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Martha Ballard, Midwife. As Good As, In Some Ways Better Than, the Best Doctors

Martha Ballard somehow managed to deliver 797 babies in the frontier community of Hallowell (now Augusta), Maine, between 1785 and 1812. She kept her now-famous diary during those years, which also tells of endless work cooking, gardening and spinning.

She reckoned she performed a total of 981 deliveries in her lifetime, since she only started keeping her diary at the age of 50.

Martha Ballard diary entry, Aug. 27, 1791

Her diary would fade into obscurity, passed around from people to the Maine State Library, where a historian then discovered it. Historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich mined what seemed a mundane chronicle to reveal insights into women’s role in the frontier economy, medical practices, the prevalence of violence, treatment of debtors (Martha’s husband), marriage customs, the Malta War and, of course, birthing babies. Thatcher’s book won the Pulitzer Prize and PBS then aired it as a documentary.

Martha Ballard

Martha Moore was born on Feb. 9, 1735 in Oxford, Mass., to Elijah Moore and Dorothy Learned Moore. Little is known about her early life and education. At 19 she married Ephraim Ballard in 1754, and they had nine children between 1756 and 1779. Three of them died in Oxford during a diphtheria epidemic in the summer of 1769.

Martha wasn’t the only health care provider in her family. She had two uncles who practiced as physicians, and her great-niece, Clara Barton, founded the American Red Cross. Her great-great-granddaughter, Mary Hobart, was an obstetrician who graduated from Women’s Medical College, of the New York Infirmary for Women and Children.

The Kennebec River today at Augusta

Sometime between 1769 and 1785, Martha and her family moved near the wild Kennebec River on the Maine (then Massachusetts) frontier.

She started her diary on Jan. 1, 1785, when she was 50 years old.

mr Ballard left home bound for Oxford. I had been Sick with the Collic. mrs Savage went home. mrs foster Came at Evening. it snowd a little.

Using a quill pen and homemade ink, she then made 9,999 entries over 27 years. In them she described the dangers and difficulties of her life. In 1981, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich got a grant to research Martha’s diary. Ten years later she published her prize-winning book, A Midwife’s Tale about it.

Better Than a Doctor?

Martha Ballard used home-grown remedies and traveled by horse (sometimes falling off) and canoe to her patients. She treated burns and rashes, frostbite, coughs, colic and sore throats. Most of the medicines she grew herself, gathered in the wild or transformed from household staples. She did buy some medicines, like camphor.

In at least one respect she was a more methodical and progressive practitioner than most country doctors, argues Ulrich. Martha Ballard kept medical records — in her diary — something most country doctors didn’t do. Her diary is practically the only medical record that exists for Hallowell in the 18th century, save for a one-page letter.

In other ways, Ulrich notes, Martha Ballard’s habits didn’t differ much from those of the best doctors of the age. She attended autopsies and meticulously recorded medical and obstetrical details. She also paid attention to vital records and was generally committed to facts.

Martha Ballard, Midwife

On Aug. 27, 1791, Martha Ballard helped with the birth of two children. She would have been about 56 years old. She wrote in her diary that Isaac Hardin called her at 4 a.m., and his wife delivered a daughter at 1 p.m.

Then, “I went Directly from there to James Savages, my hors mrd in a Swamp and I fell off,” she wrote. After extricating herself and her horse from the swamp, she arrived at the Savages at 3 p.m. to find his wife safely delivered of a fine son with the help of James’ mother.

Martha then went back to the Hardins by Colonel Dutton’s farm, rode Hardin’s horse home, and arrived at 8 p.m.

She wrote that she was, “very much fatigud.”

Chores, Too

Like most early American women, Martha Ballard spent endless hours carding and spinning. Cloth was hard to obtain on the frontier, the women had to pick, spin, comb, dye and card flax, wool and, to a lesser extent, cotton. Historian Alice Morse Earle writes that early American women bought cotton by the pound. Earle describes the tedious process.

…the seeds were picked out one by one, by hand; it was carded on wool-cards, and spun into a rather intractable yarn which was used as warp for linsey-woolsey and rag carpets. … Sometimes a twisted yarn was made of one thread of cotton and one of wool which was knit into durable stockings.

At least Martha didn’t weave the cloth herself. She took her spun cotton, wool and flax to Mr. Edson, who wove it.

On July 27, 1786, Martha Ballard wrote in her diary that she carded cotton as well as built a fence, cared for sick children, bought meat and received visitors.

Clear. I carded Cottne & Cutt Aulders and maid a Sort of a fence part round the yard By the mill Pond, and then was Calld to Eliab Shaws to See his Children, they being Sick with y^e Canker rash. Hannah North, Tammy & Sally Cox here. Bro^t a quarter of Lamb, wt 7-1/2 lb. Polly Bisbe & Adams here to Day.

The Diary Ends

She last wrote in her diary in the spring of 1812. In an undated entry, she wrote,

Clear the most of ye day & very Cold & windy. Dagt Ballard and a Number of her Children here, mrs Partridg & Smith allso. Revd mr Tappin Came and Converst Swetly and made A Prayer adapted to my Case.

at home, very feeble, Revd mr Tappin [ ] see me.

