Dan's Blog Feed

Minnesota Atheists talk

user@domain.com — 2013-05-21T15:01:10-05:00

I took a couple of days away from farmwork over the weekend, and visited the Twin Cities for the first time in a decade. The Minnesota Atheists invited me to speak about Dr. Charles Knowlton and my new book An Infidel Body-Snatcher and the Fruits of His Philosophy at their monthly meeting. The meeting was well-attended, and nearly everyone had comments or questions after the talk. Just the type of audience a speaker hopes for! And I sold quite a few books.

In the morning before the meeting, I had a chance to do a live Atheist Talk radio interview with Scott Lohman, the President of Humanists of Minnesota. This was my first experience with live radio, but I think it went pretty well. You can stream the program here, and I think the audio will also be posted on iTunes soon. It was a good weekend! I’m a bit tired from the 8 hours of driving, but I met a lot of new friends, and I’m looking forward to visiting again at the end of the summer for the MN Atheists annual conference.

Terry Davis likes my Book!

user@domain.com — 2013-03-30T10:38:18-05:00

I got an email from my writing mentor, Terry Davis, today. Terry is the author of Vision Quest (which became a hit movie in 1985 with Matthew Modine and Linda Fiorentino), If Rock and Roll Were a Machine, and Mysterious Ways. Terry was also a writing teacher (he’s retired now) in the MFA program at Minnesota State University in Mankato, where I took a couple of writing workshops with him around 2006. I might never have considered writing for publication without Terry’s advice and encouragement. So I was pretty happy to get this reaction to An Infidel Body-Snatcher and the Fruits of His Philosophy:

The prose is so smooth and conversational that the text sails on by. And what you're writing ABOUT is so valuable and timely that to make it as accessible as you do is a real service to our culture. If "culture WAR" is an accurate description of what's going on, then this is powerful weapon for the good guys.

Thanks, Terry!

Publishing this week?

user@domain.com — 2013-03-11T09:40:16-05:00

Counting down the days, now.

There are still a couple of small changes that I need to see, before the book is DONE, and ready to go up on Amazon. But they’re small, and they won’t take much longer.

In the meantime, the people who have seen the book seem to like it. I got some great blurbs for the back, and I hope to get a couple more. If they don’t all fit on the back cover, they’ll all fit on the webpage!

Published and available TODAY!

user@domain.com — 2013-03-14T17:49:20-05:00

An Infidel Body-Snatcher and the Fruits of His Philosophy is the story of a freethinker. Charles Knowlton called himself a “free enquirer”—his enemies called him an “Infidel.” Knowlton was also a “Body-Snatcher.” As a medical student, Charles Knowlton stole corpses to dissect. Charles was caught and convicted, and served time in jail.

After a troubled youth, Knowlton became a doctor and wrote America's first birth control book, Fruits of Philosophy, in 1831. He was convicted and imprisoned for that as well—this time with hard labor. Charles was an outsider for most of his life, fighting religious and social conformity. This is a true story about why outsiders are important, and what they can achieve.

Growing up surrounded by superstition and hypocrisy, Charles developed an unswerving dedication to finding and telling the truth. If the truth he’d found was opposed by authorities in the church and government, Charles went ahead and told it anyway. This is a true story about the power of integrity.

It’s also an adventure story, full of conflict, drama, humor, and a little horror. Charles Knowlton led an unusual life; it gave him a radical outlook and led him to develop a unique personal philosophy. But it was what Charles did with this outlook—the fruits of his philosophy—that really mattered. This is a true story about how experiences become ideas, and how ideas become actions.

What are people saying?

"Charles Knowlton, doctor, freethinker, and early advocate of contraception, is best remembered for his manual on birth control, ‘The Fruits of Philosophy’, which appeared in 1832 and which led to his prosecution and imprisonment. This superb biography of Knowlton by Dan Allosso, the first ever to be published, is based on the most thorough research and written with admirable clarity and understanding. This is a biography to be enjoyed by every lover of freethought."
---Bryan Niblett, Author of Dare to Stand Alone: The Story of Charles Bradlaugh

"This is really great. I love reading about my home town -- no one ever writes about Greenfield, Massachusetts. And I love the rich guy excommunicating the church. How hip is that?"
---Penn Jillette, Author of God, No!

"History isn’t always made by Great Persons engineering Great Compromises. Sometimes society moves forward because a common man or woman takes up a radical cause and pursues it without regard to consequences. Charles Knowlton was such a man, undeservedly ignored by mainstream historians. Dan Allosso’s capable new biography of Knowlton illuminates the promise – and the pitfalls – of radical social change pursued from society’s rank and file."
---Tom Flynn, Editor, FREE INQUIRY Magazine

"An interesting, engaging, and at times fascinating account of a little-known American hero. Dan Allosso has soundly crafted an excellent biography."
---Phil Zuckerman, PhD, Author of Faith No More: Why People Reject Religion

Thomas Paine’s books

user@domain.com — 2013-02-14T10:04:08-06:00

When he died, Charles Knowlton had two volumes of Thomas Paine in his library. The first that appears in the estate inventory was listed as “Paines Theological Works” and valued at fifty cents. The second, titled “Paines Political Works,” was valued at one dollar.

While it’s impossible to be certain exactly what editions of these books Knowlton owned, we can make educated guesses. Knowlton died in 1850, so all the volumes he owned would have been printed prior to that, and less valuable ones were probably older. An edition of the “Political Works” was printed in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1826 by Tannatt and Company, under the supervision of Peter Raynolds. This book contains The Rights of Man, Common Sense, The Crisis, and three letters written by Paine. Paine’s writings are preceded by a Biographical Sketch that seeks to rehabilitate Thomas Paine and undo the damage done to his reputation by earlier biographies (primarily the books by George Chalmers printed in London in 1792 and by James Cheetham printed in New York in 1809). The text of this biographical sketch seems similar but not identical to one written by W. T. Sherwin in 1819 and published by Sherwin’s friend Richard Carlile in London. It was common practice in the era before international copyright regulations for publishers on one side of the Atlantic to liberally plagiarize unprotected foreign books. So the Springfield edition probably owes a lot to Carlile’s London volumes on Paine, which were famous not only for repopularizing Paine but also for landing Carlile and several of his allies in jail for sedition and blasphemy.

There doesn’t seem to be a Springfield volume of Thomas Paine’s theological writings, possibly because they were aggressively anti-clerical and Peter Raynolds was a minister. To be fair, though, the Preface to the “Political Works” which was probably written by Raynolds gives full credit to Paine as “one of the principal founders of the American Republic.” “Had the author of Common Sense been wanting,” Raynolds says, “it is probable that our beloved country would have been, at this time, groaning under the sickly and senseless pageant of monarchy, instead of enjoying the choicest blessings of liberty.”

Since there is no Springfield edition of “Paines Political Works,” and since its value is half that of the other Paine book, I suspect Knowlton had an older volume, possibly the 1819 Richard Carlile edition (or a pirated copy printed in America). Knowlton had free thinker friends in Boston and New York such as Abner Kneeland, Robert Dale Owen, and Frances Wright, who were all publishers, and of course Owen and Wright were British. So it’s equally possible that Charles Knowlton had either a pretty faithful copy of Carlile’s edition, or the real thing.

I mention this because it helps establish the really close relationship between American and British freethought in the first half of the nineteenth century. As I’ve mentioned, I think this is an element of the story that is missing from Susan Jacoby’s two recent books on freethinkers. My biography of Knowlton will begin to address this, and my biography of Charles Bradlaugh will continue the process for the second half of the nineteenth century.

Map of "Knowlton Country"

user@domain.com — 2013-02-12T08:01:48-06:00

This is a portion of an 1832 map of New England, published by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. I’ve highlighted the towns that are important in Charles Knowlton’s story. The only major place I left off was New York City, because if I included it, it meant including all of Connecticut – which made the labels a little harder to read.

The whole Knowlton story happens on what we might think of as a really small area of land, mostly within the borders of Massachusetts. We should remember, though, that Charles Knowlton often travelled between these various places (including Hanover, New Hampshire) on foot. Later in his life, he travelled on horseback. But even so, we’re talking about four to five miles an hour.

Coming Soon!

user@domain.com — 2013-02-10T09:36:46-06:00

I’ve been offline lately, locked away, writing. Here’s the result.

An Infidel Body-Snatcher and the Fruits of His Philosophy is on its way! I’ve finished the all-important major draft. Now I’m working on revisions, editing, and formatting. The finished product will probably be ready in the next month to six weeks.

Here’s the seventeenth revision of the cover, by my lovely bride, Steph:

Batman

user@domain.com — 2012-12-09T13:21:34-06:00

I finally saw The Dark Knight Rises last night. I really wanted to like it. Didn't. (spoilers)

If a billionaire loses his entire fortune in the options market, and all the trades just happen to coincide with an armed strike on the exchange, don't you think they'd figure out something wasn't quite right?

If a young kid who becomes a cop can recognize the anger behind Bruce Wayne's smile and know he's the Batman, how come no one has a clue who the child of Ra's Al Ghul really is? Even after sleeping with her?

The one thing I did like was the chalking of the batman symbol everywhere. The attempt to understand the "coming storm" at least slightly in the context of the Occupy movement also had potential...

Chores

user@domain.com — 2012-12-08T11:28:15-06:00

Home alone — Steph and the kids are away visiting her folks. Chores this morning consisted of letting the dogs out a t first light (more or less), feeding them, eating a quick breakfast and then feeding the rest of the family. Cats got a brick of raw ground chicken, then the chickens got a bucket of sprouted sunflower seeds. The sheep and goats got a little sweet feed and some hay, out on their little loafing pasture. Then I “processed” the bucket of kitchen scraps I picked up at the restaurant last night. It consisted of a big pile of fat trimmings from “roast beef night” and a gallon or so of lettuce. That was the first course. The lower part of the bucket was also food prep materials; not too many bones to pick out (lunch seems to be the big bone producer — people order chicken wings and ribs a lot). They’ll get that batch this afternoon.

Feeding done, I split and hauled three loads of firewood, and stacked two of the loads indoors. The third is waiting in the wagon in the garage. It’s snowing now, so in case there’s a blizzard, I have a little extra. I also took advantage of the last chance before more snow-cover, to pack a couple more boxes of kindling, from the pile I left in the front yard when I cut down a nice pitchy dead pine last summer.

So the outdoor chores are pretty well complete for the day. The animals will get a little more food mid-afternoon, and then they’ll get put away in the evening; but none of that takes much time. So I have the rest of the day to do indoor work (finish the bathroom renovation, clean the garage, start building nesting boxes for the pullets, do some laundry) and to read & write. That last bit — the part that’s actually my “work” — needs to start getting a little more attention…

Oh yeah, and I need to read up on butchering chickens.

The history of our place in the universe

user@domain.com — 2012-12-04T09:12:23-06:00

Everyone is more or less aware that one of the major changes that began the European Enlightenment and brought about the modern world was the realization that the Earth was not the center of the universe. Through a series of discoveries, often fiercely opposed by protectors of the status quo, western cultures slowly embraced the idea that the universe is much bigger than we had previously believed. But maybe we ought to consider how recent many of these discoveries were, and how new information is coming to light almost daily that promises to remake our worldview all over again.

To review some of the big milestones on this journey of discovery, Renaissance astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus published his heliocentric theory, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, in 1543. Copernicus replaced the Earth with the Sun as center of the solar system, but the universe was still a smallish place, extending only to Saturn and the “fixed stars” which had been known since prehistoric times. The next planet, Uranus, was discovered by William Herschel in 1781, while his countrymen were fighting to retain their thirteen rebel colonies in America. Neptune was discovered in 1846, based on mathematical predictions made by Urbain Le Verrier to explain observed perturbations in the Uranian orbit (this was also a dramatic confirmation of Newton’s theories of gravity). But again, although our gaze had widened to include the solar system and the Milky Way, the background of more distant stars which had once been thought to all inhabit a single “sphere,” the

universe was still pretty small and we were at its center. (Illustration is the shape of our Galaxy as deduced from star counts by William Herschel; the solar system was assumed near center, as first published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1785)

Although Immanuel Kant had speculated in the eighteenth century that the Milky Way might be an “island universe,” in April, 1920, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis debated the structure of the universe at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. Shapley insisted that the Milky Way was the whole universe, while Curtis argued that observations of the “Andromeda Nebula” suggested it was separate from and far away from the Milky Way, which he believed was only one “island universe” among many. The existence of galaxies was finally settled by Edwin Hubble in the early 1920s, and in 1929 Hubble published his Redshift Distance law of Galaxies (now called simply Hubble’s Law), which for the first time suggested the true physical scale and immense age of the universe.

In 1930, Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto, and in 2005 a team led by M. E. Brown discovered Eris, a Trans-Neptunian Object larger than Pluto that would certainly have been hailed as the tenth planet if Pluto had not already been demoted. By 1936, when Hubble published his classification system for galaxies, we understood that the universe was much larger and much older than we had ever imagined. But we were still unique and special, many believed, because we were the only known solar system and the only place in the universe that harbored life.

Nobel physicist Enrico Fermi, in an informal discussion in 1950, suggested what has come to be known as the Fermi Paradox: if the universe is so old and so big, where is everyone? Outside science-fiction circles, however, Fermi’s question has been largely ignored. It was still possible, until the last year or so, to believe that even in a nearly unimaginably big and old universe, Earth was the oasis of life. Very recent discoveries make this belief much less tenable.

Over the last few years, astronomers have begun searching for and finding planets circling distant stars. At first, most of these “exo-planets” were gas giants many times larger than Jupiter. But as the technology (primarily space-based telescopes and earth-bound computer processing power) improved, they began to find rocky planets not much larger than Earth. To date, astronomers have mapped the locations of hundreds of exo-planets, with thousands of possibilities waiting to be examined. Even the Alpha Centauri system, our nearest stellar neighbor, is now known to have a planet only 113% the size of Earth.

The planet circling Alpha Centauri B is not Earth 2.0, however. It is too close to its star, so the surface temperature is much too high. In addition to believing the Milky Way was the entire universe, Harlow Shapley postulated “habitable zones” surrounding different types of stars, where liquid water could exist on a planet’s surface. Astronomers have generally regarded earth-like planets as the ideal places for life to develop, although some dissenters have pointed out that pressure as well as temperature influences the behavior of water, and there is ice on Mercury. So Shapley may have been wrong about this too, and the parameters for liquid water may be wider than just “Earth-like” worlds. But even if we restrict our search for possible havens of life to rocky planets in their stars’ habitable zones, these have now been located. And we’ve only scratched the surface.

On average, astronomers have now concluded, there are 1.6 planets for every star in our galaxy. This is news – give it a moment to sink in. Even the astronomers were surprised. There are about 100 billion stars in the Milky Way. And there may be as many “rogue planets” drifting around on their own, not associated with any particular star. There are hundreds of billions of galaxies in the observable universe. But don’t take my word for it; I’m a historian not an astronomer. Check out the links to Space Fan News, produced by the Space Telescope Science Institute’s astronomer Tony Darnell. Tony does an incredible job distilling all the latest astronomy and astrophysics headlines into weekly videos on his You Tube channel. In one of my favorites, he sums up the discoveries of the last few months: “that comes out to tens of billions of Earth-size planets that could have liquid water, in our galaxy.”

Most of these revolutions in our understanding of our place in the universe have taken some time to filter out of scientific circles. But they have also been contentious, especially when scientific discoveries challenged widely held beliefs and dogmas. I wonder, in light of all the harm religion has done to our search for the truth (and to many of the individuals who searched!), why historians are currently so fascinated with the history of religion. It’s the hot new field, if books, articles, and professional blogs are any evidence. The Historical Society, which I’m a member of, for example, has received a grant of over $1 million to sponsor a program and book on “Religion and Innovation in Human Affairs.” Seems like somebody out there ought to say something about the ways religion has hindered innovation, to balance all the papers that are sure to be written about how faith and progress are the best of friends. But even aside from the history of science and religion, I wonder whether this underlying issue of where we see ourselves in the universe has influenced how we do history. I suppose (since it’s not my period) the change from a Ptolemeiac to a Copernican worldview altered the way historians approached their work. Maybe that’s all implicated in modernism, but I wonder about the relationship between an expanding view of the universe and how we think of history. And I wonder what effect the discovery of life (intelligent or not) off Earth would have. But yeah, I guess really what I’m wondering is what it will take for people to give up on their religious dogmas? Or is it really a case of Credo quia absurdum (“I believe because it is impossible”)?

Animal Portraits

user@domain.com — 2012-11-30T09:50:26-06:00

Steph started photoshopping old-time portraits of some of our animals. I think they’re great! Can’t wait to see them on the walls in antique frames! (Update: Dan did the rooster)

The Kansas Gold Rush

user@domain.com — 2012-11-29T11:48:08-06:00

Kansas! For most East and West-coasters, it’s one of those flyover states. Even for Midwesterners like me, it’s most frequently remembered as a long flat stretch of driving, on the way to someplace else. With apologies to Kansans, for many other Americans Kansas is either a band from the 70s (“Point of Know Return,” remember? “Dust in the Wind”?), the gray place Dorothy lived before being swept into Technicolor Oz, or the scene of a bloody civil war that helped push the nation over the brink between the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act and statehood in 1861.

So I was surprised today, when I discovered in a January, 1859 Ranney Letter that “more than two hundred persons in this county” in southern Michigan were planning to go to Kansas in search of gold the following summer. It hadn’t occurred to me – maybe because I’m familiar with the flat, drive-through Kansas you can see on current maps – that the Nebraska and Kansas Territories extended to the Rocky Mountains and contained quite a bit of what is now Colorado and Wyoming, as well as a big section of the northern foothills (including the Black Hills) that in 1861 would become the Dakota Territory.

In other words, Gold Country. Between 1854 and 1861, Kansas and Nebraska were part of The West in a way they no longer are. Fort Laramie, the site of the 1868 Treaty between the U.S. and the Lakota, Dakota, and Arapaho nations, was originally in the Nebraska Territory. Pikes Peak, now 100 miles south of Denver and 30 miles west of Colorado Springs, was in Kansas.

“How did I miss this?” I thought, with some alarm. But when I flipped through the pages of books from the “Western” part of my library, such as The Legacy of Conquest, I find a Kansas and Nebraska embroiled in Stephen Douglas’s expansionism. Similarly, on my “Impending Crisis” shelf, David Potter’s book of that name devotes many pages to the 1854 Act and to the Lecompton Constitution. But Lecompton is in the northeastern corner of present-day Kansas, and Stephen Douglas was from Illinois. The free-state revolutionaries of Topeka and the Bleeding Kansas border war with Missouri were likewise situated on the eastern borders of the present state.

On the pages of the Kansas Historical Society’s website, I learned that the people of Kansas were apparently divided in 1859 over whether their state should be a “Big Kansas” including the western gold region, or a “Little Kansas” without it. Kansas entered the Union in January, 1861, during the (extremely) lame-duck session between Abraham Lincoln’s election and his inauguration, with a population of 107,206. William Seward had introduced a bill in the Senate in February, 1860, to admit “Little Kansas” under its free-state Wyandotte Constitution, which fixed the border at 102 degrees west longitude, excluding the Rockies. The bill was defeated by Democrats who opposed Kansas as a free state; but they also objected to the “Little Kansas” borders, saying the Wyandotte convention had exceeded its authority in changing the territorial boundaries. Were they afraid that the country around Pikes Peak would soon have sufficient population (the target was 93,000) to become yet another free state?

It just goes to show, I guess, how much complex and interesting detail lies just under the surface of the broad brushstrokes we use to integrate local and regional histories into American History. The Kansas State Historical Society’s site includes a reprint of a 1967 article from their journal written by Calvin A. Gower of St. Cloud (MN) State University, titled “‘Big Kansas’ or ‘Little Kansas’,” which describes the Pikes Peak gold rush and the controversy over Kansas’ borders. We’re lucky to have more and more of these resources online at our fingertips. Does their availability obligate us to rethink the relationship between the broad strokes and the details – at least for the regions where we live, write, and teach?

Mandalas are Cool!

user@domain.com — 2012-11-27T11:05:51-06:00

Steph got a couple of toys in the mail the other day. They’re stencil kits for making paper mandalas, from the jigsaw-puzzle company Ravensburger. We got the “Classic” and “Romantic” 2-in-1 kits (which refers to the wheel within a wheel stencil). We’ve been drawing and coloring like crazy ever since.

