The 1790 census showed that about 4 million people were employed in agriculture, which made up roughly 90 percent of the American population. Colonial farmers were typically able to produce everything they needed for their survival including food, clothing, house furnishings, and farm implements.
"Farm life offers the complete satisfaction of knowing that each day's work has been truly productive, a joy scarce in present times. In the old days, whether you were a blacksmith, a butcher, a carpenter, a politician, or a banker, you were also a farmer. Before setting out for the day, there were chores to be done that often took as much time as a complete day's work for the average man of today."
Eric Sloane~
One thing you realize as you learn about daily life 250 years ago is that agriculture was the key, even if one lived in the city. Agrarian life touched everyone and was key to survival.
The thing about old-time farming is that very little had changed from the earliest farming times--12,000 or so years ago (ending the nomadic hunter-gatherer period-- click HERE), into biblical times (around 2000 BC or earlier) through the first few centuries AD (with the early Christian church) and continuing on into the Medieval period (lasting from roughly the 5th century to the late 15th century), the Renaissance period (the late 15th century through the early 17th century - through about the first half of the 1600s), and then through the 18th century (the time of Washington, Franklin, Adams, Revere, Jefferson, Hancock, etc), clear into most of the Victorian era (mid-1800s---into the Civil War period), so the manner in which they farmed would not have changed much at all. In other words, plowing, sowing, harrowing, and harvesting had changed very little over time. And so since farming actually was daily life in the 18th century, that's mostly what you will see here because, more than likely, had you lived in the 1700s, you probably would had been a farmer, like John Adams. Like George Washington. Like so many others.
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| Here we have a good depiction of folks buying and selling, or perhaps trading, autumn harvest produce and goods at what could be a soldier's camp, maybe during the Revolutionary War. But looking deeper into the picture, this could be very similar to what it may have looked like at a centralized public farmers' market or at a town square. |
"From the time of the earliest settlements, colonists had to provide for their own defense against hostile Indians and rival European nations. Militias are reserves of civilian men armed, trained, and ready to mobilize in case of danger. All able-bodied adult males, with few exceptions, were to participate in training exercises as required by town ordinances.
Although the terms militia and minutemen are sometimes used interchangeably today, in the 18th century there was a decided difference between the two. Militia were men in arms formed to protect their towns from foreign invasion and ravages of war. Minutemen were a small hand-picked elite force which were required to be highly mobile and able to assemble quickly. Minutemen were selected from militia muster rolls by their commanding officers. Typically 25 years of age or younger, they were chosen for their enthusiasm, reliability, and physical strength. Usually about one quarter of the militia served as Minutemen, performing additional duties as such. The Minutemen were the first armed militia to arrive or await a battle."
(from the book Soldier of the American Revolution p. 14)
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| All able-bodied adult males, with few exceptions, were to participate in training exercises as required by town ordinances. |
Colonial militia training schedules varied by colony and law, but in regions like Massachusetts, company-level training was legally required six days a year: two days in April, one day each in May and June, and two days in October—timed carefully around the agricultural planting and harvest seasons.
Other southern colonies, like Virginia, required monthly or seasonal musters depending on local threats. October often was the month that featured two final drill days in the fall after the harvest was completed.
Most think of plowing in the spring, but it also occurred frequently in the fall.
"Stiff, hard, cloggy land intended to be tilled should be ploughed in autumn. Fall ploughing saves time and labor in the spring, when cattle are weak, and the hurry of the work peculiar to that season presses on the cultivator.
Select your corn intended for planting next season from the field, culling fine, fair, sound ears..."
(from The Complete Farmer and Rural Economist)
October 8, 1772:
"John Lake is having a corn husking tomorrow. All the young people of the neighborhood should be there. I expect to have my new pink calico dress finished before the day is over so that I can wear it to the husking."
"John Lake is having a corn husking tomorrow. All the young people of the neighborhood should be there. I expect to have my new pink calico dress finished before the day is over so that I can wear it to the husking."