A notice of her death was published on June 9, 1812.

You can browse Martha Ballard’s complete diary here.

With thanks to Martha Moore Ballard and the Medical Challenge to Midwifery by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. Also from Sickness and Health in America: Readings in the History of Medicine and Public Health by Judith W. Leavitt (Editor), Ronald L. Numbers.

Image of the Kennebec River By Billy Hathorn – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34058018. Featured image by ChatGPT.

This story was updated in 2026.

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James Cagney: Hollywood Icon, Martha’s Vineyard Farmer, Daddy Dearest

Hollywood icon James Cagney took a break from the demands of movie-making in 1936 and bought an antique house and 200 acres on Martha’s Vineyard. Fed up with the movies and movie stardom, he decided he wanted to try his hand at farming.

The Vineyard had yet to attract celebrities like the Clintons, the Obamas, Carly Simon, John Belushi or Jacqueline Bouvier Onassis. Quiet and remote, Cagney sought peace and freedom away from the clamor of Hollywood.

James Cagney around 1930

Cagneys, he wrote, have a deeply ingrained sense of privacy. “We would never intrude upon each other. Each family member would do what he or she had to do without bothering the other.”

You could take that to a ridiculous length. For example, you could build a separate house for your two small children to live in. Which is what James Cagney actually did.

James Cagney

James Cagney’s early life explains, in part, how he ended up on Martha’s Vineyard for nearly 20 years. He was born July 17, 1899 on New York’s Lower East Side to poor parents. His father was an Irish bartender, his mother a half-Irish homemaker. His childhood, he wrote, was marked by trouble, illness and his father’s alcoholism.

“I was very much a city boy,” he wrote in his autobiography. “But one day my dad rented an open four-wheeler known as a barouche and piled me, my mother, and three brothers into it for a two-week visit to my great-aunt in the then open country that is now Flatbush. That vivid memory is with me yet, and I can still see the tremendous elm in her front yard and the morning glories growing on the white picket fence. Ever since those two glorious weeks at the turn of the century, morning glories have been my favorite flower and, just as lasting in its effect, during those few days I changed from a city boy to a country boy.”

Years later, when Rollins College in Florida awarded him an honorary degree, he acknowledged the honor by sending the college an essay he wrote on soil conservation.

Show Biz

He had no intention of going into acting, but someone suggested he try out for a vaudeville drag show called Every Sailor. He got the part. His mother didn’t approve, though, so when the show ended he went to work in a brokerage house as a runner. But then he tried out for a Broadway musical called Pitter Patter, and got a part as a specialty dancer.

He also got a wife. 16-year-old Frances Willard “Billie” Vernon, a chorus girl in the show. They married two years later and stayed married until he died 64 years later.

Billie Vernon Cagney

He called marrying Billie “absolutely the smartest thing I ever did.”

“I am still crazy about this lady,” he wrote in his 1976 autobiography.

She was devoted to him. Perhaps too devoted.

Vaudeville and Stardom

He played the vaudeville circuit for the next decade. “Life seemed just a never-ending sequence of damned dingy, badly furnished rooms with a one-burner plate,” he wrote.

He finally got his break in 1930 in a play called Penny Arcade. Warner Brothers decided to make it into a movie starring James Cagney. He went to Hollywood with a three-week contract to play in the film renamed Sinners’ Holiday. He stayed with the studio for 31 years.

The grapefruit scene in The Public Enemy

By 1936, he had achieved A-list celebrityhood. He had starred in such films as The Public Enemy and Taxi!. In a classic scene in Public Enemy, he shoved a grapefruit in Mae Clarke’s face. It made such a stir he couldn’t go to a restaurant without someone sending a grapefruit to his table, he complained.

He walked out on Warner Brothers in 1932 and in 1935, demanding a fair salary. In 1936, he bought his farm on Chilmark, which then had a population of fewer than 250 people. On Martha’s Vineyard he could order a lobster at Homeport in Menemsha without getting a grapefruit along with it.

Menemsha Harbor in Chilmark. Cagney was also an avid sailor.

Farmer Cagney

“In 1936 I attained one of my best and fondest dreams – I bought a farm,” he wrote. “Martha’s Vineyard then was uncluttered with developers (which is too gracious a designation for those gentlemen; developers actually develop nothing but their own bankrolls). I couldn’t think of anything more satisfactory, more life-fulfilling, than living on a farm surrounded by salt water. This is what Martha’s Vineyard allowed me to do. The old, old house we found there – its building deed reads 1728—met my expectations wonderfully, and everything about the land and its situation charmed me right out of my shoes.”

Moreover, he wrote, property taxes amounted to $39 a year. He figured he could always scrape up $39.

“I used to lie in my California bed and dream of that old house in its very happy state of quiet decay,” he wrote. “I loved it beyond words, and at the time I said to myself, “If I had just six months to live, I’d spend them at the Vineyard”.”

Summer people had been coming to the Vineyard for decades, and Cagney found like-minded friends on the island. An amateur artist, he painted and drew with two other summer sojourners, artists Thomas Hart Benton and Sanford Ballard Dole Low. At night they’d sit around smoking cigarettes, drinking liquor and sketching each other.