The stencils are great and allow you to do a lot of neat designs. They’re especially good for people like me and G, who aren’t good freehand sketchers. G made a really elaborate ink design that he lightly colored with yellow – we’re going to have it printed on a shower curtain for the renovated upstairs bathroom.

Mandalas of course have a long history as meditation focus devices and “microcosms of the universe from the human perspective.” There are plenty of applications that let you design them on the computer, which may be fun someday. But right now, the coolest thing about these kits is that we all sit together around the kitchen table, listening to music and sharing the wheels and colored pencils.

Red Meat

user@domain.com — 2012-10-31T10:09:34-05:00

I was thinking about writing a short post about all the academic history I’ve been finding at the bottom of some pretty popular books recently. Alfred Crosby’s ideas about the Colombian Exchange in Charles Mann’s 1491, for example. Or Vaclav Smil’s story of the Haber-Bosch process for fixing atmospheric nitrogen, from his Enriching the Earth, in Simon Fairlie’s 2010 book, Meat, A Benign Extravagance. Maybe it’s no coincidence that these are both canonical Environmental History texts (they were both on my field list, thanks to my advisor, Ted Melillo). Perhaps since their interest is on the edge of science, readers of popular books on environmental issues are more open to the fairly dense technical arguments. Maybe it’s easier to move ideas from academic books to popular. But I’m not so sure. Science writers often have a lot of skill taking excruciatingly complicated stuff and making it comprehensible to the rest of us. Michio Kaku, Brian Greene, Matt Ridley, and Colin Tudge are just a few of the names that jump to mind. Richard Dawkins was Oxford’s “Professor for Public Understanding of Science” until 2008. We could probably learn a thing or two from these authors.

And Simon Fairlie’s book is part of this tradition. Fairlie is a British farmer and writer, and a former editor of the British environmental journal The Ecologist. His book about meat’s place in the food chain draws heavily on Vaclav Smil’s work on nitrogen fixation, and digs a little more deeply into the downside of the green revolution Smil describes. But the thing that really jumped out at me as I read Meat was Fairlie’s response to the famous food-mile study that surprised us all a few years ago.

You may recall the article “Food Miles and the Relative Climate Impacts of Food Choices in the United States,” written by Christopher L. Weber and H. Scott Matthews of Carnegie Mellon for Environmental Science & Technology in 2008. It made headlines outside of the science community because they concluded that “eating local” was not a very good way to reduce greenhouse gases. Eliminating red meat from your diet one day a week, they said, would reduce your carbon footprint more than going 100% local. This came as a shock to many people who had embraced local farms and markets as a way of living more sustainably. I was TA-ing an Environmental History course when the article became a news item, so I had my students read it and discuss.

There are a number of possible responses to a claim like this, and the students were able to see many of them. They pointed out the social benefits of farmers’ markets and local food, the fact that most Americans get their meat from feedlot-style animal husbandry*, and they concluded that they might get even better results if they did both rather than choose to be local or to be part-time vegetarians. Fairlie touches on each of these points, and then he drops his bomb. What the study doesn’t deal with – what we overwhelmingly urban Americans routinely fail to see when we look at the local question – is on the back end. The issue isn’t raising food and getting it to market. The issue is, getting the waste back to the farm.

Throughout history, there has been a rough symmetry between the input and output sides of agriculture and life. Food came out of the earth; crop residues, manure, and even human waste went back in. Then came the era of flush toilets, food miles, and landfills. Industrial fertilizers now fill in for the nutrients that came from all that missing waste, but they cost a lot, they run off into our water, and they don’t keep the ground from compacting and eroding the way organic material does. And assuming for a moment that either soaring global demand or peak oil is going to push the price of energy way up in the future, it’s easy to see that the days of cheap nitrogen may be numbered. So Fairlie’s point is an important one: if we don’t account for getting waste back to the farm, we’re ignoring a big factor in the true cost equation.

Economists have a word for this. The things we ignore in our models and analyses are called “externalities.” At first, they’re left out because they’re either difficult to price (like airport noise in the 1950s) or because they’re ubiquitous and “free” (like rivers and the ocean used as sewers in the 19th century). Later, they’re ignored because they raise difficult questions about private ownership and public responsibility that free-market ideology would rather bypass. And sometimes it takes someone like Fairlie, who lives on a farm, to remind the city-folk that just because you flushed your toilet or dragged your trash to the curb, the story isn’t over. I personally suspect that all our problems arise from ignoring externalities. Sounds like another book project…

But maybe you have to be 2/3 of the way through Fairlie’s book and already buying into his vision, for this to be a powerful “Aha!” moment. I may not have done justice to it here. Read the book as an example of how cutting-edge Environmental History can be turned into a best-seller, and you’ll also discover Fairlie’s answer to Garrett Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons.”

* I asked the authors about grass-fed beef and other sources of “red” meat, and Weber responded to my email, saying that “other red meats than corn fed beef do have the same high emissions” because of the methane-producing effect of digesting grass and the typically longer lifetimes of sheep and goats. So in the view of these scientists it’s not just a feedlot issue.

Lately across the web...

user@domain.com — 2012-10-19T14:10:23-05:00

Ranney Letter #24 Lucius writes to Henry in the fall of 1853. After the customary apology for not writing sooner, Lucius says he delayed because he knew Lewis had written in September. Like Lewis, Lucius says writing is difficult: he would “rather do a days work anytime than to write a letter.” Read More

Greenhouse No More! The greenhouse became a chicken play-yard today. It was becoming too difficult to keep the birds on their side of the structure, and protect the seedlings. We put up five feet of chicken wire, but they managed to find ways around it. So I’m giving up on the winter garden for this year…Read More

Blueberries When I read old books like Bolton Hall’s Three Acres and Liberty, I’m always on the lookout for references to other books, or to topics that were relevant when the book was written, but that may not be well known now. These sometimes lead in new and surprising directions. Read More

More Bolton Hall I was really interested in this book, as I mentioned a week or so ago. My reaction after reading the whole thing is mixed, but is a little bit typical of my reaction to everything from the Progressive Era, and for that matter, to the Era itself. Read More

New Ranney Letters website

user@domain.com — 2012-10-09T15:15:56-05:00

I’ve set up a new website for these Ranney Letters, so I’ll probably start posting highlights here. Check it out!

In late summer, 1847, Henry’s nephew Frederick T. Ranney writes from Centreville Michigan, about 45 miles from Allen and seven miles from Florence. Frederick is Samuel Ranney’s son, born in 1820, who went out to Michigan when his father died in Phelps in 1837. He is apparently still in the peppermint oil business in Centreville, where mint planting continued through most of the nineteenth century. Frederick asks Henry to send him money for oil he had shipped the previous fall, to prevent him from having to sell property at a loss to pay his debts. The brothers in Michigan are apparently not able to help, although Frederick went to them first, which suggests that they would have helped if they could.

My transcription:

Sherman Aug the 28th 47
Dear Sir

I am obliged to call on you for the money on that Peppermint Oil that was sent last fall. I have some money to make out in a few days or sell property at a low price. Lucius nor Lewis cannot help me to money this fall therefore I shall expect it in a return letter. You must write on the receipt of this for time is short with me. Let me know what you can do.

Yours truly in haste,

F. T. Ranney
Centerville
St. Joseph Co.,
Michigan

Ranney Letter #4

user@domain.com — 2012-10-08T12:10:08-05:00

Lewis writes from Phelps New York in November 1843, where he is visiting family and friends after selling his peppermint oil in neighboring Lyons. He apologizes for not writing sooner, admitting, “I ought to have written a long time since but through the fall I occupy twenty hours in the twenty four a stilling, therefore I wanted the rest for sleep.” Lewis reports that he left Florence on 18 October. He passed through Allen, where their mother, Achsah Sears Ranney, and the rest of the family had already moved after their father George’s death in Phelps a year earlier.

Lewis and his partner Smith delivered 594 pounds of peppermint oil to a dealer named Franklin Wells in the neighboring town of Lyons, who had commercial contacts in New York City and elsewhere. Lyons at this time was actually the center of the lucrative peppermint oil business (but you’ll be able to read more about that when I finish my dissertation), although Henry Ranney in Ashfield still did some mint oil business through the 1860s, connecting friends and family in Michigan with dealers in Boston who also happened to be relatives by marriage. A lot of business was transacted in the nineteenth century along these lines of kinship and trust. The deal is an interesting one, because it suggests the long-term relationship that lies behind it. Lewis receives $2.00 per pound in advance, and then he is also entitled to the increase in the oil’s value if it appreciates in the market over the next eight months. Peppermint oil was easy to store, and the price was very volatile, so this was a clever way for dealers to get a steady supply of oil and prevent growers from hoarding it. And it wasn’t insignificant business: Lewis and his partner made nearly $1,200, and they planned to expand their planting to thirty acres in the spring. Apparently they drove the oil overland themselves, because Lewis plans to start for home as soon as there’s “good sleighing.”

The family was ill when Lewis passed through Allen, so he didn’t stay for a visit. But he reports that his mother is pleased with the move and is thinking of staying in Michigan permanently. Their eldest brother Alonzo, Lewis says, has sold his farm in Phelps and is thinking of moving to Michigan as well (in the end though, Alonzo remains in Phelps). Lewis then announces he is planning on buying land in Indiana, just outside Chicago. It is still possible to get parcels for the “government price” of $1.25 per acre, and Lewis has seen how land values have increased in Michigan. So he plans to speculate, and set the land aside “until time of need.” This is interesting, because it shows that land speculation was quite normal. Often historians portray land speculators as ruthless capitalists from the east, and some definitely were. But it’s important to realize that everybody understood that settlement pushed up land values, and everybody who was able took advantage of the opportunity.

Like Lucius, Lewis thanks Henry for the Massachusetts newspapers he has been sending. He closes by mentioning Alonzo Franklin’s two young sons, who want to be remembered to their uncle, and assuring Henry that “Frank’s folks are all well.”

My transcription:

Phelps, Nov 13th, 1843
Respected Brother,

I now being perfectly at leisure I indulge in writing to you. I acknowledge I ought to have written a long time since, but through the fall I occupied twenty hours in the twenty four a stilling, therefore I wanted the rest in sleep. But we will stop excuses. I started from Florence the eighteenth Oct. I passed through where Lucius is but did not stay but an hour. Mother had been quite sick with a kind of fever, ague, &c., but was getting much better when I was there. Began to look fresh again and sit up most of the time, and the next was Harrison. He was a shaking with the ague while I was there. Anson had a few shakes but was rugged again. The rest of them were all well. Priscilla’s health is much improved since going to Michigan. Lucius wrote down here a few days since in true back woods style, saying they were getting as tough as bears. Priscilla in particular.

We brought down 594 lbs oil we sold to Wells of Lyons at $2.00 in advance and the rise 8 months. We had a little over 600 lbs, we left a few lbs at home. I have been here about three weeks. I shall tarry until good sleighing and then go back.

Mother and the family seem to be well pleased with their situation and find many more privileges than they expected and the prospect of a permanent home.

Smith and myself intend planting thirty acres in the spring of mint. It is rather hard business, but I think it better than wheat.

Franklin has sold his place here and thinks some of going to Michigan when I go, and look him out a place. He gets seven hundred dollars. Three in the spring and then one hundred yearly.

I think I shall start back in about four weeks probably, before if sleighing is good. My health has been good since I wrote you last winter. I shall remain in Florence another year probably. Crops were generally good in Michigan this season, but rather a poor season for mint, it being dry through harvest time.

You can direct letters and papers to me at Florence in a few weeks again and they will meet a happy reception. I am also greatly obliged to you for the papers I have received from you the year past.

I intend buying a lot of land this spring in Indiana forty miles east of Chicago, of prairie land to lay until time of need. Lands can be purchased at government price in that vicinity.

Frank’s folks are all well. Henry and Horace are a knocking about the table. They want me to write something about them. I guess they are pretty good boys.

Nothing more this time.

Yours respectfully, H. S. Ranney
Lewis G. Ranney

Estates and Credit Reports

user@domain.com — 2012-10-06T11:10:53-05:00

In addition to simply reading the Ranney letters, a diligent historian would want to find out as much as possible about where they lived and about all the aspects of their lives for which there might be records. People were writing histories of places like Ashfield Massachusetts, Phelps New York, and Allen Michigan throughout the nineteenth century. In the case of Ashfield, it was already old by American standards, since the town was originally settled in the 1760s. The western New York and Michigan histories were partly about memorializing the pioneer period in those areas, especially as the pioneer generation started to age and die. So there’s a lot of good information on what it looked like and how people lived in these places.

Similarly, wills and estate inventories can often tell you a lot about the day to day lives of nineteenth century subjects. People would literally list all the property of the deceased and tally up the value. If we pay close attention, this allows us to know intimate details of people’s lives: how many shirts they had, what books they read, what type of animals they kept. Using these details, we can reconstruct a picture of their lives and fill the frame with the appropriate, real stuff, rather than just leaving it to some vague imaginary backdrop from historical movies we saw as kids.

The probate records for Ashfield are in the Franklin County Courthouse in Greenfield Massachusetts. People working in probate offices are usually focused on the present, because they spend most of their time helping people who come in with present-day needs. But they’re also usually aware that stashed away somewhere in the vault they have old documents that probably contain some interesting history. When I’ve visited these offices, the clerks and probate officers have always been very helpful and interested in what I’m finding.

In Greenfield I found Henry S. Ranney’s estate documents, and also George Ranney’s (Henry’s grandfather), which he wrote in 1819, three years before his death. George provides for his widow (his second wife, Alithea Patch), giving her one cow, three sheep, and all the furniture she brought to the marriage, plus the use of a third of his real estate for the rest of her life. He gives his eldest sons Samuel and Jesse a nominal fifty cents each, and gives the bulk of his estate to George “Jr.,” H. S. Ranney’s father. As mentioned earlier, it was fairly common practice in the nineteenth century to leave the bulk of the estate to the youngest son, who would be with the aging parents longest and would take care of them in their old age, long after older brothers had established households of their own.

I was also able to get in touch with the probate people in Ontario County New York, and get copies of the estates of Samuel Ranney, Roswell Ranney, and Alonzo Franklin Ranney (Henry’s oldest brother). Unfortunately, they did not have one for George Jr., possibly because he died suddenly, before writing a will (although there are sometimes documents for intestate estates, too). There’s interesting material in those, which I’ll get to when the time comes.

Another source of information, which fits into the chronology right about here, is a credit report done on Henry Ranney by a reporter for the R. G. Dun & Company credit agency in 1842-3. The credit reporting company had been established only a year earlier by Lewis Tappan (1788-1873, born in Northampton Massachusetts, most famous for his work as an abolitionist), so the entries in the 1842 ledger on the small company of “Cook and Ranney” are some of the earliest. For a really good introduction to the credit crisis of 1837 and the rise of reporting agencies, see Christopher Clark’s The Roots of Rural Capitalism, 1990. These records are much harder to get your hands on than wills and estate inventories, since the ledger books are held at the Baker Library at Harvard, where they’re a little picky about who they let in and they don’t let you photograph the pages. They’re big, heavy books, divided by region, with handwritten transcriptions of the reports sent in by field agents. This is what they say about Henry S. Ranney:

Ashfield, Cook & Ranney,

"Dec 22 '42 From the enquiries we've made...

R...clever young man...was clk to J. Bement. Can't learn that he or C have more than a few hundred $ worth of property. Has been suggested that they may be assisted by Levi Cook of NY but can't say with certainty.

11-43 C we presume is the son of Levi Cook who has not any property but he has a son doing business in NY who is reported to be wealthy.

The Rs of Ashfield are considered to be men of some but not large property.

We learned that they are reputed safe and doing good business.

Aug 43 Have no knowledge of the real position of this firm. Their reputation is that they are close young men but unless they are assisted by Levi Cook of NY we don't suppose they have much capital.

Aug 44 In fair credit.

Oct 15 47 Ages 34 and 30. In business 10 years. Good character business men credit and business fair. Worth 2 to 3,000. Considered good for engagements.

Ranney Letter #3

user@domain.com — 2012-10-05T12:30:27-05:00

Lucius writes his brother Henry again from Allen Michigan, April 1843. He apologizes for not writing sooner, and thanks Henry for sending newspapers. Apologies for tardiness will be a frequent part of these letters, showing that there’s an expectation among the brothers that their correspondence will be frequent and that letters will get timely responses. This expectation, added to Lucius’s remarks about money (“We have money enough due this fall in Phelps…”) and the fact that he continues to call Phelps home, suggest the brothers continue to consider themselves members of a geographically extended family rather than free agents. This connection continues, in spite of the fact that the brothers are now adults (Henry is 27 and Lucius has just turned 24) supporting themselves and building their own homes far from the family center in western New York.

Lucius tells Henry he has traded one of his lots of land for one with a better “situation,” which might mean that the land is better for farming, or that it’s closer to town. The new parcel has thirty-five “improved” acres, ready for planting. Lucius reports in detail how much he paid for the parcel and what he plans to do with the new land. Although he doesn’t mention this, it seems he traded evenly as far as acreage was concerned, since Lucius continues to live on this 160 acre farm the rest of his life and it is easy to find on old maps. Two eighty acre parcels in the bottom center of the map above (due south of the town of Allen) are marked as belonging to Lucius. Neither parcel has the stream on it that Lucius boasted of in his first letter, so that is apparently the parcel he traded (possibly it’s one of the parcels to the right of one of Lucius’s parcels on this map). It’s also possible to find the parcels on satellite photos. Although they’ve been subdivided into a half dozen smaller parcels, you can still see the shape of the old lot and section lines. This is the case across much of the Midwest — once you’re aware of it, the lines are easy to see on satellite images or out the window of a plane.

News of other family members is a feature in this letter, as it will be in most of the Ranney letters. Lucius tells of seeing Lewis, who has expanded his peppermint planting to fifty acres. This means he will probably distill at least 500 pounds of oil in the fall, and Lucius advises his brother to come out and buy it. This is not only evidence Lucius would like to see Henry (he mentions that a couple more times in this letter alone), but is a reminder that Henry Ranney is one of several Easterners who regularly buy the peppermint oil of Michigan farmers (there will be much more on this subject in my dissertation -- wherever I manage to complete it!). Trade between Western settlers and Eastern merchants frequently ran along these family lines, and was yet another tie binding the migrants with the folks who stayed behind.

In addition to farming, Lucius has gone into the Potash business. Potash is potassium carbonate, which is used for bleaching textiles, making glass, and most important, making soap. Potassium is also one of the major elements of agricultural fertilizers (which is more important now than it was then), and is now mined but in the nineteenth century was produced by soaking wood ashes on large vats (hence the name, pot ash). Until settlers reached the treeless plains of what we now call the Midwest, there were always trees to clear before the wheat could be planted. So potash was often the first product that could be shipped back to Eastern markets. Lucius says he has partnered with “one of Mrs. Baggerly’s Sons in Law.” The Baggerlys are not an Ashfield family, so this suggests that Henry is at least familiar with some of the people his family has met since they moved to Phelps.

Lucius remarks that the land around Allen is filling up fast. Forests are becoming wheat fields, and the value of land will rise quickly as the last parcels are settled. Then Lucius gives his brother some advice: he should find a wife. His description of Henry’s social life and his own frontier existence give an interesting glimpse at the different lifestyles lived by those in the East and West in 1843. Finally, Lucius asks for information on cousins from Ashfield. He has heard they were in Medina, about thirty-five miles away, and he would like to visit them if he was anywhere nearby. Once again, family — even extended family — is an important part of frontier life.

Note: In a postscript at the end, Lucius says “Excuse bad spelling writing &c.” As I’m transcribing these letters, I’m fixing some of the spelling and punctuation in order to make them easier for modern readers. That includes adding apostrophes to contractions and breaking long run-ons into separate sentences. But just so you don’t miss all the fun, in the PS Lucius actually wrote “Excuse bad speling writing &c.”

My transcription:

Allen April 30th 43
Henry Ranney

Dear Brother

I once more take my pen to write a few lines to inform you that I am well & ever have been in Michigan. I shall not apologize for not writing any sooner for I have not any except negligence to make. I suppose you are well are you not? I hear nothing in particular from you of late but receive papers from you quite often which I peruse with pleasure.

