Early American Gardens

Overindulgence

2012-01-24T10:56:00.000-05:00

Aert Schouman (Dutch artist, 1710-1792) Drinking Party in a Garden 1739
.

Young 19th-century Gardener

2012-01-20T10:30:00.000-05:00

Orest Kiprensky (Russian artist 1782–1836) Young Gardener
.

Garden Pavilion

2012-01-20T10:20:00.001-05:00

Elisabeth Modell (Austian artist, 1820–1865) Three Children by a Garden Pavilion
.

Historic Gardens - Thaddeus Kosciuszko-1778 Garden at West Point

2012-01-17T02:28:00.000-05:00

.
This morning, my husband was reading The Peasant Prince by Alex Storozynski, and he asked me if I knew of Kosciuszko's 18th century garden at West Point. I did not.

Tadeusz Andrzej Bonawentura Kosciuszko (1746 - 1817) arrived in August of 1776 to aid the colonists in their fight against Britain. Born in Lithuania, then a part of Russian Poland, Kosciuszko sailed for America, after an extensive education in military engineering in both Poland & France. On October 18, 1776, Kosciuszko was offered the rank of Colonel of Engineers.

He set about designing a system of fortifications 3 miles downstream from Philadelphia, to protect from any possible attack by the British fleet. Kosciuszko worked on fortifications at Billingsport & Red Bank on the Delaware River until April 1777, at which time he followed his commander General Horatio Gates northward to defend the boundaries of the Canadian Frontier.

Gates asked Kosciuszko to select a site to station the army for what was felt to be a decisive confrontation with the British. Kosciuszko chose Bemis Heights along the Hudson River, fortifying it with five kilometers of earthenworks. From this vantage point the colonists defended themselves in what came to be a turning point in the Revolution, the Battle of Saratoga.

Six months later, George Washington assigned Kosciuszko to the fortification at West Point on the Hudson. West Point was Kosciuszko's greatest engineering achievement. The project took two & a half years to complete with a work force of 82 laborers, 3 masons, and a stone cutter. It would hold 2500 soldiers.

In 1778, West Point served briefly as headquarters for General Washington. For years West Point remained the largest fort in America.

While serving as Fortifications Engineer for West Point, Kosciuszko selected a secluded site for a personal garden on the ledge of a cliff below Fort Arnold. Because it was to be a private place of serenity for reading & contemplation, he never asked soldiers, civilian laborers, or prisoners of war to help him clear away the wild vegetation or to channel the mountain stream, or to cart soil down to the rock-bound garden.

Gardening & portraiture were his favorite pastimes. He devoted much of his spare time at West Point to planning his garden, constructing a fountain & waterfall, & carrying baskets full of soil to the rocky site, so that flowers might have some earth in which to grow. He discovered a spring bubbling from the rocks in the middle of the cliff, and there he fashioned a small fountain.

The garden ruins were discovered in 1802, during the first year of the Military Academy at West Point, and repaired by cadets. The spring water now rises into a marble basin. Seats overlook the fountain & ornamental shrubs dot the site which has a fine prospect of the river from the cliff.

Presidents & military officers as well as ordinary citizens have enjoyed the spot for over 200 years.

1778: Here I had the pleasure of being introduced to Colonel Thaddeus Kosciuszko, a gentleman of distinction from Poland... He had amused himself while stationed at the Point, in laying out a curious Garden in a deep valley, aboudning more in rocks than in soil. I was gratified in viewing his curious water fountain with spraying jets and cascades.--Military Journal during the American Revolutionary War, from 1775-1783; Describing Interesting Events and Transactions of This Period, with Numerous Facts and Anecdotes. Boston: Cottons and Barnard, 1827. Page 138. Entry for July 28, 1778.

1802: Early in this summer of 1802, Lieutenant Macomb and myself repaired to the dilapidated Garden of Kosciuszko, relaid the stone stairway to the dell, and opened the little fountain at the base of Kosciuszko's Rock in the Garden; planted flowers and vines and constructed several seats, which made the spot a pleasant resort for a reading party...--Memoirs of General Gardner Swift. (General Swift was the first graduate of the United States Military Academy.) United States Military Academy Archives, National Archives Record Group 404, Cadet Library, West Point, New York.

1817: The following day, the party at West Point, and Mr. Monroe (President James Monroe), met the officials in the Garden of Kosciuszko, and there he related the following story of that Pole: When Kosciuszko came from Europe wounded, he seemed unable to move when applying to Congress, and received a grant of land. It was said lameness was assumed to excite sympathy among cold-blooded members. Mr. Monroe said it was not, but to impress a Russian spy that he was not longer able to wield a sword, who was so impressed; and Kosciuszko resumed his health lost in a Russian prison. Mr. Monroe said Kosciuszko had been a faithful friend of the American cause, and that he had recently remitted him several hundred dollars to sustain him in his retreat in Switzerland. This sojourn at West Point and the examination of the Cadets, was very refreshing after city fatigues.--Memoirs of General Gardner Swift. Reference: "Tour of President Monroe in the Northern United States, in the Year 1817." United States Military Academy Archives, National Archives Record Group 404, Cadet Library, West Point, New York.

1834: After a fatiguing walk to Fort Putnam, a ruin examined by every visitor to West Point, I sought the retreat called Kosciuszko's Garden. I had seen it in former years, when it was nearly inaccessible to all but clambering youths. It was now a different sort of place. It had been touched by the hand of taste, and afforded a pleasant nook for reading and contemplation. The Garden is about thirty feet in length, and in width, in its utmost extent, not more than twenty feet, and in some parts much less. Near the center of the Garden there is a beautiful basin, near whose bottom, through a small perforation, flows upward a spring of sweet water, which is carried off by overflowing on the east side of the basin toward the River, the surface of which is some eighty feet below the Garden. It was here, when in its rude state, the Polish soldier and patriot sat in deep contemplation on the loves of his youth, and the ills his country had to suffer. It would be a grateful sight to him if he could visit it now, and find that a band of youthful soldiers had, as it were, consecrated the whole military grounds to his fame.--From the Diary of Samuel L. Knapp of New York. United States Military Academy Archives, National Archives Record Group 404, Cadet Library, West Point, New York.

1848: Emerging from the remains of Fort Clinton, the path, traversing the margin of the cliff, passes the ruins of a battery, and descends, at a narrow gorge between huge rocks, to a flight of wooden steps. These terminate at the bottom upon a grassy terrace a few feet wide, over which hangs a shelving cliff covered with shrubbery. This is called Kosciuszko’s Garden, from the circumstance of its having been a favorite resort of that officer while stationed there as engineer for a time during the Revolution. In the center of the terrace is a marble basin, from the bottom of which bubbles up a tiny fountain of pure water. It is said that the remains of a fountain constructed by Kosciuszko was discovered in 1802, when it was removed, and the marble bowl which now receives the jet was placed there. It is a beautiful and romantic spot, shaded by a weeping willow and other trees, and having seats provided for those who wish to linger. Benson J. Lossing. Pictorial Field Book of the Revolution. 1850. Vol. 1. Chapter XXX.

c 1810 Artist Kazimierz Wojniakowski (1771-1812) Portrait of Tadeusz Kosciuszko

Portrait of Thomas Jefferson by Thaddeus Kosciuszko

Kosciuszko's Garden 19th Century

View of West Point on the Hudson River in New York. 19th Century

Kosciuszko's Garden 1963

Kosciuszko's Garden 2003

A Little More About Thomas Jefferson and Thaddeus Kosciuszko...

Kosciuszko & Jefferson were dear friends. As abolistionist Kosciuszko was leaving the United States in March, 1798, to avoid the Alien & Sedition Acts, he wrote his will with Jefferson as witness, executor, & beneficiary. Kosciuszko wanted his money to go toward freeing & educating America's slaves, specifically Thomas Jefferson's slaves--all of his slaves, not just Sally Hemings & the Jefferson children.

I beg Mr. Jefferson that in the case I should die without will or testament he should bye out of my money So many Negroes and free them, that the restante (remaining) sums should be Sufficient to give them aducation and provide for thier maintenance, that . . . each should know before, the duty of a Cytyzen in the free Government, that he must defend his country against foreign as well as internal Enemies who would wish to change the Constitution for the worst to inslave them by degree afterwards, to have good and human heart Sensible for the Sufferings of others, each must be married and have 100 Ackres of land, wyth instruments, Cattle for tillage and know how to manage and Gouvern it well as well to know [how to] behave to neyboughs [neighbors], always wyth Kindnes and ready to help them . . . . T. Kościuszko.

Jefferson called Kosciuszko "the truest son of liberty I have ever known;" but after the Pole's death, Jefferson did not live up to his pact with his friend, leaving the will to languish in American courts & leaving his slaves to be sold on the lawn of Monticello.

See Gary B. Nash & Graham Russell Gao Hodges. Friends of Liberty: A Tale of Three Patriots, Two Revolutions, and the Betrayal that Divided a Nation: Thomas Jefferson, Thaddeus Kosciuszko, and Agrippa Hull. Basic Books 3, April 2008.

English Landscape & Portraitist Arthur Devis 1712-1787

2011-10-24T11:29:00.002-04:00

1749 Arthur Devis (English artist, 1712-1787) Robert Gwillym and Family

During the 1990s, I was trying to see both the English & American landscapes as those living in the 18th-century did. One of my favorite artists Arthur Devis allowed me to see both the English landscapes & the people who designed & lived in them. Here are a few of his paintings.

1749 Arthur Devis (English artist, 1712-1787) The Thomas Cave Family

Arthur Devis was born in Preston, Lancashire, England, in 1712, the eldest son of Anthony Devis & Ellen Rauthmell. He left Preston as a young man to study in London with the sporting & topographical painter Peter Tillemans.

1751 Arthur Devis (English artist, 1712-1787) Sir George und Lady Strickland im Park von Boynton Hall

1751 Arthur Devis (English artist, 1712-1787) The James Family

After the Tillemans' retirement in 1733, Devis returned to Preston, & his earliest dated landscape was in 1735. His earliest dated portraits are from 1741, & by the following year he is recorded working in London. In 1741, he married Elizabeth Faulkner; & apparently the couple had 22 children.

1754 Arthur Devis (English artist, 1712-1787) The Clavey family in their garden at Hampstead

In 1745, well established as a painter of small-scale portraits & conversation pieces, he settled on Great Queen Street in Lincoln's Inn Fields as his base. Many of his early commissions came from Lancashire Jacobite families obtained through his father's local connections. By 1752, he took on an apprentice, George Senhouse, but discharged him after 3 years for idleness; he had at least 3 other students during that period.

1758 Arthur Devis (English artist, 1712-1787) Alicia and Jane Clarke

From 1761, Devis exhibited irregularly at the Free Society of Artists, of which he became president in 1768. In 1763, Francis Vincent (then a Barrister of the Inner Temple) commissioned Devis to paint himself, his wife Mercy & daughter Ann at Weddington Hall. Devis never exhibited at the 'Society of Artists' or the 'Royal Academy of Arts' & never competed for admission to those societies.

1763 Arthur Devis (English artist, 1712-1787) Francis Vincent, his Wife Mercy, and Daughter Ann, of Weddington Hall, Warwickshire

In later life Devis was active as a restorer; between 1777 & 1778, he was paid 1,000 pounds for cleaning & repairing the Painted Hall at Greenwich. In 1783, he sold his collection of pictures & retired to Brighton, where he died on 25 July 1787.

Arthur Devis (English artist, 1712-1787) Henry Fiennes Clinton,9th Earl of Lincoln, with his wife Catherine and his son George on the great terrace at Oatlands

Arthur Devis (English artist, 1712-1787) Mrs Edward Travers in a landscape garden

Arthur Devis (English artist, 1712-1787) On the grounds of Ranelagh

Arthur Devis (English artist, 1712-1787) Sir Nathaniel and Lady Caroline Curzon

Arthur Devis (English artist, 1712-1787) The Edgar Children
.

American Seed Catalogs from Smithsonian Institution Libraries

2011-08-15T10:32:00.000-04:00

Public Gardens - July 4th Celebrations

2011-07-02T01:13:00.000-04:00

.
Many 4th of July celebrations took place in commercial gardens. A public pleasure garden was a privately owned (as opposed to governmentally owned) ornamental ground or piece of land, open to the public as a resort or amusement area, and operated as a business. Shortly after the ratification of the Constitution--by the early 1790's--the 4th of July emerged as the most popular holiday celebration in America's commercial gardens. Garden owners believed that they could not survive in the new nation offering the traditional mindless, "decadent," entertainments that characterized their British prototypes.