People of Chilmark by Thomas Hart Benton.

Parenthood, Sort of

At home in Chilmark, Billie doted on her increasingly famous husband. She made sure he always had a hot meal and enforced his privacy. No one could make noise while he concentrated on studying his lines. Over the next 20 years, he would make 30 films and become one of the leading Hollywood film stars. He would earn nominations for three Academy Awards and win an Oscar for his performance in Yankee Doodle Dandy.

In 1941, they adopted two children a year apart: a boy they named James Francis Cagney, Jr., and a girl they named Catherine, called Casey. “He was a perfectly beautiful little guy,” wrote James Cagney. “Casey, also beautiful, equally important to us right from the beginning.”

Cagney recalled the “wonderful, wonderful feeling of having them both sit on my lap as I told them stories.”

People who knew him on Martha’s Vineyard said he tried to spend time with the kids, at least in the early years. His demanding career didn’t allow him to see much of them, though.

Billie was much tougher on the children., friends later said. Very early in their young lives, she decided to build a separate house for them at their home in Coldwater Canyon. She also relegated them to the two-story guesthouse on Martha’s Vineyard, 200 feet away from the main house. They weren’t allowed to play in their parents’ house or to bring friends to it. A Japanese couple took care of the children.

James Cagney’s house in Chllmark. The children lived in a separate house 200 feet away.

“That living in another house — I can’t think Jim Junior and Casey could do anything other than resent it,” said an old family friend.

Estrangement, and Sad Endings

Cagney’s efforts at farming his Chilmark estate didn’t work out too well. He found the soil poor, and he couldn’t get help. So in 1955, when the children reached their teens, he bought a farm in Dutchess County, New York, and called it Verney Farm. There he raised cattle and Morgan horses.

His friends on Martha’s Vineyard began to age and die, and he and Billie found Verney Farm more accessible. He spent less and less time on the Vineyard, and finally gave the farm to Jim Jr. Jim Jr. couldn’t keep up the farm and sold it.

The children grew estranged from their parents. Jim Jr., joined the Marines. His father sent him checks, which he refused to cash. He wanted his father’s attention, not his money. They grew further apart. Jim Jr., left the Marines, married, had two children and ran a gas station in South Portland, Maine. Once he went to his parents’ farm to reconcile with them. Police escorted him off the property. He died of a heart attack at 42, two years before his father’s death.

Casey loved horses as her father did. She married Jack Thomas, who worked on her father’s farm. They had two daughters and divorced. Plagued by health problems, she died of cancer at the age of 64. She, too, grew estranged from her parents and didn’t speak to them in the years before they died.

Casey, Billie, Jim Jr., James Cagney

Death

James Cagney died at Verney Farm on March 30, 1986. He left his personal belongings to Billie and nothing to his children. He had written the will in 1982, two years before Jim died.

Cagney added Article VI to his will:

I have intentionally made no provision for any grandchild of mine because I believe it is the obligation of each parent adequately provide for his own children during the parents’ lifetime just as I have done, and just as I believe my children should do for their children.

Martha’s Vineyard

In 2017, the house that once belonged to James Cagney went on the market with an asking price of $13.5 million. The description of the property noted it had 69 acres, the house where the late actor lived and a “guesthouse.” It left out the sad fact the guesthouse, 200 feet away, had been home for his two small children.

Images: James Cagney summer residence on Chilmark by Boston Public Library via Flickr CC By 2.0.; Menemsha Harbor By User:Elkman – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Menemsha.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1350749. Grapefruit scene by Dennis Amith via Flickr, CC By-SA 2.0. Billie Cagney, Fair Use. Family photo, Fair Use. This story updated in 2026.

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7 Strange Things New Englanders Did During the Dog Days of Summer

Dogs were said to go mad during the dog days of summer, and New Englanders have certainly done strange things in the hot, humid weeks of July and August.

The ancient Greeks were said to have named dog days after Sirius, the dog star, when it rises ahead of the dawn. The Old Farmer’s Almanac reports they happen from July 3-August 11. The Anglican Book of Common Prayer considers them to run from July 6 to August 17.

Scholar Eleanor Long concluded the term ‘dog days’ arose because people associated hot, sultry days with sickness and madness.

A Rhode Island study showed that early belief had some truth in it. Among the state’s 1 million residents, there are 300 extra emergency department visits and 13 more deaths on days with a heat index of 95 degrees or more.

Here are some strange things New Englanders have done during the long, hot days of summer.

Enemas and Sherry

On July 26, 1788, Maine midwife Martha Ballard noted in her diary: “Dog Days begin this day.” Ballard linked the dog days with increased illness. She certainly seemed to visit more patients during them. Shortly after they began in 1788, she gave an enema of English mallow and chamomile to a dying child.
In 1915, a Boston doctor named John Bryant advised a cure for headache during the dog days, but only for thin, meat-eating patients. He wrote to the New England Journal of Medicine, noting that “the [thin] carnivore who perspires little or not at all suffers from headaches and prostration, while the herbivore sits placidly amid steams and puddles of perspiration…the carnivore must be induced to perspire.” He recommended judicious amounts of alcohol, not more than a sherry glass of claret, madeira, or other similar beverage, taken at the oftenest not more than once in every four hours.” If that doesn’t work, he wrote, the patient can take a shower.