(from Diary of an Early American Housewife)
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The night this was taken was the night of the Harvest Moon - the closest full moon to the Autumnal Equinox. Farmers historically used its bright early-evening light to harvest crops after sunset. |
During the 1700s—long before the invention of electric lighting—farmers completely depended on natural cycles to manage their crops. The phenomenon of the bright Harvest Moon - the full moon that happens closest to the autumn equinox, usually in September, though oftentimes, such as this year of 2026, in early October - provided several consecutive nights of bright, early evening moonlight immediately following sunset. 18th-century farmers used this extra light to extend their workdays late into the night, allowing them to rapidly gather ripe grain crops before the autumn rains or winter frost caused them to rot
In Britain and colonial America, families and laborers celebrated the end of the grueling working days under the Harvest Moon with celebratory community feasts, field songs, and "harvest-home" suppers.
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| Husking corn |
Speaking of harvest:
Though many apple varieties have been good for picking for weeks, it was in October when many of the varieties are in their glorious stage!
And so, let's look again to Washington Irving for a description of an 18th century autumn...and apples:
"...his eye, ever open to every symptom of culinary abundance, ranged with delight over the treasures of jolly autumn. On all sides he beheld vast stores of apples; some hanging in oppressive opulence on the trees; some gathered into baskets and barrels for the market; others heaped up in rich piles for the cider press. Farther on he beheld great fields of Indian corn, with its golden ears peeping from their leafy coverts, and holding out the promise of cakes and hasty pudding; and the yellow pumpkins lying beneath them, turning up their fair round bellies to the sun; and giving ample prospects of the most luxurious of pies..."
(from Legend of Sleepy Hollow)
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...he beheld vast stores of apples; some hanging in oppressive opulence on the trees; This is one of the heirloom apple trees planted at Greenfield Village - The Baldwin. The Baldwin apples originated in Massachusetts around 1740. |
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| Apples...not for eating, but for drinking. |
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Eventually, there would be plenty of apples for the variety of ways to cook, eat, drink, and store them. I was just having a bit of fun with photoshop for this photo, but this picture is probably more accurate than may be realized. Yes, I am actually standing in front of all of these large crates filled with apples - but it was the historic background that I added. For instance, the house there on the right is the 1750s home of Sam Daggett. With all of these apple, just think of all the cider and sauce and cakes and...! |
We know that farmer Sam Daggett had a large apple orchard and a cider press on his property. In Samuel's will he mentions his cider mill situated near the home (“by my Cider Mill at the southeast of a piece of fallowed ground” – fallowed ground is land that has been left unplanted for a period of time to rest and regenerate). It's said that some of the "descendants" of these apple trees he planted back in the 18th century still remain on the original land on which the Daggett House once stood in Coventry (now Andover), Connecticut.
By the way, on October 23, 1767, Samuel Daggett noted in his account book that he had sold:
10 quartz of cyder
15 quartz of cyder
5 quartz of cyder
19 gallons of cyder by the barrel
And that's just on one day!
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| Barrels to fill with cider. |
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| Waiting for the customers to arrive. |
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| Apples for cider~ |
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| Not all farmers had what we might call a larger, more "commercial" cider presses, especially if they didn't have a large orchard. Oftentimes they are shared with neighbors, with work being done communally. Or they may have had their own small hand press, mashing the apples with a cudgel (a mashing stick), as seen above. The mashings ready to be pressed are called pomace. |
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Here are but two smaller cider presses: on the left is a table-top press on the right is a larger floor press (though not what would have been comparable to the much larger what we might call "commercial"). |
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By the way, as mentioned, it takes approximately 30 to 40 apples to yield one gallon of cider. However, depending on the size of the barrel used, about 40 gallons of cider, or slightly more, would fill an 18th century barrel. And it would take about 60 to 65 gallons (or more, depending) to fill a hogshead, as seen next to the butter churn to the left here in the Daggett kitchen. It is a great comparison of a couple of barrels to the larger hogshead. |
Next up, a harvest time story called 'A Colonial Meal: A Description' that I nick'd from the book "A Revolution in Eating - How the Quest For Food Shaped America" by James E. McWilliams
- I modified it slightly and based it on the Daggett family -
On a warm Autumn afternoon in 1776, Anna Daggett stepped out of her garden, moved into her home where she began to cook at the hearth. In Connecticut, where the Daggett family had lived, was becoming well known for its open land for pioneer farmers to grow wheat, barley, pumpkins and other squash, green beans, corn, apples, abundant garden vegetables, and a healthy supply of meat.
