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CW Journal
: Spring 2005 : Work, Work, and More Work
Animal labor—beast and human—was the only
way to produce food in the age before machines. Colonial Williamsburg
interpreter Ed Schultz drives the ox team while colleague Wayne Randolph guides
the plow for a planting of corn.
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The kitchen is the first of the outbuildings at Great Hopes Plantation.
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Dave Nielsen looks for worms in the seed head of a tobacco plant.
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Robert Watson splits firewood with a froe.
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Emily James wields a hoe on a row of tobacco plants.
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Middling Planters Took Hard Road to Wealth, Respectability in Colonial Virginia
text by Ed Crews
photos by Lael White
Master, mistress, child
or slave, if you lived on a middling Virginia plantation in the eighteenth
century, you had chores to do—and plenty of them. Wayne Randolph, agricultural
specialist at Colonial Williamsburg, says, "The chief quality of life on a
Virginia farm in the 1700s was work, work, and more work."
Work
ebbed and flowed with the seasons, but it never stopped. From tending crops to
butchering livestock to cooking, cleaning, or mending fences and tools, there
always was something to be done.
Colonial
Williamsburg guests can see and sample eighteenth-century farm life at Great
Hopes Plantation, the museum's latest venture in historical interpretation.
There, the willing volunteer can pitch in and hoe in a tobacco field, trundle a
loaded wheelbarrow, or stack firewood.
A short
walk from the Visitor Center, the site is designed to portray work and society
on a middling plantation. It requires a diverse interpretive team to tell
colonial agriculture's sometimes complicated story. The farming experts include
Ed Schultz, rural trades supervisor; David Nielsen, agricultural interpreter;
and Randolph. Because slave labor was an integral part of plantation life,
members of the African American interpretive unit work here as well.
Great
Hopes does not show life and work on the period's grand estates, like Carter's
Grove or Berkeley. Those huge plantations had armies of laborers. Middling
plantations were smaller and more numerous. They typically covered 200-800
acres and required a workforce of about nine adults. Despite their relatively
small size, these farms offered their owners a bright economic future.
"These
middling plantations were the path to wealth," Schultz says. "If you view the
work that occurred on them simply as drudgery, then your view is off."
Also
wrong is a perception of these planters as subsistence farmers. A middling
planter could achieve a good life and a respected place in society. He could
provide for his family and enjoy luxuries. Success, however, did not come
easily. Middling planters were hard workers and hardheaded businessmen. They
could read and write, and do arithmetic. They needed a sophisticated
appreciation of market behavior and of calculated risk.
Thomas
Jefferson admired these farmers for their skill, sobriety, industry, and
contributions to their communities. He had them in mind when he wrote, "Those
who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God." Middling planters were
the workhorses of the community, Randolph says. They often served as
constables, jurors, surveyors of roads, estate appraisers, and tobacco
inspectors.
Farm
women—wives and daughters of the planter—worked, as might be expected. Nielsen
says, "They cooked and preserved food. They tended sizeable gardens." On the
frontier, they produced clothes for everyone to wear.
The
planter's slaves knew the farm only as a place of bondage and labor. They could
not advance in society or amass a fortune. Many of them took pride in their
work, despite that. The vastly different aspirations of master and slave,
however, frequently led to tensions between the two, Schultz says.
Eighteenth-century farms
had no machinery in the sense that we think of it. Laborers used simple hand
tools. With them, eighteenth-century Virginians focused their greatest
attention on three cash crops—tobacco, corn, and wheat.
Tobacco,
grown for export, was the king of Virginia's rural economy. It had been since
the 1600s. In the early 1770s, annual shipments amounted to seventy million
pounds. Tobacco was labor intensive. Its growth and processing cycle lasted
roughly from February to early spring. Corn and wheat tended to require short
but intensive work during critical times in the growth and processing cycle.
Besides
cultivating cash crops, farmers grew peas, beans, oats, potatoes, turnips,
pumpkins, cabbages, carrots, melons, and other fruits like apples and peaches.
They also raised cattle, swine, sheep, and poultry. These foodstuffs were
consumed on the farm, although some surplus might be sold locally or exported.
Colonial
Williamsburg guests can see interpreters cultivating some of these plants using
eighteenth-century techniques, and Historic Trades carpenters using
eighteenth-century tools and techniques to raise buildings typical of a
middling plantation. Already up are a kitchen and slave quarters. To come are a
master's home, a smokehouse, a corn house for storage, and a tobacco house for
curing.
Randolph cuts corn tops for livestock fodder.
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Carpenter Will Gore sharpens a pit saw for cutting timber into lumber.
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Carpenter Jack Underwood at Great Hopes.
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Wheat sheaves are set out to dry in the sun before being stacked.
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Randolph
refers to farming as "an ancient dance between man and nature." He says he
likes the out-of-doors, and the nurturing qualities the dance requires.
Nielsen
says, "I love farm labor for the endurance it creates in the laborer. I enjoy
working with tobacco, because the plant requires perfect care, and its socially
suspect nature rarely fails to find an emotion in our guests."
For
Schultz, historical farming has a clarity of purpose not always found in
twenty-first-century work. "I like the directness of this life," he says. "Its
very simple and straightforward. It's not abstract. And every day you can see
the results."
Listen to a Behind the Scenes Interview:
Interpreting Colonial Farming.
Generations of family farmers inspire David Nielsen in his work in the rural trades.
 (MP3, 5.3Mb) || View transcript
This interview is part of an ongoing series of podcasts available on the Colonial Williamsburg site.
Learn more. |
For further reading:
Ed Crews contributed to the autumn 2004 journal a profile of Colonial Williamsburg's foodways staff.
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