Their gardens would now serve as stages for presenting the new nation's ideologies & symbols. Their goal was to draw a broad spectrum of citizens past their admission gates to share in the exciting inspiration of commonly recognized symbols.

Garden proprietors recognized that some garden guests were classically educated, while others could not read. They hoped the commercial garden would serve as the common denominator. If man could be clever enough to order & regulate the nature that had ruled his life for thousands of years into an artful, inspirational, & still profitable garden, surely he could be clever enough to create a government that would allow him the freedom to order & regulate his own life.

Proprietors needed to attract patrons from across the social spectrum to remain financially successful. Profits depended on the volume of the sales of admissions, food, candles, & drinks. If partons were inspired to higher levels of patriotism & morals while spending their money, all the better. But the number of public gardens was growing, & the new citizens now had a variety of commercial gardens to patronize. People were attracted to gardens that were most comfortable for them.

Conservative citizens usually patronized the sober tea & coffee gardens, while their less inhibited compatriots enjoyed the drinks & conviviality at the tavern gardens. Many traditional garden owners relied on simple symbols to stimulate their patrons' patriotism. This was particularly true in the conservative, predominately Federalist gardens.

When inclement weather caused Baltimore's John Jalland, owner of Jalland's Gardens, to reschedule his annual 4th of July ceremony in 1794, the proprietor promised his disappointed, tea-drinking patrons that the rain-delayed garden illumination would "take place with splendor, in commemoration of a day which every tyrant must abhor, but which every friend of liberty must venerate as the first dawn of Gallic freedom." Jalland also vowed to provide music "suitable to the occasion" of the anniversary of his nation's Declaration of Independence.

Symbolism was important on the 4th of July, but so was the enthusiastic commemoration of freedom, both national & personal. Because of this, the holiday was often a day of unbridled celebration during the 1790s & the early years of the 19th century; and sometimes Independence Day festivities, even at the most elegant public pleasure gardens, got out of hand.

During its regular entertainments & special celebrations, Gray's Chatsworth Garden in Baltimore was usually the scene of "politeness, delicacy, and uniform conviviality;" however, occasionally rogues & "unprincipled fellows" disrupted the civility of the town's most pretentious pleasure garden. Shortly after the annual July 4th illumination & musical celebration in 1794, at Grey's Chatsworth, a notice in a local Baltimore paper reported that "a number of Lamps were destroyed and carried off from the Garden...which rendered the illumination...incomplete." The proprietor declared that he was outraged by this "shameful conduct" and offered a generous reward to anyone who would "inform him of the depredators."

A few public garden proprietors had the luxury of not worrying about their financial success, & sometimes these owners were not interested in attracting the general public into their gardens. In 1793, when the exclusive Belvedere House and garden opened in New York City, the Sons of Liberty rented the private clubhouse & grounds to celebrate the 4th of July with an outdoor ceremony featuring 13 exploding cannon salutes followed by a long evening of dining & drinking.

Apparently the affluent gentlemen of the Belvedere Club decided that the freedom's sons & their roaring cannon bursts were a little too egalitarian & too boisterous for the regualar members' more refined tastes; and for the next several years, the pseudo-aristocratic Society of the Cincinnati discreetly toasted the 4th of July at the club's estate. No more rentals to those rowdy Sons of Liberty. But most 4th of July celebrations in commercial pleasure gardens were not limited to specific groups.

The general public could attend any one of several celebrations in cities throughout the new republic during the 1790s. At Gray's Gardens in Philadelphia in 1790, concerts & fireworks filled the air. The colors of each state draped across the floating bridge which was decorated with masses of flowers & shrubbery. One of the exhibits from Philadelphia's federal procession celebration of 1789, a ship "Union" flying the flags of all nations, lay in the waters near the gardens. Here was the a symbol of the new nation taking its rightful place among the other great countries of the world.

Also in Gray's gardens, a "Federal Temple" displayed a vault representing the federal union, which held 12 stones plus a keystone representing Rhode Island. The Constitution was now ratified, & the stronger union was finally secure. Thirteen young women dressed as shepherdesses plus 13 young men attired as shepherds emerged from the grove in the garden & surrounded the "Federal Temple," where they joined to sing an ode to liberty consisting of solos, choruses, & responses. The shepherds & shepardesses emerging from the grove reminded the audience of the pure virgin land that spawned the virtuous new republic. As evening fell, the whole garden was lighted as all eyes were drawn to an illuminated portrait of Predident George Washington.

In New York, French immigrant garden owners prepared the most elaborate symbolic spectacles to present in their gardens, which usually catered to a more Democratic-Republican audience. Joseph Delacroix announced his 1st Independence Day Celebration at his public garden Vauxhall in New York City in July of 1797, "Vauxhall Garden...will be decorated and illuminated in a beautiful manner, and the ever memorable day will be celebrated with music & singing." Delacroix declared that his goal was to transform his public garden into a series of inspiring symbols "to call to mind the American Heroes who...contributed to its independence."

Delacroix chose one of the new nation's most enduring symbols for the entrance to his garden. He decorated the main entrance facade to represent that untouched forest symbolizing the pristine genesis of the virgin nation which Gray's Garden in Philadelphia had also emphasized. Most garden guests would understand the significance of this recreation on at least some level.

After Joseph Delacroix's New York garden guests paid their admission fees & passed through the symbolic virgin forest entrance, they were surrounded by a nature highly improved by man. Here was gardening as an art form, full of symbols & layers of meanings. Delacroix represented each of the now 16 states in brilliant colors designating each state's individual name & star at stopping points along the lighted paths of his garden . Delacroix "re-united" each of the separated individual state symbols with a chain of flowers. The chain of flowers represented the still new United States Constitution.

The Frenchman honored the nation's heros by placing an illuminated transparent painting of "the brave Gen. Washington" in one corner of the garden and "the venerable Franklin" in another area. Delacroix also commissioned transparencies representing the myths & legends of ancient Greece & Rome plus emblems personifying qualities & ideals.

One transparency depicted "Fortune" rising from the ocean's waters emblematic of the prosperity of the nation's commerce. A depiction of Apollo playing on a lyre presided over the celebration. One of Apollo's duties in ancient Greek myth was to act as the god of music. As the new republic began to look at Washington as a god, and to its war heros as demi-gods, it seemed natural for Apollo to entertain.

Another of Delacrois's illuminated garden transparencies represented "Presi. Washington on a pedestal, with his successor, Mr. Adams, with this inscription Omni pro Patria." Gardens guests could remain secure in their belief that the country would not fall with the passing of one leader but would continue in an unbroken chain of democracy. And to remind the revelers of the price of this democracy, an obelisk honoring Revolutionary War heros Montgomery, Warren, & Greene sat nearby in the garden.

Delacroix hired an artist to paint a Lady Columbia supporting the arts of the United States, while "reposing on a bank of flowers" underscored by the inscription, "The wisdon of her government makes her happy." In her left hand she balanced the part of the globe representing America, plus a brilliant Sun "darting on its rays on that part more than any other." In her right hand she held a scroll "in which is wrote the Federal Constitution, Bill of Rights."

The 1797 celebration at Delacroix's Vauxhall ended with a grand fireworks display climaxing a concert "of Vocal and instrumental Music." Tickets costing 6 shillings entiitled each person to a glass of ice cream, punch, or lemonade. "To obviate difficulties and confusion, no other liquors will be furnished that evening." One New York City newspaper sent a reporter to review the whole spectacle. He reported that Delacroix's patriotic extravaganza "excited the most pleasing emotions" in the city's citizenry.

In 1798, Delacroix presented several allegorical representations of America on four new transparent paintings each 16 feet high. One depicted Columbus landing in America; another represented the 13 original states; a third represented the English evacuation of New York at the end of the Revolution; and the fourth was Jupiter standing amid American emblems & mottos. In Roman mythology Jupiter represented the essence of all divine power;and as Jupiter Latiaris, he presided over Rome's important holiday festivals.

The climax of Delacriox's 1798 4th of July celebration centered around a depiction of a Temple of Independence, where Lady Liberty stood on the globe of America, pointing to the tombs of Revolutionary war heros who died in defense of the rights of their country, with the inscription "Imitate Them."

Delacroix did not design his symbolism to be subtle. His Temple of Independence was surrounded by the American frigates The Contellation, Constitution, & The United States. As a climax to the evening's festivities, the owner unfurled an American flag above the temple & shot a rocket into the air above the garden from the temple, while the the frigates simultaneously fired 16 exploding stars representing each of the states, to join the rocket of independence lighting the evening air above the scene.

Delacroix planned an even more elaborate thematic allegory for his commercial garden Vauxhall in 1799. He dotted the garden squares & paths of his grounds with 16 wooden summer houses representing each state & individually decorated in the colors of each. Patrons arriving early enough could sit in the summer house of their choice to celebrate the confederation.

Garden owner Delacroix added to his previous year's flat, painted Temple of Independence a three dimensional representation of the Constitution depicted as a gold column. He also commissioned a full size bust of George Washington & a 6 foot tall companion figure of Fame holding a laurel crown in one hand & a trumpet in the other proclaiming that fame "crowns real Merit."

In another section of the garden, a Temple of Mercury "80 feet front, 40 feet high, and 130 in circumference" displayed large models of George Washington's plantation, Mt. Vernon in Virginia; the John Quincy Adam's town home in Quincy, Massachusets; and the Warren monument at Bunker Hill in Massachusettes.

To highlight the evening, Delacroix hired actors to present a living tableau depicting various aspects of George Washington's public & private life in allegory.

For the 4th of July in 1806, garden entrepeneur Delacroix offered a moving diorama nearly 1000 feet long depicting the procession held in New York in 1788 honoring the adoption of the Federal Constitution. In 1807 & 1808, Delacroix presented allegorical designs honoring liberty, peace, patriotism, battles won & lost by America's military heros, particularly George Washington.

In 1798, Delacroix gained a strong competitor. When French immigrant Joseph Corré opened Columbia Garden in New York City, he commissioned 6 giant transparent paintings the inspire the 4th of July garden revelers visiting his new pleasure grounds. Corré's transparencies stood 18 feet tall.

Corre chose to have his obligatory portrait of George Washington supported by the "Geniuses of commerce, and the God of the Sea" who were grouped on a foundation of dolphins. Sea trade had traditionally been the key to the new nation's economic well-being. Garlands of flowers ornamented the painting. A companion portrait of President John Adams was also surrounded by symbolic geniuses.

Corre's remaining 4 paintings were purely emblematic. One depicted widsom as Minerva holding an olive branch to remind the viewer that the maintainance of virtue promised peace both within the new republic & with other nations. Fidelity was painted as a woman holding a basket of flowers & ears of corn, accompanied by a faithful dog close by her feet. A veil convered another female figure representing Piety. She held a cornucopia in her right hand, while her left hand rested on the head of an innocent child.

To counterbalance the peaceful images, Hercules depicted force. He held a club in one hand & stood next to a lion which symbolized heroic virtue, reminding garden revelers that virtuous force might be needed to maintain & expand the new republic. Corré enriched the whole display "with flags & warlike trophies." The next year he added a carved "figure of Fame" to his July 4th lineup of heros & emblems.

Corré declared that "as Public Gardens are for the amusement and recreation of the public, something new should be added yearly" to the Independence Day festivities. In 1801, he imported a collection of "large Busts...the immortal Washington, Socrates, Cicero, Demonsthenes, Mercury, Juno, Flora, Niobe, Ariadne, Vestal, Amour" & Narcissus. Socrates, Cicero, & Demonsthenes added classical wisdom to the garden surroundings. Amour suggested the more intimate pleasures of the garden setting.

Corré's initial public garden was so successful, that he opened a 2nd commercial garden in New York City called Mount Vernon in honor of the nation's 1st president shortly after Washington's death. For his first Independence Day ceremony at the new garden in 1800, Corré erected a pyramid near his garden fountain featuring a classical vase "lately imported from Europe" in addition to 19 garden statues representing Socrates, Cicero, Cleopatra, Shakespeare, Milton, "the illustrious and immortal Washington," plus various figures from Greek mythology.