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| A blustery Autumn day. |
And much of that combination, as it did on most days, would make up the evening meal. Anna had started soaking corn kernels at the crack of dawn to soften them for pounding, an exhausting task made necessary by the lack of a local gristmill. She knew that she needed about four cups of cornmeal to feed her husband, three children, and herself. So for the next couple of hours, Anna and her two daughters dutifully hunched over a large mortar, took wooden pestles in hand, and reduced a tub of white corn kernels into a gritty heap of meal.
Meanwhile, out in the barn, Samuel Daggett and his son, Isaiah, contemplated a decision: pork or beef? The fact that they even had a choice reflected Sam's preparation as a husbandman. Recently, when the weather began to cool, he had slaughtered two piglets and a calf. The pigs were about seven months old, the age when their muscle density was low, fat content high, and stringy connective tissue still pleasantly soft to the palate. The calf was around two years old and similarly primed for consumption and preservation. Slaughtering a piglet was a turbulent task. It began with a rapid cut to the beast's throat, followed by a prolonged period of squealing and bloodletting. The beast was then scalded in a vat of boiling water to loosen its sharp and wiry bristles so they could be easily brushed off. Samuel gathered the offal (the word literally denotes the "off fall" after the slaughter) from the barn floor to make sausage. He then hacked the corpse into two large chunks, called flitches, and placed them aside. The cow met a similar brutal fate, but its slaughter took longer, resulted in a louder and deeper death rattle, and required greater precision. Samuel had to not only kill it but also find its joints and dissect it into clean cuts of chucks, ribs, loins, and rounds. For all the commotion and mess that ensued, however, the slaughter was the easy part.
Isaiah and his father managed the more physically taxing jobs of smoking the pork and pickling the beef. Smoking pork was a procedure dating back to the Middle Ages that sealed in fat and protected freshly cut meat from spoilage. The two tossed the pork flitches in a large tub of salt, turning them over repeatedly, and then hung the coated slabs on metal hooks in order to air them out. After a day or two, they hauled the salted pork to the chimney, which served as a substitute for a smokehouse.
With the pork hanging in the shaft, the wood smoke clogged the chimney and slowly coated the meat's surface, enhancing its flavor while extending its shelf life. Pickling beef involved submerging the cuts in a brine and vinegar solution that the boys prepared with salt, spices, and saltpeter. The process took place in large wooden barrels and didn't so much impart flavor as give the acid in the vinegar time to kill the enzymes that decomposed meat. The boys secured the barrels and rolled them to the corner of the barn. With the girls and Anna still pounding the corn in the kitchen, Sam and Isaiah stood in the barn, considered their inventory, and made their decision. They chose beef.
After placing three pounds of meat in a warming pan over the kitchen fire, Anna had her eldest daughter, Asenath, who was well-trained in dairy, quickly fetch some milk and butter. The young lady has spent the entire morning in the kitchen, scalding milk pans, trays, pots, and churns in an eighteen-gallon copper pot. Whatever did not fit into the cauldron had to be cleaned individually. A colonial dairy had to be pristine. Any residual milk that dried on the surface of a container or shelf might carry bacteria that would result in not only in a soured product but very possibly in widespread and potentially fatal illness. Asenath could milk a single cow in about ten minutes. Out in the barn, after cleaning her equipment, she did just that to seven of their milk cows. She allowed the warm milk to cool in a tub and then strained it through a sieve concocted from a hollowed-out wooden bowl covered in a linen towel. The strained milk rested in earthenware milk trays for several hours, giving the cream a chance to coagulate at the top. She then skimmed the thick cream with a slotted wooden paddle, leaving behind the thinner milk that her mother had requested.
The weather that day was dry and warm, so the churning of the cream into butter took only a couple of hours rather than several. Once the butter had formed, the young lady squeezed out the buttermilk and fed it to the hogs, a practice that improved the taste of the meat. As late afternoon set in, she covered the bottom of a butter dish with salt, spooned in the thick butter, patted it down, and sprinkled the top with another layer of salt. She then carried a chunk of it over to her mother, whose cornmeal awaited.
