Passion for the Past: The Month of July: Living By the Seasons

We as a country have been celebrating America's 250 - the Semiquincentennial.

But how did the average person and family live during that eventful year?

Today's post is a look at how the everyday citizen of the American colonies lived their daily/monthly/seasonal lives.

Daily life in the 18th century was mainly centered on one occupation: farming.

In 1776, 250 years ago, approximately 90% of the population was engaged in farming or related activities. Even if you were not a farmer, many jobs still counted on farming in numerous ways: there were other occupations such as blacksmithing, who made farm tools among other items, coopers, who made barrels and buckets for the farmers, woodwrights, who also made farming tools such as axe, shovel, and rake handles, and oftentimes rakes themselves, tinsmiths for lanterns, candle molds, and sometimes plates & cups, leather workers who made straps, bindings, and horse reigns, basket weavers, chandlers (candlemakers), weavers, millers (grist) --- all played roles in farming life.

Farming was "it".

And this is why I concentrate mostly on that particular occupation.

By the way, to learn about many of the other jobs of the 18th century, please click HERE ~

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July - one hot month!

Yes, the days are long and hot now.

Dry, too.

Getting to be sultry even.

The dirt can be hard as cement sometimes.

But the weeds still manage to poke through.

Two of our grandkids fill the watering bucket with water from a nearby creek.

Rain doesn't always come when most needed, so to be successful, everyone pitches in.

Filling the watering jug from the bucket.

And it does a fine job watering the plants during these hot, dry, summer days of July.

The alfalfa, clover, and timothy hay mixture reaches its knee-high height about now, and just as the clover and alfalfa plants begin to flower, it's time to cut the hay. By hand with a scythe, the farmer headed to the hay field. In fact, on July 16th in 1805, Noah Blake wrote, "Good haying weather. Father and I worked in the field and we began building a rick."

The old saying, "Make hay while the sun shines," is very true, for there was around a

three week window from start to finish to 'make hay.' So if the day was sunny and warm, what was cut in the morning could be raked by mid-afternoon.

Then came the tedious task of "making hay." Using a pitch fork, the hay would be piled into four-foot high and wide stacks, and these bundles would be carefully constructed so they would shed rain and stand up to strong wind.

After a day or two of drying in the field, these bunches would then be hauled to the barn by hay wagon to be unloaded and stored.

The hay would have been made into a rick although some of it would have gone into the loft of the stable for horses. A hay rick, by the way, is a stack of hay used as a covering or thatching for protection from the weather. In the fall, many farmers would bank their homes with hay during the fall to help insulate it from the winter's cold.

(That is not a rick of hay in this photo, by the way)

It is also the time of year to harvest the summer wheat. An arduous but necessary task. Most believe that wheat is only harvested in the fall, but did you know that preparations for harvest time begins in July to help celebrate that first fall holiday known as Lammas Day?

We'll have a more intimate look at this early Holiday next month, but we cannot go through July without speaking of it.

According to the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, wheat was harvested by cutting the straw near the ground with a hooked hand “sickle” or “reaphook;” or mown with a “cradle scythe.” Cut wheat was gathered in bundles and tied into “sheaves.” Sheaves were then stacked upright into small stands called “shocks.” These temporary stacks were soon transferred out of the field to larger outdoor stacks, or housed if possible, inside barns to await threshing.

My friend, Theresa, harvested wheat on a hot mid-July day.

This is a combination of two pictures: I added the house to the wheat field more or less for aesthetic purposes.

My wife, Patty, and I bringing in the sheaves...

to be processed...

We often think of harvest time as being in the fall. However, the summer wheat harvest in many regions of America begins usually in July, for August 1st, is a date traditionally celebrated as Lammas Day (of which you will read about in August in greater detail).

The wheat ready to be threshed.

That being said, just what the heck is this next tool that I am holding?

Why...it's a flail.

This agricultural tool was used to thresh the wheat - separating the grains from the husks

Threshing was conducted by using the flail to beat the wheat heads, thereby separating the wheat berries from their “chaff” (or husk) and supporting straw. To flail, one stick is held and swung, causing the other to strike a pile of grain, loosening the husks.

Using a hand-flail, I threshed the wheat, separating the wheat from the chaff/husks.

Cleaning the wheat commenced with removal of the long straw.

According to research, with a flail, one man could thresh 7 bushels of wheat, 8 of rye, 15 of barley, 18 of oats, or 20 of buckwheat in a day. The flail remained the principal method of threshing until the mid-19th century, when mechanical threshers became widespread.

Now there was another method of threshing called “treading,” which achieved the same separation by using horses running over the sheaves laid on a circular floor. Larger quantities of wheat could be threshed easier by treading compared to flailing which might yield only five bushels of clean wheat per day per thresher.

I've not seen this second method, so I will, instead, stick with the flail for our demonstrations.

Next comes winnowing:

Once the wheat was threshed, remaining wheat, chaff and dust mix, were put into a basket and tossed up into the air where the wind would catch the husks and blow them away, leaving cleaned grain behind to fall back into the basket. This was known as winnowing.

Here I am winnowing~~~

Traditionally, farmers would toss the threshed wheat into the air on a breezy day, allowing the wind to carry away the light chaff while the heavier grain fell to the ground or into a container below, such as the winnowing basket.

Even a light breeze is enough to carry some of the chaff away.