Pine Cones and Witch Hazel

John Quincy Adams, the radical who wore trousers on his inauguration, actually took off his cravat during a hot August in Washington, D.C. In 1822, Adams complained of the dog days in a letter to his wife. “As the weather is subsiding from fever heat I have resumed my cravat; but you know there is always room, summer and winter, for ironical wags to make merry with my dress.”
Henry David Thoreau wrote that the dog days occurred during September 1859 in Concord, Mass. He spent the time watching pine cones ripen. “It is really a rich and interesting sight. How little observed are the fruits which we do not use! How few attend to the ripening and dispersion of the pine seed!” he wrote in his journal on Sept. 18, 1859.
Penobscot Indian women refused to gather medicinal herbs, roots and bark during the hot summer. Instead, they gathered witch hazel, sarsaparilla and sweet flag roots immediately before it got hot and pounded them into powder.
In 1889, the New England Medical Gazette recommended breast-feeding infants to lessen ‘the double peril of teething and dog days.’
Henry Bowditch, prominent Massachusetts physician, followed the Greek physician Galen’s practice of bleeding patients. But Galen advised against bleeding during the dog days.

***

Learn how New England’s wild weather affected the course of history in “New England Weather” by the New England Historical Society. Click here to order your copy today.

This story was updated in 2026.

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Six (And More) Mothers Who Left a Mark on History

Mothers have always had to balance competing demands, and some of those who did it best made history.

Mindful that Mother’s Day is around the corner, we bring you more than six New England mothers who left a mark on the region.

They include an African-American inventor from Connecticut, a Chinese-American laundress from Maine, a magazine editor from New Hampshire, a midwife from Vermont and a character from a widely-read book who was quite different from her popular image.

Mothers of Invention

Sarah Boone

On May 15, 1809, Mary Dixon Kies of Killingly, Conn., won a patent for her technique of weaving silk thread into straw to make straw hats — becoming the first woman in the United States to receive a patent. President James Madison signed Kies’ patent, and First Lady Dolley Madison wrote to congratulate her.

The people of Connecticut have been unusually inventive ever since David Bushnell invented a submarine for George Washington called The Turtle. Connecticut women – 44 of them – were among the 5,578 Connecticut inventors who obtained U.S. patents in the century after the U.S. Patent Law was passed in 1790.

From 1876 through 1890, the U.S. Patent Office ranked Connecticut first in inventions per capita every year but three, when Connecticut came in second.

At the 1876 World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago, the Connecticut Women’s Building featured 69 inventions by women, including Catherine Griswold’s skirt-supporting corset, Mary Ann Boughton’s cooking stove, Ann Harrison’s sleigh bells and Ellie Sperry’s check punch for banks.

Connecticut-born Eliza Murfey, a physician, took out at least 23 patents between 1870 and 1875 for railroad packings, used to lubricate rail-car axles to prevent derailments.

Sarah Boone, an African-American woman, received a U.S. government patent for an ironing board in 1892. She was born in Mississippi sometime around the end of the Civil War and moved to New Haven.

People had ironed on boards placed between two supports. Boone designed a hinged board with curved ends, making it possible to iron sleeves and dresses. She died in 1900, eight years after she obtained her patent.

Connecticut was still a leader in inventiveness in 2015, when it ranked eighth in the United States for total patents awarded.

Today you can see straw hats made by Mary Kies at the Bugbee Memorial Library in Killingly, Conn., as well as at the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford.

Mother of the Year

Toy Len Goon receiving the Maine Mother of the Year Award.

Toy Len Goon was born Sept. 21, 1891 in a mud brick hut to peasant farmers in Guangdong Province. It was a far cry from the White House, where she would meet First Lady Bess Truman.

As a child she did backbreaking farm chores until the family’s land could no longer support all six children. At 10, Toy Len was given to a wealthy merchant family, where she worked as a servant and babysitter. They treated her kindly. At 12 she went to a girls’ school to learn to be a good Chinese wife.

She married Dogon Goon, who had been working in a laundry in Portland, Maine. In 1917 he was arrested as an illegal resident. He had to pay $1,500 in bail and to serve in the armed forces during World War I to avoid deportation. He was wounded and returned an amputee.

He went back to China to marry Toy Len. When his new bride arrived in Portland, she spoke no English. She worked in the laundry with Dogon. Over the next 13 years, they had eight children.

She managed to save $500 for a down payment on a three-story building in which they lived and started their own laundry.

Dogon died of gangrene in 1952, and Toy Len was left with eight children ages three to 16. She kept the laundry going and made sure all her children got educations, refusing offers to put them in foster care. All did well academically.

In 1957, a local newspaper reported her son Carroll was a physician, Richard a businessman, Edward a research chemist, Albert a lawyer, Josephine a mother, Arthur, a Navy veteran, studying electrical engineering. Doris was a court reporter and Janet a college student

When asked how she did it, Toy Len Goon said, “If there is harmony in the family, there is good in the larder and peace in the country.”

