HST296E: Reading Notes, 3-Feb-2005
Donahue, Brian, The Great Meadow:
Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord. (New London: Yale
University Press, 2004.)
Reading for book presentation assignments: Preface, Introduction, Chaps
4,5,6, Epilogue
About the
illustrations:
photographs from early 20th cent (closer to original land use
patterns), GIS maps, some compiled from sporadic records of mid 17th
century
Preface
Te accepted conclusion is that excessive deforestation and extensive
farming wore out the land to the point that, by 1850, it could not
support the population.
The first comprehensive tax valuation of Concord was in 1749. This
recorded number of acres plowed and planted, number of livestock, and
amount of harvests but did not provide a picture of how the land was
used. For this, the author examined assessors' maps using GIS.
"My contention is that colonial agriculture in Concord was an
ecologically sustainable adaptation of English mixed husbandry to a
new, challenging environment." (p. xv) The object of early colonial
farmers was a comfortable subsistence that would be generationally
secure. It's practice relied on careful husbandry, a balance between
plowlands, orchard, meadow, pasture, woodland, and manure. It was not
exploitive in the sense that overproduction to extract a single
commodity was its goal. Rapid population growth and an increasingly
important market economy put pressure on this model.
In this book, Donahue explores how English husbandry was adapted to
Concord and how well it held up for five generations. He takes an
ecological approach, exploring the ecosystem through the use of maps.
It is not a comprehensive look at NE ecosystems in general, (for
example he does not examine the transformation of native flora
and fauna), rather a look at farming systems. He also does not examine
women's roles and activities. However, he brings his own experience
with mixed husbandry to bear.
"Where we live, good plowland is often poor for grass, and good
grassland is difficult to plow. I don't recall ever reading this
simple fact in a book about New England's agricultural history. . .It
is a thing you learn by watching the arable home field scorch in an
August drought, while those rockbound hillsides stay green." (p. xviii)
"I set out expecting to find that my forbears on this soil and in these
woods were primarily agents of the dominant tradition of market
expoitation, perhaps in spite of themselves. What I found instead--and
what I think is the most significant story I have to tell--is that here
we have an unusual interlude in American agrarian history in which the
tradition of sustainable husbandry was, for several generations at
least, more powerful that the extractive drive." (p. xix)
1) Introduction
Concord was the first inland settlement of the Mass. Bay Colony.
"This book is about what a few dozen square miles of land surrounding
the Great Meadow were moade of, how that land came to be the way it
was, and what the English husbandmen who arrived in 1635 made of it."
(p. 2)
The land is a result of glaciation. The Town and Bridge meadows lie on
top of a former glacier lake bed, thus the soil is easy to work though
prone to wet. This combination grows coarse native hay, very good for
animals.
The earliest settlers came from the open-field tradition in England,
thus the farming was communal, including the fencing system to keep
animals out of crops. (p. 7)
The Great Meadow produced good hay only when the river did not flood
excessively. Thus, early ecological transformations focused on
controlling flooding. (p. 8)
First Division: alloted 1/4 of 30,000 acres, remainder as Common land.
Homes in village, land outside. Next generation, Second Division, more
privitization. Younger son retains village lot and father's holdings,
older sons get consolidated 2nd division parcels.
From ale to cider: why? ecological. (p. 11)
2) Musketaquid:
the Native Ecological System
3) Mixed
Husbandry: The English Ecological System
4) The First
Division and the Common Field System
Donahue begins with the creation and frontier myths of the European
settling of New England: Edward Johnson's Wonder-Working Providence of 1654
which depicts the pioneering Puritans braving an inhospitable land to
found a new settlement; with the famous Concord farmers that sparked
the Revolutionary War; and with the "launcher" of the American
ecological movement, Henry Thoreau.
The first settlers did not come into an untamed wilderness, though they
believed they did. What they found was a land that had been supplying
trappers for some years, and also had been terraformed to a certain
extent by the indigenes that preceded them and who, after decimation by
disease in the twenty years before their arrival, had all but
disappeared from the scene. The colonists task was to adapt their
cultural model of mixed husbandry to the land and climate in which they
found themselves.
The town was laid out near the meadows and abutting fields previously
tilled by the Indians. Many of the settlers came from
open-field/commons communities in England and so structured their
settlement the same way.
The Commons System in Concord
There is no direct record of how land was divided in the First
Division, however, the divisions were recorded in the 1650s-60s in
preparation of the Second Division. Donohue bases his conclusions on
that. The land was divided into:
- houselots: 3 to 10 acre lots clustered around the meetinghouse,
training field and mill. These lots typically contained a house, barn,
outbuildings, cowyards and garden. Some may have contained pasture,
meadow and woods, but generally the lots were not meant to be
self-sustaining units. (NB: Thomas Flint's 119 1/2 acre lot - he was a
London merchant who may have bought up other's lots: an interesting
support of Powell's open-fielders/independent landowners model.)
- tillage: though specific areas were owned by specific people, the
tilled fields were generally clustered together and bound by a common
fence
- meadows: large lots were even more widely dispersed. In the case
of one farmer, one meadow was three miles from his house. Some smaller
lots were closer to their homes.
