Part 2
The large fireplace in the kitchen had its usual equipment of pothooks, fire shovel and tongs, gridiron, trivet, and bellows, and beside it was an old dark lantern valued at only two shillings. There were iron pots, kettles, skillets and ladles; a brass pot and a mortar. There was a frying-pan with a hole in it and in a box were kept “bullets, hinges and other smale things.” Two beer vessels were listed; a case of bottles, two jugs, three pans, a tray, and two baskets. Such was the simple equipment of the Dillingham kitchen. There were plenty of table-cloths and napkins but no curtains at any of the windows. If a broom were used it probably was made of birch twigs bound together around a long handle. Candlesticks do not appear in the inventory and the only store of food mentioned (aside from twenty-one new cheeses valued at £2. 16. 0.) was seven bushels of rye, two firkins and a half of butter, a half bushel of malt, six pounds of raisins, and some spice. Our ancestors had a highly developed appreciation of the value of condiments. In a Salem inventory at a somewhat later date appear salt, pepper, ginger, cloves, mace, cinnamon, nutmegs, and allspice.
Mrs. Dillingham’s wearing apparel unfortunately is not listed item by item, but given a total value of £5. 8. 4. Her linen amounted to an almost equal sum. Some of her deceased husband’s clothing is included in the inventory, such as a coat with silver buttons, a red waistcoat, a suit of serge and a black suit of serge unmade, a jacket of cloth, and an old suit and cloak. Little Sara Dillingham, the orphaned child, when sent to school to goodwife Symonds was supplied with “a stuffe petticoat & waskote” and four “shifts with shewes”; also a gown that cost £2. 10s. Perhaps after a time she may have been able to read and fully appreciate the books formerly in her loving father’s chest. They were:--“Perkins works in 3 volumes, Seaven Treatises bound in 2 volumes, the Spowse Royall, the bruised reade, & a little new testiment.”
By way of contrast let us glance at the inventory of the possessions of William Googe of Lynn, who died in 1646, ten years after Mrs. Dillingham had willed that her body be “decently buyried” and her child “religiously educated if God give it life.” Googe left a house and twelve acres of land and the total value of his possessions amounted to but £28. 11. 7, with debts of £4. 9. 7. He left a widow and three small children, and though dying in very lowly circumstances he may have known better times, for John Mascoll, the servant of Mr. Googe of Lynn, was fined in 1643, for neglecting the watch. The title of honor, “Mr.,” was used but sparingly in those early days and usually indicated a degree of social standing in the community.
[Illustration: JOHN WARD HOUSE, SALEM
Built in 1684; showing overhanging second story, gable windows and casement sash]
Googe had been a soldier, for among his personal belongings at death were a sword and belt, a musket and bandoleers, and also gunpowder. One cow and four hogs comprised his entire livestock, and five bushels of wheat, ten bushels of Indian corn, and flax in the bundle lay in the garret of his house, which was frugally furnished with a chest, a chair, an old chair, a stool, and a trunk. The family probably slept on pallet beds made up on the floor, for bedding is listed but no bedsteads. They had a frying pan, a gridiron, a skillet, a posnet, an earthen pot, six spoons, and the following wooden ware, viz: “3 wood trayes & 3 wood boules & 3 wood dishes, 1s. 9d.; one runlitt, 1s.; paieles & tubs, 3s.” Two bags valued at two shillings bring to a close the list of the earthly possessions of William Googe of Lynn. When the inventory was brought into court it very properly gave the goods to the widow “for the bringing up of her three small children.” So reads the record.
Doubtless there were many families in the Colony little better conditioned, judging from the relatively small number of estates settled through the courts when compared with the deaths and estimated population.
Googe’s house and twelve acres of land were valued at only £8. This must have been a very simple, thatch-roofed house of not more than two rooms, comparable with the outlying farmhouse of Jacob Perkins that was burned in Ipswich in 1668. And thereby hangs a tale. Master Perkins and his wife had gone to town one summer afternoon leaving the house in charge of Mehitable Brabrooke, a sixteen-year-old serving maid. We will let the ancient document in the court files relate what happened.
“About 2 or 3 aclocke in the afternoone she was taking tobacco in a pipe and went out of the house with her pipe and gott upon the oven on the outside & backside of the house (to looke if there were any hogs in the corne) and she layed her right hand upon the thatch of the house (to stay herselfe) and with her left hand knocked out her pipe over her right arme upon the thatch on the eaves of the house (not thinking there had been any fire in the pipe) and imediately went downe into the corne feild to drive out the hogs she saw in it, and as she was going toward the railes of the feild ... she looked back, and saw a smoke upon her Mistress’ house in the place where she had knocked out her pipe at which shee was much frighted.”[13]
The wife of a neighbor came running to the assistance of Mehitable and afterwards testified that when she reached the house she looked into both fireplaces and saw no appearance of fire, only a few brands nearly dead under a great kettle hanging in the chimney. She also looked up into the chamber through the floor boards that lay very open on the side where the smoke was.