The winnowing process also separated weevils or other pests stored in the grain. The cleaned wheat was stored in a granary and then taken to a local mill Or, as some farmers did, ground the wheat into flour themselves. But to do this next step, the farmer must have either a mill of his own (quite possible or even probable should he live far enough away from the local gristmill) by using a hand quern, which would have been used when no other means of grinding was available. The quern, a tool from the iron age, was like a mini-gristmill and might be used when one moved into a new settlement where no gristmill had been built yet. Of course, the manner of using a quern was not only a tedious task, but it took an excessive amount of time to get enough flour worth baking.

Fortunately, most settlements usually had a gristmill not too distant away. Once threshed and winnowed, the grain can now be ground into flour, either by way of a gristmill or a table-top hand mill known as a quern.

I am using a quern, or a hand mill, to grind the grain into flour.

A quern is something a colonial may have while living on the frontier, too far to travel to a gristmill. Or, perhaps, they might have one on hand to be more self-sufficient, especially if they had a smaller crop with little reason to take it to the town miller.

Once the grain becomes flour, let the baking begin!

It is interesting to note here how farmers used to work in what we now call darkness. Many present-day scientists insist that the early countrymen had extraordinary eyesight, keener than the average eyesight of today. Farmers frequently did their haying well into the night, using the moon or stars for illuminations, and taking advantage of the coolness of the summer night.

Here is another entry from Noah Blake's diary - from July 17th:

"Rick is under way. Mr. Adams is going to thatch the roof for us. Carried water to Mother's garden, which is dry."

Summertime is the time for growing. But...it is also the time for the first harvest - the summer harvest:

One can almost feel the heat emanating from these pictures taken during hot and humid July days.

But the 18th century farm family were not cooling off in their air-conditioning, for obviously, they had no a/c in the 1760s! The family, instead, were very busy out doors, where any slight summer breeze would be accepted with gratitude, while doing the necessary summer duties and chores of the time.

In 18th century, July was a busy time for farmers and households looking to utilize the peak of summer bounty. While modern conveniences like refrigeration were absent, several fruits and vegetables were harvested and enjoyed fresh or preserved for later consumption.

Fruits: blueberries, black and red raspberries, strawberries, cherries, and possibly early apples, peaches, pears, and plums towards the end of July.

Vegetables: sweet corn, beans (possibly including such heirloom varieties like Jacob's Cattle Bush and Early Yellow Six Week), cucumbers, bell peppers, tomatoes, summer squash (including zucchini and possibly lemon squash), beets, and cabbage.

In addition to fresh consumption, food preservation played a crucial role, utilizing techniques like:

~Drying and dehydrating: For fruits, vegetables, and herbs.

~Salting and curing: Especially for meats like pork, but also for butter.

~Pickling: Vegetables such as cucumbers.

~Cool storage: Root cellars or cool parts of the house for root vegetables, beverages, and some dairy products.

From Sam Daggett’s own ledger book we see other means of making money by working at other farms:

"July 11 ye 1749: Thomas Wisse, debeter, for cradelings*

more to cradeling two acor and 3/4 of otes"

*The way wheat and oats were cut years ago was by 'cradeling' (cradling). Meaning he used a tool known as a grain cradle for his help in a summer harvest.

All of this on top of the normal summer chores of weeding and taking care of the house and kitchen garden.

This was also time for weaving wool on the loom, which would continue for pretty much the rest of the year, or until the weather was severely cold.

So, how does one water the garden during a dry spell when little or no rain falls?

From the well, for sure, but how to get the water from the well is the question.

Colonial farmers were known to use well sweeps.

For those who have visited the home of Samuel and Anna Daggett at historic Greenfield Village in person, have you noticed that long wooden pole coming up from the ground with rope and a bucket tied to the end that sits just outside the kitchen/buttery door? That's a well sweep. Largely used in colonial America and on the frontier, well sweeps were vital simple machines used to gather water deep in the ground in a time before the more well-known "wishing well" style wells became popular.

"The well-sweep creaked in the breeze..."

Notice the well sweep to the right. According to Early American Life Magazine

(June 2018), few originals survive today, so we are very lucky to have one within

our midst at Greenfield Village (though it is not an 18th century original but a very

well-done replication).

The old well sweep at the Daggett House had seen better days, so historic presenters, Roy & Chuck, decided (and got approval from management) to build a new one. It was a summer project that lasted the entire summer - from June until September - for the two men only worked one day a week, and they made the project last so visitors could witness the work.

Roy & Chuck making a new well sweep - and it was done in an 18th century manner.

In fact, Roy commented that at one point he wanted to use a power tool but he thought of how "disappointed Ken would be in me," so he stuck with period tools, such as augers, braces, and bits to drill holes.

I helped out a little while visiting Greenfield Village in my period clothing.

No, I do not work there, but Roy kindly allowed for me to help some on the days Chuck was not there, of which I appreciate very much. In fact, below the following photo is a link to my posting on how the summer of the well sweep went, loaded with pictures.

Since I did lend a slight hand, I took a picture with Roy of the completed project.

I like that Roy and I took a picture together of us and the well-sweep.

Aside from keeping a few pieces steady while Roy drilled, and helping to set it in the hole in the ground, etc., I also took many photos over the course of about 14 weeks - from early June through mid September - that can be seen in the link to the posting (directly below here). So there's that, so I suppose being in such a picture is okay for the few things I did.

To read the story on how this well sweep was made, from start to finish, please click HERE.