As Anna warmed the meat and folded the butter and milk into the boiling cornmeal, Samuel sent his Isaiah out to the cider house, a small structure adjacent to the barn, where he and his father had spent several long afternoons mashing hundreds of apples gathered from the Daggetts' orchard into a gloppy pulp of apple meal. They placed the sweet mass of fruit in cider bags that the two daughters, Asenath and Talitha, had woven out of human and animal hair. Isaiah then picked up the bags and proceeded to take them to the cider press on their property, pressing the apple juice into a vat. After bottling the apple juice in earthenware jugs and corking them, they were placed in a cool dugout beneath the barn. Young master Daggett now grabbed three of these bottles and rushed back to the house, where the earthenware containers were set upon the table alongside the root vegetables that Anna had picked from her garden and roasted in the wide hearth.
Placing jugs of cider on a table was a fairly remarkable thing for Isaiah to do, as there were a number of eighteenth-century families in colonial America that lacked such amenities as even a dining table and chairs. The Daggetts had both. The girls threw a worn tablecloth over the pine table, and, after Anna pulled a loaf of cornbread from the hearth, the family carried their chairs (they knew of some families who used tree stumps) to the table. They shared a few wooden and pewter and even bone utensils to serve their food into their trenchers and bowls. Then everyone began to eat.
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| No, we are not the Daggetts, but you get the idea. |
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| By candle light... |
It was an event that would have made Miss Manner's head spin. It was common for a family to rip the meat off the bone with their dirty hands and shove it in their mouths. Food scraps were soon scattered across the table. Some families, especially out in the wilderness, had no forks, spoons, or individual cups or tankards, though I believe the Daggetts did. The cider pots were passed upon request to the person who wanted a drink. No napkins civilized the scene, as the coarse wool that made the boys' britches and the dark serge of the girls' dresses served that purpose just fine, as did the tablecloth.
And so, rapidly and with gusto, the family consumed beef, cornmeal with butter and milk, corn bread, carrots, beans, and cider. As the sun descended, as the shadows outside stretched across the farm, and as the embers glowing in the hearth turned ashen, Anna and the girls began to clean. No candles were lit - a family like the Daggetts did not lack candles, but used them sparingly, and sleep beckoned.
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| Harvested wheat from this past July. |
The harvesting of the field crop continues to take priority. While the primary harvest season for wheat is typically in the summer month of July, winter wheat, planted from mid-September through early October of the previous year, may be harvested as early as June or as late as September or October, depending on the region. Additionally, some spring wheat varieties are planted in the spring and harvested in the fall as well.
Get all that? Whew!
The use of a scythe is traditionally called mowing, now often called scything to distinguish it from machine grass cutting.
It is October, and the wheat from July and September has been harvested and dried, so threshing can continue, though this month was generally considered to be the very tail end of the season.
Before the invention of modern combine harvesters in the later 19th century (which cut and thresh the wheat simultaneously in the field), farmers would cut wheat, bind it into "shocks" or "stooks," and let it dry. Depending on labor availability and the size of the farm, these stacks might sit for weeks or months.
So, just as was done throughout the later summer, processing wheat and corn in October was oftentimes a continuing factor in the farming year. Utilizing the flail for threshing, and then winnowing after threshing, and then finally grinding grain into flour was still a physical chore that continued on.
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Here two of us are, using flails to beat the wheat from the wheat heads. And in the photo below, you can see our accomplishment. |
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| Amidst the wheat stalks and sticks are the wheat heads - also known as wheat berries. |
The same process for wheat as done in July would be done again in October.
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| As I thresh, Tonya winnows. |
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| Look at all of the wheat berries! |
After winnowing came the final step in flour making:
taking the wheat berries to the gristmill.
A gristmill is a fairly large - oftentimes three story - building in which grain would be ground into flour used for baking bread and cakes and the like.
So if one was able to settle not too far from a gristmill, it was a welcome sight.
After all, bread is the staff of life and God's provision of spiritual food to nourish his people. Our ancestors took this biblical quote literally, and wheat seems to have been the main staple crop of farmers from those biblical times onward, all the way through, even unto today in our modern times.