Could photographs more vividly picture the scene? The thatch-roofed farmhouse had two rooms on the ground floor and a chimney with two fireplaces. An oven was built on the backside probably having an opening inside the kitchen fireplace in the usual manner. The house was of but one story judging from the low roof that the maid was able to reach when standing on the oven, and the floor of the chamber in the loft had wide cracks between the boards so that it was possible to look through from below and see the under side of the roof. In similar homes lived many a family in the early days in comparative comfort.
As for the careless Mehitable, she was brought before the Quarterly Court on suspicion of wilfully setting the house on fire; a serious offence, which as late as 1821, was the cause of the execution in Salem of a sixteen-year-old boy. Among those who deposed at her trial was a young man who said that as he and she were going into the meadow, before the fire, to make hay, she told him that her mistress was angry with her, but she had “fitted her now” for she had put a great toad into her kettle of milk. As it turned out the Court ordered Mehitable to be severely whipped and to pay £40 damages to her master Jacob Perkins. It now seems incredible that a serving maid of 1668 could ever get together so large a sum of money.
The settlers in the New England Colonies, unless persons of wealth or possessed of large families, during the early years lived generally in houses having but one room and an entry-way on the ground floor. Above would be a chamber--sometimes only a garret. As the family increased in size and became more prosperous another room would be added to the house on the other side of the entry and chimney, making the structure a so-called two-room house. Still later, with the need for more room, a leanto would be built on the back of the house, thereby supplying three additional rooms on the ground floor with a kitchen in the middle. The earlier kitchen would then become a living-room or “sitting room”--in the New England phrase. This earlier kitchen was usually called “the hall” during the seventeenth century and in it centered the life of the family. It was the room where the food was cooked and eaten. There the family sat and there the indoor work was carried on. A loom sometimes occupied considerable space near a window and frequently a bed was made up in a corner, on which the father of the family slept, and there sometimes also he died.
The principal feature of this common room was its huge fireplace in which hung pots and kettles suspended by means of pot chains and trammels from the hardwood trammel-bar or lug-pole that rested on wooden cross bars and so bisected the wide flue in the chimney. These large fireplaces in the early days were sometimes called “chimneys” in the vernacular of the time. They were generally as wide as eight feet and a ten foot opening is not unknown.
This cavernous opening was spanned by a wooden lintel--a stick of timber sometimes sixteen inches or more square, and when exposed to a roaring fire, piled high with logs, this became an element of danger, the charring wood smoldering all night and setting fire to the house. The trammel-bar in the flue also caught fire not infrequently and gave way, allowing the pots and kettles to fall to the hearth, bringing disaster to the dinner or to the curdling milk and sometimes to those seated near. A trammel stick in the house of Captain Denney gave way from this cause and a large kettle filled with wort[14] fell down and spilt the boiling liquid over four of his children who were sitting or lying on the hearth, some of them asleep, “which scalded them in so terrible a manner, that one died presently after, and another’s life is dispaired of” continues the record.
“Here is good living for those who love good fires,” wrote Higginson in his “New-Englands Plantation,” and under the spell of the glowing flames, the bare, whitewashed walls, the brown timbers and floor boards of the ceiling, the dress of pewter, and the simple furnishings of the room, enriched by the shadows, became a place full of cheer--a place where privation and homesickness might be forgotten in the glow of the bright firelight. On cold nights the short bench inside the fireplace was a chosen place and the settle, a long seat made of boards with a high back to keep off the draft, was drawn before the fire and here sat the older members of the family.
The larger kettles hanging in the fireplace, were of brass and copper and some of them were of prodigious size. Hot water was always to be had and these kettles also served for the daily cooking, the cheese-making, soap-boiling, and candle-dipping.
Much of the food of the average New Englander until comparatively recent times consisted of corn-meal, boiled meats and vegetables and stews. Every well-equipped household had its spits for roasting and many had gridirons, but the usual diet of the average family was “hasty pudding,”--cornmeal mush and milk--varied by boiled meat or fish served in the center of a large pewter platter and surrounded by boiled vegetables. Baked beans and stewed beans appeared on the table several times every week in the year. Indian bannock, made by mixing corn meal with water and spreading it an inch thick on a small board placed at an incline before the fire and so baked, was a common form of bread. When mixed with rye meal it became brown bread and was baked in the brick oven with the beans and peas.