I traded one of my lots of land the other day for a lot with 35 acres improved House & Barn. I gave or rather agreed to give five Hundred Dollars in four yearly payments, the first next fall, & clear ten acres on the lot I let him have. I think the extra improvements are worth five Hundred Dollars & the situation of it is worth One Hundred Dollars more than the one I traded, so therefore you see that according to my estimation I have made $100. We have money enough due this fall in Phelps to make the first payment & shall with common luck raise enough wheat to pay the rest. I have six acres of wheat on the ground which bids fair for 100 bushels. I intend to clear 20 acres this summer & seed thirty to wheat. I have two as good lots of land for farming as there is in Michigan or anywhere else. If you doubt my word come out here and see which I hope you will this fall will you not?

As for Lewis I saw him a few weeks ago. He was well and is doing well I guess. He & his partner will have about 50 acres of mint to still this fall. You had better come out this fall & buy their oil. What is it worth now?

I wrote a letter home about two weeks since stating to our folks that I should probably be at home about the tenth of May. I suppose that they will move then to the West but shall write again today that I shall not return home until June for my business is such that I cannot leave at present. I want to plant about eight acres this spring & furthermore I am in the Potash business with a partner. One of Mrs Baggerly’s Son in Laws. We are a building a Pot-Ash this spring. We have made three tons & we find it profitable therefore we intend to follow the business.

This part of the country is settling fast. Where there was forests one year ago the same surface is now waving with wheat. The cars will run to Hillsdale Center this summer, six miles east from where this child is & then you can out here time in a hurry if you please.

We have had a hard winter for the past one for this country. Grain is pretty well up. Wheat is worth 62 cents per bushel corn 50 oats 37 potatoes 25 &c.

I shall give you a little advice, that is a man of your cloth & business ought to have a wife. Why? Because you are t home at night then and nothing to trouble your mind but someone to cheer up your drooping spirits. But you are now a hunting up a horse and then you are in trouble to know who to take to this party that ball that ride this circus &c. But it is different with me. Sometimes I should be at home at night & sometimes in the woods to where night would overtake me I should be obliged to stay. Now I am contented where ever I am, with a wife I should be discontented under such circumstances. Therefore you see the disadvantage I should labor under with one. But I don’t say that I shan’t have one.

Enough on that head. I want you should write as soon as you receive this or put it off till after I go East. I shall go about the first of June. I should like to meet you there or somewhere else very much. I do not know when I shall go to Ashfield if ever, but think I shall in the course of a year or two. If you see any of Uncle Jesse’s folks just ask them what part their girls live. When I am a traveling about I may go near them. If I do I should like to know it & go and see them. I have been through Medinah where I heard since one lived. Give my respects to all inquiring friends.

Yours in haste, Henry S. R.
Lucius Ranney
Excuse bad spelling writing &c.

Ranney Letter #2

user@domain.com — 2012-10-04T13:12:32-05:00

In May of 1842, 23-year-old Lucius writes to his older brother Henry of his arrival in Allen Michigan, after a 10 day journey from Phelps. He announces he has bought a quarter section (160 acres) of prime farmland for $148 cash and his wagon and team of horses. Lucius describes the property, listing the distances to neighbors and nearby towns, inventorying the trees and water on the parcel, and noting that the railroad will run only six miles from the property later in the year.

Lucius mentions that their brother Lewis came down to see him, but was unable to wait for him to arrive. Lewis had a farm in St. Joseph County, about fifty miles away, where he had continued a Ranney family tradition by being the first farmer to successfully grow peppermint. Lucius also says their father is “very low” and that although their parents intend to move from New York to Michigan in the fall, he doesn’t think they will. He is right: their father George Ranney Jr. died in Phelps in September 1842.

Lucius tells Henry he plans to plant winter wheat and gives the current prices for wheat, corn, and oats. He closes by asking Henry to write soon, and to send Massachusetts newspapers so he can keep up with events out east.

Like the earlier letter from Lewis, Lucius’s letter to Henry reveals their shared interest not only in news of the family, but in the specific details of the land Lucius has bought. The list of tree species and the remark “you may judge what the soil is for yourself” suggests that the brothers remain very interested in each other’s success. The slightly boastful tone of Lucius’s descriptions implies there may be some friendly sibling rivalry involved, too.

My transcription:

Allen May 15th 1842

Respected Brother

I now take the present moment to drop a few lines to you as perhaps it will be interesting to you to read, for I suppose that you know that I am in the woods. I arrived here on the fourth of the present month being ten days on the road with a team. I am happy to say that I am well in good spirits and well suited with my location.

I have a warrantee deed of one hundred sixty acres of as good land as there is in Michigan. For said land I paid one hundred and forty eight dollars, a span of horses, one wagon and harness which we calc $280.00 for it and I would not take a song for the bargain.

Lewis was here about three of four days before I arrived here. He thought I was here, stayed two days expecting me along. He then wrote a line and left. He writes that he and a fellow by the name of Smith have set twenty four acres of mint this spring and it is large enough to hoe. It is in the town of Florence St. Jo. Co. 5 miles from White Pigeon north I think.

Father was very low with a live complaint or consumption when I left home. I have not heard from him since I left. The rest were well as usual.

There is a good spring of water on my land. A brook runs through the back part of it which there is two saw mills within one mile of it. A road on 2 sides of it. 12 houses within 1 1/2 mile of it. 9 miles south west of Jamesville. 3 miles south of Allens (???) in the timbered land white wood and maple beech butnut bass black walnut oak hickory are the principal timber on the land. You may judge what the soil is for yourself. Six miles from Hillsdale Center which the railroad will be completed to from Adrian this season.

I am calculating to sow ten acres of wheat this fall and fix some for building. Our folks are expecting to move out here this fall but I don’t think that they will. I stayed with Orren Ranney one night in Adrian. He is in the mercantile business and is a doing well I expect.

Wheat is worth 87 1/2 cents per bushel here oats 25 corn 31. I wish you would send the papers along here into the woods at least 1 or 2 a week so that I can pass of leisure time in a pleasant way. Direct yours to Sylvanus, Hillsdale Co. I have my board for $1.25 per week. I don’t think of anything more to write just now. Give my respects to all inquiring friends. If you can solve this writing you will do well. Write as soon as convenient.

This from a Distant Brother

Lucius Ranney

Hoophouse

user@domain.com — 2012-10-04T06:17:52-05:00

The combination chicken shelter/greenhouse is complete, and just in time. Weather forecasts are calling for snow today!

The structure is made of inch and a half PVC, and it’s covered with 6-mil poly that is supposed to let in about 90% of the sunlight and then block outgoing infrared to help keep the place warm. I put black plastic on the back wall, which is against the back wall of the henhouse, and I filled six steel trash cans (lined with plastic bags) with water to provide a bit of a heat sink. Sprayed them with matte black paint on the sunward side.

The chickens will be able to run from the pop-hole to the back door along the north side of the shelter. The south side is protected by chicken wire – that’s where I’ll plant my spinach, chard, kale, etc. This is all very experimental, but I’ve tried to make this structure sturdy and temporary. If it blows away, I didn’t make it sturdy enough. We’re supposed to have 40-mile an hour gusts today, so that’ll be a bit of a test. If it’s still standing this weekend, I’ll start planting.

Later in the day:

Ranney Background

user@domain.com — 2012-10-03T10:19:59-05:00

So who were these Ranneys, anyway? What can we find out about them, to set the scene for this series of letters? Looking for information on a family like the Ranneys in nineteenth century America, we have a pretty wide variety of sources available to us. As many descendants of more recent immigrants to the Americas have found, European communities were not always big on record-keeping. There may be nothing written down about an average family except births, deaths, and marriages in a local church register — and that register may have been lost or destroyed. Luckily, Americans seem to have valued genealogical information from very early in our history. The list of birthdates Lewis provides for Henry in the first letter is an indication of this. And this impulse wasn’t limited only to Mayflower descendants. Between the middle and the end of the nineteenth century people started publishing books tracing the genealogies of families like the Ranneys. According to the Ranney book, (The Ranney Memorial and Historical Association: Preliminary Report, 1904), the family in America originates with a Scottish immigrant named Thomas Ranney, born in 1616, who settled in Middletown Connecticut in the mid-1650s. Although no one knows why Thomas left Scotland, the Scots were defeated by Cromwell’s parliamentary forces at Dunbar in 1650, leading to the unification of England and Scotland in 1653. It’s possible that Ranney, like many of his countrymen, chose to emigrate as a result of these events or the social changes they caused. The book on Middletown’s early history (Charles Collard Adams’s Middletown Upper Houses: A History of the North Society of Middletown, Connecticut, from 1650 to 1800, with Genealogical and Biographical Chapters on the Early Families and a Full Genealogy of the Ranney Family, 1908) agrees with the Ranney book (which is not unusual, since most of these early sources borrowed freely from each other without attribution) and elaborates. Thomas Ranney became a landowner in Middletown in 1658, and married seventeen-year old Mary Hubbard, a daughter of another founding family, in 1659. By 1670, Thomas was paying £105 in taxes, placing him ninth on the list of 52 town proprietors. Thomas was not a member of a church. He died at age 97 in 1713, the last surviving settler. In his will, Thomas gave grants of land to each of his ten surviving children. In addition to his homestead, valued at £110, Thomas’s estate included nearly 400 acres of land and was valued at £757. Thomas Ranney died a fairly wealthy man.

Thomas Ranney’s great-great-grandson, George Ranney III, was born in Middletown in 1746. By this time, Middletown had become the largest port city between Boston and New York, with more international shipping than Hartford or New Haven. The oldest son of a main branch in what was already a large and complicated family tree, George entered the “West India trade” as a young man. The trade, which flourished from the 1750s until the Revolutionary War, is evasively described by local historians as “carrying out mules, horses, and hay, and bringing back rum, sugar, molasses, and fine woods.” Although Middletown had a larger slave population than any other Connecticut city (peaking at 218 in 1756, according to most accounts), it is unclear whether the young George Ranney was involved in this aspect of the trade, or whether he ever actually went to sea. But since the money that islands like Barbados used to buy New England livestock, food, and fodder was derived from sugar produced by slaves and sold in the British market, there is little point splitting hairs: Middletown’s “West India” economy was part of the British colonial system and the slave-based sugar economy.

What is known about George Ranney is that he married Esther Hall, daughter of Captain Samuel Hall, in January 1771. George was 25, his wife 20. Captain Hall was not a ship’s master, but rather a member of another Middletown founding family, a deacon, and a captain of the militia. The Ranney and Hall families have a long history of intermarriage, and in fact George’s younger brother Francis married Esther’s younger sister Rachel two years later. George and Esther’s first child, named Samuel Hall after his grandfather, was born in March, 1772.

The West India trade in Middletown never really recovered from the American Revolution. The British West Indian colonies found other sources of supply during the nearly decade-long conflict, and after independence Middletown’s economy began to shift toward manufacturing. In 1791, a rum distillery that came symbolize this transition was begun by a Hall relative of George’s wife Esther. Although this “last relic of former days…distilled annually, 600 hogs-heads of rum,” by the early years of the New Republic most of Middletown’s merchants had turned their attention to textiles, according to another old history, Whittemore’s 1884 History of Middlesex County: The Town and City of Middletown.

George and Esther Ranney moved their family to Ashfield Massachusetts in 1780. In addition to young Samuel, who was eight at the time of the move, the family included Jesse, age five, and Joseph, three. George IV, called George Jr. in Ashfield records and born in May 1780, may have been the first Ranney born in Ashfield. George III’s younger brothers, Francis and Thomas, moved to Ashfield in in 1786 and 1792, leaving their much younger brother Jonathan (b. 1765) to care for their aging parents and inherit the family homestead in Middletown. By the early 1800s there were many Ranney cousins in the neighborhood, including the prominent merchant and selectman Captain Roswell Ranney and his large family.

George Ranney bought a 100-acre “farm” from Lamberton Allen, and built a log house. Several Ashfield histories suggest that Allen’s so-called farm was really an uncleared tract of forest, and this suspicion is strengthened by the fact George Ranney built a log house rather than moving into an existing structure. Lamberton Allen was originally from Deerfield, about fifteen miles away on the rich, flat farmland beside the Connecticut River. In August 1746, during one of the many Indian conflicts preceding the Seven Years (“French and Indian”) War, Lamberton’s father Samuel Allen had been killed by a native raiding party while working in his fields. Two of his older children were at work with him: Eunice was “tomahawked” and Samuel Jr. was taken as a captive to Canada. The younger Samuel eventually escaped from the Indians as they were making their way northward into Canada and made his way back to Massachusetts. Samuel and his younger brothers Lamberton and Enoch settled in Ashfield, after the two younger men married daughters of the Belding family. The Beldings were another old Deerfield family who were very active in the early settlement of Ashfield. (Converse, Some of the Ancestors and Descendants of Samuel Converse, Jr…., 1905)
George and Esther’s sons grew to adulthood in Ashfield in the years between the Revolution and the War of 1812. When the Ranneys arrived in 1780, Ashfield was a tiny upcountry village that had already attracted attention beyond its borders for its “Yankee” independence. In the 1760s, the town’s new Congregational church had taken the land of Baptist residents who had refused to pay the Congregational church’s “tax” because they said their church had been there first. The Baptists protested to the colonial legislature in Boston, but the Congregationalists, led by Harvard-educated Israel Williams, refused to give back the 400 acres taken from the Baptists, and got the government to back them up. The Baptists appealed to London, and in 1769 King George III’s Privy Council gave them back their land. When the Bostonian patriots like Samuel Adams established committees of correspondence and sent out their revolutionary call just a few years later, many Ashfielders called them hypocrites. “They were calling themselves the sons of liberty and were erecting their liberty poles about the country,” said Baptist leader Ebenezer Smith, “but they did not deserve the name, for it was evident that all they wanted was liberty from oppression that they might have liberty to oppress.” (Quoted in Mark Williams’s The Brittle Thread of Life, 2009)

Lamberton Allen, who sold his land to George Ranney, moved north to Vermont where his cousins Ethan and Ira Allen were local heroes. He settled on Grand Isle in Lake Champlain, between Vermont and Canada, helping to found a township called Middle Hero. At this time, Vermont was a wild frontier area between New York, New Hampshire, and Canada. The Allens and their Green Mountain Boys resisted the territorial claims of their neighbors and played each of them against the others, until 1791 when Vermont finally joined the union as its 14th state. Samuel Allen remained in Ashfield a while longer than his brother Lamberton, according to US Census data. Although he had been a lieutenant in the Revolutionary War, Samuel opposed the local and Bostonian aristocrats who he believed had betrayed the spirit of the Revolution as a people’s independence movement. Samuel led a company of local men during Shays’ Rebellion, and then refused to sign the loyalty oath required by Massachusetts authorities when the rebellion failed. Although this refusal made him unable to hold any public office due to his continuing “rebel” status, Samuel stayed in Ashfield through the 1790s before moving to Grand Isle. He was remembered by Ashfielders as “Barefoot Allen” for one of his many eccentric habits.

The Ranney sons were remembered for helping their father George turn his homestead into one of the best farms in Ashfield. Samuel, the oldest, had been eight years old when the family arrived in Massachusetts. Samuel settled on a parcel just south of his father’s, and in 1821 he built a two-story brick house that still stands beside Route 116 south of the town center. Second son Jesse settled on the land north of his father’s farm, which he later sold to his brother Joseph when he bought a larger farm in Ashfield. Jesse raised his family in Ashfield and died at his home in 1861, age 86. Joseph lived in Ashfield until 1838, when he was killed by a falling tree in his woodlot. Youngest brother George Ranney IV (George Jr.) was born in Ashfield in 1789.

George Ranney Jr. inherited the family homestead when his father George died at age 75 in 1822. This was traditional in early America, because older sons generally started their own farms or businesses long before the parents were ready to hand over their assets, and the youngest would be more available to take care of his parents in their old age. George lived there another eleven years, and then became the first brother to leave Ashfield, migrating to Phelps (then called Vienna) in western New York in 1833, when he was 44 years old. He took his entire family (wife Achsah Sears Ranney and eight out of their nine children) to their new home 260 miles west of Ashfield, leaving behind only his third son, 16-year old Henry Sears Ranney.

Ranney Letter #1

user@domain.com — 2012-10-02T16:03:09-05:00

As I was doing research toward my dissertation in Ashfield Massachusetts last year, I came across a series of family letters written by six out of a set of eight brothers (and one sister who apparently wrote no letters). The Ranney brothers were all born between 1812 and 1833 in Ashfield, but all of them but the third son Henry went west — some farther than others. They wrote each other regularly for more than fifty years, and over a hundred of their letters are preserved at the Ashfield Historical Society. These would have been letters kept by Henry Sears Ranney. The collection probably includes most of the letters Henry received (he was apparently a very meticulous record-keeper, and served as Ashfield’s Town Clerk for fifty years!), but unfortunately does not include copies of letters Henry wrote. Unfortunate, but not unexpected. Although blotter-books were used in this period to make copies of handwritten letters, this practice was usually reserved for business correspondence.

A collection of a hundred family letters spanning half a century is treasure for a historian. Because the writers were all brothers, there is very little time wasted on empty formality — they get right to the point and write about what’s most important to the family. Reading the letters, we get a rare glimpse at the interests and concerns of a fairly normal American family, as they experienced life in the nineteenth century.

The story begins in May, 1839, with a three-page letter from twenty-four year old Lewis George Ranney (he was born George Lewis, but there were Georges in every generation since the Ranneys arrived in America in the 1650s, including his father and grandfather, so he switched to “L. G.”) to his younger brother Henry. Lewis begins with the most important news: “our folks are well as usual.” Their parents, George Ranney Jr. and Achsah Sears Ranney, had moved most of the family to Phelps New York (then called Vienna) in 1833. Henry, sixteen at the time, had stayed behind in Ashfield. In early 1838, George Ranney bought 105 acres in Phelps for $5,000; a year later he bought another hundred acres for $2,800. Eldest son Alonzo Franklin Ranney had a two acre house lot in town, worth $500, and Lewis was living at home in 1839 when he wrote to Henry — but he had already decided by this time that he was going on to Michigan.

The contents of the letter reveal the topics that interested Lewis, that he knew his brother would want to hear about. First, news of both the immediate and extended family. Lewis remarks about their cousins, Samuel Ranney’s sons: “Dexter is yet in Michigan I suppose, William is a-building a new house in the West Village, Frederick is about here as usual” (Samuel had died in 1837). In response to Henry’s letter, Lewis lists the birth dates of all the siblings. Achsah Sears Ranney had eleven children in the 21-year period between age 23 and 44, and then lived to age 80. Nine of the children were alive in 1839. Lewis goes on to mention a couple of Ashfield acquaintances, and then tells Henry that their father wants him to send money. Funds will be tight in Phelps until the harvest, several months away, and George Jr. “has had none from Michigan.” This is a very interesting point, because it shows that the family is not only in contact over half the continent, but is financially connected as well. Money and information (and, as we’ll see later, merchandise) flows in both directions between family members all over North America. We’re mistaken if we assume that when people moved west, they cut their ties with family and went on their own.

Here’s my transcription of the letter:

Phelps May 19th

Respected Brother,

I take the present opportunity of informing you that our folks are well as usual. I am working at home this season. I have a couple of acres of peppermint planted &c. We have planted this season about six acres of mint nine acres corn six acres spring wheat potatoes oats sufficient &c.

As to stock they have five cows four yearlings and four calves and in the horse line Lucius thinks he has got a team. They have swopt the old big sorrel and a mare they had for a pair of Dun colored horses equally matched. As heavy as the old (???) horse which makes a (???) team, they being smart, and the big horse is yet on hand. They calculate to summer fallow about eighteen or twenty acres. There has been a very good spring so far for crops and there are prospects now for considerable fruit.

Our people are a going into the poultry line considerable this season. Forty or fifty chickens already and a quantity of eggs yet to hatch. Eleven young turkeys and two turkeys yet to hatch &c. &C.

Our folks have taken a girl about ten years old which they like very well. I believe which makes quite a help to the woman affairs. Dexter is yet in Michigan. I suppose William is a building a new house in the west village. Frederick is about here as usual. Frank is about Pecks yet. Now news &c.