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| That's the gristmill right of center. |
As described by David Larkin in the book, Mill:
(The miller) knew the intricacies of the mill and carried repairs when needed, if necessary remaking parts himself; he was a good judge of the density and content of the grain, which varied with a wet or dry harvest and the skill used in threshing and winnowing, and had many opportunities for sharp practice. He would run through a sample with his finger and thumb, calculate its value, and made his wealth that way.
From colonial times through the nineteenth century, gristmills flourished in America by meeting that important local grinding need in agricultural communities using large, circular stones. Of course, a toll, usually in kind, would be paid for the service.
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| The gristmill would be built along a stream or a man-made mill pond to turn the massive water wheel. |
There are records of gristmills dating back to the 17th and 18th centuries in America, though not all people used them. Even with the availability of gristmills, there were many farmers who would take to the grinding of grain into flour by hand by using a hand quern, which would have been used when no other means of grinding wheat into flour was available, or if a minimal amount of flour was needed. 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.
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| You can see how the quern has turned the wheat berries into flour. In the bowl on the right side of this photo you can see the wheat berries/grain before grinding, while in the bowl on the left we have the ground flour. You can also see some ground flour there in front of the wheel on the towel |
Now, after all of these steps, you have flour (which is not nearly as fine as the flour you purchase in a 21st century store, by the way) and are ready to prepare to make and bake bread. This entire flour making process, from harvesting to threshing to winnowing to grinding, is not easy and is very time consuming. It could easily take weeks or months.
No matter the time of the harvest season, the same process that was done in July would be done again, if necessary. After all, bread is the staff of life and God's provision of spiritual food to nourish his people. Our ancestors took this literally, and wheat seems to have been the main staple crop of farmers from those biblical times (and before) onward, all the way through, even unto today in our modern times.
I have personally very much enjoyed taking part in the steps of processing bread in the same manner as was done in those long ago times.
The oats, the wheat, the vegetables, the apples and maybe pears; the harvest that began in summer flourishes in October...and even into November in many cases. From morning candle to evening candle, the entire family would take part in all of the harvesting chores. This would ensure survival for the coming bitter winter months.
With the harvest in, it was time to prepare the land for the next growing season, and one way to prep was by sowing (planting) cover crops (crops that are grown to enrich the soil for the next growing season). And just like in the spring, there was also plowing, harrowing and then planting winter wheat and your root crops in the early fall for a harvest the following warm season.
The colonial farmer would have planted and cared for a variety of root vegetables such as turnips, potatoes, beets, and other similar varieties, then, come fall, would have stored them in stone-lined pits that would have prevented hard freezing.
The change from early fall to late fall is most obvious during October. It's when the leaves show the biggest variety of color: green, gold, red, orange, and even some brown, and there's a nip in the air - cold enough to rid us of bugs and allow us to sleep comfortably. And like so many in our area of Michigan, we find ourselves visiting apple orchards and cider mills, historic farms, and participating in historic harvest activities.
The corn has now been cut and shocked, grain has been threshed and ground, all of the hay is stacked, and the labors of summer are now nearly over.
The garden season is finally starting to wind down, and the potatoes and turnips are ready to dig up…we need to hurry and do this last bit before the ground freezes.
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| Our beets didn't do too well, but the turnips didn't turn out too bad. |
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| Here are a few of what came out of the kitchen garden |
Many of the next activities will take place indoors.
It was in the kitchen that so much of the activity tended to take place, even during harvest.
Running a kitchen really did require a staggering range of skills, including chopping kindling, keeping a fire burning indefinitely, knowing which wood was best for baking or frying, plucking feathers from fowl, butchering animals large and small, cosseting (caring for) bread yeast, brewing beer, making cheese, grinding corn, fermenting vinegar, pulverizing sugar, drying damp flour, recycling stale bread, adjusting 'burners' of coals on a hearth and gauging the temperature of a bake oven. In fact, the colonial cook would have to begin their work by "building a good-sized fire on the hearth, but once the logs had burned to coals, the embers were moved around, and carefully selected pieces of wood would be added to produce different kinds of heat, often having several small fires going at once. Piles of live embers on the hearth were like burners on a stove; a gridiron set over a pile of coals could be used for broiling; a pan set over coals on a trivet could be used for frying; and coals could be piled over and under a Dutch oven for baking." (From the book America's Kitchens by Nancy Carlisle and Melinda Talbot Nasardinov).