Corre climaxed the event in his new garden with an evening fireworks display. In 1801, Corré's program at his Mount Vernon garden revolved around Washington including full length portraits of Washington, Warren, Mercer, Greene, Montgomery, Putnam, DeKalb, & Franklin. Illuminated paintings of national allegorical figures & scenes as well as a fireworks "battle between 26 ships of the line, being a representation of the battle fought between the British and French fleets in the Bay of Albankiv" concluded the spectacular.

In 1802, Corré climaxed his 4th of July celebration with fireworks depicting the coat of arms of the United States; the Cross of the Society of the Cincinnati with an eagle in the center; and a profile of President Jefferson in fire. Each of Corre's Independence Day celebrations during these years revolved around George Washington. Most commercial pleasure garden 4th of July celebrations for the ten years after George Washington's death in 1799, centered around the hero's life.

Even before Washington's death in 1799, Joseph Delacroix offered a fireworks in June of 1798, especially in his honor which ended with "a nosegay of fire...(leaving) a golden column standing, on which is placed the goddess 'Fame' 8 feet high, holding a wreath of Laurel in one hand & Washington with the other." Within 4 years of his death, the garden owner added a permanent tribute to Washington to his garden ornamentation. One visitor described the scene, "The illuminated walks on every side were irresistably inviting, and the lofty statue of Washington standing elegantly conspicuous in a brilliant area drew the general gaze."

After Washington's death, displays in New York City's French-owned public pleasure gardens began to deify him, especially those of competitors Joseph Corré & Joseph Delacroix. In his 1802 Independence Day commemoration, Delacroix presented a personification of Washington arriving on the scene at Vauxhall Garden in a triumphal carriage pulled by six horses driven by the figure of America and then being placed by America's heroes (Warren, Otis, Putnam, Greene, etc) on a military trophy in the Middle of the Temple of Immortality. After a proper musical & rifle salute, two geniuses descended from above bearing a civic crown placed on Washington's head by the Figure of Gratitude.

In 1803, Delacroix unveiled his bronzed life-size equestrian statue of President George Washington standing on a pedestal composed of 16 columns, representing the 16 states, surrounding a large center shaft. Washington, in full military attire, pointed "his sword towards the Narrows, the passage through which the British retired at the final evacuation of the United States."
Delacroix redecorated the area of his garden where he set the statue--which he named "the field of Mars" -- with gilt military trophies, garlands of white roses, & drawings illustrating Washington's military career. Washington was the American Mars. Mars represented the ancient Roman god of war who the Romans worshiped in three capacities: as Mars Gradivus, the warrior god; as Mars Silvanus, a rustic divinity who presided over agriculture; and as Mars Quirinus, the protector of the state. As Ultor, the avenger, the Roman Mars punished the enemies of Rome just as the military Washington vanquished the British ememies of America. Washington was the Mars of the new republic.

Of his 1801 Independence Day celebration at his new garden Corre advertised that "The tomb in which Gen. Washington was buried at the foot of Mount Vernon will be exactly represented. While Mr. Fox delivers a monody at the door of the vault...the ghost of Washington will arise! and (be) borne to heaven by cherubs amidst a flourish of trumpets, in the presence of the audience."

Here Washington was more than the American Mars, Washington was a new national savior figure rising to heaven to sit somewhere near the right hand of the Father and Son. After dispatching Washington to heaven in 1801, Corre could hardly bring him back the for the next year's 4th of July celebration, so he had Fame descend from heaven in 1802 "in a cloud surrounded by the sun" carrying a portrait of Washington, that she placed in the Temple of Independence which Corré had erected in his garden.

By the end of the first decade of the 19th century, commercial pleasure gardens had pushed the celebration of the 4th of July about as far as they could. Attendence dwindled; and in 1809, French entrepeneur Joseph Delecouix placed his New York City garden for sale.

Amazingly, on the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1826, two of the most famous signers of the document, Presidents John Adams & Thomas Jefferson, died. And ironically on that same day, in Maryland, the Frederick-Town Herald decided to no longer publish 4th of July celebrations & toasts, which they declared to be "generally dull, insipid affairs, about which few feel any interest."

For everything there is to know about commercial gardens in New York City, from their heyday in the federal period to their decline after the Civil War, see Thomas M. Garrett, “A History of Pleasure Gardens in New York City, 1700-1865,” Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1978.
.

American Seed Catalogs from Smithsonian Institution Libraries

2011-07-02T01:12:00.000-04:00

Garden Activities - Celebrating July 4th Outdoors

2011-07-02T01:11:00.001-04:00

.
After the Revolution, friends and strangers would gather together in sweltering July weather in public parks and in neighbors' gardens & pleasure grounds to celebrate the new nation's independence.

In Maryland, Rosalie Stier Calvert wrote to her father of attending a 4th of July party of more than 100 people, held on the banks of the Potomac under a 70 foot long tent decorated with garlands of laurel. The table was "very well provisioned" for the garden feast.

Guests were asked to come in "American made clothes," and only wines and liquors made in Virginia were served -- apple & peach brandy and whiskey. "It was a completely patriotic fete."Fourth of July picnics and barbecues often were set up in near water or under the shade of a grove of trees to protect the celebrants from from the heat of the day.

The Reverand Mr. William Bentley, pastor of the East Church in Salem, Massachusettes, noted in his diary on July 4, 1792, The day of our INDEPENDANCE, to be celebrated in every part of the United States. Boston has given notice of its intentions, & the patriotic Sons of Gloucester have published the same purpose. For ourselves a few are to enjoy a Turtle feast at the Fort.

In the new Washington City in 1795, over 100 persons gathered to celebrate the Declaration of Independence near the tree-lined banks of the meandering Rock Creek with a dinner prepared by the owner of the Washington Tavern. (Columbian Chronicle, 7 July 1795)

In Frederick, Maryland, in 1805, the town's residents assembled for a 4th of July dinner at Mr. John Dare's spring, near the shady banks of the beautiful Monocacy River. (The Hornet, 9 July 1805)

And at St. Johns College in the old Maryland capitol of Annapolis in 1812, "a handsome dinner prepared by Mr. Isaac Parker, on the College Green, under the shade of that majestic Poplar" to celebrate the nation's independence. (Maryland Gazette, 9 July 1812)
Near Philadelphia on July 4, 1814, an organization called Tamanny Society's Wigwam met at Richmond, on the shady banks of the Delaware River and "sat down to two tables, of 160 feet each in length, well and plentifully supplied with the best products of the season." (Philadelphia Aurora General Advertiser, 6 July 1814)

John L. Krimmel (1785-1821), a German artist who came to the US in 1810 & settled in Philadelphia. 4th of July in Center Square, 1819.
To celebrate the 4th of July in 1821, in Amherst, New Hampshire, the entire town decided to not have the traditional town ceremony but to gather together to go fishing in a nearby pond and then to cook up two large pots of fish chowder for all to enjoy. (Hillsboro Telegraph,6 July 1821)

At some outdoor public celebrations, commercial vendors set up booths & tables to provide refreshments for citizens, as they attended Fourth of July events. During the 1820 4th of July celebration in Washington D.C., turtle soup was offered at Lepreux & Kervand's "near the 7 buildings," from 11 a.m. until 3 p.m., and at Burckhart & Koenig at the Columbia Garden beginning at 12 noon. Both vendors offered carry-out service. (National Intelligencer, 3-4 July 1820)
Clam soup was a New York City favorite. Actually, New Yorkers strolling through Central Park in 1824, could chose from more than soup. Vendor booths in shady Central Park offered "baked beans, roast pig and punch, custards and clam soup." (New York Daily Advertiser, 5 July 1824) Four years later, turtle soup had been added to the take-out menu on the Fouth of July in New York City. "Flushing Bay Clam and Turtle soup . . . [was] served up in the usual style, at the Flushing Hotel," while "green turtle soup" was available at the Washington Hall dinner in July of 1828. (New-York Enquirer, 4 July 1828, 2-3).

Another large outdoor dinner took place on the Washington Parade grounds in New York City in 1826 celebrating the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Tables were arranged in lines 500 feet in length under a temporary covered arbor and "were tastefully decorated with flowers and evergreens." For this huge celebration, the butchers of Greenwich Market cooked & served "roasted oxen" The Governor of New York was served first. He took the first cut of an ox. A crowd of citizens & military then pressed forward, formed a line the whole length of the arbour, and commenced a spirited attack upon the eatables & drinkables, in the most gallant style of epicurean emulation. The attack continued with unabated ardour until the victory was complete, and the whole assailing force, satisfied with their share of booty when they retired in a peaceable and creditable manner at an early hour. (Richmond Enquirer, 14 July 1826)

The same newspaper reported that in nearby Petersburg, Virginia, 200 citizens gathered at Poplar Spring for dinner to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Fourth of July. (Richmond Enquirer, 11 July 1826)

Tickets were required for most 4th of July celebrations, but at the 1826 dinner 50th anniversary commemoration in Charlotte, North Carolina, soldiers who fought in the Revolutionary War "were invited to partake 'without money, and without price." (Charleston Courier, 21 July 1826)

Outdoor public dinners often allowed for the presence of women, but females were typically not invited to organization celebrations. At such fetes, the food was usually prepared & served by men only. In 1802, a Mr. Kindig served a 4th of July dinner to men at Good Spring near Lancaster, Pennsylvania. (10 July 1802) On Maryland's Eastern Shore, on July 4, 1816, "a meeting of gentlemen" was held on the property of Mr. Rue's tavern, where the gentlemen reportedly enjoyed a "sumptious dinner." (Republican Star, 9 July 1816) Several years later in New Haven, Connecticut, Col. George Ward provided the 1834 Fourth of July dinner for a large assemblage of "republican" men. (Columbian Register, 28 June 1834)

Although they would not be allowed to vote in the United States until 1920, the often excluded woman were not above taking matters in to their own hands on occasion. At Mossy Spring, Kentucky, in 1819, a group of determined pioneer women "seated themselves on the grass" and celebrated the holiday with food which each had brought from home. Copying the typical progression of the gentelmen's dinners, a patriotic oration was presented by one of the female diners followed by an offering of 13 "resolutions," not toasts, which the ladies feared might "be deemed unfeminine." (Commentator, Frankfort, Kentucky, 30 July 1819) To celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence at Northampton, Massachusettes, in 1824, the town's genteel ladies held a "Tea Party on the Green, presenting a brilliant and enchanting scene." (Boston Evening Gazette, 10 July 1824)Some of the large outdoor gentlemen's celebrations could last for hours, include numerous rounds of toasts, and become a little boisterous. The editors of the Rhode Island Providence Patriot & Columbian Phenix suggested on July 4, 1828, that public dinners "often" result in "excess, noise, riot and intemperance" and that dinners are not "calculated for social enjoyment." To solve the problem, the newspaper recommended that Independence Day dinners be "eaten at home with a few friends, without a drop of ardent spirits of any kind, but conclude with a temperate use of unadulterated wine."

For everything there is to know about 4th of July celebrations see the Fourth of July Celebrations Database, Researched, Compiled, & Arranged by James R. Heintze. American University, Washington, D.C.

.

American Seed Catalogs from Smithsonian Institution Libraries

2011-05-31T22:52:00.000-04:00

Why Garden? - A Proper Activity for Columbia's Daughters

2011-05-31T20:11:00.001-04:00

.
A Proper Female Pursuit for Columbia's Daughters in a Patriarchal Society

Early botanist Jane Colden Farquher (1724-66) came from a traditional patriarchal family. Her physician father Cadwallader Colden (1688-1776) sailed to New York in 1710, He was Lt. Governor of New York from 1761 until his death; member of the Council of New York; & Surveyor General for New York. His scientific curiosity included a personal correspondence between 1749-1751 with Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778).

Colden thought women should study botany because of "their natural curiosity & the pleasure they take in the beauty and variety of dress seems to fit them for it." Moreover, he viewed such study as an ideal substitute for idleness among his female children, when he moved his family to the country in 1729.

He believed gardening and botany "an Amusement which may be made agreable for the Ladies who are often at a loss to fill their time." He went so far as to recommend that perhaps from Jane's example "young ladies in a like situation may find an agreable way to fill up some part Of their time which otherwise might be heavy on their hand May amuse & please themselves & at the same time be usefull to others."