Toy Len Goon was named Maine Mother of the Year in 1952 by the American Mothers Committee of the Golden Rule Foundation. Then she won the national competition.

There were political motives for selecting her. At the height of the Cold War, she represented the superiority of democracy over communism as a Chinese immigrant small business owner and mother.

The week she took off to receive her award was her only vacation. She visited the White House where she met First Lady Bess Truman, and she was honored with a parade in New York’s Chinatown.

Shortly after receiving the award, she moved to Lynn, Mass., to be closer to her children. She died at the age of 101 in 1993.

You can see Toy Len Goon’s former laundry at 615 Forest Ave. in Portland and, while you’re at it, take Mom to the Great Lost Bear nearby for dinner.

Mother Goose

Mary Goose tombstone

Mary Goose, buried in Boston’s Granary Burying Ground, is often called the Mother Goose whose nursery rhymes have entertained children for centuries.

There’s a little bit of truth to the story – but just a little. The name ‘Mother Goose’ had been around since at least the 17^th and possibly the 10^th century in Europe.

In colonial Massachusetts, Mary Goose, born Mary Balston, married a wealthy landowner named Isaac Goose. They had 10 children. Mary died in 1690, and Isaac then married Elizabeth Foster of Charlestown, and they had six more children. They named one of their daughters ‘Elizabeth.’

In 1715, the younger Elizabeth Goose married a Boston printer named Thomas Fleet – by none other than Cotton Mather.

They had a son, which delighted Fleet’s mother-in-law. “Mother Goose, like all good grandmothers, was in ecstasies at the event; her joy was unbounded; she spent her whole time in the nursery, and in wandering about the house, pouring forth, in not the most melodious strains, the songs and ditties which she had learned in her younger days, greatly to the annoyance of the whole neighborhood–to Fleet in particular, who was a man fond of quiet. “

Fleet tried to quiet his mother-in-law, but failed. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, he decided, and in 1719 he published a book of nursery rhymes called Songs for the Nursery; or, Mother Goose’s Melodies for Children. It was a clever use of his mother-in-law’s name. In 1697, a French writer named Charles Perrault published a book called Contes de ma Mère L’Oye, or Tales of My Mother Goose.

By 1833, a copy of Fleet’s book survived and was republished as The Only True Mother Goose. A century later, Mary Goose was promoted as the real Mother Goose to attract tourists to the Granary Burying Ground — as if the graves of Paul Revere, John Hancock and Sam Adams weren’t enough.

The Granary Burying Ground is at Tremont & Bromfield Streets in Boston.

Mother of Thanksgiving

Sarah Josepha Hale

Sarah Josepha Hale, born Oct. 24, 1788, in Newport, N.H., influenced American fashion and taste as long-time editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, the biggest women’s magazine before the Civil War.

She’s been described as a cross between Martha Stewart and Oprah Winfrey. Sarah Josepha Hale made popular the Christmas tree, the white wedding dress and the Thanksgiving dinner of turkey, stuffing and pumpkin pie.

We might not celebrate Thanksgiving at all were it not for her. Before the Civil War, there were only two national holidays: Washington’s Birthday and Independence Day. Thanksgiving was only celebrated in New England, and each of the six states scheduled its own date to celebrate from October through January. Hale wrote letters to five presidents and editorials in her magazine urging Thanksgiving be celebrated as a national holiday. Finally Abraham Lincoln acquiesced, thinking the holiday would help unify the nation after the Civil War.

Among her many accomplishments are the poem Mary Had a Little Lamb and dozens of books. She helped with the founding of Vassar College, the restoration of Mount Vernon and the completion of the Bunker Hill Monument. The Richards Free Library in Newport bestows the annual Sarah Josepha Hale Award on a New England writer. The first honoree was Robert Frost in 1956; poet Sharon Olds won it in 2016.

The Rising Sun Tavern, her father’s establishment and the site of her wedding, is located two houses north of the south Congregational Church in Newport, N.H. The Richards Free Library is at 58 N. Main St. in Newport. The New Hampshire Historical Society sells Sarah Josepha Hale bobblehead dolls online and at its museum store at 30 Park St. in Concord.

Mother of Industrial Psychology

Lillian Gilbreth

Lillian Gilbreth had 12 children, and two of them in 1948 wrote a book about her called Cheaper By the Dozen. The book described how she and her husband, Frank B. Gilbreth, used the time-and-motion principles they taught industrial clients to manage their large household.

She hated the book, which depicted her as a sweet, stay-at-home mom. She was anything but. Lillian Gilbreth was the prototypical working mom, balancing marriage, career and family.

It wasn’t easy to tell where the management company ended and family life began.

They turned their home near Brown University into a laboratory for motion study. The Gilbreths took photos of their children doing dishes to figure out how to do it faster. They spent a vacation on Nantucket finding the best way to pack soap for Lever Brothers.

The children listened to language lessons on the Victrola while taking baths, and learned Morse code after Frank painted the symbols on their walls and ceilings. He left funny messages in code for them to decipher.

Though Frank hadn’t gone to college, she held a doctorate from Brown. She was a pioneer in incorporating psychology in industrial planning and one of the most influential women in America.

