Rural myths begin to crumble
03/04/10 09:04
One of the persistent myths about early American towns is that they were inherently stable, inward-looking communities; in contrast with cities which are thought of as the scene of rapid, disruptive changes leading to modernity. Cities are imagined as filled with new people and ideas, and focused on trade, progress, and material success. Towns, on the other hand, are pictured as being filled with families and focused on “good, old-fashioned” values. In contrast with the city’s commerce and profit-motivation, the farmers, artisans and small merchants of these exceptional New England communities are supposed to work for a competence or sufficiency. Rather than upward mobility, town and country folk are believed to appreciate staying put. Democratic town meetings and the Congregational assembly are seen as institutions that focus social life and best represent the character of rural people.
I’ll have to marshall my sources when I argue this point in the dissertation, but even off the top of my head, a number of core texts that present this view come to mind. Even the classic history of those who stayed behind, after admitting that people left a small New England town, argued that then it acquired all these characteristics. The problem is not so much that any of these preconceptions about towns is dead wrong, but that they’re not really drawn from evidence. Rural life has been defined in contrast to urban life in most American histories, so historians and their readers have expected to find the opposite end of the spectrum from the cities. When they find these traits, they make a big deal about the difference between urbanity and rurality -- possibly a bigger deal than the actual people made at the time.
The census, I’m finding, can be a black hole that sucks you in and never releases you. There’s always more to find, always one more way to verify that the person you’re looking at on the 1810 page for Lysander NY is actually the guy who was in my town in 1800. This involves at least eliminating all the other guys with the same name, by figuring out where they were. Much of the time it’s impossible, especially when the guy has a common name. It helps that there were so many fewer people in the first few census years!
I have to remember HCR’s advice: if you’re only going to spend 10 pages talking about this point in the book, don’t research 100 pages. On that basis, I’ve already spent too much time on this. My excuse is that, this first time, I want to see how far this can be pushed. Prove my claim that online census, vital records, and town histories (thanks to ancestry.com and google books!) have changed the game for historians. I think there’s a paper in this -- at least a point to be made in my talk in England this fall.
So what have I found in the census so far? The most striking thing is, the majority of people who live in this particular New England hilltown between 1790 and 1840 don’t stay. Many go to neighboring towns farther up in the Berkshire foothills, and a surprising number go to upstate New York. I expected there to be a big exodus around the 1830s, but there’s actually a steady flow of people, from the very first years of settlement.
Another surprise is that, when the town’s political/religious crisis happened in the 1830s (which in itself is a huge counterstory, but more on that later), the richest family in town (based on the 1830 tax book) pulled up their stakes and moved out. Constant mobility, continued connection with extended family in the west, and willingness to abandon social and financial roots seem to be the themes of this story; not some set of unique rural values creating static New England exceptionalism.
Census stuff
02/27/10 17:04
Similarly, ancestry.com has all the U.S. census forms, and they have a search engine. This is cool, because you can track a person from census to census, and see where he (yes, for most of the census years, they only took down head-of-household names, which were 99% male) lived at least every ten years. The transcription seems relatively good, but it isn’t perfect. So it pays to be a little creative with spellings, if you don’t find your person right away. And look at the original form, because you might see something the transcriber didn't, if you know what you're looking for.
And if your person has a common name and you find too many, there are tricks to narrowing down your candidates. Some of these are other sources (lots of county and town histories are also available on ancestry and google), some take advantage of the fact you can compare census data from a series of years side by side. I use this feature to try to eliminate people. If I’m looking for John Doe who lived in Springfield in 1800, and there are five John Does in the 1810 census, I can see whether some of the others lived in the same places in 1800 and 1810, and eliminate those candidates. I can also compare family sizes, since the census data (on the original forms, which can be viewed) includes counts of males and females, bracketed by age. A little quick math, and you’ve got another clue. Neither of these is foolproof, of course -- a lot can happen in ten years. But they can point you in the right direction.
So, back to my original point. All this info is available now. Seems like it’s going to be very difficult from now on, to make vague, generalized points about persistence, migration, and a whole bunch of social changes related to demographics; when you can check the numbers and say something precise. So I’m checking the numbers and names in all the places I’ll be writing about. Not because I want to do a “migration history,” but because I just can’t imagine what type of excuse I’d use to get around knowing what happened with the people, in these places I’m studying.
I think what I’m going to find is that people were a whole lot more mobile than we think they were. I’m only halfway through my first town dataset right now (the earliest one, covering 1790-1840), and it seems like as many people leave the town as die in it. This type of thing has been done on a limited basis (when it was paper-based, and MUCH harder) for a few cities (cf. Thernstron & Knights on Boston), but I don’t think a close study has been done for a rural town. So maybe there will be some surprises. A quick glance at the 1850 census of one of the towns in Upstate NY I haven’t really started on yet, showed that over 200 people were born outside the U.S. I’m not sure of the total population yet, but that’s probably between 10% and 20%. Most of these people were young and from the U.K. (Irish slightly outnumbering English & Scottish). There were also a lot of Canadians, about a dozen Germans, a handful of French and Dutch, and one Swiss. Don’t know what this means yet -- the town isn’t right on the Erie Canal, and it’s a full generation after its construction. So these aren’t all trench diggers who decided to hang around. Maybe there are stories that no one has found because they were buried in such a huge mountain of data. Stay tuned...