- commons: these unenclosed lands were used by the inhabitants,
with that use highly regulated, for grazing livestock, cutting wood,
and digging sand, clay and gravel.
Ecological Challenges Facing the
Commons Systems in Concord
The settlers, in trying to transplant a fairly complex communal
husbrandry system developed ober time in England, to the new
environment of Cconcord. In so doing they faced two problems: 1)
"finding the right combination of crops and livestock, integrating them
into a working system," and 2) determining if the commons system could
work under these new circumstances (as opposed to individual farms).
(p. 87)
they determined early on that traditional English grains would not do
as well as Indian corn, with the exception of rye. The soil in Concord
was suited to Indian farming with its longer use/fallow cycles, the use
of felled and burned trees for enrichment, and the light texture that
could be worked by hoe. It was less suited to the more intensive and
plow-based English farming, so Concord farmers began fertilizing it,
first with fish, later with dung as their livestock numbers increased.
Folding, the process of allowing livestock, especially sheep, to graze
and fertilize fallow fields, was more diificult in New England. Sheep
were not as easy to raise (climate, soil and predators), the grazing
season was much shorter and so not that much manure would be available,
and the timing was wrong: folding in England was done prior to sewing
winter wheat. Folding in New England would have needed to be done
before sewing corn in the spring. So, manure had to be carted from the
barnyard. Given the wide dispersion of fields, this eventually became
an impractical process.
Another challenge was providing enough hay for fodder for the longer
New England winters. Meadows in Concord were often two wet to mow.
Regulating the water of hay meadows had occurred over generations in
England. Such work, crucial to the colonists farming practice, was also
undertaken in Concord and continued for generations. Again, the land
lots were dispersed to ensure that all farmers had access to hay, even
though they might have to cart it from great distance.
New England had provided food for browsers, especially deer, but was
rich in grasses that "responded well to constant grazing." (p. 95)
Rainfall patterns were also different than England, with similar total
numbers but a different distribution: more long dry stretches that
resulted in soil ill-suited to tradiational English grazing plants.
Settlers could clear more common land for stll-poor grazing, or, as
they actually did, improve their own lots.
Wood was also a challenge: they had plenty but needed more than in
England for fuel. They also, early on, ran into a conflict between wood
for fuel and necessities cut from common land, and wood that was prized
by individuals for its commercial value (white oak). Privatizing
woodlots to control who had access to white oak and its profits, became
part of the Second Division process.
The Decline of the Commons in Concord
The 1640s in Concord added two additional challenges: exceptionally
cold weather, and Civil War in England that disrupted trade and
diminished immigration. Concord was almost abandoned. "In England, the
common field system had appeared during the Middle Ages when sufficient
population pressure made the tight regulation of field rotations
necessary, to maximize grazing with the expanding arable fields and to
integrate the delivery of manure by the sheepfold." This worked less
well in Concord and so as the second generation came of age they
decided to move to an individual farm system, mostly as a way to
protect the "best lands" for their heirs.
5) The Second
Division
"On January 2, 1653, the householders of Concord assembled in town
meeting and agreed to a sweeping division of the commons" (p. 102)
although they retained rights for communal pasturage on the commons.
The town was divided into thirds with each group made responsible for
its portion (determine how the land would be divided, create maintain
roads, control animals, etc.) The division was communitarian, but not
egalitarian--people of greater wealth and standing received more land.
Nor was it divided in a grad system. Settlers bargained for diverse
holdings, and so the resulting division is quite complicated. It also
occurred over several generations. (Donahue looks at these divisions in
detail, tracing them through GIS maps based on the records.)
Once common property became personal property it was taxed. Taxes were
needed to pay the General Court, for surveying, clearing titles,
building meetinghouse and hiring minister, and roads and bridges.
Land Division Strategies
Land was divided based on two main desires; provising sufficient land
for one's heirs, and providing diverse enough land to support them
without recourse to use of the commons (i.e. they needed tillage,
pasture, meadows, woodlots)
- woodlands: the divisions were categorised as pinelot (good for
fuel) and woodlot (harvestable valuable timber). The woodland divisions
show a growing awareness of the kinds of woods available and an
appreciation for how they could be used. Some of the lots were quite
small, indicating a desire to "secure an ample supply of very
particular trees." (p. 115)
- meadows: the choicest bits had already been distributed in the
First Division, but some people picked up swamp that was later
converted to meadow
- houselots and tillage: "Undoubtedly the driving purpose behind
the Second Division was to provide land for Concord's proprietors to
set up new, more consolidated homesteads outside the village--or to
afford that opportunity to their offspring." (p. 115) (although some of
those offsrping had to wait a considerable time for it! Judah Potter -
38 yrs. old)
Persistence of the Commons
Despite the divisions that apportioned them to individual ownership,
the Great Field and the Great Meadow remained in common use, with that
use being strictly regulated. These jointly managed areas were fenced
as two communal unit, for two weeks in October to keep grazing
livestock in, but for most of the year to keep animals out. Maintaining
this dense and tall fence required fairly intense labor. Some areas
were vulnerable (and once in, livestock could damage the entire area)
while some areas were inconvenient (roads through the commons). The
area fenced dwindled and the fenced commons was finally dissolved in
1778.
