects, and Revolution