Jane Colden far surpassed her father's amusement theory. She was the first scientist to describe the gardenia. Although she had to read the works of Carolus Linnaeus in translation, she mastered the Linnaean system of plant classification perfectly. She catalogued, described, and sketched at least 400 plants. She actively collected seeds & specimens of New World flora & exchanged them with others on both sides of the Atlantic.

Peter Collinson (1694-1768) wrote Linnaeus that Jane Colden “is perhaps the first lady that has so perfectly studied your system. She deserves to be celebrated.” The South Carolina scientist Dr. Alexander Garden (1730-1791) wrote that Jane Colden “is greatly master of the Linnaean method, and cultivates it with assiduity.” Her work on plant classification was in a Scottish scientific journal in 1770, four years after her death.

Irish immigrant gardener, seed dealer, & writer Bernard M'Mahon (1775-1816), noted nearly the exact sentiments as father Colden in his 1806 Phildadelphia book The American Gardener's Calendar, "The innocent, healthful, and pleasing amusement that Botanical studies might afford to the fair daughters of Columbia, who have leisure time to devote to such, is also a very important object, as in that way, many happy and enchanting hours might be delightfully spent to useful and salubrious purposes, which othecwise would hang heavily or be trifled away perhaps to disadvantage."

Rosalie Stier Calvert (1778–1821), who lived near Washington D. C. just when it was becoming both a political & social capitol, thought women should hold themselves above an discussion of politics, especially during the mud-slinging surrounding Thomas Jefferson's personal life & loves. She called gardening her “greatest diversion.”

Rosalie Stier Calvert and her daughter.

In 1807, she observed, "I see so many women making themselves ridiculous by discussing politics at random without understanding the subject that I am disgusted with all controversy except about flowers! Their culture absorbs me more every day, for as I go out rarely, it is my chief amusement."

In South Carolina, Eliza Pinckney (1722-1793), who was responisble for profitably changing the economy of South Carolina by introducing indigo agriculture, wrote in 1760, “I love a garden & a book; & they are all my amusement.”

1805 Salem Girls School later Salem College.

Salem College began in 1766, when the Moravians, established the village of Salem. Among the town's early residents were 16 girls & women who walked more than 500 miles from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to join the new community. Salem Girls School, later Salem College, was run by the unmarried women, the Single Sisters, of the Moravian community, who were economically self-sufficient, a rare condition for women of the 18th century. Moravian records show that Salem educated African American girls as early as 1785. The gardens at the Girls’ School in Salem, were described as “designed for literary repast, & evening amusement.”

1912 Photo of Tableau on the Lower Pleasure Grounds at Salem College.

In 1858, Principal Robert deSchweinitz transformed the Lower Pleasure Grounds from a heavily-wooded ravine barrier between Salem Academy & Salem College into a beautifully landscaped garden, creating rose gardens & pavilions. An amazing photo of this area, where amusement & theater weere still a serious components, from 1912 exists at the College.

Outdoor literary repast. 1798 William Clarke. Mrs William Frazer. Delaware.

The Rev. Mr. John Bennett, a clergyman interested in the appropriate behavior (especially the conduct of women) for a moral society whose 1803 Letters to a young lady...calculated to improve the heart, to form the manners and to enlighten the understanding circulated throughout Great Britain & the United States, wrote, Attention to a garden is A truly feminine amusement. If you mix it with a taste for botany, and a knowledge of plants and flowers, you will never be in want of an excellent restorative.
.

American Seed Catalogs from Smithsonian Institution Libraries

2011-05-31T20:10:00.004-04:00

Gardener & Agricultural Innovator - Eliza Lucas Pinckney (1722-1793) of South Carolina

2011-05-31T17:02:00.000-04:00

.
Eliza Lucas Pinckney (c 1722-1793) was born into a family of privilege on the Caribbean island of Antigua, where her British military officer father was stationed. She was sent back to England for a proper education & then she sailed with her family to South Carolina. Ironically, as a teen-ager she would manage her father's Carolina plantations, while he was away in the military; and, years later, she would manage her husband's plantation after his death.

When Eliza was 16, her father, seeking a healthier situation for his ailing wife, brought her & their two daughters to a plantation, which he had inherited on Wappoo Creek in South Carolina, near Charleston, in 1738.

As the conflict between England & Spain, called the War of Jenkins’ Ear, heated up, forcing him to return to his military assignment in Antigua in 1739, the management of Wappoo, and of her father's 2 other plantations in the Carolina low country, fell to Eliza.

At age 16, Eliza Lucas Pinckney was managing her father’s 3 plantations, while taking care of her younger sister & her dying mother. We have many details of Eliza's life & hopes; because when she was 18, Eliza began keeping her letters & memoranda from 1740 until 1762. Her letterbook is one of the largest surviving collections of letters of a colonial woman. Her rich letters reveal her quick-witted perseverance & grit, as she forged an unique life for herself & plotted a new path for agriculture in South Carolina.

When she was 18, Eliza wrote of her new situation to a friend in England, on May 2, 1740. "I like this part of the world, as my lott has fallen here... I prefer England to it, ’tis true, but think Carolina greatly preferable to the West Indias, and was my Papa here I should be very happy...

Charles Town, the principal one in this province, is a polite, agreeable place. The people live very Gentile and very much in the English taste. The Country is in General fertile and abounds with Venison and wild fowl...

My Papa and Mama’s great indulgence to me leaves it to me to chose our place of residence either in town or Country, but I think it more prudent as well as most agreeable to my Mama and self to be in the Country during my Father’s absence. We are 17 mile by land and 6 by water from Charles Town where we have about 6 agreeable families around us with whom we live in great harmony.

I have a little library well furnished (for my papa has left me most of his books) in which I spend part of my time. My Musick and the Garden, which I am very fond of, take up the rest of my time that is not imployed in business, of which my father has left me a pretty good share and indeed, ’twas inavoidable as my Mama’s bad state of health prevents her going through any fatigue.

I have the business of 3 plantations to transact, which requires much writing and more business and fatigue of other sorts than you can imagine. But least you should imagine it too burthensom to a girl at my early time of life, give me leave to answer you: I assure you I think myself happy that I can be useful to so good a father, and by rising very early I find I can go through much business.

The teenager brought her infectuous love of learning with her to Wappoo. She reveled in music & could “tumble over one little tune” on the flute. She quoted Milton, read Richardson’s Pamela, & spoke French. She actually enjoyed reading John Locke, Virgil's Plutarch, & Thomas Wood. But, her favorite subject was botany.

She tutored her sister Polly & “two black girls,” whom she envisioned making “school mistress’s for the rest of the Negroe children,” if her father approved. In 1741, she recorded sighting a comet whose appearance Sir Isaac Newton had predicted. Eliza enjoyed brief soical visits in Charleston, but devoted most of her energy to her family & to plotting the success of her father's business in Carolina.

In July of 1740, she wrote a memorandum, "Wrote my Father a very long letter on his plantation affairs and... On the pains I had taken to bring the Indigo, Ginger, Cotton and Lucerne and Casada to perfection, and had greater hopes from the Indigo (if I could have the seed earlier next year from the West India’s) than any of the rest of the things I had tryd."

Eliza recognized that the growing textile manufacturing industry was creating a worldwide market for good dyes. In 1739, she began cultivating & creating new strains of the indigo plant from which blue dye could be made. She introduced the successful cultivation of the plant indigo used in making dye to the American colonies.

While she was forging ahead in her agricultural experiments, she worried about her father, who was her only support system. Her letters let him know that she believed he cared about his country & career more than his family. She wrote in 1740, to him in Antigua, where he remained on military duty, "I want of words to Express the concern we are under at not hearing from you. The dangerous situation you are in terrifies us beyond expression and is increased by the fearful apprehensions of your being ordered to some place of immediate danger. . . I know how ready you are to fight in a just cause as well as the love you bear your Country in preference to every other regard..."

She continued to look for ways to make a profit from the family's plantations. On April 23, 1741, she wrote a memorandum, "Wrote to my Father informing him of the loss of a Negroe man, also the boat being overset in Santilina Sound and 20 barrels of Rice lost. Told him of our making a new garden and all conveniences we can to receive him when we are so happy to see him. Also about Starrat and pitch and Tarr."

In June of 1741, she finally heard from her father after 6 months without any letters, and she wrote him in return, "Never were letters more welcome than yours...We expect the boat dayly from Garden Hill [one of their other plantations] when I shall be able to give you an account of affairs there. The Cotton, Guiney corn, and most of the Ginger planted here was cutt off by a frost.

I wrote you in a former letter we had a fine Crop of Indigo Seed upon the ground, and since informed you the frost took it before it was dry. I picked out the best of it and had it planted but there is not more than a hundred bushes of is come up - which proves the more unluckey as you have sent a man to make it. I make no doubt Indigo will prove a very valuable Commodity in time if we could have the seed from the west Indias in time enough to plant the latter end of March, that the seed might be dry enough to gather before our frost. I am sorry we lost this season. We can do nothing towards it now but make the works ready for next year."

Eliza hoped a fine grade of blue indigo grown in Carolina could be prepared into dye cakes for cloth manufacturers in England. The market for South Carolina rice had dwindled with the war, and indigo could be bought from South Carolina to supply British markets instead of from the French Carribean islands, if she was successful at introducing a 2nd staple crop to the colony. Indigo accounted for over one-third of the value of the colonies’ exports before the Revolutionary War.

“I was ignorant both at the proper season for sowing it [indigo] and the soil best adapted to it”, Eliza wrote, but she perservered. Her determination brought to success experiments in growing this crop which had been tried & discarded near Charleston some 70 years earlier.

Knowing how complex was the process of producing the dye from the fresh-cut plants, Colonel Lucas sent her an experienced indigo maker from the French island on Montserrat in the summer of 1741. Optimistically, Eliza wrote her father that October “informing him we made 20 weight of Indigo….’Tis not quite dry or I should have sent him some. Now desire he will send us a hundred weight of seed to plant in the spring.”

She was also experimenting with other crops. In April of 1742, Eliza wrote, "I have planted a large figg orchard with desighn to dry and export them. I have reckoned my expense and the prophets to arise from these figgs."

At the age of 19 in September of 1741, was fully immersed in the business of the colony. She noted, "Wrote to my father on plantation business and concerning a planter’s importing Negroes for his own use. Colo. Pinckney thinks not, but thinks it was proposed in the Assembly and rejected. He promised to look over the Act and let me know. Also informed my father of the alteration ’tis soposed there will be in the value of our money- occasioned by a late Act of Parliament that Extends to all America - which is to dissolve all private banks, I think by the 30th of last month, or be liable to lose their Estates, and put themselves out of the King’s protection. Informed him of the Tyranical Government at Georgia."

A month later, she recorded, October 14, 1741, "Wrote to my father informing him we made 20 w[eight] of Indigo and expected 10 more. ’Tis not quite dry or I should have sent him some. Now desire he will send us a hundred weight of seed to plant in the spring."

In April of the next year, she wrote to her friend in England, about her daily routine, "In general then I rise at five o’Clock in the morning, read till Seven, then take a walk in the garden or field, see that the Servants [slaves] are at their respective business, then to breakfast. The first hour after breakfast is spent at my musick, the next is constantly employed in recolecting something I have learned least for want of practise it should be quite lost, such as French and short hand. After that I devote the rest of the time till I dress for dinner to our little Polly and two black girls who I teach to read...

The first hour after dinner as the first after breakfast at musick, the rest of the afternoon in Needle work till candle light, and from that time to bed time read or write. . . . Mondays my musick Master is here. Tuesdays my friend Mrs. Chardon (about 3 miles distant) and I are constantly engaged to each other, she at our house one Tuesday⎯ I at hers the next and this is one of the happiest days I spend at Woppoe. Thursday the whole day except what the necessary affairs of the family take up is spent in writing, either on the business of the plantations, or letters to my friends. Every other Fryday, if no company, we go a vizeting so that I go abroad once a week and no oftener..."

She wrote to her friend again in May of 1742, "Wont you laugh at me if I tell you I am so busey in providing for Posterity I hardly allow my self time to Eat or sleep and can but just snatch a minnet to write you and a friend or two now. I am making a large plantation of Oaks which I look upon as my own property, whether my father gives me the land or not; and therefore I design many years hence when oaks are more valueable than they are now -- which you know they will be when we come to build fleets.