She is credited with developing the modern kitchen, conceiving the ‘work triangle’ and inventing the foot pedal trash can, refrigerator door shelves and wall light switches.

Frank and Lillian Gilbreth ran an industrial psychology consulting firm, headquartered in Providence from 1912-19.

Frank died in 1924, but Lillian continued the company until her retirement in 1968, just before she turned 90.

You can still see the New England Butt Company building at 304 Pearl St., where the Gilbreths pioneered the first process flow charts and micromotion studies, or Brown University, where Lillian obtained her PhD in Applied Management. The family lived a half block from Brown, first at 71, then at 77 Brown Street. The Gilbreths’ Nantucket cottage, which had two buglights on the property, was on the extension of Hulbert Avenue behind the Jetties Beach tennis courts.

Mother Myrick

Taconic Mountains

Mother Myrick is both a 3,290-foot-high mountain and a candy store in Vermont. Not much is known today about the original Mother Myrick, but in the late 18^th century she was well respected by the locals.

Mother Myrick lived in Beartown, a now-abandoned settlement on the mountainside. She was a skilled midwife and healer, much like Maine’s Martha Ballard. She had many patients, according to local lore, which is how the mountain was named after her.

Mother Myrick Mountain, part of the Taconic Range, rises to the west of Manchester, Vt. It is covered with a stand of a rich natural hardwood forest, part of the Equinox Highlands.

Mother Myrick’s Confectionery is located nearby in Manchester Center. It began as a small fudge shop in 1977, selling buttercrunch toffee, caramels and chocolates. Today Mother Myrick’s makes cakes, tarts and breads. They offer free shipping for Mother’s Day on their signature Lemon Lulu Cake and Spring Celebration Bread.

Mother Myrick’s Confectionery is at at 4367 Main Street in Manchester Center, Vt.

Images: Mother Goose gravestone By Swampyank at en.wikipedia – Own workTransferred from en.wikipedia to Commons by User:Mutter Erde using CommonsHelper., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4904213. This story updated in 2026.

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When Farmers New Year Began on March 25

A real old farmer’s almanac would have started on March 25, sometimes called Farmers New Year. It was the day farmers began their diaries.

Many New England farmers kept to the old practice of starting the new year on March 25. It may have begun in North America with John Winthrop, who wrote in his diary: March 25: The year 1620 beginneth. (He arrived a little later.)

John Winthrop. American Antiquarian Society

So important and ubiquitous was the farmer’s day book that the New England Farmer magazine in 1827 gave advice on how to keep accounts in it.

Some had blank pages inserted between the calendar pages. The owner used the blank pages to record his daily expenses, debts, travel, the weather, crops planted and their outcomes.

Thomas C. Hubka, in Big House, Little House, Back House, Barn: The Connected Farm Buildings of New England, explained why 19th-century farmers especially viewed diaries as important. The 1800s were an era of improvement, he wrote. Diaries “partook of the same sustaining spirit of optimism, perfectibility, and progress. Most important, it was an attitude popularly shared and reinforced by most farmers.”

Day By Day

Much can be learned about 19^th-century farm life from the diaries that survive. Hubka based much of his book about New England farm architecture on diaries kept by three generations in Kennebunk, Maine. Tobias Walker began his journal on August 1, 1828, when he was 34. He kept it up for more than 37 years until he died on Oct. 10, 1865. His son Edwin continued it, and then Edwin’s son Daniel took it up. The Walker family recorded every single day for 23,691 days.

Daniel Walker made the final entry on Tuesday, June 27, 1893:

Went to the village with butter. Got 10 bushels of corn of Edm. Warren at 5-8cts/bushel. Got a rake and a scyth and —– for haying.

Why Daniel Walker stopped writing is unclear. Hubka speculates he had lost his optimism about the future of farming – like many farmers of that era.

Noah Blake was born on Farmers New Year in Connecticut in 1790. His parents gave him a diary on his 15^th birthday. With a crow quill and butternut ink, he wrote about helping his father build a bridge. He also wrote about the weather, a visit from a neighbor (“we drank mead and mint tea” and, maple sugaring. An entry on March 27, two days into the New Year, read,

27: Father was wrong about the weather, for it snowd again today. We kept within the house, sharping and making ready tools for the year’s farming.

In the next century, writer and illustrator Eric Sloan discovered Noah’s diary in a library book sale. Sloan then illustrated and published it as Diary of an Early American Boy, and it became one of his best-selling books.

Farmers New Year

Another typical farmer, Benjamin Harwood began his diary in Bennington, Vt., on the same day in 1805 as Noah Blake. Harwood started with a typical farm entry: “Prun’d my Orchard–” Harwood’s son’s diaries were also published as a book.

Farmers weren’t the only ones who kept diaries in early New England. In A Midwife’s Tale, historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich writes daybooks were also kept by craftsmen, shopkeepers, ship’s captains and perhaps a very few housewives. Maine midwife Martha Ballard started one when she was 50 years old. She made 10,000 entries in the diary she kept for 27 years.

An entry in Martha Ballard’s day book

(You can search Marta Ballard’s diary entries here.)