You requested us to send the Names Births &c. Of the children. I will write them viz.

Alonzo F Ranney Born Sept 13, 1812
Lewis G Ranney Born March 10, 1815
Henry S Ranney Born March 5, 1817
Lucius Ranney Born April 12, 1819
Priscilla M Ranney Do Jan 19, 1822
Harrison Ranney Born March 4, 1824
Lyman A Ranney Born August 1, 1828
Lemuel S Ranney Born Jany 17, 1831
Anson B Ranney Do May 31, 1833

Mother says she calculates to send you two or three pairs of socks.

James King is about Vienna making pumps.

James Flower was married a few weeks ago.

Father wishes you to send him fifty or a hundred Dollars if you can as he has had none from Michigan and having some to make out he Requests &c. Money is very scarce here now probably will be till after harvest.

They thought if you could spare it till fall it would accommodate very much then they want to square up the horse and the stock line and other small debts. Write again soon and send if you send &c.

Yours Truly
L G Ranney

Announcing!

user@domain.com — 2012-10-01T22:08:50-05:00

A new website for the farm and farm-related reading, history, homeschooling, arts and crafts…check it out!

New Book Review

user@domain.com — 2012-09-28T12:40:19-05:00

Holy Shit!, Gene Lodgson’s 2010 book about manure and compost is based on his conviction that soil fertility is the key to human survival. He says it very clearly in the introduction: “My bias — it will be called bias anyway — is that only on smaller, decentralized farms and gardens can food and manure be managed in a truly economical way. Only if populations of animals and humans are spread out over the land will we be able to survive.” (my emphasis) It’s an interesting book, about equal parts agricultural history (for example, W. R. Grace, one of the world’s largest fertilizer companies, began in Peru in the guano business. Makes sense, but who knew!) and practical advice for small farmers (for example, there’s a big difference between the ways you handle a manure pack under wintering livestock and a thermophilic garden compost pile. Again, of course, but who knew!). Read more about it here.

Good fences

user@domain.com — 2012-09-26T15:02:59-05:00

Robert Frost once famously epitomized New Englanders with the wry phrase, “Good fences make good neighbors.” But even if your neighbors are far enough away for comfort and you like them, fences have their uses. I’ve been thinking about these as I continue to work on 19th century American history while starting up a small farm in the upper Midwest. It’s interesting, because I suspect I’m living through a moment of historic change, and it’s all about fences.

In addition to influencing the relationships of neighbors, I’m learning fences have a number of other uses on the farm. Of course, they help keep your animals where you want them. And hopefully they help keep predators off your animals. And they may keep wildlife off your vegetables, although hungry deer will jump any fence less than eight feet high. Less obviously, though, fences define our relationship to the land and the uses we can put it to.

Most everyone is familiar with the story of the colonial split-rail fence. There’s one on the cover of William Cronon’s Changes in the Land. The rail fence, roughly cut from the timber settlers needed to clear in order to turn wild eastern forest into farmland, symbolizes European ideas of land use and ownership that settlers brought with them and imposed on the environment and the natives they found there.

This style of fencing was cheap and easy where settlers found trees needing to be cleared. I took this photo at the Genesee Country Village and Museum in western New York. This section of the museum represents life around the year 1800, when farming was a family enterprise done with ox, horse, and human power (we spent a 4th of July weekend in that cabin as "The 1800 Farm Family"). An energetic farmer could clear about seven acres of land in a year, and often the family farmstead was split between a small cultivated field, a pasture for grazing animals, and a woodlot for fuel. As families moved west, however, they discovered plains of prairie grasses that towered over the heads of children like Laura Ingalls. The wooden fences of the East were impractical in many parts of the Midwest, where lumber came from far away at great expense, and was reserved for building things like houses, barns, churches and saloons. And without internal combustion and irrigation, much of the land farther west was unfit for cultivation, but ideal for grazing if the animals could just be contained.

Joseph Glidden (1813-1906) was a New Englander who moved to Illinois in 1843. He patented barbed wire in 1873 and died a millionaire. Among his holdings were 335,000 acres in Texas: range land that his invention had allowed to be fenced. The enclosure of the rangelands is one of the mythic moments in the story of the American West. Through books and movies like The Virginian(1902), Oklahoma (1943), Shane (1953), Heaven’s Gate (1980), and Open Range (2003), it is as central to popular western history as Frederick Jackson Turner’s comments about the closing of the frontier are to the academic West. Barbed wire fences dramatically expanded our ability to affordably control very large spaces. Once again, Americans were able to impose our vision on the land (and also, once again, on the Indians).

Fences remain important to farmers, and their use is still a complicated affair. Cattle and horses can be grazed on pasture enclosed by a few strands of barbed wire. Sheep, with thick fleeces to protect them, will go through barbed wire. Goats are even harder to contain – there’s an old saying that if your fence won’t hold water, it won’t hold goats. And although chickens will usually come back home in the evening, there are a lot of varmints out there that will eat them in the meantime if they aren’t protected by a fence. Farmers have used woven wire, hardware cloth, rigid panels, and electric wire to contain and protect animals. Each comes at a price, and it adds up: a decent four-foot high sheep and goat fence will run you over a dollar a foot. So these fences tended to be expensive and permanent. Most small farmers use and endlessly reuse a variety of materials based on what they can get cheap, and hoard the bits they aren’t currently using.

As sustainability and soil depletion have come into sharper focus in recent years, innovative farmers have rediscovered what the old-timers knew before the age of chemical fertilizer: pastures will support a larger number of animals if they are grazed in succession. Sheep and goats prefer to eat different plants than cows, so they can coexist with cattle on a pasture without competing. And then the poultry can follow, eating bugs out of the droppings; which not only breaks up the fertilizer and spreads it over the fields, but also actually reduces the number of parasites and pathogens. This is a win-win-win, the animals are better off, the farmer produces a larger quantity and wider variety of protein on a given plot of land, and the land itself is improved in the process. The only catch is, you have to enclose and protect all these different types of creatures!

That’s where the story gets interesting. The cost of fencing has traditionally made it difficult for farmers to fence appropriately for intensive pasturing, and the effort involved in setting and moving fences has made land use inflexible. But recently, battery-powered low-impedance fence chargers and moveable electric fences have changed the game again for small farms. Deep-cycle batteries like the ones in your boat or RV can run miles of low-cost electric tape, twine or netting. They can even be hooked to solar chargers. And they’re easy to set up and move, allowing farmers to raise temporary paddocks and move animals as quickly or slowly as needed over the land. Of all the different types of fencing in this photo, what’s actually holding in the animals is just the orange Electroweb.

This may not seem like such a big deal, but I think it may turn out to be. The world’s food supply depends heavily on fossil fuels, both for transportation and for the production of synthetic fertilizers like anhydrous ammonia. It currently takes fifteen calories of energy to put a calorie of food on your table. If there’s any truth to either climate change or peak oil, multi-thousand acre cornfields and factory-style feedlots may turn out to be as much of a twentieth-century anomaly as McMansions and jet-setting to conferences. But it has been suggested that the world’s food needs could be met by intensive techniques combining grazing with gardening. Farmers like Joel Salatin claim that not only would intensive pasturing solve the world food problem, but “in fewer than ten years we would sequester all the atmospheric carbon generated since the beginning of the industrial age” (Folks, This Ain’t Normal, p. 195). If true, this is a really big deal; and even if Salatin is not quite right about this, intensive pasturing still seems like a really good idea. And these new fences make it possible. That could be historic.

(Note: This post was originally written as a contribution to The Historical Society’s blog. In spite of the fact that I was the most prolific contributor after THS’s President, for a variety of reasons, it will be my last post on THS. Life’s just too short. So there will probably be an increase in history on this blog, which hopefully will be a good thing…)

Sprouts

user@domain.com — 2012-09-23T11:01:45-05:00

Sprouts are cool! I always wanted to sprout seeds for salad, but I’ve never really been organized enough to do it. I’m trying it again, with mung beans, alfalfa, and coriander seeds. The coriander seeds are big -- if we get sprouts from those that are the size of mung bean sprouts, but taste like cilantro, that would be really cool!

I read in Harvey Ussery’s chicken book that he sprouts feed grains for his chickens, so I thought I’d give that a try, too. I picked up a bag of whole oats at the coop, so I threw a couple of scoops into a bucket and soaked them for a day. Then I put them in an ice cream bucket with little wholes drilled in the bottom and sides. I rinsed them once a day, and in a couple of days I had little rootlets. I gave some of these to the chickens, and they piled onto them like candy (they really like sweets -- they love leftover plum smoothie, pear and apple cores, etc.). A couple more days, and the seeds had sprouted little stems and leaflets. This is supposed to make the oats about twice as nutritious for the birds as dry seeds. And once again, they ate the sprouts just as soon as they hit the ground.

It’s easy enough to do – I suppose the trick is just being around and remembering to rinse them daily to avoid mold. Another chore to add to the list, but it seems a lot of this small farming stuff is just about being there and staying on top of small increments of work on a regular basis. It’s an interesting combination of supervising these processes, and just letting them happen. Kind of cool, that the sheep and goats sort of take care of themselves, and the chickens keep growing, without me having to watch them the whole time. It’s not so much like rolling a boulder up a steep hill (like many of the jobs I’ve done over the years) as it is like kicking a soccer ball down a field. The ball’s momentum does most of the work; my job is just to keep it going in the right direction and then put it into the goal.

Anyway, the oats are sprouting well, and I’m going to keep starting batches every couple of days until it’s just too cold to play with water in the garage. I also tried a little batch of the oil sunflower seeds I bought for the wild bird-feeder. Surprise! They sprouted too. And apparently whole corn will sprout. I’ll keep experimenting and see where it takes me…

Plums

user@domain.com — 2012-09-20T10:51:13-05:00

Funny things turn up on old farms. Yesterday Steph was cutting down brush to throw to the goats, because they were grazing on a spot where there were no bushes to browse. She uncovered a trailer we didn’t even know was there! It looks like the frame is in good enough shape to build a portable animal shelter on next Spring.

There are old fruit trees around, and a lot more flowering trees like ornamental crab apples. And I had noticed, earlier in the summer, that we had a wild plum tree at the back of the garden. But I wasn’t expecting the number of plums we discovered on it about a week ago! Turns out, there are several little trees all growing into each other, and that tangle of branches produced about a bushel of plums for us. I got up on a ladder and grabbed as many as I could reach. Steph chopped off some of the dead lower branches, many of which were covered with 3 to 4 inch thorns. This winter I’ll read up on pruning these trees, and hopefully in the Spring we’ll be ready for a good crop.

The plums are small, but very sweet. We ate a bunch of them, made smoothies with them, and tried canning about a dozen quarts. I tried a couple of quarts in brandy, too. They went into the fridge, because I didn’t want to boil off all the alcohol. We need more practice with the canning, but it was a good start. Next to the plums was another bush with clusters of bright red berries. We thought these might be some type of wild currants, but they turned out to be “highbush cranberries” (Viburnum opulus, not a real cranberry at all, but a cousin of the honeysuckle). Incredibly tart. We picked them, but after letting them sit in the fridge for a week, we admitted we weren’t really excited about making jam, and threw them to the birds. Still, the flowers are supposed to be very pretty in the spring…

Pizza party

user@domain.com — 2012-09-12T13:39:31-05:00

They like pizza and lawn clippings too!

Chicken Feed

user@domain.com — 2012-09-08T15:29:35-05:00

What do they eat, anyway? That’s one of the mysteries, and one of the things newbies wonder and worry about (at least if our experience is typical). On the one hand, you want your chickens to be healthy and happy, and grow, and not die. On the other, you don’t want to spend a fortune feeding them. If it costs three times as much to raise a backyard chicken as it does to buy a frozen bird at the coop, then it’s a much harder sell. And there’s a fair degree of disagreement between the respected, authoritative chicken guides. Storey’s Guide leaves you very doubtful you’re being a responsible chicken-keeper unless you buy the Starter crumbles, followed by the Grower and then the Layer, etc. On the other hand, Harvey Ussery grinds his own grain and says his birds get a large percentage of their needs off the pasture. So which is it?

Our birds are about a month old now (looking back at the blog I see they arrived on August 8th — it seems like much longer!), and they’re living in their henhouse. They’ve almost got their full compliment of big-kid feathers now, just in time for the change of weather. So what are they eating?

We are feeding them on (non-medicated) Starter from the coop, but from the first few days we’ve been supplementing that. Many of the birds got pasty butts in the first few days, and there were several heat-lamps on them, so I don’t think it was from being too cool. The other cause (according to Harvey Ussery) is their diet. I gave them some corn meal (actually, the Masa we use for tamales), and some greens from the kitchen and grass clippings from the lawn. These seemed to help — and then when we started giving them grasshoppers, they were all better!

Grasshoppers have been a big part of their diet because there are so many in the lawn and fields. The kids have become expert at catching them, and regularly bring the chickens jars filled with treats. This has resulted in the chicks running toward us when they see us coming, rather than away, which is nice. And now they’ll take food from our hands.

They’re also getting cracked corn from the coop, and since they moved outside they’ve been eating grass and the bugs they can find. Now that I’ve got them tilling the area that’s going to be the hoop house, I’ve been mowing a small piece of lawn each day, and giving them a bag of clippings. They seem to like this, and they’re really practicing their digging skills, turning over these piles.

Today I gave them some leftover pasta that had spent too long waiting to be eaten, and some old spinach. The birds don’t understand transparency: if they can see an object, they think they can peck it. So I had to tip the container on its side. They liked the pasta, and treated it like grasshoppers. A bird would grab a piece and run with it, and the others would give chase. Some of the chicks even went outside to try to get away from their pursuers!

At some point, I think some of these birds will be dedicated compost specialists. We’re still getting used to the different temperaments. But I can definitely see the Jerseys as kings of the pile…

Also...

user@domain.com — 2012-09-05T15:55:35-05:00

I posted a new review, on Bill McKibben’s 2010 book Eaarth, which I mention here because it relates directly to what this farm project is all about.

Winter Gardenagerie

user@domain.com — 2012-09-05T12:41:06-05:00

The sun’s shining and it’s still shorts weather, but those days are numbered. Time to start to preparing for winter up north. We’re going to choose the best among the cockerels and put the rest in the freezer, but that will still leave us with at least a couple dozen chickens to take through the winter. And after reading Eliot Coleman’s Winter Harvest Handbook, we want to start trying to grow a little food in the “off-season.”

Coleman writes a lot about temporary structures called cold-frames and high tunnels, which he distinguishes from greenhouses because unlike greenhouses, you don’t heat them at all. These structures provide shelter from freezing rain, snow, and wind, but they don’t get any more heat than they can trap from sunlight during the day. In spite of this, Coleman claims you can grow a variety of hardy leaf-crops — so that’s what we’re going to try.

There are plenty of prefab hoop houses and high tunnels to choose from. Most are made of galvanized steel, with poly sheeting. I looked at several on Farmtek’s website, but I wanted to start a little smaller. And a lot cheaper. So I started thinking about PVC.

In addition to the selection of PVC pipe sizes and connectors you can get at the Depot, there are a growing number of websites like Creative Shelters and Formufit, offering what they call “furniture grade” PVC connectors in a very wide variety of sizes and shapes. I was originally thinking about a semicircular “hoop” design, like most of the steel tunnels I’ve seen (it’s amazing how many of these things you start seeing all over, once you’re aware they exist!). But the weight of snow concerned me. And obviously, if snow is lingering on the top of the structure, light isn’t getting through.

Then I noticed that in addition to all the T-connectors, Formufit has a 45-degree angle elbow connector. And they offer all this stuff in a range of diameters, including inch and a half, which I was starting to think might be better than one inch, for a largish structure that’s meant to stand up to northern winter storms. It occurred to me that 45 plus 90 plus 45 again equalled 180, which meant I could build something that looked like a house using off the shelf parts! So in the end, I redesigned our first experimental house so it has a pitched roof.

This structure is going to fit right behind the henhouse, so the chickens can get into it via their pop-hole. Part of it will be devoted to them, and part will be fenced off for the garden. It will be about 25 feet long, and just under 15 feet across. I messed around with the dimensions until I was able to get the most for my money, using 10-foot sections of PVC pipe I could buy at the Depot. So, for example, the “roof” pieces are seven feet and three feet long. They’re separated by a T-connector that allows me to tie them all together with pipe running lengthwise; and also to intersperse them with the supports that hold the building up.

People call this stuff tinker-toys for adults, and it’s true! Designing this and putting it together, I felt like a kid with a new Lego kit. I bought about 45 pieces of pipe for a bout $4 each. The connectors were about $270 (I bought a few more than I needed), and the poly sheeting and clip connectors to hold it on came to about $100. There’s some additional lumber for the ends (I’ll put together a detailed parts list and plans sometime soon, if it all works out as planned). So for about $600, we’ll have an experimental winter gardenagerie. That’s about a thousand bucks less than a comparably sized round cold frame from Farmtek.

So far, I’ve cut and assembled the frame, and run chicken-wire around it so the birds can start tearing up the sod. In the next couple of weeks, I’ll build the ends, put all the posts into their measured bases, and throw on the poly. And start planting the winter garden…

DIY Electricity

user@domain.com — 2012-09-03T09:40:55-05:00

Part of preparing for winter this year is preparing for power failures. Although the “last mile” of phone, cable, and power wiring to the houses in this part of town is all underground (a big improvement over New Hampshire, where even the posh neighborhoods were festooned with old-fashioned telephone poles and overhead wiring), that doesn’t prevent lightning from striking a substation or other types of power failures. So we’ve got our own source of short-term electricity.

There are two types of small-scale generators on the market. The older-fashioned ones are basically gasoline engines that spin a much smaller version of the bundle of coiled wires that generates electricity at Niagara Falls or the local coal-fired power plant. The gas engines are fairly efficient: when the power goes off, you flip a switch, open the choke, and give the starter one pull. Then you plug in your lights and appliances and you’re off to the races.

The newer type of generator is called an inverter. It is advertised as “broadband” technology, to the old generator’s “DSL.” But this isn’t a useful analogy, because the two devices do quite different things. Inverters, as the name implies, are all about changing the form of energy: specifically, they change alternating current (AC) to direct current (DC), and vice versa. The point of this is that DC can be stored in batteries, whereas AC can’t be stored at all (which is one reason our national electrical grid is so complicated, centralized, and inefficient — but that’s a story for another time). As a result, inverter type standby power supplies incorporate batteries as well as motors. They use the motors to charge the batteries, and the batteries to power your appliances. (for a more detailed explanation by a sales-guy, look here)

One result of this process is that the inverters are often much quieter. The motor isn’t constantly running, so you’re not using gas the whole time and you don’t have to listen to the constant hum. And you’re not running a 3500-watt motor to power 350 watts of load, so in the long run the inverter is more fuel-efficient. Another advertised benefit is that the power is “conditioned” as it goes through the inversion process, so you get a very smooth wave-form instead of the noisy, jagged signal produced by the generator. This is seen as beneficial because computers and other high-tech devices prefer “clean” power. A third result is that inverters are often several times the cost of a comparably-rated generator.

Unlike a lot of the people who buy generators (many of whom are campers, I guess, on the basis of the way these things are marketed), I’m more concerned about keeping the fridge, freezer, lights, water heater, pump, and (in a longer term outage) washer and range working, rather than my computer or entertainment center. I figure if there’s a major outage, I’m probably not going to be surfing the web anyway. And as far as clean power goes, we already have surge strips between the wall and the computers.

Also, if I’m buying a generator, I’m mostly interested in its generating ability. Batteries are something else. When I want to store electricity, I’ll buy batteries from a battery specialist, not from a small engine manufacturer (sorry, Honda). And I may be interested in doing that at some point down the line. Wind and solar installations would both use an inverter and a bank of batteries — so it seems like it would be smarter to get them when the time comes, and think of the generator as just another source of raw power into the system. That will be the real, permanent DIY electricity story — this is just a small step on the way to that final goal.

So in the end, we got a generator that should keep the household appliances and lights on if the grid goes down temporarily. It will run for about half a day on a tank of gas — so in addition to the unit itself, I need to store fuel. I’ll be keeping and running it outside the main house (carbon monoxide is an issue as well as noise), and connecting to the house using two 100 foot extension cords. This unit has two 120 volt plugs, as well as a 220. So if there was a longer-term outage and we got tired of eating leftovers out of the microwave, we could connect the kitchen stove. Now I just have to track down where the well-pump gets its current from, and make sure I can attach a couple of the basic household systems so we can function when the lights go out.

