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Hallowell Maine

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 they 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 2023.

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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.

1950 Bates Bedspread ad.

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.

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. The 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 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

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 made by his great-grandmother, Eva Deck, 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 2023.

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Caleb Haskell Reports a Murder on Arnold’s Expedition to Quebec

Caleb Haskell, like all the soldiers who followed Benedict Arnold on his failed expedition to capture Quebec, suffered all kinds of hardship: cold, wet, hunger, hard physical labor and, in one case, murder. In his diary, Caleb Haskell reported the killing almost as an afterthought.

Detail of 1795 map overlaid with Arnold’s expedition route. A Cambridge; B Newburyport; C Fort Western; D Fort Halifax; E Great Carrying Place; F Height of Land; G Lake Megantic. Courtesy Boston Public Library.

Lothrop Withington, who edited the published version of Haskell’s diary, explained in the introduction:

The soldier who struggled through the forests of the upper Kennebec, who lived upon the scanty remnants of a canine carcass, who lay at death’s door within a pest house, who stood in the besieging trenches amid the snows of a Canadian winter, and did the bidding of such a driving master as Benedict Arnold, hurrying from place to place, had little time for graphic story telling on the line of march and field of combat.

Arnold’s men traveled 350 miles – twice as far as they planned — through poorly charted wilderness in what is now Maine. They endured grueling portages up the Kennebec River. Their boats leaked, their gunpowder ruined, their food scarce. By the time Arnold reached the French settlements above the St. Lawrence River, he had only 600 starving men.

Caleb Haskell had enlisted as a soldier in the American Army in Newburyport, Mass. in May 1775. He marched to Cambridge, participated in the Siege of Boston and survived the Battle of Bunker Hill unscathed. Then he marched back to Newburyport with Arnold, boarded one of 11 transport ships and set sail for what is now Maine on Sept. 19, 1775.

On Sept. 23, they landed in Hallowell, Maine. The next day they marched to Fort Weston, where they camped. “Several of the companies have no tents here,” wrote Haskell. “We are very uncomfortable, it being rainy and cold and nothing to cover us.” Then he mentioned someone shot someone else in camp and the wounded man died the next day.

On September 25th, Caleb Haskell wrote:

This morning I was on quarter guard. A Court Martial sat on the trial of the murder, brought him in guilty and sentenced him to be hung.

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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.

This story was updated in 2023.

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Hallowell Maine

When Farmers New Year Began on March 25

Day By Day

Farmers New Year

Diarists

The Bates Bedspread of Maine, America’s Favorite Counterpane

Candlewicking

Carding and Spinning

Benjamin Bates

The Bates Bedspread

Washington’s Choice

Poppy Shills for Bates

Decline

Dalton, Georgia

Caleb Haskell Reports a Murder on Arnold’s Expedition to Quebec

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

Martha Ballard

Better Than a Doctor?

Martha Ballard, Midwife

Chores, Too

The Diary Ends

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