"The transition to private, enclosed farming was more nearly completed
by the 1730s, when Concord had been settled to its borders and almost
all land and livestock had come under individual management as well as
ownership. But this did not mean that farmers even then became
single-mindedly devoted to maximizing individual profits from their
land. Throughout the colonial period, they remained bound one and all
by family and community obligations and expectations and by the
limitations of their environment and their markets into a system that
was oriented primarily toward yielding a comfortable way of life
directly from the diverse elements of Concord's landscape." (p. 127)
6) Settling the
East Quarter
How were lands divided in subsequent generations? While there was
consolidation, distribution among several heirs meant that a balance of
land needed to be passed on. Thus, a blend of tillage, houselot,
pasture, meadow, and woodlot continued to be carved out of available
land. "The result was a pattern of fragmented farms, often knitted
together into complex kin neighborhoods, across the landscape of
Concord. A family trade such as blacksmithing or tanning (also passing
from generation to generation) was often central to the family economic
and social fabric." (p. 135)
In the remainder of the chapter, Donahue follows the land inheritance
of several families through several generations. In some cases those
generations overlapped by quite a few years, the families overlapped by
intermarriage, and the "crazy quilt" division of land become quite
pronounced.
Favorite example: "Like the Meriams, the Brooks family chose not to
partition their land into solid blocks and disperse their houses, but
to keeo their homes within sight of one another along a quarter mile of
road and make a hash of their outlands. The exception was Joseph
Brooks. It appears that Joseph had a homelot alongside his brothers
granted him by his father in 1605, but when he finally came to marry in
1704, he decided instead to sell a piece of this to his brother Hugh
and live off by himself. We cannot tell what motivated Joseph Brooks.
We can only notice that, coincidentally or not, things never did seem
to go well for him or his progeny." (p. 147)
As the generations progressed some families consolidated land holdings.
In either case, Concord was expanding outward as well as filling in as
population increased.
7) The Ecological
Structure of Colonial Farming
8) A Town of Limits
9) Epilogue:
Beyond the Meadows
Donahue begins with the Concord of 1850 that Thoreau would have seen.
Much of the woodlands have been converted to meadow and pasture, crops
and dairy are now produced for external markets, and the population is
divided between original families and newcomers who would rewrite our
memory of Concord's past. "To this day, we tend to view colonial
agriculture largely through the sharply critical eyes of the
self-confident nineteenth-century improving men who knew it in its
dotage and who wrote its obituary." (p. 222)
Why did so many farms fail? He suggests several reasons: the failure of
ancillary industries like tanneries and taverns, the inability of small
subsistence farming to compete with commercial farming, or simply
failed business dealings.
By 1850, Concord's land use patterns had changed dramatically. Concord
had the same response to population stresses that their English
ancestors did: "control fertility, emigrate, intensify subsistence
production, or specialize in commercial production." (p. 225) The
population, through fertility and emigration, stabilized between 1780
and 1820. English husbandry continued to be adapted successfully, with
some high-yield, high-nutrition crops becoming more prominent (ex:
beans and potatoes). Higher yield crops also meant less dung was
needed. Cattle (for meat and hides) and wood remained the major "cash
crops."
This changed in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. "Concord
farmers looked mainly to their cattle to find their market specialty:
first beef, then butter and cheese, and, with the coming of the
railroad in 1844, milk. The herd enlarged dramatically, and Concord
became a town of dairy farmers. The increase in commercial production .
. . was mare possible partly by farmers' raising of fodder instead of
bread on the tilled land, but mostly by a sharp rise in hay." (p. 228)
Woodlots were sacrificed for haylots as coal became available for fuel
and dimensional lumber was imported for housing. This had a damaging
effect on the environment.
"Colonial farming was not extensive farming, moving on constantly to
fresh land as what lay behind was exhausted. On the contrary, it was
intensive farming, in which a great deal of labor was concentrated on
much the same lands, and a workable balance among those lands was
established and carefully maintained. . . The remarkable thing about
colonial Concord is that here, at the very moment when the English
world was setting a capitalist course based on the denial of natural
limits, long generations of new Americans put in place and steadily
improved a workable version of an older mixed-husbandry village culture
and economy, based on an ever-deepening understanding of their local
environment. . . What emerged by the end of the colonial era had all
the makings of a durable agrarian village economy on the ancient
English model, a fundamentally sound agroecosystem." (pp. 230-231)
And the Great Meadow? In 1862 the meadow owners lost their case [that
worsened flooding which ruined hayfields was caused by the Billerica
milldam], when "an august scientific commission appointed by the
legislature to investigate the flowage controversy but dominated by the
mill interests, ruled against them. . . After two centuries at the
heart of Concord's husbandry, the river meadows had scant value in the
new world of commercial farming." (p. 233) But the change in language
had already signaled a change in attitude: the colonials had called the
communal meadows the Great Meadow. By Thoreau's time they were divided,
privately owned, and called the Great Meadows.
hope.greenberg@uvm.edu,
created/updated: 3-February-2005
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