Beulah Carlson

user@domain.com — 2012-09-02T13:06:19-05:00

We lost a baby goat this week. She was a real cutie, too.

We got a second batch of animals last week, on a Sunday morning. Steph went to see her friend, and came home with two doe goats and a little white ewe. The littler of the two goats was a black and gray two-month old. Unlike the other goats we got, she wasn’t bottle-fed, but was raised on the field by her mother. So we expected her to be a little less tame. Even so, when Steph managed to catch her she was fairly friendly and not too skittish.

All the animals spent a night together in the barn, and things seemed to be going fine. The sheep and the goats seemed to be getting along. The little white ewe lamb was the most timid, always keeping the other two, larger sheep between us and herself. The goats seemed to be getting along well.

On Tuesday morning, when we opened up the barn and prepared to let the animals out onto the pasture, the little goat was laying on her side. She let out a cry when she saw us, and we knew something was wrong. Little Beulah was stiff as a taxidermied goat. Her legs were all straight out, and she couldn’t move them. She followed us with one eye, but couldn’t even crane her neck to look at us.

Beulah probably had tetanus. We still don’t know for sure, although in addition to what we were able to find out, we had an experienced farmer and a vet look at her. If it wasn’t tetanus, she might have had polio or have been poisoned. But tetanus seems like the most obvious conclusion. Apparently it is common in goats, and although the farmer we bought her from says she was vaccinated along with the rest of the babies, the shot didn’t work on her.

The most amazing thing about the situation (not counting the frustration and sadness of trying to help the little animal and failing) was that we were pretty much on our own. Most of the vets in the area only do small animals. One of the two large animal vets did not have the appropriate drugs, and the other (who did) was over an hour away. We were able to get hold of another sheep/goat farmer nearby, who was incredibly helpful and even met us at a nearby restaurant, since we aren’t that familiar with the area yet. He took a look a Beulah and gave us some of the medicine he kept on hand for his own flock. Unfortunately, we later figured out that the antitoxin he gave us was for a different strain of clostridium (the one that attacks the animals when they overeat), so the shots we gave her over the next day were ineffective on the tetanus.

The next day or so were spent giving the poor little animal shots. Penicillin, antitoxin, and when she stopped being able to swallow the water we were squirting into her mouth, subcutaneous water. The penicillin may have helped her a bit the first time we gave it to her, because she was able to stand and walk a bit on her own for a few minutes. Then she stiffened up again, and we were fighting a downhill battle. We took her to a local retired vet who was a friend of the farmer we bought the animals from. He took one look at Beulah and announced that she had tetanus and the most probably source were the scabbed-over wounds from the de-horning procedure she’d been through a week or so earlier (tetanus normally takes 10-14 days to set in, and prefers the anaerobic conditions in closed wounds). He sedated Beulah and debraded the wounds, but warned us the prognosis wasn’t good. Unfortunately, he was right.

We learned from this experience that we need to be prepared for animal sickness. We were ready for worms, but not for something as seemingly random as tetanus. This was not something stressed in the books we read, which I suppose were written in a time when rural areas abounded with vets. The situation is not like dogs and cats, where you can just jump in the car and take them to an animal hospital. The regular vets don’t know anything about farm animals, large or small. The fact that lots of people are starting to keep small animals would seem like an opportunity for some enterprising vet to at least keep a few of the most common drugs in his fridge; but it isn’t one that has occurred to anyone around here. Luckily, you can buy penicillin, antitoxin, thiamin (for polio) and activated charcoal (for poisoning) online, and keep a supply in your own fridge.

Which Broussais?

user@domain.com — 2012-08-30T08:47:54-05:00

One of the books I catalogued in Charles Knowlton’s estate inventory is a volume listed simply as “Brousair” or “Brousais.” Looking at the medical texts available at the time, I supposed this might refer to François-Joseph-Victor Broussais (1772-1838), who wrote several books on inflammation between 1808 and 1828. But I noted in my inventory, it might also be a work on family planning by an unrelated (as far as I know) Alphonse Broussais, published in the late 1830s or early 1840s.

I’m finally getting back to writing my Knowlton biography, after my move and starting the farm, so today I was looking at a book called An Introduction to the History of Medicine, by Fielding Hudson Garrison (1917). Garrison doesn’t mention Alphonse, but he has some pointed things to say about François. He begins by charging that Broussais “did away with metaphysical conceptions of disease only to substitute something worse.” (426)

According to Garrison, Broussais was the son of a French physician who joined the republican army in 1792 and later served as a surgeon in Napoleon’s campaigns. As a result, Garrison says, “his methods were Napoleonic and his therapeutics sanguinary.” The underpinning of Broussais’s regime was a belief that life depends on irritation (friction, heat), and that gastro-enteritis was the basis of all disease. In this belief, he was a step ahead of the older generation and their “fevers,” says Garrison. But only a small step. Ironically, this emphasis on heat and digestion is not all that unlike the focus of Samuel Thomson’s herbalist alternative medicine, which was widely regarded by professional physicians as quackery.

Broussais’s treatment program called on the doctor to “deprive the patient of his proper food and leech him all over his body. As many as 10 to 50 leeches were applied at once.” As a result, Garrison says “in the year 1833 alone 41,500,000 leeches were imported into France…Yet in 1824-25 two or three million were sufficient to supply all demands.” Witnessing these “torrents of blood, students began gradually to edge away from him, until his theories were finally exploded by…good sense and temperate judgment” (427). This doesn’t seem like the sort of physician or regime that would appeal to Charles Knowlton, especially in light of the difficulties he had as a young man searching for a cure for his own maladies.

Luckily, searching the web today, I was able to find out a little more about the other Broussais. Alphonse apparently published a sex manual which was translated and published in New York in 1843 as Self-Preservation: or Sexual Physiology Revealed. The editor was “A Physician of Philadelphia,” and the book was “Sold by all periodical agents.” I got this not from standard historical sources, but from an auction advertisement for a copy of the old book.

This book seems a much more likely fit for Charles Knowlton, whose own sex manual, The Fruits of Philosophy, was being illicitly reprinted in Philadelphia at about the same time. I’d love to get my hands on a copy of Self-Preservation, to see if any of the text or ideas are lifted from Knowlton or from his friend, Robert Dale Owen, rather than coming from this untraceable Frenchman, Alphonse Broussais. Also, the value listed in the inventory for this volume was $ .12, which seems more appropriate for a 128-page sex manual you could carry in your pocket than for a medical treatise, even an out-of-date, discredited one.

Of course, there’s no definitive proof that Self-Preservation was the book in Charles Knowlton’s library. Just a preponderance of circumstantial evidence and educated guesswork. But how much of history, I wonder, is just that in the end?

Things we might want to know about higher education.

user@domain.com — 2012-08-29T08:22:29-05:00

The good people at Onlinecolleges.net have compiled a list of 25 interesting facts about higher education. Reading through them, I found that many of them had to do with the history of different types of educational institutions, teaching practices, and what types of people got to go to college (and why). Some of them were no surprise to me: for example, I went to a Land Grant University and took classes in Morrill Hall, so I was aware of how the Morrill Act created the State University system we now have. But people who didn’t go to UMass, Texas A&M or Cornell (and there’s probably an interesting story behind how Ezra Cornell got New York’s land grant money) probably don’t know about that. And there were several points that surprised me, including the one about Colonial America having more colleges than England (although perhaps not more than Great Britain).

An interesting theme that runs through many of the facts has to do with demographics and participation. Who got to go and why they went is an interesting question -- and history might tell us something about how to move forward. Everyone has an idea about what higher ed should look like in the 21st century; how many of those ideas have any foundation in higher ed’s history?

The economic hardships faced by institutions, the explosions of participation surrounding the Morrill Act and the GI Bill (both wartime measures, interestingly), even the transition from being training facilities for professionals (ministers, lawyers, and slightly later, physicians) to being about more general “liberal education” for the masses -- these are all issues where a little look at history might inform the current debate. In any case, the list is interesting and thought-provoking. Well done, Onlinecolleges!

Hay!

user@domain.com — 2012-08-26T09:05:43-05:00

We got our first load of hay today. Managed to put 32 bales on the back of the pickup, in spite of the fact it’s a short bed. We’ll be getting 100 more, but pulling the hayrack home with that, in a couple of days. Hay takes up a fairly big space in the barn, but more about that later. And it’s heavy. A barn you could drive through would be really convenient at this point. I don’t think I can back a hayrack up into our barn, especially since there’s a slight hill in front of the door, and I won’t be able to see the back of the rack. So we’ll probably be parking beside the barn and carrying that 100 bales in through the backdoor. At 50# each, that’ll be a good workout!

Back to the farm

user@domain.com — 2012-08-25T20:41:09-05:00

I went away for a few days. Drove 2,300 miles, taking our daughter to college. While I was gone, the chicks grew up a bit. They’re definitely starting to look like the chickens they’re going to be. So when I got home I hurried up and made some last minute adjustments to the henhouse, and moved them in. They spent an afternoon on the grass, catching grasshoppers. Then they moved into their new home. So far, so good.

Electric fence and escapees

user@domain.com — 2012-08-14T07:06:00-05:00

There’s so much pasture the animals haven’t been on yet! In order to get them out there, though, I need to make sure they’ll be staying where I put them, and not wandering into the next field (or the neighbors’ garden, or down the road…). I got a fence-charger and a long spool of electric twine (it has six stainless steel wires woven in), and some plastic insulating posts. There was an old charger mounted on the barn wall, which apparently powered a strand of the barbed wire that goes all the way around the farm, but I thought it would be better to start with no surprises. And I thought the three or four horses the previous people had were probably more likely to respect the barbed wire and stay where they were put. And too big to try to squeeze through between the wires.

Like many things on the farm, working with electric fencing is completely new to me (barbed wire isn’t, actually: I repaired pasture fencing while working for my adviser when I was an undergrad). But like many things on the farm, it just makes sense. The systems are pretty self-explanatory, and it seems once you get into the right frame of mind, things fit together the way they’re supposed to.

I set the posts eight small paces apart, going up the hill toward the big pasture. This will be a small paddock, and it is surrounded by our other fenced fields, in case something goes wrong. I pulled the twine through the top set of loops, and realized that the yellow poly was a great way to see if the fence-line was straight. So I corrected my post placement a little, as I strung the top strand. Looped the twine a couple of times to tighten it, and then started back down the hill. Each side of the fence is anchored to keep it tight: the near side to the barn wall and the far side to a post on the barbed wire fence (carefully, so as not to ground the twine).

There are five strands in all, and I used up about ¾ of the spool, which surprised me. The cool thing about electric fencing is that you don’t have to close the circuit. You can just end anywhere. The ANIMAL closes the circuit, by connecting the fence to the ground. This is what produces the shock – and it’s why it’s so important to drive ground stakes as the instructions specify. I didn’t, actually – I’m using the ground stakes from the previous installation. But if I don’t end up with the power I need on the fence, those old ground stakes are the most likely culprit. It’s on my longer-term to-do list…

The fence fired up when I plugged in the charger, with the classic tick-tick-tick. I tested the fence with a loop of grass, and it was working. But I thought I’d be on the safe side, so I mowed beneath the fence to minimize the grass-grounding along the way.

The fence was running when I brought the sheep back to the barn, and Bob made contact and yelped. Then he ran through it a few minutes later, in a bid to avoid going inside for the evening. But I think it would deter animals that aren’t in actual flight mode. We’ll see, I guess.

This morning I let the sheep saunter out the back door of the barn into their new paddock. They browsed calmly and I congratulated myself and went off to do some other chores. When I checked on them a while later, Bob and Bella had made their way into the back pasture (not Elsie, of course. She was right by my side all morning), where I didn’t really want them to be. Someday, but that field goes over the hill and continues an eight of a mile to the road. We want to walk before we run.

The sheep squeezed between a couple of strands of barbed wire, at the back of the paddock. I found the spot easily, from the tufts of black and brown wool the two sheep left on the barbs of the fence. There’s a lot of good eating in the paddock I made for them, and cool shade under the evergreens, so I had hoped they’d stay there. But for whatever perverse reason, they disappeared. I don’t know whether they went into the woods or crossed the fields and took off through the neighbors’ yards for greener pastures. But they were gone.

I spent a fair amount of time today walking the property – part of the time with puppies and goat in tow, then they got tired and opted to stay on the porch. It’s possible the sheep are still closeby, even on the property. If they went into the woods and decided to hide, I’d have a hard time finding them with all the underbrush. Likewise in the stands of trees that separate the fields. The nursery rhyme phrase “leave them alone and they’ll come home” came to mind. But I was not holding my breath.

I think it’s interesting that the sheep escaped through barbed wire and not through the electric fence. But if we keep sheep at all (and I was leaning against it most of the afternoon), we’ll treat them as maximum security convicts. There’s a certain look Bob gave us that I won’t mistake again. It was a “you’re the predator and I’m the prey, and I know it” look. He was right of course. In the long run, he was destined for the stew-pot or sausage mill. But that would have been in a couple of years. As it is, he may be wolf-food within the next couple of days.

Update: in the early evening, one of our neighbors from the development behind the farm came over to tell me she had a couple of sheep in her backyard and supposed they were ours. I was surprised and pleased – I guess there’s some truth to nursery rhymes. It took a little bit of creative herding to get the sheep back on our land and then out of the open fields and ultimately into the barn. The trick was, I herded them into the garage and then closed the door. The sheep, not knowing there was a backdoor, just stood there looking at me like, “Oh, shit.” While they were confused, I was able to grab Bob and guide him out the backdoor and over to the barn. Once in the barn they headed straight for their stall, and I rewarded them with some sweet feed. This procedure would not have worked on Elsie, of course, because she knows where all the doors are. On the other hand, it wouldn’t be needed for Elsie – which is something to think about when we’re planning for how many goats vs. sheep we want to keep…

Update

user@domain.com — 2012-08-13T12:54:07-05:00

It’s midmorning and I’m sitting on the deck, catching up on getting my impressions down before I forget. A lot has happened in the last few days.

First, we got a couple of sheep and a goat. The sheep (a ram and a ewe) are a mixture of Border Leicester, Karakul, and (I think) Shetland. They have nice open faces, and no personalities at all; but Steph says the fleeces will be good for felting, rugs, and heavy sweaters. Their names are Bob (Baahb) and Bella.

The goat is named Elsie Hatfield, and she has decided to be my constant companion. She’s a Kinder, which is half Nubian, half Pygmy. Elsie was an orphan, so she was bottle-raised and got a LOT of attention as a baby. She is currently standing next to me, chewing cud. Sometimes she nibbles a bit at the flap of my pocket as if she’s trying to rob me or leans her head against me. Often, she’ll lay down at my feet, if I’m sitting in one place long enough. If I disappear she’ll call for me. When I’m in the house she stands patiently by the screen and waits. This is an improvement over the first day, when she’d bellow at the top of her lungs until Steph or I returned.

Steph bought the animals from a local woman who singlehandedly runs a farm of two hundred fowl, a hundred sheep and goats, and I don’t know how many cattle (maybe a dozen). We’ll be getting a couple more goats and another ewe in September. Steph picked them up using the dog crate, and we originally put them in the old garden, which is overgrown with grass, weeds, raspberry canes and little birch trees after a couple summers of disuse. The idea was that the sheep would eat the grass and the goat would take down some of the weeds and saplings, to make it easier for me to till. And they’d leave behind a bit of fertilizer.

The plan worked well with the sheep, who contentedly work away at eating until it gets warm – then they lay down until it gets cool again (Very smart). But the goat managed to squeeze herself through the six inch openings in the garden fence, and escape. Luckily, she didn’t want to go far. She wanted to find us. Same thing happened when we put her in her pen in the barn, so we doubled the security and plugged the holes.

Henhouse roof

With some much-appreciated help from Sofie (who’s going away to college in less than a week), I got the Suntuf roofing material installed on top of the henhouse. This is an experiment – I don’t know how this stuff will perform in a northern winter. But if it works it will provide lots of light and turn the henhouse into a much brighter and warmer place. I might even put some plants in there (above the nesting-boxes or on the rafters, where the birds won’t get them) until I have a greenhouse.

The Suntuf panels are eight foot by 26 inches, to allow for a two inch overlap. They are supposed to be mounted on special plastic pieces that are molded to the correct shape, but the Home Depot had never heard of these. The “Pro” desk people checked one of their books and told me I could order them, but only by the case (of 100). so I opted for pine 1x2s instead. The panels themselves are fairly easy to install, except for the ridgecap, which in my opinion is the weak link of the system. It is not a trivial task, getting the top on evenly. I didn’t actually manage it, so there’s a little bit of waviness to the top of the building. But the roof is sealed, and that’s the main thing.

Standing on the top rungs of a twelve foot stepladder took me some time to get used to. Toward the end of the day, I had stopped thinking about the height (except when I dropped a screw and watched it fall), which was good, because several times I had to get up over the panels and use two hands to steady the ridgecap so I could screw it down correctly. That meant releasing my death-grip on whatever joist was available. Sofie said afterward she couldn’t believe I didn’t fall, but I never felt like I was going to.

This henhouse was a learning experience for me. I’ve never built anything on that scale before, so about half the time I was just guessing. It looks like I guessed right, but time will tell. The chickens are growing fast – later this week I’ll probably start bringing them out to visit their new home, a couple of dozen at a time.

There are a few little details to finish yet. Cosmetic things like trim on the corners, and functional things like windows. But the building itself is pretty much complete. It even has a door that locks!

Been busy! More details soon...

user@domain.com — 2012-08-10T22:03:46-05:00

Chicks!

user@domain.com — 2012-08-08T18:28:11-05:00

Well, if it’s really a farm when you have animals you’re planning on eating, then we started farm life today. The first batch of chicks arrived today! I got a call from the Post Office midmorning, and drove down to the loading dock in the back where they were waiting in their box, peeping up a storm.

We got four varieties: Rhode Island Red, Barred Plymouth Rock, Jersey Giant, and Buff Orpington. I can’t tell the Jerseys from the Rocks — they both look like little penguins to me. They’re in a brooder I built in the garage, where the kids can go out and see them whenever they want. The kittens (who are living in the garage too until they’re a little older and the barn is ready) haven’t noticed them yet, despite a day of peeping. But just in case, there’s a wire lid on the breeder to keep the little guys safe. We lost a few in transit, but they’re guaranteed, so I imagine we’ll get credit for them. After some water and starter (which they really preferred to gro-gel) and a nap under the heat lamps, they’re looking bright-eyed and happy. A couple of the Reds have even caught flies already!

More details soon: in the meantime, here are a couple more photos:

Barn Security

user@domain.com — 2012-08-07T20:10:54-05:00

Today we worked on basic barn security. I drove some stakes into the ground and Steph made an enclosure for sheep and goats with found materials. The gate panel in the photo was conveniently attached to the wall, so we used it as one side and used some heavy, quarter-inch wire panels for the front. I trenched out below the outside walls and put down some half-inch hardware wire to discourage rats and other pests. There was a doorway that was basically boarded up, that I thought might be useful for getting animals to the side pasture, so I made a bottom sill, and then attached the hardware cloth to it. I used stakes to keep most of the hardware wire down, and a little quikrete in holes and corners where the old wood was damaged. I suppose that’s cheating, but anything that helps keep out unwanted night visitors is good at this point.

In the afternoon, I went back to the henhouse. I finished the back and started the front, with the help of a rented 12-foot stepladder. Since that’s rented, I’m going to try to get a lot of use out of it tomorrow too. We also rented an industrial strength bolt cutter, to deal with the quarter inch wire panels we’re using in the barn. It’s nice to have a well-stocked rental place nearby, since we’re new to the area and don’t know anyone we could borrow a ladder or a bolt-cutter from. And it’s great that there’s a lot of material left around from the previous owners’ projects, for us to scavenge and use. There’s a lot here to work with, which gives us a bit of a head-start. It’s not the coziest, most rustic looking barn, but it’ll do for now -- and Steph and the kids have spruced it up nicely so it looks much more inviting than it did. In any case, it needs to be ready. Animals are coming later this week!