I intend, I say 2 thirds of the produce of my oaks for a charity (I'll let you know my scheme another time) and the other 3rd for those that shall have the trouble of putting my design in Execution. I sopose according to custom you will show this to your Uncle and Aunt. 'She is [a] good girl,' says Mrs. Pinckney. 'She is never Idle and always means well.' 'Tell the little Visionary,' says your Uncle, 'come to town and partake of some of the amusements suitable to her time of life.' Pray tell him I think these so, and what he may now think whims and projects may turn out well by and by. Out of many surely one may hitt...

The 1744 indigo crop did, indeed, "hitt" & was a success. Six pounds from Wappoo were sent to England and “found better than the French Indigo.” Seed from this crop was immediately distributed to many Carolina planters, who soon were profiting from Carolina's new staple export product.

While she was busy with plantation affairs, she also took time to survey the gardening efforts of her neighbors. South Carolinian Eliza Lucas Pinckney described her neighbor William Middleton's mount at his estate Crowfields in 1743, “to the bottom of this charming spot where is a large fish pond with a mount rising out of the middle-the top of which is level with the dwelling house and upon it is a roman temple.”

At Crowfields, she noted, the amazing fishponds, "...a large fish pond with a mount rising out of the middle-- the top of which is level with the dwelling house and upon it is a roman temple. On each side of this are other large fish ponds properly disposed which form a fine prospect of water from the house."

She surveyed the use of ornamental plants at Middleton's, "The house stands a mile from, but in sight of the road...as you draw nearer new beauties discover themselves, first the fruitful Vine mantleing up the wall loaded with delicious Clusters." Of the formal garden, she noted, "From the back door is a spacious walk a thousand foot long; each side of which nearest the house is a grass plat ennamiled in a Serpentine manner with flowers."

At Crowfields, she noted the mounts & bird-friendly area of wilderness,
"Next to that on the right hand is what immediately struck my rural taste, a thicket of young tall live oaks where a variety of Airry Chorristers pour forth their melody."

Eliza described, in May, 1743, "I...cant say one word on the other seats I saw in this ramble, except the Count's large double row of Oaks on each side of the Avenue that leads to the house--which seemed designed by nature for pious meditation and friendly converse."

She also paid attention to the ornamental aspects of her own garden and grounds. She wrote in a letter in 1742, "You may wonder how I could in this gay season think of planting a Cedar grove, which rather reflects an Autumnal gloom and solemnity than the freshness and gayty of spring. But so it is...I intend then to connect in my grove the solemnity (not the solidity) of summer or autumn with the cheerfulness and pleasures of spring, for it shall be filled with all kind of flowers, as well wild as Garden flowers, with seats of Camomoil and here and there a fruit tree--oranges, nectrons, Plumbs."

On May 27, 1744, Eliza Lucas married attorney Charles Pinckney, a childless widower more than 20 years her senior. Pinckney built a house on Charleston’s waterfront for his bride, but as usual, she chose to spend most of her time in the country. At his plantation on the Cooper River, Eliza initialized the culture of silkworms to establish a “silk manufacture.” While in England in 1753, during an audience with the Princess of Wales, Eliza Lucas Pinckney presented her with a dress made of silk produced from her plantations.

By 1746, Carolina planters shipped almost 40,000 pounds of indigo to England; the next year the total exported was almost 100,000 pounds. Indigo sales sustained the Carolina economy for 3 decades, until the Revolution cut off trade with England.

Eliza & Charles Pinckney had 4 children within 5 years. Eliza vowed “to be a good Mother to my children…to instill piety, Virtue and true religion into them; to correct their Errors whatever uneasiness it may give myself….”

Charles Pinckney's appointment as commissioner for the colony in London took the family in April of 1753, to England. They had hoped to live there with their family, until their sons finished their education. When war with France broke out, Eliza & her husband returned in May of 1758, to Carolina, leaving the boys at school in England.

Pinckney contracted malaria & died in July of that year. Again Eliza turned to plantation business as she directed her husband’s seven separate land holdings in the Carolina lo country.

Eliza wrote this letter to the headmaster of her son's school in England, "This informs you of the greatest misfortune that could have happened to me and my dear children on this side Eternity! I am to tell you, hard as the task is, that my dear, dear Mr. Pinckney, the best of men, of husbands, and of fathers, is no more!

"Comfort, good Sir, Comfort the tender hearts of my dear children. God Almighty bless them, and if he has any more blessings for me in this world may He give it me in them and their sister.

"The inclosed letter for the dear boys be so good to give them when you think it a proper time. What anguish do I and shall I feel for my poor Infants when they hear the most afflicting sound that could ever reach them!"

By 1760, Eliza was once again fully immersed in managing a plantation and her husband's business affairs in South Carolina. "I find it requires great care, attention and activity to attend properly to a Carolina Estate, tho’ but a moderate one, to do ones duty and make it turn to account, that I find I have as much business as I can go through of one sort or other. Perhaps ’tis better for me, and I believe it is. Had there not been a necessity for it, I might have sunk to the grave by this time in that Lethargy of stupidity which had seized me after my mind had been violently agitated by the greatest shock it ever felt. But a variety of imployment gives my thoughts a relief from melloncholy subjects, tho’ ’tis but a temporary one, and gives me air and exercise, which I believe I should not have had resolution enough to take if I had not been roused to it by motives of duty and parental affection."

Eliza recorded her last letter in her letterbook in 1762. She wrote, "I love a Garden and a book; and they are all my amusement except I include one of the greatest Businesses of my life (my attention to my dear little girl) under that article. For a pleasure it certainly is &c. especially to a mind so tractable and a temper so sweet as hers. For, I thank God, I have an excellent soil to work upon, and by the Divine Grace hope the fruit will be answerable to my indeavours in the cultivation."

Pinckney spent 30 years, after her husband's death, overseeing their plantations & helping her family. She invested monies she earned from exporting indigo into her children’s education. Both of her sons became involved with the new nation. Charles Cotesworth Pinckney (1746-1852) signed the United States Constitution, and Thomas Pinckney (1750-1828) served as South Carolina Governor & as Minister to Spain & Great Britain.

Hampton Plantation near Georgetown, South Carolina.

Eliza lived with her widowed daughter Harriet at Daniel Huger Horry's estate, Hampton. There, they continued to improve the grounds. In 1790, they added a portico to the land side of the house. When George Washington visited during his Southern Tour in 1791, they asked him whether a certain oak tree should be cut down to create a better view from their new portico. He replied that he liked the tree, and it was saved.

Eliza died of cancer on May 26, 1793, in Philadelphia, where she had gone for medical treatment. At her funeral, President George Washington, then presiding over the United States government in Philadelphia, served as one of her pallbearers.
.

American Seed Catalogs from Smithsonian Institution Libraries

2011-05-31T17:01:00.001-04:00

From the Utilitarian Republican Garden to Ornament & Status

2011-05-31T16:25:00.004-04:00

.
From Flowers to Grass to Flowers with Proper, Scientific Names

During & immediately after the Revolution, many gardeners began banishing intricate patterns of flowers in favor of the less ostentatious simplicity of turf. Philadelphian Elizabeth Drinker wrote in her diary, “flower roots…were dug out of ye beds on ye south side of our garden--as my husband intends making grass-plots and planting trees.”

During this period, plain grass flats often defined the terraces of the gentry. However, at the same time, a flood of newly arrived professional seed merchants were enticing the growing gardening public to plant curious bulbs & roots imported from Europe. And the middle class merchants and artisans were beginning to accumulate both leisure time that could be spent in improving their homes and grounds and a bit of extra cash to spend toward this end. This flurry of marketing paid off, and the style that caught on. By the 1790s, specimen gardens & flowers once again flourished in the Chesapeake.

By the turn of the century, the popularity of intricate flower beds once again soared. Flowers remained a garden favorite, but gardeners now tended to segregated flowers by type rather than integrating them into a complicated design. Diarist Anne Grant reported that, in the gardens she saw before the Revolution, flowers “not seen in ‘curious knots’, were ranged in beds, the varieties of each kind by themselves.”

Botany & new classification systems for plants also caused a surge in collecting plants. In 1789, William Hamilton instructed the gardeners at his Philadelphia estate, Woodlands, to plant “exotic bulbous roots…at six or eight Inches from each other…taking care to preserve the distinctions of the sorts.”

In 1805, Rosalie Steir Calvert (1778–1821) wrote to her father from Riversdale in Prince George's County, Maryland, "The fancy for flowers of all kinds is really increasing; everyone takes an interest, and it is a great honor to have the most beautiful.”

The next spring, she was “curious to know if it is becoming fashionable in your country to become horticulturalists. Here we occupy ourselves with that more every day and are getting much better.”

Her father sent tulip bulbs in late 1807, and Rosalie Calvert wrote back, “now I will have the most beautiful collection in America, and I assure you my reputation is already quite exalted.”

A new cycle in American pleasure gardening had begun.
.

American Seed Catalogs from Smithsonian Institution Libraries

2011-05-31T16:24:00.002-04:00

The Practical Republican Garden in the Chesapeake

2011-05-31T09:31:00.006-04:00

.
In 1789, Jedidiah Morse (1761-1826), noted clergyman & geographer, wrote of one country seat: “Its fine situation. . .the arrangement and variety of forest-trees - the gardens - the artificial fish-ponds. . .discover a refined and judicious taste. Ornament and utility are happily united. It is, indeed, a seat worthy of a Republican Patriot.”

In the early Republic, many gardeners strove for a balance of useful plants and trees and genteel design. On both town and country plots, most Mid-Atlantic gentry, merchants, shopkeepers, & artisans planned gardens that were both practical & ornamental.

Generally, Chesapeake gardeners shared John Adam’s (1735-1826) negative attitude towards the excesses of the natural grounds movement of the English. During his 1784 tour of English gardens with

Thomas Jefferson, he announced, "It will be long, I hope, before ridings, parks, pleasure grounds, gardens, and ornamented farms grow so much in fashion in America."

In the same year, George Washington (1732-1799) wrote to the wife of Marquise de Lafayette (1757-1834) encouraging her to accompany her husband on a return visit to the new American republic. "You will see the plain manner in which we live; and meet the rustic civility, and you shall taste the simplicity of rural life." Until rather recently many garden historians assumed that by the end of the 18th century, few formal gardens with their traditional geometric bed designs remained at the homes of the royals & gentry in Britain. Practical beds did remain in English gardens, and they dominated Republican American gardens.

In the 18th-century Mid-Atlantic, gentry who gardened were aware of the new English natural style & sometimes added serpentine entry roads & paths that meandered through the wooded edges of their grounds, but they overwhelmingly designed their gardens with traditional square beds containing useful, kitchen garden plants and approaching avenues of practical, often fruit-bearing straight trees.

Chesapeake Gardens, a Balance of Utility and Ornament

Charles Carroll of Annapolis (1702-1782) was one of the wealthiest men in the colonies, but he planted the beds of his terraced gardens at his home in the capitol of Maryland with an eye toward practicality. Orderly squares filled with vegetables surrounded by low privet hedges decorated the flats of Carroll’s falls garden. Painter Charles Wilson Peale reported, “the Garden contains a variety of excellent fruit, and the flats are a kitchen garden.”

Included among the vegetables Carroll grew in the flats of his decorative terraces were early York, battersia, red, & green savoy cabbage; white, purple, & green broccoli; cauliflower; solid & upright celery; green & white endive; green & brown Dutch lettuce; several sorts of beans & peas; round & prickly spinach; prickly, early, & long prickly cucumber; white & silver corn; Spanish onion; salmon radish; mustard; cresses; & marrow.

Practical Gardens at Newly Burgeoning Town of Baltimore

Charles Carroll lived in Annapolis, which had been the political hub of Maryland for decades. But as early as 1769, provincial secretary William Eddis wrote of the developing commercial center of Baltimore, "Persons of commercial and enterprising spirit, emigrated from all quarters to this new and promising scene of industry. Wharfs were constructed; elegant and convenient habitations were rapidly erected; marshes were drained; spacious fields were occupied for the purposes of general utility; and within 40 years, of its first commencement (1729), Baltimore became not only the most wealthy and populous town in the province, but inferior to few on this continent, either in size, number of inhabitants, or the advantages arising from a well-conducted and universal commercial connexion..."