On March 25, 1788, for example, she wrote:

Clear & Cold. mr Woodward & his wife here. They Broke their Sleigh Coming Down the hill. I went to to [sic] mr Williamss to See Patty. Shee has a swelling on her throat.

Diarists

Joshua Hempstead of New London, Conn., was perhaps the granddaddy of New England farm diarists. He began his day book on Sept. 8, 1711, and kept it for 47 years.

Joshua Hempstead’s house

On March 25, 1745, Hempstead stayed home, pruned his orchard and paid down a debt.

Mond 25 fair. I was about home all day. I pruned Some appletrees near ye house [and] I pd Mr Gilberts 8. in pat of ye 25. due more 17.

Samuel Lane of Stratham, N.H., — farmer, tanner, shoemaker — enumerated his blessings in his diary when he was 75. On Nov. 21, 1793, a public day of Thanksgiving, he wrote:

The Life & health of myself and family, and also of so many of my Children, grand Children and great grandchildren; also of my other Relations and friends & Neighbors, for Health peace and plenty amongst us.
for my Bible and Many other good and Useful Books, Civil & Religious Privileges, for the ordinances of the gospel; and for my Minister.
for my Land, House and Barn and other Buildings, & that they are preserv’d from fire & other accidents.
for my wearing Clothes to keep me warm, my Bed & Bedding to rest upon.
for my Cattle, Sheep & Swine & other Creatures, for my support.
for my Corn, Wheat, Rye Grass and Hay; Wool, flax, Cider, apples, Pumpkins, Potatoes, Cabbages, turnips, Carrots, Beets peaches and other fruits.
For my Clock and Watch to measure my passing time by Day and by Night,Wood, Water, Butter, Cheese, Milk, Pork, Beef, & fish, &c
for Tea, Sugar, Rum, Wine, Gin, Molasses, pepper, Spice & Money for to bye other Necessaries and to pay my Debts & Taxes &c.
for my Leather, Lamp oil & Candles, Husbandry Utensils, & other tools of every sort &c &c &c.

Bless the Lord O my soul and all that is within me Bless his holy Name.

This story updated in 2026.

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The Bates Bedspread of Maine, America’s Favorite Counterpane

The Bates Bedspread, once found in nearly every household, has links to presidents, First Ladies, a famous midwife and countless women who wove white candlewick counterpanes in their own homes.

Though the first Bates Bedspread first sold in 1940, its American ancestors date to the 18^th century. George Washington gave Martha Custis the prototype for the bedspread as a wedding gift. Little did he know the precedent he was setting — or that the giant textile mills that made the bedspread named after him would employ more people than any other company in Maine.

1950 Bates Bedspread ad.

A Bates Bedspread advertisement wasn’t far off the mark when it claimed,

Garlands and stylized flowers with a richly looped hand-woven look make this aristocratic bedspread truly an heirloom.

Candlewicking

Whitework embroidered bedspreads were fashionable when George and Martha tied the knot in 1759, but they became even more popular from about 1800 to 1840. In those days, having a fine white candlewick counterpane helped maintain one’s social standing.

In many places, the way to have an early American version of the Bates Bedspread was to make one yourself.

Candlewicking

Cloth was hard to get, especially on the frontier. Women had to pick, spin, comb, dye and card flax, wool and cotton. Cotton was bought by the pound in early America, according to historian Alice Morse Earle. Women picked out the seeds one by one, carded it on wool cards, then spun into thread.

In Hallowell, Maine (then part of Massachusetts), Martha Ballard wrote in her diary that she had carded cotton on July 27, 1786. Ballard, made posthumously famous by Laurel Thacher Ulrich in A Midwife’s Tale, didn’t weave the cotton cloth herself; she took her spun cotton to her neighbor, Mr. Edson, to be woven.

Carding and Spinning

Most women back then spent endless hours carding and spinning. In 1790, 15-year-old Elizabeth Fuller started a diary from her home on a farm in Princeton, Mass. Entry after entry describes making cloth. “I spun two skeins today” and “I wove five yards today” were typical. In the spring of 1792, she wove for two months solid and estimated she produced 140 yards of cloth.

Some women were expert enough to make candlewicking bedspreads on home looms.

In candlewicking, large running stitches are sewn into a pattern on unbleached white muslin and passed over a small twig. The twig is later removed and the fabric shrunk in hot water, which holds the stitches in place. It gets its name from the soft cotton thread that’s also used as a candle wick.

Elizabeth Perkins Wildes Bourne made one (and probably more) on her loom in Kennebunk, Maine. Her daughter, Abigail Wildes, wove a poem into a coverlet she sent to First Lady Dolley Madison in 1809.

Benjamin Bates

Benjamin Bates, born July 12, 1808, grew up on a farm in Mansfield, Mass. He was the son of a Yankee farmer, merchant and maker of cotton cloth – probably on a home loom.

The Bates Mill complex, home of the Bates Bedspread

He moved to Boston, went into the dry goods business and made a public profession of his Congregationalist faith. He prospered and became the president of the First National Bank of Commerce in Boston, the Union Pacific Railroad and the Lewiston Water Power Company, which built the first canal in Lewiston.