Henhouse again

user@domain.com — 2012-08-06T19:16:36-05:00

Worked on the henhouse this morning. It went something like this:

Day of Rest and Food Prep

user@domain.com — 2012-08-05T11:53:35-05:00

So it’s Sunday morning again. Got up late (after the sunrise) and drank a couple of cups of coffe while playing with the kittens and puppies on the back porch. Then Steph and I came inside and did our Sunday morning chore, preparing a week’s worth of food for the two pups and three kittens (the old indoor cats prefer their dry cat food and an occasional can of tuna).

The process is becoming a little more streamlined, now that we’ve done it a few times. The kitchen counter is a disassembly line. Whole chickens enter on one end and packaged meals exit the other. On the left, two two-packs of whole chicken, which we picked up again for 95 cents a pound at Walmart. I cut the birds on the board (with knives I’ve remembered to sharpen!), and Steph runs them through the machine. Along the way, there’s a loop, as the meat first gets cut into pieces that can be sent through the grinder, and then it all goes through twice. Then on the other end, they go into reusable plastic food storage containers.

The rough grind takes less time than it takes me to cut up the four chickens. After two birds, Steph cleans out the auger of all the cartilage that piles up there, so I have a chance to catch up. Bone goes through just fine, but the cartilage gets hung up there and after a while sounds like knuckle-bones popping as the grinder turns. So we clear that out, and it doesn’t end up in the final mix of food (which is probably just as well, since I don’t think it adds a lot to the nutritional value of the food). We get two big bowls from four chickens, and next time we’ll clean the auger between each of those bowls as we’re feeding it through again, too. By the end of the second run-through, the grinder was slowing down a bit.

Working together, we managed to make the process fairly efficient. Steph was even able to catch about half the meat as it came out of the second grind, which decreased the amount that had to be packed from the bowl at the end, and also eliminated the need to reuse the bowls from the first grind. After about an hour and ten minutes, we had 29 meals for the freezer, and a little pile of fresh meat for today. Then came the deep-cleaning of the kitchen (because, after all, we’re talking about raw chicken bought at Walmart), complete with bleach on the countertops and floor. The meat goes into the chest freezer, and we’re good for another week!

History work, too...

user@domain.com — 2012-08-02T20:50:34-05:00

Spent two hours this morning on skype with one of my dissertation buddies. I have a couple of people I keep in touch with, talking about our projects from time to time. This one is writing an article that basically sets the scene for his dissertation. Nineteenth century America, so it’s a period I’m interested in, even though political history isn’t my main focus. He’s working on a new interpretation of Reconstruction, that focuses on continuity in politics from the period before the Civil War to the period after. In a sense, he’s suggesting that the sectional battle over slavery was not the whole story, and that the other things going on may be equally interesting and important. I’m looking forward to reading more as he continues developing this idea. For our next skype session in two weeks, we’ll be talking about my work, so I have a deadline to get some material written and sent off to him!

After lunch, I painted up another set of panels for the walls of the henhouse. Then I finished cutting and mounting the side walls. Painting them first is a chore, but I think it speeds up the process in the long run.

Puppies!

user@domain.com — 2012-07-31T18:18:20-05:00

In addition to cats, a farm needs dogs. Especially in coyote/wolf/cougar/bear country. We saw a black bear in our backyard a couple of evenings ago. A little one, but that suggests there may be a Momma bear around.

These puppies are half German Shepherd, half Great Dane. So they should be about the right size to scare off animals and protect the kids.

The brown one is Gertie, and the black one is Freya. Their Dad’s name is Odin, so we’re continuing the Norse mythology theme (Mom’s name is Isis, which is also cool, although not Norse).

Barn paint and scaffolding

user@domain.com — 2012-07-30T17:53:15-05:00

Today we started the week with an early trip to town for building supplies. I got lumber, nails, and other hardware, and

Steph got white paint to brighten up the corner of the barn that’s going to house the animals we’re getting this week. After she had put a can of white stain on the bare walls, the kids came in and painted animals and flowers. It should be a nice bright spot for the new animals to live in -- at least it will make us happy when we visit them!

My task today was trying to figure out how to get the roof built on the henhouse. I thought I’d be able to use the extension ladder as a platform, and stand on 2x4s. But I’m not that sure-footed and I’m not that good with heights. I managed to get the 12 foot support for the back of the ridgepole set up, and the temporary front support (there’s no center support on the front because there’s going to be a door there). When I tried to get up on the horizontal ladder and nail the ridgepole to the temporary front support, I was forced to admit I needed scaffolding. There was no way I was going to be able to stand on three 2x4s at six feet and nail a 15 foot ridgepole to a 2x4 another six feet up. In the first place I’m not that tall. And if I fall on my head, my projects will come to a pretty screeching halt.

Luckily there’s a rental place in town that has everything you could possibly need at reasonable rates. I shot down there and got the pieces I needed. Things went much smoother after that. It’s a heck of a lot easier to concentrate on doing the job when I’m not constantly thinking about falling. Like Clint says, you’ve gotta know your limitations.

I almost finished the roof joists. Will complete that and install the roof tomorrow before I have to bring back the scaffolding. That means another early trip for supplies, and I may as well get the wallboard at the same time I get the roofing material. I’m going to try translucent suntuf panels. They come in 2 foot by 8 foot sheets, so I’m going to need the scaffolding to get them up on top. But with luck, I’ll have that all done by tomorrow evening, which is when I said I’d bring back the scaffolding. In the last photo, I’ve already taken down the second story of scaffolding, because I was running out of space inside the structure. Couldn’t add any more roof rafters with the scaffolding sticking up there!

Boy, it’s nice to have the right tools...

Blueberries

user@domain.com — 2012-07-28T14:35:25-05:00

It’s the weekend, so I mowed the lawn over the septic system and planted blueberries and a couple of apple trees. I got the eight blueberry bushes online from Berries Unlimited. Five different varieties, all supposedly good for zone three. A mixture of early, early-mid, and mid-season bushes. If I keep them very wet through the rest of the summer, we should have berries in the spring.

While I was out this morning looking for peat moss to mix with the soil (I also incorporated some aluminum sulphate to pull down the pH a bit), I stopped by Nature’s Edge Garden Center. Chad didn’t have a bale of peat (but he directed me to Ace Hardware, where they did), but he was selling off his fruit trees cheap. Bought too many this spring, he said, and he didn’t want to carry them over the winter. They were a screaming deal. So I got two apples, and planted them in the fruit tree row on the top of the hill.

It's a grind!

user@domain.com — 2012-07-27T20:17:58-05:00

We now have two indoor cats and three barn kittens. Next week we’re getting two puppies, and in the late fall a third. We had good luck feeding our dog in New Hampshire a raw diet, so we thought we might try that here. In Keene, we were able to buy frozen blocks of ground raw chicken from the small meat market up the road. Here, no one is really doing that yet. So we decided to do it ourselves.

A little back-of-an-envelope math suggests that three big working dogs are going to eat 18-20 thirty-three pound bags of chow a year. Five cats are likewise going to eat about 20 twenty pound bags of cat food. If we used a decent supermarket brand like Iams, we’d be looking at about $1,500 in annual petfood costs. If we used a premium brand, it would be more. A lot more.

On the other hand, we could grind fresh meat for all the animals. This meat could come from a variety of sources, at a variety of costs. Some of it could come from the farm or from fishing, and would be very very cheap. But let’s look at the worst case scenario, and assume we went to the supermarket and bought people food, and ground it up for the animals. How would that compare?

We started out today with four whole chickens at 95 cents per pound. I dismembered them a little bit (note to self: sharp knives are more efficient and safer!), and then Steph fed them through the grinder for a coarse grind. The machine gobbled up skin, organs, meat, and bones, as fast as we could stuff chicken into the top. Then we changed to the fine extruder, and I fed the rough mix through again. This not only ground the chicken finer, but also mixed the meat, organs, bones and marrow into a nice uniform paste that looked just like the chicken-burger you get at the store. Most of that went into forms Steph placed in the freezer so we’ll have bags of serving-sized chicken for several weeks, from about an hour’s work this morning.

If the animals

eat between three and four pounds of raw meat daily, we’ll save from $100 to $500 in the first year. That will pay for the grinder. And chances are, our animals will be healthier and fitter as a result. We’d save even more, of course, if we added fillers like rice to the mix. But let’s be real, fillers are one of the reasons commercial pet foods lead to obese pets.

The kittens inhaled it.

Of course, it’s having a large number of animals to feed that makes this economical. We wouldn’t be able to do it this efficiently with just one dog or two cats. But it would still be healthier for single pets to eat a raw diet. Something to think about…

Later in the day, I worked on the henhouse some more. I set the base plates, cut the posts so they were all level at the top, and framed the sidewalls. Then I threw some of the dirt I had previously removed onto the floor, to protect the hardware cloth. I placed the studs so that I’ll be able to hang nesting boxes between them. I’m going to build the nesting boxes in stacks two across. So some of the gaps are two feet, and others are closer to three (for the Jersey Giant hens). It will all make sense later in the process. But it was fun cutting and hammering, and it’s nice that this structure is finally starting to look like something!

Got Worms?

user@domain.com — 2012-07-26T18:49:10-05:00

We got our worms this morning, from Uncle Jim’s Worm Farm. I gave them some water to wake them up, and split them between the three compost bins. Their job is to eat everything the animals won’t eat, and to process the animals’ waste into compost for the gardens. As much as possible, we’d like to capture all the nutrients available biologically, and minimize the fertilizers coming from off the farm. I kept an eye on the worms throughout the day to make sure they were hydrated and not being eaten by robins before they could get to work. I also got a few seed-packs of heritage greens from “Uncle Jim” for the fall garden, but I put them aside for later.

After I put out the worms, I got back to work on the henhouse. I cut and leveled the base plates, then started cutting the one inch hardware cloth for the floor. This process was interrupted by rain a couple of times, but in the end I got all the pieces cut, and the two end pieces fastened to the 10 foot base plates. Then came the hard work.

Bending 16 gauge wire to lace these panels together was difficult. I did some of that, but mostly I cut short pieces of wire and made “twisties” every three of four inches. Hopefully these and the one inch overlap between sheets will stop any critters getting through to eat our birds. There’s a foot of extra mesh on each long side, which I’m going to fold upward and nail to the joists. I’ll add a couple more of these extensions on the front and back, to discourage animals trying to get in at the base of the walls.

Tomorrow, I’ll finish setting out the floor and fastening the baseplates. Then I’ll be able to start framing the sidewalls, and the thing will start to look like a structure!

Footings and Kittens

user@domain.com — 2012-07-25T20:49:43-05:00

Today I got back to work on the chicken house. I measured again, dug holes at each of the corners, and set the posts I’d brought from the sandbox in Keene. They were still in their concrete footings. The concrete was all kinds of overkill for a sandbox with a little fort and slide, but it sure came in handy today!

Digging post holes was less of a chore than I’d imagined it would be. We have about six inches of topsoil here, and beneath that is a nice layer of sand. In one spot I actually made it down to a clay layer below the sand, but it didn’t give me any trouble. There were some bigger stones in the sand (evidence that farmers before me had removed the stones from the upper layer, I guess), but they were handy for bracing the posts when it came time to level them.

I had two concerns with these posts: making them straight up and down, and making them exactly 10 and 15 feet apart, top and bottom. I used two braces in each direction, one for the top measurement, one for the bottom. It actually worked great, once I figured out how to keep the high braces up high while I was attaching them. I tried just balancing the other end on the top of the far post, but the 2x4 kept falling and I ended up with a bruised finger and a bent temper for a couple of minutes. Once again, the old sandbox from Keene was the solution. There were big eyehooks on top of each post, which once had rope through them for hanging cloth. Steph had used them to make tents and shelters for the kids. I used them to attach a bungie, so I wouldn’t need another person to hold up one side, while I was nailing the other.

Long story short, I got the braces up, leveled the posts, and poured rocks and concrete into the holes. Once again, this was found material. The rocks were the ones that had come up in the digging process, and the Quikrete was the remains of two bags I found in the garage when we arrived here.

So I have four corners of a henhouse. Tomorrow, weather permitting, I’ll dig out the floor a little more, set the base plates and lay out the hardware cloth that’s hopefully going to stop predators from getting our birds. This is going to be a deep-bedding-over-dirt style henhouse, so I need to prevent critters from burrowing under the walls. Mark the insurance guy, who has been raising chickens around here for over twenty years, poured a concrete floor and wrapped the edge with a course of blocks. I’m still hoping that won’t be necessary, because I was convinced by Harvey Ussery’s description of deep bedding, and want to give it a try.

Steph spent part of the afternoon shoveling away at the manure floor of the shelter behind the barn where the horses were kept. It’s deep, and will make good worm food, then good compost! She filled each of the three sections of the composter with a good foot or so for a base layer, and I watered it down. Tomorrow, we should have worms to throw on the pile…

One last thing that happened today: Steph read a craigslist ad this morning from someone giving away kittens. We had already determined we’d need a couple of barn cats. Heather wrote an interesting piece on the role of cats on the frontier for The Historical Society’s blog this week, and our reasoning was pretty much the same (except not the part about mice eating my beard!). Just goes to show how some things don’t change (the need for cats), while some things do (once they were rare and expensive, now they’re free to a good home). In the end, we went looking for two and came home with three. Their names, from left to right, are Quintus Maximus (or just Max), Iorek Byrnison (from The Golden Compass), and Tommy (or Tom-tom, or Thomas). Hours and hours of fun…

Composter

user@domain.com — 2012-07-24T16:37:58-05:00

In spite of the fact that we’re going to have dogs and chickens — omnivores who ought to eat most of our table scraps and garden waste — I took some time out from the henhouse project today to put together a composter. It has three sections, and we’ll probably fill at least one when we clean out the shelter behind the barn where the previous owners kept their horses.

I used old lumber, mostly pieces from the old sandbox I disassembled in Keene and brought along. If you look closely, you can see where the kids painted some of the boards. These are cedar, so they should be fairly rot-resistant. They were also precut into sizes I could use without any modifying. The couple of pieces of pine I had to add from the pile in the barn all went up off the ground. Those were the only three pieces I had to cut. I didn’t get it completely done with found materials, though. The chicken wire around the outside is new (it’s really nice Redbrand wire from the coop, as a matter of fact), but I managed to salvage a couple of old scraps for the dividers between the sections. And I used up nearly a box of nails and a whole box of staples. But all in all, about $25 and half a day’s work. We’ll start filling it tomorrow, and then we’ll see how the worms like it when they arrive.

(Carrying away the remaining pieces of Keene cedar. I’ll find another use for them soon…)

Gardenagerie, Week One

user@domain.com — 2012-07-23T16:23:16-05:00

Day One

The morning began early: 5:30 or so, when I woke in a hotel room in northern Wisconsin. I looked out the window to verify that the truck was where I had left it and hadn’t been messed with during the night. We’d asked for a room overlooking the truck parking in the back of the hotel, but since they gave us a room facing the street and the front parking lot, I had moved the truck to the front and parked it in six or seven spaces (with the other two vehicles in the two spaces in front of the cab, so I’d be sure to be able to get out), We began the breakfast/quick packing/sneak-the-cats-out routine we’d mastered during the course of this trip, excited that this would be our last hotel stay.

We still had several hours to drive to reach our destination, and we arrived at the farm about lunchtime. The grass had been mown, and the lot looked tidy and well-kept. The trees had filled in nicely (when I’d been out here in May, the oaks were still flowering and hadn’t really leafed out yet), and the house was well-sheltered from the dirt road in front. I called Steve the realtor to tell him we’d arrived early, and he said he’d come out immediately to do the walk-through with us rather than wait until 2:00 (everybody is incredibly nice here).

Steve came out, we walked through the house, and he let us leave the cats in the garage, which was a big relief. Freddy had cried pretty much the whole way from New Hampshire, and although she didn’t complain a lot, Meowie had been carsick several times.

We went to town, since the way we’d arrived went through the woods, and I wanted to show the family how close we were to town, and I to show off the town; and stopped at the food coop. We got some lunch and joined the coop (the first of many coops we’d be joining in the coming days). Then we went back to the farm. The kids were thrilled with the old swing-set and the huge yard, and just happy to be out of the car. So we threw a couple of blankets down under the trees and left them (with big sister Sofie) to play when we headed down to the closing.

The closing went fine. We came back and opened the house up. Although we were tired, we couldn’t help but start unpacking the truck. Did that for a couple of hours, during which Steve the realtor stopped by with four take and bake pizzas! So we had our first meal and sat on the back porch watching the hummingbirds dart around the feeder. For a moment, it seemed like “hummingbird habitat” might be a better name than Gardenagerie…

We got the mattresses out of the truck, and threw them on the appropriate floors. As the sun set we turned off the air and opened the windows. It’s quiet here. If you listen very hard, you can hear a road in the distance. Sometimes trains. But these are faint sounds, and are easily drowned out by the beating of finches’ wings or the buzz of hummingbirds.

Day two began at about 6:30 AM, when I woke on the bed on the floor of my new bedroom. Outside the windows, tree branches waved in a gentle breeze, in front of an overcast sky. It had been light for what seemed like hours, and I vaguely remembered waking once or twice before, and deciding it was too early to get up.

There was no coffee, so I had a glass of cold water. There was no food to speak of, so I had a fig newton. I figured we’d go out to breakfast when everyone was awake, and I’d get my dose of caffeine soon enough.

In the meantime, there was still half a truck to unload. We’d made a good start on it the evening before, but the stuff toward the front was heavier (books!), and it was stacked floor to ceiling. Luckily I had the dolly, so I moved piles of boxes at a time, down the ramp and into the garage. Steph and Sofie helped with the remaining furniture, and by 9:00 we had just about everything out. The final heavy pieces were the kitchen table and the sofa, which had to go around to the back of the house and enter by the sliding door on the deck.

So by nine the truck was empty, except for the six four-by-four posts with concrete footings that I had salvaged from the kids’ play-house I’d built in Keene. These were beasts due to the big concrete feet on each of them, but the wood was valuable, and I like the idea that I’m going to build the chicken house with some lumber that the kids painted and played on when they were littler. I used the dolly to take these one by one to the barn. Then it was time to shower and get some breakfast.

We went to the bakery Steph and I had noticed the day before on the way to the closing. There were a dozen or more old people at a long table in front, eating breakfast. We got a table and ordered — Steph asked for a “cake” donut along with her meal and was very happy when she didn’t have to explain what that meant. It’s like being back home!

We dropped the kids back at home, where the little ones played on the “playground” (the old swing-set in the backyard the previous owner left behind) and Sofie watched a DVD movie on her computer. First stop was the local U-Haul, where we dropped off the 26-foot truck we’d just emptied. I’d already made a couple of calls earlier in the morning — joined the electric coop and learned that because of the storm last week, it would be ten days before the telecom coop could connect our internet. We went in and filled out their paperwork (you have to give everybody your social security number and sign a W-9 when you join these coops, because they actually pay their members dividends if they make a profit — what a concept!), and then we got a library card and did our first grocery shopping. The dreaded stock-up new house shopping trip, which we managed to get done for just a little less than I expected.

In the afternoon, we made another trip out and joined the farm coop, where we got the things we’ll need for the first batch of chicks, and some grass seed and hoses. This is a real farmer’s coop — and I filled out another W-9 to join! The prices were reasonable and the guys were knowledgeable and helpful. The manager came out of his office and gave the kids little coloring books and crayons. They had 50 foot extra-heavy duty hoses on sale for $19.99. The last hose I bought at the fake coop in Keene (Agway) was a 50-footer too, but it cost me $54!

So we came home and I found some old lumber in the barn to use for the chick brooder. Then I threw down the grass seed I’d bought (I knew I should have bought the 25# bag — I always underestimate grass seed!) and watered. I think they seeded when they finished the septic system, but the ground is bone dry. I wonder when the last decent rain was here?

We had our first home-cooked meal in the new house: bison meatballs and organic (jarred) red sauce over linguine. When I said it would be ready in five minutes, Vivi asked, “Where are we eating tonight?” It’s been a while since we sat down to a home-cooked meal. But slowly we’re getting back to normal.