[Illustration: JOHN WARD HOUSE, SALEM
The Parlor]
The brick oven was a feature of every chimney. Sometimes in early days it was built partly outside the house but so far as known the opening was always in the kitchen fireplace. To reach it the housewife must stoop below the oaken lintel and stand inside the fireplace, taking care that her woolen skirts did not come near the flames. To heat it for a baking, a fire was built inside, usually with specially prepared pine or birch wood that had been split and seasoned out of doors for a short time and then housed. The oven was hot enough when the black was burned off the top and the inside had become a uniform light color. The fire and ashes were then taken out by means of a peel--a long-handled, flat-bladed shovel made for the purpose--and when dusted out with a broom made of hemlock twigs it was ready for the brown bread, beans, peas, Indian pudding, pies, and rye drop cakes which were made with rye meal, eggs and milk and baked directly on the bricks in the bottom of the oven. Potatoes and eggs were roasted in the ashes of the fireplace.
Between the years of 1635 and 1655, court records and inventories of estates in the Massachusetts Bay Colony mention the following articles of food:
Bacon, beef, butter, cheese, eggs, fowls, lamb, milk, mutton, pork, suet, veal, wild game, and cod, herring, mackerel, salmon and sturgeon.
Barley, beans, Indian beans, bran, cabbages, carrots, chaff, corn, English corn, Indian corn, hops, Indian meal, rye meal, oatmeal, oats, parsnips, pease, pumpions, rye, squashes, turnips and wheat.
Apples, berries, fruit, honey, raisins, sugar and vinegar.
Biscuit, blewlman, bread, cake, malt, salad oil, porridge, rye malt, yeast, salt and many kinds of spices.
Much of this food was raised on the farm and nearly every family had its garden. Such articles of food as were imported were usually obtained at the shops in the larger towns by barter, as money was scarce. In 1651, a farmer from the frontier town of Andover came through the woods to Salem in his cart bringing twelve bushels of rye. He stopped at a shop owned by George Corwin and from the daybook kept at the time and still carefully preserved, we learn that among other necessaries he carried home sugar for the goodwife and for the children--a doll and a bird whistle.
In the early years domestic animals were too valuable to be killed for meat but game was plentiful and was roasted by being trussed on iron spits resting on curved brackets on the backs of the andirons. This, of course, required constant turning to expose the roast on all sides in order to cook it evenly--a task frequently delegated to a child. A skillet would be placed beneath to catch the drippings. Sometimes a bird was suspended before the fire by a twisted cord that would slowly unwind and partly wind again, requiring some one in frequent attendance to twist the cord. Families of wealth possessed a “jack” to turn the spit. This was a mechanism fastened over the fireplace and connected with the spit by means of a pulley and cord. A heavy weight suspended by a cord which slowly unwound, supplied the power that turned the spit.
At night, on going to bed, the fire was carefully covered with ashes in order to keep it for the next day. This was called “raking up the fire.” If through poor judgment the fire didn’t keep some one would go to a near neighbor to borrow coals, or if this was inconvenient, resort was then had to the tinder box. Tinder was made by charring linen or cotton rags and the tinder box was kept in the niche on the inside of the fireplace, made by leaving out a couple of bricks.
In “the hall,” usually upon open shelves, but sometimes upon a dresser, was displayed the pride of the housewife,--the dress of pewter and lattin ware. “China dishes,” imported by the East India Company or made in Holland, were used sparingly during the early years of the colonies. There was much earthenware and stoneware bottles and jugs, but it was woodenware and pewter that were commonly used. When Lionel Chute died in 1645 he bequeathed his silver spoon to his son James.[15] It was the only piece of silver in the house. Of pewter he died possessed of fourteen dishes “small and great,” eleven pewter salts, saucers and porringers, two pewter candlesticks and a pewter bottle. The widow Rebecca Bacon who died in Salem in 1655, left an estate of £195. 8. 6., which included a well-furnished house. She had brass pots, skillets, candlesticks, skimmers, a little brass pan, and an excellent supply of pewter including “3 large pewter platters, 3 a size lesse, 3 more a size lesse, 3 more a size lesse,” having a total value of £1. 16. She also had a pewter basin, six large pewter plates, and six lesser, nineteen pewter saucers, two fruit dishes, an old basin and a great plate, two candlesticks, one large salt and a small one, two porringers, a great flagon, one lesser, one quart, two pints and a half pint; and an old porringer. She also left “1 silver duble salt, 6 silver spoones, wine cup & a dram cup of silver.”