Wealthy planters found the harbor of Baltimore a convenient place to dispose of their produce & to buy goods. These tasks employed growing numbers of merchants, agents, shipbuilders, brokers, seamen, shopkeepers & artisans. During the Revolutionary War, unlike Charleston, Savannah, Norfolk, Philadelphia, & New York, all held or blockaded by the enemy, Baltimore's port was usually free of British cruisers.

George Washington wrote of Baltimore in 1783, that it was his "earnest Wish, that the Commerce, the Improvements and universal Prosperity of this flourishing Town my if possible, increase with even more Rapidity than they have hirtherto done." In the same year, General Nathaniel Greene visited Baltimore, & noted in his diary, "a most thriving place. Trade flourishes and the spirit of building exceeds belief. Not less than 300 houses are put up in a year...The inhabitants are men of business."

Post-war German visitor Dr. Johann David Schoepf noted, "Philadelphia excepted, there are nowhere in that country so many merchants gathered together and ready to take up what is offered," especially the backcountry tobacco & grains for export & the foods & goods arriving at the town's wharfs. Merchandise came to Baltimore's importers on consignment or in response to specific orders; and emptied vessels filled with exports, as they left the harbor.

Detailed Garden Plan for a Baltimore Republican Garden

The most detailed plan for a garden in Baltimore during the early republic was drawn by Colonel Nicholas Rogers (1753-1822). As Rogers planned a new home in the late 1700s, he designed the four-part garden at the back of his house with an eye to both utility an decoration. Order & symmetry dominated Rogers’ plan which detailed which plants were to be maintained in each segment of the large kitchen garden.

Colonel Nicholas Rogers 1801 Garden Plan for Druid Hill, Baltimore, Maryland. Drawing by Susan Wirth. Plan at the Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore.

Rogers' garden beds were each 80' by 62', separated & surrounded by garden walks 10 feet wide. An additional 10 feet of land bordered the garden walks. Down the exact center of these verges, Rogers planted fruit trees at 20', 22', & 25' intervals. Fruit trees on the property included 25 apple, 20 peach, 10 pear, 6 quince, 5 cherry, & 2 plum. In the middle of each rectangular garden bed sat one practical fruit tree, & an additional fruit was planted in each corner. This style of placing trees followed the traditional quincunx pattern.

Of the 2 gardens plots closes to Col. Rogers’ Baltimore country seat, one contained a combination of vegetable & melon plants, & the 2nd was dedicated solely to fruit.

The 2 quincunx plots farther from the Roger's house were devoted largely to vegetables. Four additional beds were bordered by 60 currant bushes placed 4' apart in single rows along the center garden walk. In the rear beds, 60 raspberry bushes planted 4' apart in single rows ran along the rear garden walk. Rogers also planted 200 strawberry plants in row 2' apart in the fruit garden.

Planting many fruit-bearing shrubs & trees in the garden occasionally had its downside. In 1720, William Byrd reported that he ate “so many plums” on a walk one evening that he “could not sleep.”

Rogers’ house was 36' wide & sat in the extreme northeast corner of the 210' square that enclosed the 4 gardens plus the 3 utility areas that ran to the back of the property directly behind the house. The meat house & the well signaled the beginning of a 2nd yard, also measuring 36' by 40', that continued without interruption from the first.

Across the garden walk from this second yard, Rogers dedicated a plot measuring 36' by 82' to his servants. Within this area was an 18' by 16' slave quarter. Rogers’ slaves used the remainder of this long rectangular area as their kitchen garden. The kitchen garden for slaves was usually referred to as a “huck patch” during the period. At the end of the salves’ vegetable patch, a 36' by 18' hog pen abutted the rear of the property. A two-seat privy stood along the outside verge of fruit trees that separated the formal garden plots from the servants’ garden.

Rogers planned a utility road to run just outside the 210'-by-210' main grounds on the north side. The road was 12' wide with 10' verges on either sided, and it was also planted with fruit trees at 20', 22', & 25-foot intervals. Just opposite the well house on the utility road side of the main grounds, Rogers build his horse trough, handy to both the well & the road.

Rogers’ private road approaching the entrance facade on the east-facing house was also 12' wide with 12' grass verges lining each side. About 30' directly in front of the entrance sat a circle of grass 56 feet in diameter. The entrance road encircled the grassed area. Two maples were the only plantings within the circle, but matching double rows of trees shaded the approach to the house. According to his written list, Rogers’ ornamental trees included 6 maple, 4 cedar, 2 weeping willow, 1 horse chestnut, 2 catalpa, 2 ash, & 14 locust.

Fruit trees were not the only practical yet attractive trees used in planting. Nut trees & sugar maples offered important benefits. As agricultural enthusiast John Beale Bordley observed, “The maple is a handsome clean tree. A grove of them, two or three acres, would give comfortable shady walks, and sugar for family use.”

A Map of Baltimore's Republican Gardens

By 1798, more than 70 combination pleasure & kitchen gardens were thriving in & near Baltimore. At the end of the 18th century, Baltimore’s well-to-do merchants often maintained a country house, in addition to their city dwelling, to escape the disease & oppressive heat that seized the port town in the summer months. These country seats were usually only a mile or two from town, allowing a businessman to travel to his office in town as conveniently as possible.

Thanks to the comprehensive 1797 mapping of “Warner and Hanna’s Plan of the city and Environs of Baltimore” we are able to know the layouts of many of Baltimore’s larger country seat gardens. Written descriptions of the gardens drawn on this map closely match the cartographer's depictions. Of the 70 geometric plots dotting the Baltimore hillsides, gardens with four beds, planted with fruits & vegetables, were by far the most numerous, more than 35 in number & varied in style.
Practical Chesapeake Terraced Falling Gardens

Because the land around the harbor at Baltimore was hilly as it dropped toward the bay, many builders chose terraced falling gardens for the south side of their homes. Even the terracing of gardens itself served both aesthetic & practical purposes in the colonial Mid-Atlantic.

On uneven hillsides, terraces created flat areas for planting & helped control erosion. In 1772, Charles Carroll of Annapolis wrote to his son, who was improving his gardens which dropped to the bank of Spa Creek, “If you wish to make a continental slope from ye Gate to ye wash house, I apprehend the Quantity of Water in great Rains going ye way may prove convenient.”

The elder Carroll was still fretting about those garden slopes in 1775, as he wrote his son again: “Examine the Gardiner strictly as to...Whether he is an expert at leveling, making grass plots & Bowling Greens, Slopes, & turfing them well.” Carroll was well aware that falls were functional devices which could divert water drainage & reduce soil erosion.

Typical Terraced Falling Garden. Chairback by John & Hugh Findley c 1804. View by Francis Guy 1760-1820. Garden Facade of Mount Deposit. Baltimore Country Seat of David Harris (1752-1809) Baltimore Museum of Art.

Pragmatic Mid-Atlantic landowners often constructed their terraces when the dwelling house was newly built; so that the earth, clay, and rubbish that come out of the cellars & foundations could be used to shape the falls. The same practicality sometimes prompted Mid-Atlantic landowners to build mounds. The products of cellar digging, heaped up into a mound, could be used as the base for another structure, such as a summerhouse or detached library, as well as an elevated site for surveying the surrounding landscape or just a spot for catching cool air on sultry summer days.

Classical, Functional Quincunx Garden Beds

Charles Carroll of Annapolis also advised his son to plant the flat beds on his terraces in the classical quincunx style. In 1777, Carroll gave his son privet rather than boxwood to outline his new garden beds & advised him to keep the privet trimmed to a small size, “not to Exceed 12 inches in Width.” Carroll did not want the privet roots to interfere with the smaller vegetables he planned to grow in the beds each season.
Thomas Jefferson’s brother-in-law Henry Skipwith advised a young orchard gardener in 1813, to consult Virgil to learn about a “quincunx, which is nothing more than a square with a tree at each corner and one in the center and thus continued throughout the orchard.” Adopting conservative, classical forms was common in early Chesapeake gardens. Jefferson himself wrote, “I should prefer the adoption of some one of the models of antiquity which have had the approbation of thousands of years.”

Terraced 4 Bed Gardens

Detail. Cartographer Charles Varle. Engraver Francis Shallus. Warner & Hanna's Map, Plan of the City of Baltimore. 1801. 2nd edition. Drawn 1797. (1st edition 1799)

Of the more traditional four-bed gardens near Baltimore, 15 sat on terraced falls. Typical of these was merchant John Salmon’s home, which perched atop a Baltimore County hill adjoining the country seat of his fellow merchant, Robert Oliver (1757-1834). Oliver was an Irishman from Belfast who arrived in Baltimore in 1783, working there as a merchant until 1819. The neighbors’ homes had mirror-image four-bed terraced gardens descending in the direction of the bay. Also arriving in Baltimore in 1783, Salmon built a two-story home with a balcony & piazza facing south, overlooking his falling gardens. Salmon & Oliver enjoyed smoking "segars" & wagering over cards at each other's homes.

Happy with his view from both his northern entrance facade & from his southern garden facade, Salmon built a second piazza, on the entry façade, facing north. Contemporaries reported that the situation was “admirable,” commanding a view of the town, harbor, & harbor below. An observer reported of Salmon’s 5 acres, once again empasizing the practical aspects, “The garden…is laid off in beautiful falls: in it is an excellent cold bath and a milk house through which there runs a constant stream of water.”

An Unusual 4 Bed Garden

One unusual example of garden design was at the home of painter & glazier James L. Walker, whose four garden beds were not arranged in the typical square. Three long rectangular beds were lined up side by side & a 4th was set perpendicular to them & in front of the house. Walker was an artist.

Walker's shop was in downtown Baltimore, "Market-Street, near the Court-House Baltimore, Sign of the Painting Muse." In 1792, he wrote a broadside advertisement for his business titled Painting in General. Here he announced that he painted coaches; signs; rooms; chimney, fire, & candle screens; landscapes; & floor cloths, as well as sold paints, watercolors, crayons, varnishes, "lacker," & chalk. He also opened a looking glass manufactory which supplied glass for mirrors, pictures, & windows. A receipt from his Baltimore business appears in the correspondence of Robert Carter (1728-1804) now at the Virginia Historical Society.

Detail. Cartographer Charles Varle. Engraver Francis Shallus. Warner & Hanna's Map, Plan of the City of Baltimore. 1801. 2nd edition. Drawn 1797. (1st edition 1799)

The Simple Kitchen Garden of a Baltimore Tradesman

Four Baltimore country seats were possessed of a single large rectangular garden plot, which probably served as the traditional kitchen garden. One of them was the home of William Hawkins (1754-1818), which sat on the busy road that ran to Frederick, Maryland. Hawkins was a merchant tailor who was also a preacher in the Baltimore Methodist church movement. He served at the Methodist meeting house at the corner of Light Street & Wine Alley, and was active in Baltimore's 1798 anti-slavery society. He married Frances Cunningham, in 1779, just 6 years after arriving in Baltimore from England, with his brother John who was also a tailor on Fleet Stree in Fells Point.

Detail. Cartographer Charles Varle. Engraver Francis Shallus. Warner & Hanna's Map, Plan of the City of Baltimore. 1801. 2nd edition. Drawn 1797. (1st edition 1799)

Growing fruits & vegetables was considered a practical necessity at country seats, since many of Baltimore’s well-to-do moved to these residences during almost the entire growing season. Nine Baltimore homes had gardens of twin rectangular beds, & 2 of these were terraced, falling toward the harbor.

Avenues of Trees Leading to Traditional Garden Beds

Two of the remaining homes with double-bed gardens had accompanying avenues of trees leading to the house, like that of court crier William Bigger, or trees lining the road before the house. Only 2 Baltimore gardens consisted of 3 matched rectangular beds & neither was terraced.

Detail. Cartographer Charles Varle. Engraver Francis Shallus. Warner & Hanna's Map, Plan of the City of Baltimore. 1801. 2nd edition. Drawn 1797. (1st edition 1799)

Practical & Decorative Avenues, Alleys, & Rows of Trees

Chairback by John & Hugh Findley c 1804. View by Francis Guy 1760-1820. Woodville. Home of Jeremiah Yellott . 1805. Baltimore Museum of Art.