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'Twas a fine harvest, allowing for a good serving of vegetables before preservation was to begin. And over the hearth we can see 18th century delectable delights, including Essence of Ham, Apple Tansy, Windsor Beans, Dressed Parsnips, Crookneck or Winter Squash Pudding, Applesauce, Apricot Chips, Hasty Fritters, Common Peas Soup, and Brandied Peaches & Cheesecake for dessert. |
Without refrigeration, food supplies and routines changed with the seasons. Spring and early summer were the leanest times of the year, with supplies held and preserved from the previous harvest season were running short. However, garden produce was much more plentiful in later summer & fall. With the cooler weather coming, food could keep much longer than during the warmer months of later spring and summer.
Spinning may not had been as popular in the later 18th century as we would like to think. According to Colonial Williamsburg’s textile curator Linda Baumgarten, spinning tended to be done more out on the frontier areas than in a bustling city.
However, according to my own research, there were many women who spun, and spun consistently. I have read numerous family history stories that have been passed down either in diaries or by word of mouth.
However, according to my own research, there were many women who spun, and spun consistently. I have read numerous family history stories that have been passed down either in diaries or by word of mouth.
One of the reasons why a great many 18th-century women may not have spun on spinning wheels on a daily basis for all their family's clothing was due to the fact that fabric could also be purchased quite easily from local dry goods stores or general merchants, which sold affordable manufactured textiles that were imported from Great Britain.
But that takes money. 'Twas much cheaper to make homespun.
Spinning was mostly done out of necessity, or as a specific task by young, unmarried household members who had spare time. And then spinning wheels saw a massive surge in public use during political boycotts—such as when the Daughters of Liberty organized "spinning bees" to make "homespun" clothing in protest of British taxes. This “homespun” movement was a popular protest beginning with the Townshend Acts ("a series of 1767 British parliamentary measures that placed import taxes on everyday goods in the American colonies, including glass, lead, paint, etc., to raise revenue and assert royal control"). During these rough times, women spun in order to forgo the imported, taxed fabric.
Proud patriots!
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| The homespun movement~ |
As I combed through numerous books and internet sites, there tends to be some disagreement on the information for who had - and who did not have - spinning wheels. For those who lived in the city, such as Boston, it seems that chances are they may not have had a need for a wheel and would had been more inclined to purchase fabrics from stores, whereas those who lived further from a larger town or city may had been more likely to have a wheel in their home. Some of this is referenced in the account books of Samuel Daggett. It seems as if this jack-of-all-trades farmer found spinning wheels to be omnipresent in people's lives in his own rural Connecticut community of Coventry. Besides farming, Daggett himself was a housewright and woodworker, and was called upon to repair many items belonging to his neighbors...repairs that included spinning wheels, spinning wheel parts, and looms.
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| Spinning on a treadle wheel---or what is now called a Saxony wheel... Spinning in the colonies was a universal female occupation, a "domestic" duty, integrated into a complex system of neighborly exchange. Using the spinning wheel for spinning wool and flax has been seen as an essential expression of a woman's devotion to her home and family. It also shows self-sufficiency. |
Retired colonial historian Harold Gill recalls that in his many decades of researching household inventories in the Williamsburg area, he found that many households had a spinning wheel.
The 18th century large great wheel/walking wheel was popular to spin wool into yarn. Common in 18th-century homes and colonial American farms, spinning yarn on a walking wheel was a frequent daily chore for women and girls.
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| Rebecca at the wheel~ |
If the weather was dry, they may a large vat of water boiling over a fire pit outside in the yard. This is part of the operation of having the spun wool dyed to a variety of colors. As we saw in the September photographs, the women of the family would hunt through fields and woods or even in their own garden for flowers, leaves, plants of varying types, and bark to dye their wool, crushing walnut shells for brown, goldenrod blossoms for yellow, and roots of the madder plant for red.
Also, cochineal beetles could be used to dye the wool red as well.
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| Not spaghetti (lol) but spun wool. |
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| Inspecting the dyed wool. |
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| All of the wool yarn you see here was spun and then dyed naturally at the Daggett Farm. |
We're still not done with spinning:
Are you familiar with flax?