Giles Badger of Newbury left to his young widow, a glass bowl, beaker, and jug valued at three shillings; three silver spoons valued at £1, and a good assortment of pewter, including “a salt seller, a tunell and a great dowruff.” The household was also furnished with six wooden dishes and two wooden platters. In other inventories appear unusual items such as a pewter brim basin, pewter cullenders, pewter beer cups, pans, and mustard pots. Pewter tankards were common. There were new and old fashioned candlesticks. Pewter salts came in three sizes and the saucers were both small and large. In 1693, best London pewter plates cost the Boston shopkeepers 9-1/2 pence per pound in quantity.
The seventeenth century “hall” must have had little spare room for its daily occupants, for in addition to its table and chairs, its settle, stools and wash bench, the long ago inventories disclose such chattels as powdering tubs in which the salted meats were kept, the churn, barrels containing a great variety of things, keelers and buckets, bucking tubs for washing, and the various implements used in spinning and weaving, washing and ironing, cooking and brewing, and the making of butter and cheese. In the chimney hung hams and bacon and suspended from the ceiling were strings of dried apples and hands of seed corn.
It is claimed by some that the floors were sanded. That certainly was true at a later period but there are strong elements of doubt as to the prevalence of this custom during the seventeenth century. Sand, however, was used freely with home-made soft soap, to scrub the floors which were always kept white and clean, and whenever an early house is restored or taken down sand is always found, sometimes in considerable quantity, where it has sifted down through the cracks between the floor boards. The downstairs rooms had double floors but the chamber floors were made of one thickness of boards with here and there a knothole and frequently with cracks between the boards through which the dust and dirt from above must have sifted down upon the heads of those seated at dinner or engaged in their daily tasks in the rooms below. Not only does the structural evidence show this to be true but a number of instances occur among the papers in Court files, where witnesses have deposed as to what they had seen and heard through the cracks in chamber floors. A grandson of Governor Endecott once fell a victim of two gossiping sixteen-year old girls who had spent some time on their knees peeping through the cracks in a chamber floor. Capt. Richard More, the last survivor of the company on the “Mayflower,” late in life kept a tavern in Salem. He was spied upon in this manner and eventually brought before the justices of the Quarterly Court to answer for his evasion of the law set forth and maintained at that time.
[Illustration: JOHN WARD HOUSE, SALEM
The kitchen showing roasting jack, settle, birch broom, hands of seed corn, etc.]
The parlor, called “the foreroom” at a later time, was the room where guests of station were received. The best bed hung with curtains and valance and covered with a rug, stood in a corner. In those days rugs were not used on floors but as bed furnishings. Even the baby’s cradle had its rug. Carpets, likewise, were too fine for wooden floors and were used as table covers. Of bedsteads there were many kinds,--high and low, canopy, close, corded, half-headed, joined, side, standing, inlaid, and wainscott, and slipped under the higher bedsteads during the daytime, were trundle or “truckle” beds in which the children slept at night. Lionel Chute, the schoolmaster, had an “old darnkell coverlet” on his bed while some of his neighbors possessed branched and embroidered coverlets and several had coverlets made of tapestry.
Among the better families the parlor and chamber windows had curtains hung from rods. In the parlor stood one or more chests in which were stored the family clothing and bedding, for closets did not exist in the seventeenth century house. There were great chests and small chests, long boarded and great boarded chests, chests with a drawer, carved chests, wainscot chests, trunks, and boxes. A few stools and chairs, a looking glass, a small table, and perhaps a cupboard completed the furnishings of the well-supplied parlor. In Capt. George Corwin’s best room there were chairs with leather bottoms and straw bottoms, a clock valued at £2, a screen having five leaves, a napkin press, and a “Scriture or Spice box.” White calico curtains hung at his chamber windows and the maid had a “Calico Cuberd cloth” in her room. Parlor walls were whitewashed and bare of ornament. The first families owned a portrait or two in oils and here and there a map in unglazed frame decorated a wall. The Puritan character did not warm to the fine arts and austere living was the aim if not always the achievement of the time.
The chambers in the second story must have been curiously furnished rooms, containing a huddle of stores of all descriptions. Henry Short, the town clerk of Newbury, died in 1673 leaving a goodly estate valued at nearly £2000.[16] He owned a negro slave and his house was large and well furnished. There was an old parlor and a new parlor containing beds, chests, chairs, trunks, and boxes. In the chamber over the new parlor there was a good feather-bed and bed clothing but no bedstead. Wool and yarn were stored in this room together with boxes, tubs, some feathers, and miscellaneous “lumber”--the phrase of the period for odds and ends. The chamber over the kitchen, a comfortable room of course, in winter, had its bed and bedding, also “5 hogsheds, 6 barrels, 5 Iron hoopes, a pair of stock-cards, meale trough & other lumber, a parcell of old Iron, a pike, a bed cord & other cordage.” Small wonder in such a clutter that the rooms frequently had other tenantry than the human occupants.