The canal allowed water power to run the machinery in the textile mills that Bates’ money would soon build. Until then, weaving cloth had been a home-based profession. In 1810, for example, 88 percent of the households in Topsham, Maine, told census takers they made cloth. More than half had looms, and some loom owners, like Martha Ballard’s Mr. Edson, wove cloth for their neighbors.

Bates was the biggest investor in the Bates Mill, which opened in 1854. The company eventually built 11 buildings between 1852 and 1923.

Before the Civil War broke out, Bates bought cotton and produced uniforms for the Union Army. He contributed $100,000 to the Maine State Seminary, which renamed itself Bates College without his knowledge. The first girls to graduate from Bates College paid for their own education by working at the mills.

The Bates Bedspread

The Bates Manufacturing Company wove its first basic Bates bedspread in 1858. Almost 60 years later, in 1915, Bates expanded and bought new kinds of looms to make Jacquards, crochets, satins, brocades, damasks and Ripplette.

The company grew and grew, and for many years the enormous Bates Mill complex employed more people than any other employer in Maine.

First Yankee farm girls worked at the mills. Then came Francophile Canadians and Irish fleeing the potato famine. No wonder then, why one mill building has a shamrock on one wall, a fleur-de-lis on the other.

Sometime in the 1930s, a Bates representative touring Mount Vernon was impressed with the bedspread George Washington gave Martha. The rep realized such an item could sell, as the colonial revival was at its peak.

The Bates rep also thought the Lewiston mills could make Martha Washington’s counterpane. So Bates designers went to work collecting samples of the antique spreads, visiting Mount Vernon and scouring museums and libraries for information about candlewicking.

Washington’s Choice

After experimenting for two years, Bates produced the first of the legendary Bates Bedspreads and called it George Washington’s Choice. It was made on a specially designed loom in January 1939. The company put the first Bates Bedspread on sale in March 1940.

It didn’t sell. But Bates added a double-knot fringe and made a few adjustments, and the Bates Bedspread caught on. It became a favorite wedding and anniversary gift in the 1940s and 1950s. Like the whitework embroidered counterpanes of the early 19^th century, it was a status symbol – and more. “Loomed to be Heirloomed” was the apt slogan.

Each Bates Bedspread had a ‘pedigree’ at one end of each bedspread that tells its size, style, year of production and loom number. New Bates Bedspreads were later introduced, such as the Abigail Adams and Queen Elizabeth.

Weavers worked seven days a week making Bates Bedspreads, but they couldn’t keep up with demand. It its heyday, 200,000 Bates Bedspreads were sold each year.

Poppy Shills for Bates

In 1948, a future president of the United States made his appearance in a Bates ad. George Bush and his new bride Barbara posed with Joan Walls of Bennington to show that Bates’ fine fabrics were perfect for the discriminating college student. The caption above the photo reads,

Victoria. Chosen by Barbara and George ‘Poppy’ Bush of Yale, and admired by Joan Walls of Bennington. Joan and Barbara wear easy-to-sew campus fashions in Bates cotton. Young marrieds on campus make Bates the beautiful basis of a long-range decorating plan. Indispensable at college, these bedspreads and matching draperies stay fresh and bright through four years of wear and washing. After graduation, they are ready to grace a future bedroom or living room.

(You can see the ad here.)

Decline

As New England’s textile industry moved South, and then overseas, the Bates Bedspread kept the Lewiston mills humming.

By 1990, the 50^th anniversary of the first Bates Bedspread, demand dropped off and only about 35,000 a year were sold. Fred Lebel, Bates’ executive vice president, told the Lewiston Sun-Journal the reason was that so many people had them and didn’t need new ones.

But then he conceded competitors were producing cheaper quality versions of the Bates Bedspread and hurting sales.

In 1992, the City of Lewiston took possession of the Bates Mill Complex after years of unpaid taxes.

Dalton, Georgia

When Bates came up with the first George Washington’s Choice, the company claimed candlewicking was a lost art. Actually it had been thriving in northwest Georgia in a small city called Dalton.

Dalton, which called itself “The Bedspread Capital of the World,” was home to a flourishing cottage industry of tufted cotton products. From the 18^th century, women made tufted cotton bedspreads for their own use.

After World War I, Dalton entrepreneurs set up roadside stands selling chenille robes and bedspreads for tourists driving south along Highway 41, known as Bedspread Boulevard. Later, thousands of men, women and children in Dalton would work on bedspreads at home for national distributors.

In 1942, the Dalton News reported that an early version of a Bates Bedspread from Dalton, Ga., had made a splash when displayed at ‘one of the national bedspread marts.

According to the Dalton News, J.T. Bates of Bates Bedspread Company owned an antique candlewick spread. His great-grandmother, Eva Deck, made it in 1789. Deck was 16 when she picked the cotton, spun the thread and tufted the bedspread. The newspaper considered it less beautiful than the Bates Bedspreads her great-grandson’s company sold. J.T. Bates said he would sell

…any other spread for much less than he would this old heirloom, in fact this one is not for sale.

With thanks to Ashley Callahan in Southern Tufts: The Regional Origins and National Craze for Chenille Fashion. This story was updated in 2026.

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