Along his utility road, Rogers planted practical rows of cherry trees, like those that William Lux had
planted nearly 40 years earlier to lead the way to his Baltimore home, Chatsworth. Avenues & alleys of fruit-bearing trees were common in colonial gardens throughout the 18th century. Rows of trees were used to define property lines & to separate one area on the grounds from another.

Row of trees defining property line. Chairback by John & Hugh Findley c 1804. View by Francis Guy 1760-1820. St. Paul's Chairity School. Baltimore.

Many Mid-Atlantic plantations & country seats included avenues of rows of trees well into the last decade of the 18th century, long after such linear plantings were being shunned in England.

Chairback by John & Hugh Findley c 1804. View by Francis Guy 1760-1820. Entrance Facade of Grace Hill Home of Hugh McCurdy from 1790-1805. Baltimore Museum of Art.

During most of the 18th century, homeowners in the colonies & states along the Atlantic planned avenues approaching their plantation houses as wide, straight roadways lined with single or double rows of trees & usually cutting symmetrically through a lawn of grass. Avenues were usually as wide as the house & sometimes wider. They were the entrance used by carriages. Alleys were narrower lanes which usually transversed the gardens.

An Avenue of Trees as the Sole Garden Decoration

Detail. Cartographer Charles Varle. Engraver Francis Shallus. Warner & Hanna's Map, Plan of the City of Baltimore. 1801. 2nd edition. Drawn 1797. (1st edition 1799)

The grounds surrounding the country seat of John Philip Henry Christopher Raborg (1750-1815), a copper merchant, who arrived in Baltimore during the Revolution. At the age of 3, he had sailed Philadelphia with his parents from Hanover, Germany. His family moved to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he served an apprenticeship, and married Catherine Barbara d'Ormond; before moving to Baltimore, where he opened his own foundry on Water Street. He made the cooper acorn ornaments on the State House in Annapolis, and served in the Revolutionary War.

Raborg's garden boasted a dramatic straight avenue of evenly spaced trees leading to a simple dwelling on a property with no other formal gardens or ornamentation. Apparently Raborg bought most of his produce at one of the Baltimore farmer's markets.

An Avenue of Trees with Traditional Garden Beds

Detail. Cartographer Charles Varle. Engraver Francis Shallus. Warner & Hanna's Map, Plan of the City of Baltimore. 1801. 2nd edition. Drawn 1797. (1st edition 1799)

At most large Mid-Atlantic country seats of the period, however, avenues & alleys of trees were only one component of more complicated garden plans, such as those at Major Thomas Yates’s (1740/41-1815) house in Baltimore. Yates was born in England, arriving in Maryland in 1774. He married Mary Myers in 1778, while he was serving as an officer in the Revolutionary War. He was a linen draper, and then he became "the auctioneer for Baltimore Town" during the 1780s. In 1790, he took on a partner in the post, Archibald Campbell. His 1st wife died in 1796, & his only son died in 1810. He remarried in 1799, Mrs. Mary Atkinson, but she died 3 years later.

Practical Squares of Flowers, Fruits, & Vegetables.

Garden planners continued to define garden spaces by outlining individual beds & squares with borders, often of fruit trees & bushes. The garden of Charles Norris in Philadelphia was, “laid out in square parterres & beds, regularly intersected by graveled and grass walks and alleys…with…rose intermixed with currant bushes, around its borders.” Near the end of the century, flowers were once again popular. In 1800, Philadelphian Henry Pratt’s garden was composed of 20 squares each with a 3-foot-wide border, “the border of every square…decorated with pinks and a thousand other flowers.”

Shopkeepers & artisans stuck with practical plants, often using vegetables in their borders. In Williamsburg in 1786, Joseph Prentiss “Sowed Lettuce Seed, on Border on left Hand under small Paling in the large Garden….Sowed Lettuce on small Border under Yard Pales.” In Annapolis in March of 1792, William Faris “Sowed a border next the Dining Room with Radish & Large Winter Cabbage.” And he planted sage around his ornamental statue.

Ornamental But Practical Grounds with Outbuildings & Yards.

Because the majority of country seats were nearly self-sufficient units, the grounds usually contained several practical auxiliary buildings & work yard areas in addition to the main house & its geometric ornamental & utilitarian gardens. The majority had a springhouse, a milk house, a smokehouse, & a stable. Many of the grounds also contained barns, sheep houses, cow houses, pigsties, icehouses, washhouses, root cellars, poultry houses, & summer kitchens; & a few had greenhouses, stovehouses, chaise houses, & bathhouses as well.

A Practical Garden with Decorative Slave Quarters

As the 19th-century dawned, some Mid-Atlantic garden designers familiar with the natural grounds movement advocated the addition of artificial lakes. One of these was Rosalie Stier Calvert of Riversdale in Prince George’s County, Maryland, who pointed out that her beautiful ornamental lake supplied ice for food preparation & fish for the table.

On December 10, 1808, she described in to her brother: “A lake just finished which looks like a large river before the house on the southern side gives a very beautiful effect, and furnishes us at the same time with fish and ice for our ice house.” She had fled to Maryland from Europe with her wealthy parents in the 1790s, had lived at the terraced Strawberry Hill plantation near Annapolis as a child & later at the Paca House. Rosalie Stier married George Calvert, the son of a governor of the state. She designed he gardens & grounds at their estate with the help of her father in Belgium & a variety of professionals.

Although the privileged Rosalie Calvert was concerned with balancing beauty & utility; she carried it to an aristocratic extreme. In the carefully landscaped grounds on one side of her house were some of the plantation’s slave cabins, which she designed to look like small rustic huts, complete with quaint thatched roofs. She even styled one slave cabin like a small temple with classical columns.

Ornamental Gardens Including Odoriferous & Flowering Shrubs

A superb example of balancing utility & beauty was the Baltimore estate of Adrian Valeck, a merchant from Holland who arrived shortly after the Revolutionary War & was named Dutch consul in 1784. Contemporary observers described his 31-acre property, called Harlem, as “a large garden in the highest state of cultivation, laid out in…walks and squares bordered with espaliers…the greatest variety of fruit trees…from the best nurseries in this country and Europe...a grove and shrubbery of bosquet planted with…the finest forest trees, odoriferous & other flowering shrubs.”

Detail. Cartographer Charles Varle. Engraver Francis Shallus. Warner & Hanna's Map, Plan of the City of Baltimore. 1801. 2nd edition. Drawn 1797. (1st edition 1799)

These accounts of Harlem also mention a fenced kitchen garden, a greenhouse, two hotbeds with twelve moveable frames, and on an eminence a pavilion, under which was “a well-constructed ice vault.” The main house, a gardener’s house, & stable for 7 horses & 12 cows were all of brick, the stable & carriage house of frame construction. A dairy “laid in marble” & a “pidgeon” house completed the property.

Adrian Valeck's Baltimore Country Seat, Harlem, painted by Nicolino Calyo in 1834. Winterthur Museum, Delaware.

An expensive brick wall surrounded the garden at Harlem, signaling that Valeck was a man of means & also serving a practical purpose. His gardener espaliered fruit trees along the brick wall, which absorbed the sun’s heat & brought Valeck’s fruit to ripeness weeks earlier than his neighbors’ fruit on unprotected trees standing exposed to the whims of the elements. Colonials often called espaliered fruit trees & shrubs “wall fruit.”

A Natural Ground
Detail. Cartographer Charles Varle. Engraver Francis Shallus. Warner & Hanna's Map, Plan of the City of Baltimore. 1801. 2nd edition. Drawn 1797. (1st edition 1799)

Baltimore did boast a few exceptions to the traditional ordered garden. Beech Hill, built by Colonel John Dorsey about 1770 & purchased by Scots merchant Robert Gilmor (1748-1822) in 1797, was laid out with apparently carefully planned natural grounds. There were no terraces, even though the property sat high above the bay with a spectacular view that was celebrated in paintings for decades.

Francis Guy (1760-1820). View of the Bay from Near Mr. Gilmor's. (From Beech Hill Down to the Baltimore Harbor.) 1804. Maryland Historical Society.

The land around Beech Hill contained an S-shaped driveway lined with rather evenly spaced trees but no accompanying rectangular beds or parterres were in evidence on the grounds.

Chairback by John & Hugh Findley c 1804. View by Francis Guy 1760-1820. Beech Hill. Home of Robert Gilmor (1748-1822). Baltimore Museum of Art.

Many European travelers remarked that the groves, clumps, copses, & bosques so carefully cultivated in their countries, were more easily assembled in the colonies. “In order to have a fine garden, you have nothing to do but to let the trees remain standing here & there, or in clumps, to plant bushes in front of then, & arrange the trees according to their height.” In England, the natural grounds movement owed part of its popularity to the fact that timber was getting scarce in the countryside. The British gentry planted their “natural grounds” with trees they needed to grow.

Two of the most ambitious traditional four-part terraced gardens were built near Baltimore, after the Revolution. They belonged to George Grundy (1755-1825), a merchant, & Solomon Birckhead (1761-1836), a physician, whose home was called Mount Royal.

At Solomon Birckhead’s Gardens at Mount Royal in Baltimore, traditional gardens had geometric designs within its squares. The garden fell in the direction of the bay from Birckhead’s two-story stone dwelling, which measured 54' by 31' & had a two-story 31' by 18' addition. The 101-acre grounds a Mount Royal also contained an unusual one-story round milk house measuring 10 ' in diameter, a frame smokehouse 12' by 12 ', two barns of two stories, one stone & one frame, both measuring 46' by 24 ', & a two-story stone mill 51' by 41 '. The house & its geometric gardens were built around 1792.

Garden for Use and Ornament and Recreation

Chairback by John & Hugh Findley c 1804. View by Francis Guy 1760-1820. From the North the Entrance Facade of an early Bolton. Home of George Grundy (1775-1825) Baltimore.

A short distance from Mount Royal sat Bolton, which George Grundy built immediately after he acquired the 30-acre property in 1793. In addition to a 65-by-37-' two-story brick home, he constructed a barn, two coach houses, a wash house, a smokehouse, & an icehouse, with orchards of fine peach, apple, & cherry trees. Near a spring of pure water & beside the enclosed kitchen garden area sitting at the base of his falling turfed terraced, Grundy build a comfortable two-story frame dwelling for a gardener.

Detail. Cartographer Charles Varle. Engraver Francis Shallus. Warner & Hanna's Map, Plan of the City of Baltimore. 1801. 2nd edition. Drawn 1797. (1st edition 1799) (5)

Grundy planned his garden at Bolton to consist of three individually fenced rectangular turfed falls dropping south toward the harbor. These terraces were more that three times the width of the house, & initially the lowest rectangular terrace was planted in rows to serve as a kitchen garden. Gravel walks defined each terraced division, & a walkway ran from the house bisecting each terrace.

Francis Guy (1760-1820). Bolton From the South Garden Facade. 1800 Maryland Historical Society. Baltimore. Detail from the road down to the Baltimore harbor.

At the turn of the century, Grundy altered the lower garden to a semicircular bed surrounded by a white picket fence that projected from the fencing enclosing the rectangular terrace just above it. In the center of this semicircle was a large flowering tree or group of shrubs surrounded by a circular walkway. Outside of this walkway & within the picket fence were rectangular beds now planted with flowers instead of vegetables & herbs.

Francis Guy (1760-1820). Detail of Bolton From the South Garden Facade. 1800 Maryland Historical Society. Baltimore.

The large flowering tree or group of shrubs in the middle of the lowest flat at Bolton may have been a living bower or arbor. Colonial Americans had for decades planted trees, shrubs, flowering beans & vines for cooling shade. A visitor reported in 1679, “We had nowhere seen so many vines together as we saw here, which had been planted for the purpose of shading the walks on the river side.” In 1787, at Grey’s Gardens near Philadelphia, Manasseh Cutler reported, “At every end, side, and corner, there were summer-houses, arbors covered with vines or flowers or shady bowers encircled with trees and flowering shrubs.”

Francis Guy (1760-1820). Bolton From the South Garden Facade. 1800 Maryland Historical Society. Baltimore. Detail Vegetable Garden at the bottom of the falling terraces.