Flax is grown in the garden or in a large flax field. Just before it matures, it is pulled from the ground, roots and all. The seeds are removed once the plant is dried (called rippling). The plant is then submerged in water in order to rot the useless part of the plant. This is called retting. The flax is then spread on the grass (called dew retting). Once the plant is dry, the next step occurs:
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A flax break is a tool with wooden blades on top and bottom. The top blades are hinged at one end and can be raised and lowered to smash the stalks. A large bundle is centered at the hinge (or wider) end of the break; the upper meshes with the lower and comes down with a bang upon the flax which is struck as it gradually moves to the smaller end, softening the brittle stalks as well as removing the useless parts. |
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After using the flax break, the remains are then scutched on a scutching board to remove more broken shives from the tough line fiber. Scutching is a scraping process where the broken flax is laid over the top edge of the upright board and a wooden knife is used to scrape off the chaff from the line fiber. |
The hackle is one scary looking but important tool, for it is the last of the three steps in preparing/softening the flax fibers to be spun.
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| The flax is pulled through the hackling spikes (also referred to as combs), which parts the locked fibers, splits and straightens them, cleans them, removes the fibrous core and impurities, all to prepare them for spinning. |
Processing flax can be done any time of the year, but because I have usually seen this done in fall, that's where I get my autumn association.
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| My wife and I working the flax process together~ |
Once the flax was spun into linen thread, it could then be used as wicking for candle dipping or sent to the weaver to be woven into fabric.
On the loom, the weaver makes cloth by interlacing hundreds of feet of yarn in a grid-like pattern. Pieces of yarn stretched lengthwise on the loom, called the warp threads, are lifted in a pre-arranged order. The weaver passes a single strand of yarn, called the weft thread, through this arrangement of warp threads. The process is repeated thousands of times in order to weave a few yards of cloth.
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In the 18th century, professional weavers were predominantly men. While women and girls handled the highly time-consuming prep work of spinning and carding fibers, the actual operation of the large, professional floor looms was a specialized, usually male-dominated craft that required formal apprenticeships. Professional weaving was a trade that required years of training. In fact, my own colonial ancestor - my 5th great grandfather, William Raby - was a weaver. I like to think that I am honoring him whenever I get a chance to work a loom. |
With the flax spun and woven, a fine linen shirt can be made.
Or, from the spun wool, maybe a woolen cap, cloak, scarf, socks, or mittens to be used for winter.
Once turned into clothing, the fabrics had to be cared for. "I am drying and ironing my cloths til almost every brake of day," wrote Mary Cooper on December 24, 1768.
By the time daughters were adults, their fingers and mind were stocked with multiple household skills.
Though we noted the cooper back in August, because 18th-century coopers (barrel makers) relied heavily on the agricultural calendar, autumn—specifically October and November—was universally their busiest time of year.
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| Cooper shop - - The cooper was a vital tradesperson who made and repaired wooden, staved containers like barrels, casks, buckets, and tubs using shaped timber staves held together by wooden or metal hoops. Because the era relied on wooden vessels for shipping and storing everything from water and rum to flour and tobacco, the cooperage trade was foundational to daily life and global commerce.
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| Perhaps these barrels will soon be filled with cider. |
So now we are at the end of October.
What most people tend to think about at this time of year is Hallowe'en. But an 18th century Hallowe'en still had a strong harvest connection, as did the late October full moon, which was called The Hunter's Moon: with the sun setting earlier and earlier, late October gatherings in the 18th century, just like in September, relied heavily on moonlight for both work and late-night festivities.
The harvest has historically been a time for celebration across cultures to mark the end of the growing season, usually in the fall, and give thanks for the bounty of God's blessings. Such festivals often were community gatherings to celebrate the end of hard labor and ensure enough food for the winter, and included feasting, music, dancing, and storytelling, which oftentimes might take place in or near a local cemetery; often stories might be about the ancestral dead lying in graves nearby, allowing family history to be on par with community history.
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...the silenced dead lying in graves nearby... Here we see the actual graves of Anna Daggett, who died in 1732, & her husband, Samuel Daggett, whose death occurred in 1798, along with the shadows of the night. |
In fact, in Washington Irving’s 1820 classic story, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, ghost stories and local superstitions dominate the atmosphere of the sleepy Hudson Valley village.
