Living In Early Southborough

Southborough Historical Society

Southborough, MA

Living in Early Southborough

The early years of the town mainly had to do with decision making on the part of the people as to the location and building of the church and meeting house and the laying out of the town. At the center of each town was a meetinghouse and it was the most important building in the town. It was the place where Sunday church services were held, and town business was conducted on the same day with only a short break for lunch.

One of the first things the town meeting had to do was search for a minister and establish a school. Each of these requirements must be met in order to operate as a town within the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In 1647 the General Court of Massachusetts had ordered that a common school be established in every township of fifty families, and a grammar school in each of the larger towns. From this crude beginning has developed the public school systems of the United States.

In most cases children would only attend school when they were not needed to work on the farms. Farming and farm work were more important than learning the three R's and much of what children needed to learn was taught at home. Hunting, building, and repairing things were considered the necessary skills for a colonial boy. Colonial girls were taught how to garden, sew, spin, cook, and care for the animals. Trades and professions were taught on the apprentice system. Under the apprentice system, young people and adults were taught a craft or a trade by working along side an accomplished master for a set period of time. It was not unusual to set up the apprenticeship contract to include reading and writing as part of the expected training and it was not unusual for children to live with another family to be trained.

Animals were required to be fenced and many stone walls had to be built along property lines with stones cleared from the fields. These stone fences were intended to keep animals out as well as to keep them contained. If the animals happened to get free and were caught on another property, they would be placed in the town pound until a fee was paid. The chore of keeping the animals contained and out of the crops, was a job often left to the children to perform, along with many other household duties.

Early houses in the colony were made from logs. They had thatched roofs and the chimneys were hollowed logs plastered on the inside. Fires were so common that by 1700 the colonists were building most of the houses in the cities from brick or stone. Houses in the towns were being framed by lumber once the saw mills were built to cut the logs. Steep roofs built to shed the New England snows would be covered with hand hewn wooden shingles and clapboards attached as siding to finish the outside.

The first houses had oiled paper for windows much of which would be brought from England. Glass windows were first used in the cities while the frontier settlements still had wooden shutters. Few houses in New England were painted but some interior walls were plastered with a mixture of mud and straw and then whitewashed.

Native American Indians fashioned early candles for light from knots of the pine trees. The early colonists usually burned these in a corner of the fireplace to avoid having smoke fill the room from the turpentine and pitch which caused this candlewood to burn “ as clear as a torch “. Later, candles could be purchased from England but at a high price. The thrifty colonial housewife would loosely spin hemp or milkweed which grew in the fields into candlewicks. In the Autumn she would begin the hard task of making her own candles using large heavy kettles to melt the tallow in the fireplace. The fireplace was large and located central in the house because it provided the only warmth in the winter and was where all the meals were prepared. Hooks and chains hung inside and the most expensive items in the household, the pots and kettles, could be hung at various heights over the fire.

The table was a wide flat board which stood against the wall until needed. It then would be placed on legs similar to saw horses, when needed. One of the most important items for setting the table was the trencher. These were made from a block of wood, about ten inches square and four deep, hollowed down in the center. In this the food would be placed and usually more than one person would eat from them, two children or a man and wife. Some tables had these hollows in the top itself eliminating the need for these trenchers. The food was eaten with the hand and with carved wooden spoons. Even the drinking vessels were made from wood.

Chairs or stools were rare and most often a person would sit on a backless bench when sitting at a table. Many times children would stand behind the adults seated at a table and the food would be passed back to them or they would stand at a side table and go to the main table to refill their trenchers.

Wild honey was used in the place of scarce and high priced sugar and the maple trees were tapped in the winter and earliest spring. The sap was collected in buckets and taken to the sugar camp to be boiled down . A good sap run meant staying in the shack a night or two. Children living near the sugar camps were known to eat the snow candy from where drops of the sweetened liquid would be spilled on the ground.

Preparing meals for the family was fairly simple because there were not many choices in what one had to eat. Corn, fish, and game were the most important food sources for the colonists and were smoked and dried for storage. The preparation of the food for storage was very laboring. Refrigerators and tin containers, of course were not yet known. Pumpkins and squash were plentiful and the settlers followed the Indian custom of drying and stringing them for winter use. Potatoes were rare and it was most probable that they were of the sweet potato variety. Orchards were eventually planted and apples were dried, made into applesauce and apple butter.

At the time America was settled, Europeans did not drink water the way we do today. The English drank ale, the Dutch beer, and the French and Spanish drank wine. As the cows increased in number in the colony, milk became an important part of the food of families. In 1728, Boston newspapers named only bread and milk for breakfast and for supper. Variations were milk and hasty pudding, stewed pumpkin and milk, and milk and berries. In the winter when the milk was scarce, sweetened cider diluted with water or soaked in bread was substituted. The farm during these years had to provide the family “all to eat, drink and wear.”

The early wheat did not ripen well in the New England climate. White bread was rarely eaten because rye grew much better. A bread made of one half rye meal and one half corn meal was commonly used and was known as “rye and injun”. Corn meal was so plentiful that it was told that New England families would have hasty or Indian pudding three hundred and sixty-five times a year.