Crops In New England Colonies

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Colonial Farming and Food: Dearth to Prosperity

ByTim Saenger, N Carolina State Academy, 2013

"Corncobs." Photograph of maize, a North American crop adopted by colonial farmers. By user Asbestos, on Wikimedia Commons, used with Creative Commons license CC By-SA 2.0. Food, adjacent to h2o, is the well-nigh important demand to support homo life. Modern American society has grown comfortable with the ease of obtaining nutrient; it has forgotten the long history of food development and growth that expanded from the hunting and gathering days of the earliest American colonists. In colonial America, before the grocery store, men and women had to hunt, gather, or cultivate food, and at times wait for shipments from Europe, in order to survive. The work needed to secure sustenance molded social club and the way colonists lived and expanded in America in colonial times.

Famine, Starvation, and Jamestown Cannibalism

Modernistic Thanksgiving feasts contrast sharply with the feel of Pilgrims and Indians at the outset Thanksgiving: on today's table in that location is an abundance of food including a big turkey, mashed potatoes, sqaush, corn, stuffing, cranberry sauce, and other staples. Still, this is not an accurate picture of feasts or daily life in colonial times. Early on explorers described an affluence of food and claimed the land full of wildlife and plants. This gave the impression that colonists would have no trouble having an adequate supply of nutrient. However, long, cold winters held many colonies captive by famine, and with inadequate farming in early settlements, colonists were dependent upon merchandise with Native Americans or supplies from England to furnish stores. Stores depleted speedily, and despite new supplies from England, colonists were at times barely able to make information technology through the winter, resorting to "half rations".

Starvation was a real threat in early settlements. The "Starving Fourth dimension" at the Jamestown (Virginia) colony during the winter of 1609-1610 was notedbyJohn Smith and George Percy, the president of the colony, and referred to by Percy as""this starveinge Tyme". And although at that place are written accounts of Jamestown cannibalism, it was not until the discovery of a female person trunk, dubbed "Jane", that physical evidence was plant to back up the writings of colonists in Jamestown. The victim, "Jane", unearthed past Jamestown Archeaologists in 2012 in a 17th century trash deposit in a cellar of a 1608 building at James Fort, showed evidence of a butchered skull and shinbone. This discovery helps us fathom the starvation of Jamestown and the desperate state of affairs the colonists were in to survive. Cannibalism, however, was not widespread. The limited number of accounts of these events (with possibly only one commencement-hand report) has atomic number 82 historians to believe that this was a small independent outcome in Jamestown that only a few desperate colonists took role in. Notwithstanding, nutrient scarcity and starvation were prominent among settlements including North Carolina.

The 13 Colonies: Farming with a Fat Breadbasket

Although off to a rocky kickoff, the colonies became great food producers in practiced fourth dimension. Once the British colonists solidified their hold in the new world, access to food proved to be dissimilar from of the days of John Smith and colonial Jamestown. Indentured servitude and slavery granted colonists an extended workforce to expand farming capabilities and increase their wealth. Colonists grew enough food to support their families and in some cases were able to step away from subsistence to trade, barter, and sell.

The harvests gathered by colonial farmers included an expansive number of crops: beans, squash, peas, okra, pumpkins, peppers, tomatoes, and peanuts. Maize (corn), and later on rice and potatoes were grown in place of wheat and barley which were mutual European crops that did not take readily to eastern American soil. Probably one of the nearly important contributions to colonial food was the adoption of Native American agricultural practice and crops, chiefly corn and tobacco. Tobacco was a valuable export and corn, debatably the about important crop in colonial America, was used to feed both people and livestock. Colonists also harvested wild fauna from hunting and fishing to supplement their nutrition with important protein. These included rabbit, squirrel, possum, raccoon, deer, bear, and fowl equally well as many types of fish and shellfish.

Indentured servitude, followed by slavery, bolstered the subcontract production of colonial America, particularly in the southern colonies. Indentured servants, white immigrants from England, were the first population to cultivate the land under a principal. Ideally these workers would piece of work off their immigration debt and later buy their own country to cultivate, still, this was not ever the case and indentured servants oftentimes became victim to a perpetual cycle of an inescapable labor system. Beginning in 1619 with the importation of the first African slaves, the agriculture system throughout the eastern seaboard grew quickly, and by 1700 slavery had displaced indentured servitude in the southern colonies. Before the advent of mechanized tools, farming during colonial times was hand-labour agriculture, accomplished by the hoe, scythe, and axe, and plow. These tools, in conjunction with cheap labor made bachelor by slaves, allowed for increasingly sustaining harvests and the product of crops for merchandise.

References:

Bergstrom, Alexander, "English Game Laws and Colonial Food Shortages." The New England Quarterly Vol. 12, No. 4 (1939): 682-683.

Cochrane, Willard West. The Development of American Agriculture: A Historical Analysis Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

Dawdy, Shannon Lee. "A Wild Gustatory modality: Food and Colonialism in Eighteenth-Century Louisiana." Ethnohistory Vol. 57, No. 3 (2010): 389.

Herrmann, Rachel B. "The "tragicall historie": Cannibalism and Abundance in Colonial Jamestown."The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 68, No 1 (2011): 47-74 .

Zierden, Martha A. and Reitz, Elizabeth J., "Animal Use and the Urban Mural in Colonial Charleston, South Carolina, USA."International Periodical of Historical Archaeology (2009). https://www.praguehotelsweb.com/phdtreeorg (accessed October xvi, 2014).

Additional Resources:

Schlotterbeck, John T. 2013. Daily life in the colonial South. Santa Barbara: Greenwood.

McWilliams, James E. 2005. A revolution in eating: how the quest for food shaped America. New York: Columbia University Printing.

Kulikoff, Allan. 2000. From British peasants to colonial American farmers. Chapel Hill: University of Due north Carolina Press. https://site.ebrary.com/id/10273414 (accessed October 16, 2014).

Anderson, V. D. 2004. Creatures of Empire: How domestic animals transformed early America. Oxford: University Press.

Carney, J. 2001. Blackness rice: The African origins of rice cultivation in the Americas.

Cambridge: Harvard UniversityPrinting.

Gray, L. C. 1932. The history of agriculture in the southern United States to 1860, vol. i. Washington DC: Carnegie Institution, .

Hooker, R. J. 1981. Food and beverage in America: A history.

Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.

Hume, Ivor Noel. "We are starved." Colonial Williamsburg. https://world wide web.colonialwilliamsburg.org/ (accessed Oct xvi, 2014).

Image Credits:

Asbestos. "Corncobs." Photograph. Wikimedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maize (accessed October 16, 2014). Used with Creative Eatables license CC By-SA two.0.

16 October 2014