Day three began about six, with hot coffee in the french press — I guess that means we’re home! I unpacked the tools and sorted the garage a bit, then I put together the little brooder for the chicks. Called the post office to ask how they handle chicks, and the lady said, “Our trucks usually come in between 7 PM and 3 AM and I’ll call you when the chicks come. But some people don’t like to be called after midnight,” she continued, “So I can wait until morning too.” I said no, please call as soon as they arrive and I’ll come get them. Can you believe it though? They call in the middle of the night when chicks arrive! We keep being surprised how nice people are here!

Steph got an old-fashioned school desk from a lady on craigslist, for our youngest. And when we went to the Depot for paint, she got paint to customize it per our daughter’s instructions: gloss black with red, orange and yellow flames! We also got three shades of yellow and a light green, for the first round of painting, and Steph painted the wall in the living room that had been red. I took inventory of the barn and found a couple of sheets of old paneling and chipboard that I can use to build nesting boxes for the henhouse. I also got a 100 foot tape measure, so I could measure off the gardens. There’s enough space between the side-door of the barn and the animal pen in back, for a 40 or 45 foot run. So the 36 foot hoophouse will fit behind the henhouse, as planned.

I dragged some heavy fence panels onto the grass, but they weren’t in great shape and they weren’t the right lengths. So I hauled them back into the barn and stashed them out of the way. I bought the 25# bag of grass-seed from the coop today, so I’ve been throwing that down and watering it. The coop guy remembered my name, and said he’d tried two more distributors, but couldn’t find a source for the Cedarific cat litter Steph had been using in NH. But I’m going to try the pine shavings we’ll be using for chick bedding — they cost a lot less and I could compost it.

In the afternoon we visited a farm about 45 minutes away, to look at puppies. They’re an accidental litter from a German Shepard/Great Dane cross, born about six weeks ago. Cuter than hell. We went for one, but decided to get two. Met both parent dogs, and they were both nice animals. Such a difference from the puppy-farm people; and it turns out they’re everywhere. Yesterday Steph called on another craigslist ad and the person wouldn’t let her visit to see the puppies. It was that same old line: “Oh, I’m coming into town anyway so I’ll meet you in the Walmart parking lot.” they must all read the same grifter manual!

Day four began at about 2:30 AM, when I decided I really wasn’t going to get anymore sleep. I was hoping to get a call from the Post Office at 3-ish, with news of the baby chicks’ arrival. But that didn’t come. Turns out they weren’t shipped, because the hatch was less than expected. So we’ll be getting them next week.

As I was laying awake, I started going over my plans for the henhouse in my mind. I had been thinking of building it 12 x 18 feet, but that would have meant the roof pieces would need to be over 8 feet long. That would mean buying more suntuf panels, cutting and overlapping them. It would also mean that the roof would have to be reinforced where the overlaps were, which sort-of defeats the purpose of buying translucent panels.

At 5:16 I noticed the eastern sky was getting a little light behind the trees. I was sitting at the kitchen table, looking through the sliding glass door. A car went by outside. Happens a few times a day. What a change from 24x7 traffic and sirens at all hours of the night and day!

This house is practical: it doesn’t have a dining room. And the old electric range — well, damned if it doesn’t actually boil water on all four burners! Not like that pretentious glass-top thing we had at the last house. And the dishwasher. They’re all a standard size, so how does this one manage to fit twice as much in it? I guess when you lose that stainless steel effect, you gain something too.

So, in any case, I’ve got a new design for a slightly smaller (10 x 15 feet) henhouse, and detailed drawings of how I think it’s going to go together. And a step-by-step plan (Step 1: posts and braces, Step 2: sides, Step 3: back, etc) and bill of materials. It should be a little cheaper at this size, and I don’t think we’re sacrificing too much in the way of living space. This will be a spot for laying hens, anyway — meat birds will probably end up living somewhere else.

I should be able to build this without buying any new tools. So I can put off a table-saw purchase for a while. I might splurge and get myself a nice post-hole digger, since I’ll be doing more of that soon, when I get around to fencing the front and putting up a gate. The garden/chicken fence is going to be electronet to start. Especially since it won’t be much of a garden until I get the hoophouse put up. Then in the spiring I may have to think about a fence — or we may use the garden fence that’s already up, if the goats can clear the wreckage from that area.

I took an hour nap, and made it through the rest of the day. Went to the depot and got a load of lumber, and to Acme Tools for a chainsaw. Took down a dead pine in the front yard. It was a workout! I’m going to be able to get in shape just by working on this land!

Day five: When I woke this morning, the sun was already clearing the trees. Had breakfast and visited a little with the in-laws, who drove out for a visit, then the women went to see art in the park, Roger watched the kids hit golf balls, and I worked some more on the pine tree I took down yesterday. Lots of branches on a pine, so there were a lot of small sticks and twigs to cut or break and then stack. The goals was, to make the site look like there hadn’t been a big tree taken down and disassembled on it. I haven’t moved the stacks yet, because I’m not sure exactly where I want to put them (but they’ll probably end up in the woodshed once I take a harder look at that and get it a bit organized), but it looks pretty good.

Then I took down three dead birches, that were already starting to rot from the bottoms. There were shelf mushrooms of some type on the lower parts of the trunk, but the wood above seemed sound.

Went up on the roof in the AM, too. The sixteen foot ladder I picked up yesterday was more than enough to get up onto the garage, and from there you can hop up onto the main roof. My fear of heights didn’t have much chance to kick in, and I was able to trim off all the remaining seedpods from the lilac bushes. I even got several that were leftover from prior years.

We went out to dinner in the evening, which will probably end up being a fairly rare thing for us.

Day six: Brought in all my boxes of books from the garage this morning, and put about 1/3 of them on the shelves in the study — which is Sofie’s bedroom until she goes off to college in three and a half weeks. After she goes, I’ll paint the gray and white paneling and set up my desk. I put out only the books I think I need for my immediate projects. More books will fit on the shelves, but I’ll probably be able to cull a few, too.

Played a little horseshoes with Sofie & Steph, and watched the kids play for a bit.

This afternoon I’m trying to bake a loaf of bread.

I’ve sort-of designated Sundays as a day to think and plan, but not to work on any large projects. So I didn’t cut any wood today. Didn’t start digging on the henhouse. But maybe the post-holes on that project will happen as the same time as the fencepost holes in the front yard, and maybe I’ll get somebody to dig them or rent a power tool. Have to think more on that.

The loaf has a little coarse cornmeal in it. Just enough to taste good with the honey I used instead of sugar, I hope. Not enough to ruin the loaf (I hope!). But it seems to have risen well, out on the back porch in the 90 degree summer heat….

It actually rose quite well, and I baked a successful loaf.

Day seven was day one of chicken coop building. Not a lot of building today, really. Digging. In spite of being in the upper midwest, our new place is a little hilly. The ground isn’t completely level where I want to put the chickens and additional gardens, so I decided to make a level pad for the henhouse. It’s going to have a dirt floor and deep bedding (with a hardware cloth predator barrier), but even so, I don’t want it to look like a falling-down shack as soon as I build it!

We also got internet (hence the blog update) and phone service today from the telecom coop. Nearly a week before we expected to, because the lady we signed up with took the trouble to check for cancellations and squeeze us onto the schedule. And an insurance guy came to inspect the place for our homeowner’s policy. We chatted about chickens (he’s been keeping layers and raising meat birds for over 20 years up here), and also about trees. I asked him who he might recommend to take down a few trees that are either too big or leaning in strange ways or too close to the house, and he said “If you can wait until the weather cools down a bit, I’ll do it.” (Have I mentioned people are just NICE here?)

The digging was strenuous, but the Mantis made it a lot easier. And it was definitely not as tough as it would have been in New England. The ground here is sandy loam, and since it was once farmland, it’s pretty free of stones. There were a few, but nowhere near the number there would have been in New Hampshire. Tomorrow I’ll start digging the footings and maybe place the posts. The weather was a little cooler today — it was warm in the sun, but not the 100 degrees we’ve been having every day since we arrived!

Before the Plunge

user@domain.com — 2012-07-07T16:10:07-05:00

“an incredibly riveting read”! (that’s what she said…)

Got an unexpected email a couple of mornings ago, from Jasmine at onlinecolleges.net. She was writing to let me know she’d included this blog in her article, “The 50 Best American History Blogs.” I’m very happy to be included – you’ll find me at #16 in the alphabetical list – especially after looking at some of the other blogs Jasmine picked. Really good stuff! And the list itself is a great resource; I found a bunch of blogs I didn’t know about, which I’ll probably follow regularly. So thanks for including me, Jasmine, and thanks for the list! Online colleges also looks like an interesting concept and website, which I’ll be looking into more closely as well.

For people who may be coming here for the first time, I should mention that I recently archived my posts from the last few years, and started fresh. So the new stuff is here, and you can find everything before this summer here.

Still preparing for the move.

We’re down to the last few days of our stay in Keene. It’s the deep breath before the plunge, as Gandalf would say (we’ve been watching the extended versions of The Lord of the Rings to help the time pass). Today I’m taking it easy. Tomorrow, the trampoline comes down, the computers get packed, and the kitchen and everything else that’s not staying. Monday we finish packing. Tuesday we load the truck. Wednesday we clean and the buyer walks through. Thursday morning we close and drive.

Blueberries

As part of the finishing-up-with-New-England project, we picked blueberries today at our favorite spot, Monadnock Berries. This was their opening day, and we got there early in the morning and beat the rain. Next time we pick blueberries, with luck, it will be on our own spot.

I’m really looking forward to getting started on the little farm – we’re thinking of calling it a Gardenagerie. But, just to prove this back-to-the-land idea isn’t something we just pulled out of thin air, here’s a photo of me with one of my “projects” for animal science when I was an undergrad at UMass. So, nothing new here. The surprise is that it took me this long to make the big circle and end up where I began.

Charles Knowlton's Books

user@domain.com — 2012-07-05T13:38:29-05:00

I recently made a trip over to the Franklin County Courthouse in Greenfield Massachusetts, to see if they had any documents in their Probate Office on the families I’ve been researching. I should have done this a long time ago, but I never managed to get around to it. Now that I’m leaving the area, I had to get over there or lose the chance.

It was worth the trip. Although it is a courthouse, so you’re likely to see people in shackles and you have to empty your pockets and go through a metal detector, the Probate people are very nice and helpful. They’re very focused on the present in their day-to-day work, of course. But they seem to like it when historians come and show interest in the old documents they have stored away in the vaults. And there’s gold in those vaults.

I found wills and estate inventories for several of the people I’m researching. Most importantly, I found a huge folder for Dr. Charles Knowlton, including the will and inventory, an inventory of items sold in the estate sale (and who they were sold to!), and guardianship papers and accounts for the minor children Knowlton left behind. You can learn a lot about your subject from these documents. Who were his friends? Who did he trust to look after his children? Who owed him money?

One of the most interesting things for me, so far at least, has been the inventory. It lists everything from horses and buggies (how did he get around when seeing patients?) to featherbeds and mustard spoons (what did the house and furnishings look like?). The list of medical devices was surprising, and suggests (I’m going to check with a couple of historians of medicine to be sure) Knowlton was at the cutting edge of his profession. And then there are the books.

By cross-referencing between the inventory and the estate sale documents, I think I’ve managed to identify nearly all of the books in Charles Knowlton’s library. The majority of them are medical texts, as I expected. There are 72 titles I was able to identify, but many of them contained multiple volumes (largest being Braithwaite with 18 vols.), so the actual count was easily over a hundred books. This seems like quite a large collection for a country doctor. And interestingly, they aren’t all dated around the period when Knowlton was studying medicine (the mid-1820s). Several of them were brand new at the time of his death (1850), which again validates the idea that Knowlton was trying to stay up to date on the very latest procedures and techniques. In addition to the texts, he subscribed to several regional and national medical journals – one of which, The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, he was a regular contributor to.

This was not a trivial task: the inventory was a five-foot long roll of paper, and the titles were never complete. In about half a dozen cases, I was not able to decode the script, or there was no title or author that matched what I seemed to be seeing. But I feel pretty good about getting all but 6 of about 150 titles -- that’s 96%! Here’s an example of the inventory:

I don’t know enough yet about these medical texts to say whether this collection represents a particular medical point of view, but I notice there are a lot of anatomy texts and a lot of texts on treating women. This makes sense, given Knowlton’s interest in birth control, women’s health, and women’s rights in general. Interestingly, one of the books in what I’m calling the Freethought section of his library is Mary Wollstonecrafts Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

Which brings us to the non-medical portion of the collection. The general library contained 28 titles, many of which (such as Peregrine Pickle) were probably books used in the education of the Knowltons’ three children or for family entertainment. The Freethought library, in contrast, contained 44 titles. I’m making value judgments here, assigning texts to one category or another. Clearly, Knowlton’s medicine was influenced by his philosophy. And clearly, even a book like Noah Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Language could be political. But also obviously, the Thomas Paine texts belong in Freethought, as do the histories of religion and books like Paley’s Natural Theology (Knowlton liked to understand the other position, and anticipate his opponent’s argument in debate). And I’ve also put Democracy in America and Weld’s American Slavery As it Is in this section, because I think Freethought was very political for Knowlton, and his ideas about America were tightly bound to this perspective.

Charles Knowlton died in 1850, so of course we don’t see one of the foundational texts of contemporary secularism, Darwin’s Origin of Species. Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of The Natural History of Creation, however, is right where it ought to be on Knowlton’s shelf. This is remarkable, and it demonstrates not only Charles Knowlton’s incredible coolness, but that if anything, James Secord underestimated the importance of Chambers’s anticipation of Darwin’s theory of evolution in his book, Victorian Sensation.

Okay then! Without further ado, here are the books:

Oh, wait! One more thing: The dates below represent the first publication dates of these works, not necessarily the editions Charles Knowlton owned -- which of course we’d have no way of knowing. Many of these titles were regularly revised and updated. Similarly, the links do not necessarily represent the earliest edition or the edition Knowlton owned.

Medical:

John Abercrombie, Pathological and Practical Researches on Diseases of the Brain and Spinal Cord, 1829

Southern Society for Clinical Investigation, Philadelphia, The American Journal of the Medical Sciences, (1830s-60s)

Joseph Ayre, Practical Observations on the Nature and Treatment of Marasmus, and of those Disorders Allied to It, which May Strictly be Called Bilious, 1822

Matthew Baillie, The Morbid Anatomy of Some of the Most Important Parts of the Human Body, 1793

Thomas Beddoes, Manual of Health, 1806

Charles Bell, The Anatomy of the Human Body, 1803

John Bell, Discourses on the Nature and Cure of Wounds, 1795

J. Frederick Blumenbach, The Institutions of Physiology, 1795

The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal

W. Braithwaite, The Retrospect of Practical Medicine and Surgery (a biennial journal), 1840-50

Amariah Brigham, A Treatise on Epidemic Cholera, 1832

F. J. V. Broussais, Conversations on the theory and Practice of Physiological Medicine, 1825

But it might also be Alphonse Broussais, Self Preservation: Or, Sexuality Revealed: Being Facts of Vital Importance to the Married and Unmarried…, 1843

Thomas Brown, Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind, 1826

John Burns, T.C. James, The Principles of Midwifery; Including the Diseases of Women and Children, 1817

Charles Caldwell, Facts in Mesmerism, and Thoughts on its Causes and Uses, 1842

N. Chapman, Elements of Therapeutics and Materia Medica, 1822

J. Chitty, A Practical Treatise on Medical Jurisprudence, 1834

Colombat de L’Isere, Charles Meigs trans., A Treatise on the Diseases and Special Hygiene of Females, 1845

Astley Cooper, A Treatise on Dislocations and Fractures of the Joints, 1823

Astley Cooper and Richard Rowland, articles on disease in Medical and Surgical Monographs, 1838-40

Samuel Cooper, A Dictionary of Practical Surgery, 1809

Samuel Cooper, The First Lines of the Practice of Surgery, 1815

James Copland, A Dictionary of Practical Medicine, 1834

William P. Dewees, A Compendious System of Midwifery, 1825

William P. Dewees, A Treatise on the Diseases of Females, 1826

Robert Druitt, The Principles and Practice of Modern Surgery, 1847

A. J. B. Parent Duchatelet, Prostitution in Paris, Considered Morally, Politically, and Medically, 1845

Robley Dunglison, American Medical Library, 1837

Robley Dunglison, Cyclopaedia of Practical Medicine, 1845

Robley Dunglison, Human Physiology, 1832

Robley Dunglison, Medical Lexicon: A Dictionary of Medical Science, 1842

Robley Dunglison, New Remedies: The Method of Preparing and Administering Them; their Effects on the Healthy and Diseased Economy, &c., 1839

Guillaume Dupuytren, Clinical Lectures on Surgery, 1832

Lewis Durlacher, A treatise on Corns, Bunions, the Diseases of the Nails, and the General Management of the Feet, 1845

John Eberle, A Treatise of the Materia Medica and Therapeutics, (2 vols) 1830

John Eberle, A Treatise on the Practice of Medicine, 1830 (2 vols)

R.T. Evanson, H. Maunsell, A Practical treatise on the Management and Diseases of Children, 1838

O. S. Fowler, Love and Parentage, Applied to the Improvement of Offspring, 1846

Robert Gooch, An Account of Some of the Most Important Diseases Peculiar to Women, 1829

An Estimate of the True Value of Vaccination as a Security Against Small Pox, T.M. Greenhow, 1825

George Gregory, Treatise on The Theory and Practice of Physic, 1826

Horace Green, A Treatise on Diseases of the Air Passages, 1846

Samuel D. Gross, The Anatomy, Physiology, and Diseases of the Bones and Joints, 1830

Marshall Hall, On Diagnosis, 1817

John Harrison, An Essay Towards a Correct Theory of the Nervous System, 1844

Abner Kneeland, Boston Investigator, 1831-9 periodical

William Lawrence, A Treatise on the Diseases of the Eye, 1830

Charles Lee, A Dictionary of Practical Medicine, 1834

John Macculloch, An Essay on the Remittent and Intermittent Diseases, Including, Generally, Marsh Fever and Neuralgia, 1828

R. Marsh, The Animal Magnetizer: Or History, Phenomena and Curative Effects of Animal Magnetism; With instructions for Conducting the Magnetic Operation, 1840s

Jacques Maygrier, Atlas of Gynaecology and Obstetrics, 1822 not available online, but possibly similar to this, which is sometimes credited to Martin and Maygrier

The Medical Recorder of Original Papers and Intelligence, Philadelphia, 1816-26

John Ayrton Paris, Elements of Medical Chemistry, 1825

A. P. W. Philip, A Treatise on the More Obscure Affections of the Brain on which the Nature and Successful Treatment of many Chronic Diseases Depend, 1835

William Prout, Samuel Colhoun, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Treatment of Diabetes, Calculus, and Other Affections of the Urinary Organs, 1826

William Prout, On the Nature and Treatment of Stomach and Urinary Diseases, 1840

W. H. Ranking, The Half-Yearly Abstract of the Medical Sciences, 1845-73, for example

P. Rayer, W. B. Dickinson trans., Treatise on Diseases of the Skin, Founded on New Researches in Pathological anatomy and Physiology, 1833

Possibly Reports and Other Documents Relating to the State Lunatic Hospital at Worcester Mass, 1837

William Stokes, John Bell, Lectures on the Theory and Practice of Physic, 1842

J. G. Spurzheim, The Anatomy of the Brain, with a General View of the Nervous System, 1826

J. G. Spurzheim, Education: Its Elementary Principles, founded on the Nature of Man, 1847

J. G. Spurzheim, Observations on the Deranged Manifestations of the Mind; or, Insanity, 1836

J. G. Spurzheim, Phrenology, 1826

J. G. Spurzheim, The Physiognomical System, 1815

Dugald Stewart, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, 1813

S. A. Tissot, Onania; or a Treatise upon the Disorders Produced by Masturbation, 1758

William Tully, Thomas Miner, Essays on Fevers and Other Medical Subjects, 1823

Alfred A.L.M. Velpeau, wrote extensively on midwifery and diseases of the breasts, 1830s-60s. Also wrote on surgical anatomy 1830s.