Over time, these stories turned into more of a ghostly nature, in a similar vein as depicted in the Sleepy Hollow story. But years earlier in history, the ancestral stories were simple family history stories.
Because a good bounty of food took a lot of hard work, in the colonial period pumpkins would not have been wasted as a carved jack-o-lantern for All Hallow's Eve.
According to folklore researchers, the original story and the tradition of making Jack-o’-lanterns for Halloween come from Ireland.
In the United States, the carved pumpkin was first associated with the harvest season in general before it became a symbol of Halloween. In fact, it was in 1895 when an article on Thanksgiving entertaining recommended giving a lit jack-o'-lantern as a child's prize in Thanksgiving games. The poet John Greenleaf Whittier, who was born in Massachusetts in 1807, wrote the poem "The Pumpkin" (1850), which mentions Thanksgiving but not Halloween:
Oh!—fruit loved of boyhood!—the old days recalling,
When wood-grapes were purpling and brown nuts were falling! When wild, ugly faces we carved in its skin,
Glaring out through the dark with a candle within!
However, the carved pumpkin lantern's association with Halloween is recorded in the November 1st, 1866 edition of the Kingston, Ontario Daily News:
The old time custom of keeping up Hallowe'en was not forgotten last night by the youngsters of the city. They had their maskings and their merry-makings, and perambulated the streets after dark in a way which was no doubt amusing to themselves. There was a great sacrifice of pumpkins from which to make transparent heads and face, lighted up by the unfailing two inches of tallow candle.
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| Turnips lit for All Hallow's Eve. |
As far as trick or treating beginnings, the actual ancestors of trick-or-treating on Halloween came from the Celtic and Scottish-Irish traditions like guising (wearing costumes and performing a trick, poem, or song for food) and souling (begging for soul cakes in exchange for prayers).
Pagan and religious (Catholic) connections abounded.
All part of the many varied traditions of Harvest Festivals.
October, as can be plainly seen, was one very busy month, especially in the agricultural world. But, as I have noted many times, often there is not set date or month when many of these activities or chores may be done. We will see some of the same activities and chores done in July, August, September, October, and even sometimes in November.
It all goes to show the importance of farming.
Until next time, see you in time.
The information here came from a variety of sources.
Other sources include:
Seasons of America Past by Eric Sloane
Holidays and Celebrations in Colonial America by Russell Roberts
Early Farm Life by Lise Gunby
The American Farmer in the 18th Century by Richard Lyman Bushman (though not nearly as much of this book is actually about farming practices of the time as I had hoped...it is a bit of a let down)
Diary of an Early American Boy by Eric Sloane
Diary of Mary Cooper
Seasons of America Past by Eric Sloane
Holidays and Celebrations in Colonial America by Russell Roberts
Early Farm Life by Lise Gunby
The American Farmer in the 18th Century by Richard Lyman Bushman (though not nearly as much of this book is actually about farming practices of the time as I had hoped...it is a bit of a let down)
Diary of an Early American Boy by Eric Sloane
Diary of Mary Cooper
Family Life in the 17th and 18th Century America by James and Dorothy Volvo
Some information came from my presenter friends at Historic Greenfield Village as well as Colonial Williamsburg
Halloween: An American Holiday, An American History by Lesley Pratt Bannatyne
Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween by Lisa Morton
Some also came from a variety of Wikipedia and other internet pages. For Instance, the Turnips & Pumpkin info came directly - word for word - from HERE
Also, I suggest checking out the original The Legend of Sleepy Hollow: The Original 1820 Edition: Classic Illustrated Edition by Washington Irving
Some also came from a variety of Wikipedia and other internet pages. For Instance, the Turnips & Pumpkin info came directly - word for word - from HERE
Also, I suggest checking out the original The Legend of Sleepy Hollow: The Original 1820 Edition: Classic Illustrated Edition by Washington Irving
I do not hide the fact that much of what you have read came, word for word in some cases, from the above sources.
Feel free to see more of these chores HERE
To check out wonderful documentary dramas about historic life and farm life, click HERE
Sources:
The Complete Farmer and Rural Economist - Thomas Green Fessenden
The Complete Farmer and Rural Economist - Thomas Green Fessenden
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