A Day with a Colonial Farmer's Wife, 1776
You Are There - Graphic History Series
You Are There… Graphic History Series.
Historical Backdrop
In the summer of 1776, rural Massachusetts was a place of constant labor and quiet dread. The shooting war that began at Lexington and Concord just fifteen months before had pulled thousands of men into the militia and the new Continental Army. Word of the Declaration of Independence, signed on July 4th in Philadelphia, was just reaching small inland towns by mid-to-late July, carried by riders, broadsides, and traveling neighbors.
Our subject is Mercy Hartwell, age 32, a farm wife in Sudbury, Massachusetts. Her husband Jonas serves with the militia north of Boston. She manages a small mixed farm alone with three children. The date is Wednesday, July 24, 1776. Smallpox is in the next county. A cut finger could kill her. A British advance in New York could orphan her children. And the bread must still be baked.
July 24, 1776 — 4:35 AM — Hartwell farmhouse, Sudbury, Massachusetts
You wake up in the bone-cold dark of a New England farmhouse, and your husband’s musket is no longer hanging over the mantel. The baby is crying. The room smells of cold ash, sour milk, and damp wool. You swing your bare feet to the wide pine boards, fumble for the flint and steel on the hearth, and after a dozen strikes coax a spark into the dry tow. A small flame catches. Your shoulders ache before the day has begun.
July 24, 1776 — 5:20 AM — Cow byre behind the Hartwell farmhouse
You carry a wooden bucket through wet grass to the small log byre. Bess, the cow, stamps and lows. You lean your forehead against her warm flank, the smell of manure and cud strong in your nose, and squeeze the rhythm out of habit. Streams of warm milk hiss into the bucket. Mosquitoes find the back of your neck.
July 24, 1776 — 6:40 AM — Keeping room, Hartwell farmhouse
You set wooden trenchers on the trestle table. Patience stirs the cornmeal mush over the fire. Samuel sits sleepy on a stool, scratching a flea bite. The baby gnaws a crust on your hip. You eat standing, watching the door, half-listening for a horseman on the road.
July 24, 1776 — 8:15 AM — Kitchen garden, south side of the house
You kneel between rows of beans and cabbages, pulling pigweed by the fistful. The sun is already hot on your back. Sweat darkens your shift between your shoulder blades. Samuel is supposed to be hauling water but is poking a stick at a beetle. You bite your tongue and keep weeding.
July 24, 1776 — 10:00 AM — Dooryard, beside the well
It is laundry day. You stoop over a wooden tub of steaming gray lye-water, scrubbing Jonas’s spare shirt against a board. Your hands burn. The wood-ash soap stings a small split on your knuckle. You think about the cut for one half-second longer than you’d like.
July 24, 1776 — 11:30 AM — At the brick beehive oven, ell of the house