Rudolph Wagner, Elements of the Comparative Anatomy of the Vertebrate Animals, 1845

Alexander Walker, Intermarriage; or The Mode in Which, and Causes Why, Beauty, Health, and Intellect Result from Certain Unions, and Deformity, Disease, and Insanity from Others, 1839

Thomas Watson, Lectures on the Principles and Practice of Physic, 1845

Caspar Wistar, A System of Anatomy for the Use of Students of Medicine, 1811 (2 vols)

William Youatt, Every Man His Own Cattle Doctor, 1832

Freethought:

F. W. Adams, Theological Criticisms: or Hints of the Philosophy of Man and Nature in Six Lectures, 1843

Aaron Bancroft, The Life of George Washington, 1826

Paul Brown, The Radical: and Advocate of Equality, 1834

Orestes A. Brownson, Charles Elwood: or the Infidel Converted, 1840

Gilbert Burnett, A History of the Reformation of the Church of England, 1690

George Bush, The Soul; or, An Inquiry into Scriptural Psychology, 1845

Joseph Butler, The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature, 1824

Robert Chambers, Vestiges of The Natural History of Creation, 1844

Joseph Coe, The True American, 1840

George Combe, The Constitution of Man Considered in Relation to External Objects, 1828

Thomas Cooper, A Treatise on the Law of Libel and the Liberty of the Press, 1830

Rodolphus Dickinson, A New and Corrected Version of the New Testament; or, A Minute Revision, and Professed Translation of the Original Histories, Memoirs, Letters, Prophecies, and Other Productions of the Evangelists and Apostles; to which are Subjoined a Few, Generally Brief, Critical, Explanatory, and Practical Notes, 1833

John Fellows, An exposition of the Mysteries, or religious Dogmas and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, Pythagoreans, and Druids. Also: An Inquiry into the Origin, History, and Purport of Freemasonry, 1835

Female Education: Tendencies and Principles Embraced, and the System Adopted in the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, 1839

John Mason Good, The Book of Nature, 1828

Probably Thomas Hertell, A Layman’s Apology for the Appointment of Clerical Chaplains by the Legislature of New York, 1834

Paul Henry Thiry Holbach, The System of Nature; or, the Laws of the Moral and Physical World, 1795

George Houston, The Correspondent, 18207-9 periodical

David Hume, Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects, 1758

The Works of Flavius Josephus volume 1, translated by William Whiston before 1752

Joseph C. Lovejoy, Memoir of Rev. Charles T. Torrey, 1847

Harriet Martineau, “A Manchester Strike,” Illustrations of Political Economy volume III, 1834

H. C. O’Donnoghue, The Church of Rome: A View of the Peculiar Doctrines, Religious Worship…, 1830

William James Linton, Life of Paine, 1839

Benjamin Offen, A Legacy to the Friends of Free Discussion, 1846

Robert Owen, New Moral World, 1836

Robert Dale Owen, Frances Wright, The Free Enquirer, 1826-9 periodical

Robert Dale Owen, Moral Physiology; or, A Brief and Plain Treatise on the Population Question, 1831

Robert Dale Owen, Origen Bacheler, Discussion on the Existence of God, 1832

Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, 1794

(Probably Richard Carlile), The Theological Works of Thomas Paine, 1819

The Political Works of Thomas Paine, 1826

William Paley, Natural Theology; or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of The Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature, 1802

William Paley, The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, 1817

David Pickering, Lectures in Defence of Divine Revelation, 1831

John Jay Smith, Celebrated Trials of All Countries, 1837 (includes William Cobbett and Richard Carlile)

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy In America, 1835

Volney, The Ruins, or, Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires, 1791

Voltaire, A Philosophical Dictionary, 1796

Theodore Dwight Weld, American Slavery As It Is, 1839, which many Ashfield peddlers carried on their rounds

William White, Lectures on the Catechism of the Protestant Episcopal Church, 1813

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects, 1792

Frances Wright, A Few Days in Athens, 1822

General:

Addison & Steele, The Spectator, periodical, 1810s-20s

E. A. Andrews, C. Julius Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic War, 1844

John L. Blake, A General Biographical Dictionary, 1835

Thomas S. D. Bucknall, The Orchardist, 1797

Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote de la Mancha, (in 4 vols) 1818

The Works of Cowper and Thomson, 1832

Ross Cox, The Columbia River; or, Scenes and Adventures During a Residence of Six Years on the Western Side of the Rocky Mountains…, 1832

David Crockett, The Life of Martin Van Buren, Heir Apparent to the “Government,” and the Appointed Successor of General Andrew Jackson, 1836

Timothy Flint, Travels and Residence in Mississippi, 1826

An Abridgment of Goldsmith’s History of England, from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Death of George II, and Continued to the close of the year 1828, 1833

Edmund Hoyle, Games, 1845

John Fellows, The Posthumous Works of Junius, 1829

Washington Irving, The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, 1831

Knickerbocker, or New York Monthly Magazine, 1840s, for example

The Library of Romance; A Collection of Traditions, Poetical Legends, and Short Standard Tales and Romances, Of All Nations, 1837

Lambert Lilly, The History of New England, Illustrated by Tales, Sketches, and Anecdotes, 1831

J. R. Major, Schrevelius’ Greek Lexicon, 1831

Thomas Moore, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron: With Notices of His Life, 1830

Memoirs of Marshal Ney, 1833

Alexander Pope, Poetical Works, 1841

W.S.W. Ruschenberger, Three Years in the Pacific; Including Notices of Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, and Peru, 1834

George Saintsbury, ed., The Works of Laurence Stern in Six Volumes, 1814

James A. St. John, The Lives of Celebrated Travelers, 1832

Walter Scott, The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, 1827

Walter Scott, The Waverley Anecdotes, 1833

T. G. Smollett, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, In which are included, Memoirs of a Lady of Quality, 1758

Joshua Sturges, Guide to the Game of Draughts, 1800

Noah Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language, 1828

Ready to go!

user@domain.com — 2012-07-04T13:20:57-05:00

We’re getting ready to go.

We’re more than ready to go,

but there’s still a little more time to wait and a little more packing to do. We’ve been doing some “last time in New England” types of things. Went on a whale watch and saw whales (and got seasick!). I wore my kilt to the showing of Brave at the Bellows Falls Opera House theater we like. Planted some pumpkins for the new people (and to keep the weeds down a bit in the garden). Have to pack the things we use daily – though I’ve already packed all my clothes and am living out of a duffel bag. I finally went to Greenfield and found Charles Knowlton’s will and estate inventory, as well as a couple of Ranney documents for my other project. Knowlton’s library was listed in the inventory, title by title. So I’ve been transcribing that and looking up the books. More on that when I finish the list.

A week from tomorrow we’ll close on this house and start driving west. Then the rural adventure begins….

Some general thoughts about place

user@domain.com — 2012-06-18T13:15:46-05:00

So I’m sitting in a Starbucks in Keene New Hampshire, writing a biography of freethinker Charles Knowlton. I’m doing a chronological first draft; there’s plenty of detail, background, explanation, and interpretation that I’ll need to add to this, but I figured getting down the skeleton of the story is the first step.

Pun not intended, but there it is. I’m writing about the first time Knowlton goes up to the “medical lectures” in Hanover. They formed the basis of what later became Dartmouth Medical School. The fourteen-week lectures cost $50, which neither Knowlton nor his traveling companion Herman Partridge could scrape together. So the two men decided to steal a body, since it was an open secret that Hanover paid $50 for “subjects” they could use in anatomy lectures.

This was probably Knowlton’s idea. He had already stolen a body and gotten away with it by this time. He was 22; his companion Partridge was 31. Ironically, Partridge later became the Coroner of their home-town Templeton Massachusetts. They found one body, but it was badly decomposed when they got to it and only yielded a skeleton. Then they heard of another burial, ten miles in the wrong direction. Desperate (the lectures had already commenced and they were missing them!), they went out in the night and stole this body too.

Carrying the corpse into Keene, where I now sit writing about it, Partridge was sure they had been discovered. Their wagon was old and their horse slow. They had to get out and push when they went up hills. Certainly there would be no chance of an escape, if they were caught. Partridge’s panic, however, was premature. They avoided the town and tavern, staying the night with a farmer who had lived in Templeton. The eighty-mile trip took them three days, and when they arrived in Hanover, the corpse was unusable and the anatomy professor was not buying. But he gave them $20 to dispose of the body.

As I write these events, I find myself trying to imagine what Keene looked like in 1822. What it was like to drive an old wagon over country paths, taking three days to make a trip we can now accomplish in two hours. And I hope that, since it’s interesting to me, it will be to my readers when I satisfy my own curiosity and fill in these details.

For every sentence of narrative, it seems as if there’s another sentence of explanation and context. So it’s not just that these things happened in this particular sequence, but that they happened in this alien world where you can’t pass over the meaning of carrying a body through town at a snail’s pace. The suspense would go on for a much longer time, if people on horseback or even running on foot could catch up to you. The anxiety that someone was going to smell the foul thing decaying under the covers in the wagon must have built to an extreme level, when hours passed under the hot sun as the old horse trudged on.

But here I sit, in an air-conditioned café. The past really is a foreign country…

Getting ready to move

user@domain.com — 2012-06-13T09:38:44-05:00

I’m spending a lot of time in a coffee-shop, writing. But we’re also preparing to move halfway across the country in just about a month. So last night I transferred my school books from the shelves in my study into boxes. An even dozen bankers boxes – because that was the biggest box full of books I wanted to carry. A dozen (the two on the left are from the kids’ room).

When we arrived in New England

a little over four years ago, I had about as many books as I could fit in a backpack (okay, I did keep my original boxed set of The Lord of the Rings that I read as a kid). My previous collection had been liquidated when we went to Chile, through selling on Amazon and giving books away. So this pile of books is the result of just four years of acquisition. Dang!

In my defense, most of the books on these shelves are history, and I have been getting a PhD, which involves a little reading. It could have been much worse: I’d have accumulated twice as many if I had actually bought every volume I read. And lately, I’ve read dozens of books on Kindle. Those don’t take up shelf-space, either.

I should probably get rid of some of these, but I suspect there’s material in them that I haven’t dealt with yet. As I recently found, rereading a text I’d powered through for my Comps, there’s a lot more to find when you have more time and a wider focus than preparing for Oral Exams. And more recently, I’ve added some books that are background to the writing projects I’m doing. And others that are practical, how-to books for the move to the farm.

So I’m going to consider myself lucky they all fit into just a dozen medium-sized boxes. That will be more than enough to lug onto the truck and off again on the other end. Then there are those three big boxes of clothes…

Advice to Farmers

user@domain.com — 2012-06-08T08:37:20-05:00

People have been giving advice to farmers throughout American history. Sometimes farmers themselves have written about their favorite techniques or innovations, but often experts have tried to compile the “best practices” of the past and add new ideas developed by scientists and technologists. The progressive era amped up this process, and turned the USDA and land grant “Agricultural and Technical” universities into big producers of information for rural people.

But that process is a story for another day. Today, what caught my attention is an old (1880) book I found in the UMass library stacks, called Farming for Profit (which is available online here). Written by John Elliot Read (who claims in the introduction to be “a practical farmer, acquainted with the details of farm management, and thoroughly used to manual labor”), the book promises to show “How to Make Money and Secure Health and Happiness on the Farm.” I think it’s interesting that even a volume designed to be an “Encyclopedic” and “Comprehensive” source of “Mechanics” and “Business Principles” in 1880 puts the rural lifestyle front and center.

Farming for Profit

is a fascinating combination of late-nineteenth century technique and culture – both of which can be compared with what came after. At some point, I’m going to make a more thorough study of how the two elements of farm tech and farm life changed over time. For right now, I thought these items were interesting:

In the illustration at the top, across from the title-page of the book, we get a more or less classical view of farm life – not of technology. There are no new machines in the picture, and the buildings don’t even seem to be in the best repair. The impression I get is of an ancient and venerable way of life. Peaceful, slow-moving, and dignified. Later in the book, there are more practical illustrations, like this diagram of an ideal farmstead. And in another illustration, we see more evidence of a transition in farming: the first view is of corn plants (old-fashioned ones -- not the giant hybrids we’re used to seeing today) that have been “drilled or planted,” while the second shows corn planted in hills. Hill-planting was the old technique colonists learned from the Indians, so it’s interesting that it still finds its way into a manual from 1880. Suggests that maybe the author was a practical farmer with lots of experience in the fields.

America by bus

user@domain.com — 2012-06-07T10:06:04-05:00

I took the bus from New England to South Carolina last week, to attend The Historical Society’s conference. I knew I didn’t want to fly, for several reasons. The cost, of course – but even more, the disastrous environmental effects and the obnoxiousness of the whole TSA-centered security regime. The only way to really object to this, I thought, was to boycott flying.

So the choice was between driving and taking a bus or train. The train seemed like an interesting option, until I discovered it arrived in Columbia SC at about 1:30 AM. This seems fairly typical of Amtrak schedules – they really don’t seem to put any thought into the extreme inconvenience of getting somewhere strange in the middle of the night. And the cost is quite a bit higher than busses. I imagine it’s nice to be able to get up and walk around (especially to the food car!), but how much is that worth?

I decided not to drive because the trip was going to take about 16 hours each way. I just did a long drive (24 hours each way, split over 4 days), and I was surprised how tired I was afterwards (am I getting old?). And the cost of gas and tolls made it about the same as the bus. So I ended up taking the greenest option, for some of the right reasons and some practical reasons. Nice that they aligned like that!

I jotted down some impressions during the early stages of the trip. After a while, I realized trying to type was making me dizzy. I spent the rest of the trip and most of the return trip reading and sleeping. The first (and last) legs of the trips were in newer busses run by affiliates of Greyhound (Peter Pan and Southeastern Stage); the middle, high-traffic legs of the trip were on Greyhounds.

All the buses had AC outlets and Wifi. The Greyhound legs (between New York City, Richmond VA, and Fayetteville NC) were night runs. The busses were completely full, but I slept through most of those parts. The middle of the night changes in Richmond were a little strange. The weirdest place on the trip, however, was the New York Port Authority.

It’s strange, when you’re going from one place on the periphery to another (with apologies to Columbia), to go through the center. Especially since the bus got off the expressway at about 140th Street and drove the city streets of New York to the Port Authority, which is at 42nd Street on the west side, by the Lincoln Tunnel. We got there at rush hour, too – making the driver’s three million accident-free miles (advertised on the side of his bus) seem even more remarkable. Entering the Port Authority itself was like being swallowed up into an underground world which only seemed stranger because the only vehicles were hundreds of big busses. But it was super-efficient: it was impossible not to figure out where you needed to be.

The amenities of bus travel are not the same as those of air travel. You bring your own food, because often the sandwich shops in terminals are closed at the hours you’re there, and sometimes the vending machines are out of change and won’t take your bills. Some of the bathrooms are the sort where you don’t wash your hands after because it probably wouldn’t result in a lower germ count. And if you have any lingering class or race issues, you’ll probably come face to face with them on the bus. But look at it this way: getting out of your comfort zone and seeing the real world is an opportunity to grow.

Everybody I came across on my trip was either friendly or kept to themselves. I heard lots of languages, including Russian (a bunch of young tourists on their way to Myrtle Beach). I had a couple of conversations with people on the busses and in lines at the terminals. One of my neighbors was a New Yorker from a 28-square mile Caribbean island, another was a lady on her way to Texas to collect her grandkids. And I slept next to complete strangers without thinking much of it. My only problem was, some of my seat-mates were just too big for their seats. Americans need to lose some weight!

So I got to my destination at mid-day, after about 24 hours of travel. 8 hours longer than driving myself, but I wasn’t exhausted from driving. The first guy I met at the conference had come by plane from Montana, but he’d been stranded overnight in Minneapolis due to storms. His trip had been twice as long as mine, and probably three times as expensive. Another friend found a deal on a flight from Boston for $99. But I’d do it again. Only, next time I’d bring a sweatshirt for the air conditioning, something soft to use as a pillow, and a few extra snacks.

Rural Life

user@domain.com — 2012-06-06T17:58:19-05:00

Thirty years after getting a degree in agricultural economics, and after decades living both the highs and lows of the American Dream and nearly a decade as an aspiring writer and historian, I’m actually moving to a farm. I’m going to keep a record of the move and the new life on these pages.

Unlike many of the old farmers and sustainable living folks whose books I’ve been reading, who’ve been practicing their lifestyle for two or three decades, we’re newbies. My family and I haven’t been living the life, raising free range chickens since we were kids; so our experiences getting our first batch of chicks later this summer will be fresh and our learning process will be happening as we report it, not something imperfectly remembered from ages ago. We’ll be making discoveries daily, rather than trying to remember what it felt like and what we might have wanted to know, back when we began. From that perspective, sharing our excitement and learning from our mistakes might be useful to our readers.

Since we’re trying to make life changes that are directly related to how we understand the world, its history, and our place in it, there will be some theory from time to time. The idea is that the unexamined life isn’t worth living, but also that the ideals we don’t act on aren’t really the ones we hold most firmly. At some point, if you’re lucky, you get a chance to put your money where your mouth is. This is us taking that chance.

I’m going to write about our family farming experiences, and also about my other work (I was going to say my “day job,” but one of the coolest things about this change is I’m no longer sure which is which!) as a writer and historian. A big part of my history work revolves around regular people in rural settings, so this will also find its way into these pages. History influences the present in ways as trivial as our choice of poultry breeds, and as important as our choice to leave the suburban East Coast and live on a Midwestern sustainable farm. This mixture of present, past, and future – like the attempt to balance farm work, reading, and writing – will be a big element of my project. Hopefully, they’ll result in material people will find interesting and useful.

Old blog posts in Archive

user@domain.com — 2012-06-04T09:49:26-05:00

Click here to go to the archive containing my old blog posts, or here for my reading blog. Seemed like time to start a new page…

After the show...

user@domain.com — 2012-06-05T20:39:14-05:00

Went to The Historical Society’s biennial conference this week. It was great: small and low-key, with very smart people presenting interesting material. I’ll probably have a lot to say in the next few weeks as a result of it, but one thing struck me, and I wrote a little about it on the bus-trip home:

I really need to re-engage with the libertarians again, at some point. Because once upon a time, I was one of those young, naïve, fresh-faced guys (there were many at the conference). That was me once: I had my picture taken with Henry Hazlitt! (which, given when he died, dates me…) And I know their founding documents. I‘m probably a little hard on them, because I really believe in the importance of the classical liberalism they claim to support. But I’m particularly unhappy when well-heeled corporate sponsors use these ideals as cover for actions and policies that are antithetical.

The conservative spokespeople who were at the conference are very smart, and most of them are sincere. When push comes to shove, most admit that their support of free market principles does not necessarily mean they support the 1%. That they understand that there’s growing income and wealth inequality, and that just isn’t good. But why does push have to come to shove, to get them to admit these things? My point is, if you’re going to advocate for free markets, you have an EXTRA responsibility to point out when they are not operating freely, and to work toward the IDEAL situation you advocate, rather than the ACTUAL situation where global corporations regularly end-run free markets, but use free-market rhetoric to cover their tracks and silence their critics.

The conservatives’ story is that people accuse them of being hyper-patriotic and chauvinistic. That Howard Zinn’s over-the-top critique of America is the problem. I think Zinn is too easy a straw man. I have a copy of the conservative, patriotic values one of the speakers espouses, and I agree with most of them. The actual critique, I think, is that these guys are suspected of fronting for corporations that don’t walk this talk. That this is just propaganda the 1% pay to have pushed on the poor and middle classes to bamboozle us, while they pollute, victimize employees, avoid paying their share to support the social and physical infrastructure that makes their profits possible, and even (ie. Goldman Sachs) routinely break the law when they can’t change it to their advantage.

I’m not denying that entrepreneurship and innovation are important (even heroic) elements of American character, or that private property and financial rewards encourage these activities. But let’s also admit that concentrations of wealth create power inequalities, and that collective action is sometimes necessary to create the DIALOGUE about values that enables societies to choose between alternatives. Or are we really supposed to believe that the rich, the poor, or anyone else can be impartial, especially when they have a lot of skin in the game? Hasn’t postmodernism at least taught us that we’re all influenced by the particular cultures we’re part of?

So I’m hoping to find people who really believe in classical liberalism. And maybe it’ll be my role to engage with them (taking advantage of my perspective as an informed outsider) to help them explore the relationship between their (or our shared) ideals and the situation on the ground. Both historically and right now. My working title for this project might be adapted from Ayn Rand: “Capitalism, the Unpracticed Ideal.”