It is possible that the unusual large circle of shrubs or trees in the midst of Bolton’s garden may have been similar to the one in Salem, North Carolina, where a visitor wrote, “into the garden…we saw…a curiosity…extremely beautiful. It was a large summer house formed of eight cedar trees planted in a circle, the tops whilst young were chained together in the center forming a cone. The immense branches were all cut, so that there was not a leaf, the outside is beautifully trimmed perfectly even & very thick within, were seats placed around and doors or openings were cut, through the branches, it had been planted 40 years.”

Francis Guy (1760-1820). Bolton From the South Garden Facade. 1800 Maryland Historical Society. Baltimore. Detail Lower Garden with the unusual arbor in the center, surrounded by flowering beds.

At Bolton, Grundy planted the approach from the north with evenly spaced tall cedars along the wooden fence bordering the property. An elaborate white picket gate opened from the public road onto Grundy’s private driveway, which let to a second wooden gate, situated directly opposite the central door of the house on the north entrance façade.

Francis Guy (1760-1820). Imporved Entrance Facade of Bolton.

The house on this side was totally surrounded by a rectangle of white picket fencing. The driveway within the closest fenced area was a semicircle, with no deliberate plantings, either naturalistic or symmetrical. Bolton was a prime example of a traditional Chesapeake post Revolutioary War garden.

Gardens Surround the House

Detail. Cartographer Charles Varle. Engraver Francis Shallus. Warner & Hanna's Map, Plan of the City of Baltimore. 1801. 2nd edition. Drawn 1797. (1st edition 1799)

But Baltimore also had nontraditional gardens, such as the curious garden of five distinct rectangles owned by a French merchant John Carriere (1768-1837). This country seat was unusual not only for he number of garden beds it boasted, but also because the house, an elegant structure named Libourne, sat in the middle of the largest of the beds, where it was intimately surrounded by the glory of its garden.

Sophisticated Pragmatic Garden Design

Several Baltimore homes sat perched above six-bed terraced gardens. One of he most sophisticated was built by Paul Charles Gabriel de Ghequiere (1754-1818), a grain merchant who designed his home & gardens upon arriving in Baltimore in 1782, from Courtney, France. Ghequiere chose an avenue of tall lombardy poplars standing like soldiers at attention along the path to the entrance façade.

Detail. Cartographer Charles Varle. Engraver Francis Shallus. Warner & Hanna's Map, Plan of the City of Baltimore. 1801. 2nd edition. Drawn 1797. (1st edition 1799)

The intentionally ordered approach demanded respect for the owner. He built a wide gravel walk that divided the front yard. Rectangular beds, outlined by whit picket fencing, bordered the walkway to the brick house, which measured 50' by 24'. He planned that the doorway on the back of the house would open onto a garden of six geometrically planted beds surrounding a fountain or water bason. Ghequeire’s country seat contained 56 acres & boasted a fine view across Baltimore to the harbor.

Utilitarian Gardens Did Not Detract from the View

The nearby home of Colonel (later Governor) John Eager Howard (1752-1827), called Belvedere, contained a geometric garden area whose design matched Ghequiere’s at the rear. The entrance facade boasted a spectacular view down to the harbor. Howard erected Belvedere between 1783 & 1786.

Chairback by John & Hugh Findley c 1804. View by Francis Guy 1760-1820. Entrance Facade of Belvedere. Home of John Eager Howard. (1752-1827) Baltimore.

The large hipped-roof mansion was noted for its magnificent gardens & for statues, which dotted the grounds just as at the papal Belvedere, where Julius II displayed his collections of statues during the Italian Renaissance. The Papal Belvedere had served for centuries as a focal point for the sculptures of the ancients. There were alcoves boasting Apollo, Venus, Cleopatra, Hercules, and the river gods Nile & Tiber. Fountains danced among the lifeless figures surrounded by the sweet aromas of green gardens.
Detail. Cartographer Charles Varle. Engraver Francis Shallus. Warner & Hanna's Map, Plan of the City of Baltimore. 1801. 2nd edition. Drawn 1797. (1st edition 1799)

Governor Howard’s garden in Baltimore was remarkable for more than its statuary. Howard planned hat the garden facade of Belvedere would contain a large porch, running the full length of the center block, which had a projecting two-story bay in the center. Howard enjoyed entertaining visitors for breakfast on this porch, overlooking the terraced formal gardens & the natural area of shrubs & trees that fell south toward the harbor. The entrance side of the house, on the north, faced a totally natural setting.

View of Baltimore from the Howard Park at Belvedere. 1796 George Beck Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore.

A French visitor to Baltimore remarked on “a hill owned by Colonel Howard that dominates the town to the north. The mansion & its dependencies occupy the forward part while a park embellishes the rear. The elevated situation, the mass of trees, an appearance that evokes despite itself European ideas.” Apparently Belvedere owed more to its natural surroundings than it did to its large & elaborate gardens & impressive classical statuary.

Belvedere, Home of John Eager Howard, Baltimore, Maryland, 1786-1794, painting by Augustus Weidenbach c 1858.

Classical Statues in Republican Gardens

Some gardeners emphasized the ancient republican aspects of their gardens with statues. They might set statues in the midst of a natural open green leading to the house, or in pairs on either side of the entrance gate. Others chose the seventeenth-century style of placing statues in the middle of a turfed garden square. In 1791 a visitor to the garden of Joseph Barrell, a Boston merchant reported seeing, “a young grove…in the middle of which is a pond, decorated with four ships at anchor, and a marble figure in the centre…The Squares are decorated with Marble figures as large as life.”

Garden statues produced by American & European artists were widely available by the last decade of the 18th century. In Philadelphia, a 1796 ad read: “To be sold…Six elegant carved figures, the manufacture of an artist in this country, & made from materials of clay dug near the city, they are used for ornaments for gardens…they are well burned and will stand any weather without being injured…they represent Mars, and Minerva, Paris and Helen, A Male and Female Gardner.” Even non-gentry, like Annapolis craftsman William Faris, might have a statue in their 1790s garden.

A grove of trees in early America was a small woods or large cluster of trees, usually occurring naturally & intentionally left in the landscape or occasionally purposefully planted in the pleasure grounds around a dwelling. Often a grove consisted of large trees whose trimmed branches shaded the ground below. Groves also produced food for songbirds & served as settings for obelisks or statues meant to inspire the garden visitor. Abigail Adams wrote that Andrew & James Hamilton’s Bush Hill had “a beautiful grove behind the house, through which there is a spacious gravel walk, guarded by a number of marble statues, whose genealogy I have not yet studied.”

By the 1790s, Chesapeake gentry were coming up with ingenious places for their statues. If statues were meant to stand in groves of lofty trees, then why not be practical & put them in orchards, where the trees have some utility as well. And that’s just what Margaret Baker Briscoe (1745-1814) & her husband Gerard Briscoe (1732-1801) did in their orchard at Clover Dale in Frederick County, Maryland. In a 1799 portrait, Charles Peale Polk depicts Mrs. Briscoe proudly seated before a view of her orchard, in which each long row of trees is guarded by a full-sized statue perched on a marble pedestal.

The Decorated Entrance Facade

Near the end of the 18th century, John Donnell (1752-1827) began the construction of his Baltimore gardens & pleasure grounds called Willow Brook. Like many other Baltimore estates, the entrance to the 26-acre country seat followed a traditional design, planted with avenues of trees & outlined with rectangular white picket fence. But adorning the entrance facade of the house were four statues sitting on classical pedestals.

Contemporary observers reported that the property was “divided and laid off into grass lots, orchards, garden…with the greatest variety of the choicest fruit frees, shrubs, flowers…collected from the best nurseries in America and from Europe…with vegetables of all kinds…In the garden is a neat wooden house…a gardener’s house, ash house, spring house, stable and carriage house, a fish pond well stocked with fish, and an elegant bath with two dressing rooms, bath and spring house.”
Statues placed across the front of the home. Chairback by John & Hugh Findley c 1804. View by Francis Guy 1760-1820. Willow Brook. Home of John Donnell (1754-1827). Baltimore Museum of Art.

Statues from Europe poured into American market. European artists were even making likenesses of American heroes for export. A New York newspaper reported on a local public garden that had “lately imported from Europe…nineteen statues…Socrates, Cicero, Cleopatra, Shakespeare, Milton…the illustrious and immortal Washington…and miscellaneous figures from Greek mythology.” By 1805, Vauxhall Gardens in New York City had, “procured from Europe a choice selection of Statues and Busts,…Washington, Cicero, Ajax, Antonious (in two poses, Hannibal, the Belvidere Apollo (in four sizes), Venus, Hebe (in two poses), Hamilton, Demostenes, Plenty, Hercules, Time, Ceres, Security, Modesty, Addison, Cleopatra (in two poses), Niobe, Pompey (in two poses), Pope, The Medici Apollo, and Thalia.”

Decorative & Practical 8 Bed Garden

Chairback by John & Hugh Findley c 1804. View by Francis Guy 1760-1820. Rose Hill. Home of William Gibson (1735-1832) Baltimore Lanvale Street at Eutaw Place.

The second eight-bed garden graced the home of William Gibson (1753-1832), the Baltimore County Clerk, who built Rose Hill in the early 1790s. Rose Hill’s formal gardens were falling terraces consisting of four squares divided diagonally by walkways, creating eight triangles. A fountain or water bason sat in the middle of the formal gardens, & the walkways radiated from it like rays.

Detail. Cartographer Charles Varle. Engraver Francis Shallus. Warner & Hanna's Map, Plan of the City of Baltimore. 1801. 2nd edition. Drawn 1797. (1st edition 1799)

Sensible Gardens & Terraces

Francis Guy (1760-1820). Entrance Facade of Mount Deposit. 1805 Maryland Historical Society.

A country seat probably more remarkable for its name than its falling gardens was Mount Deposit. This home was situated on about 260 acres acquired by David Harris (1752-1809), who built the house & gardens between 1791 & 1793. Harris was the cashier of the Office of Discount & Deposit, a leading banking institution in Baltimore, after which he apparently named his estate.

The county seat was described by contemporaries as, “a large and elegant dwelling, containing ten rooms, besides kitchen and garrets, with extensive porticoes; a large barn, stables and granary, coach house, ice house and smoke house, two orchards of fruit and a well cultivated garden.” The approach to the entrance façade of Mount Deposit from the north allowed the visitor to look past the house towards Fells Point on the harbor.

Francis Guy (1760-1820). Detail Entrance Facade of Mount Deposit. 1805.

This side of the home was defined by a white picket fence that ran the width & twice the depth of the house & enclosed the land immediately in front of the dwelling. Ordered plantings of trees dotted the traditional, rectangular fenced courtyard area.

Francis Guy (1760-1820). Garden Facade of Mount Deposit. 1805.

Exiting the home on the garden side, a visitor would find three terraced falls deliberately carved our of the rather steep existing slope. The falls were wider than the house itself, planted with grass & shrubs but no flowers, enclosed by a white picket fence, & divided down the middle by a walk leading from the central door of the house & intersected by crosswalks.

A Practical and Political Garden

Northeast of Mount Deposit sat a more intricate & formal garden of four squares internally divided with circles & triangles & surrounded by a row of fruit trees on one side & a grove of trees on the other. This country seat, named Belmont, was built around 1778 by Charles Francois Adrien Le Parlmier d’Annemours (1742-1809), who was the French consul General to Maryland & Virginia until 1792. In that year he built “an obelisk to honour the memory of…Christopher Columbus…in a grove in one of the gardens…on the 3rd of August, 1792, the anniversary of the sailing of Columbus from Spain.”

When the Baltimore estate of French Consul General d’Annemours was sold in 1800, it was not the elegant obelisk honoring Christopher Columbus that sold the property. The estate was described as “beautifully situated” with “a handsome grove of lofty oaks and an extensive kitchen garden and orchard well stocked with fruit of the best and choicest kind.” The practicality of the garden was the attraction. The estate was sold to Archibald Campbell.

Detail. Cartographer Charles Varle. Engraver Francis Shallus. Warner & Hanna's Map, Plan of the City of Baltimore. 1801. 2nd edition. Drawn 1797. (1st edition 1799)

Clearly, in the early American Republic, ornament was consistently counter-balanced by usefulness. In early America, if you needed a grove of trees as a setting for a statue, you planted sugar maples. If you needed a border for garden beds, you mixed currant bushes with the roses. If you needed a row of trees to define the road to the house, you chose cherry trees over poplars. There was an implicit moral sanction keeping garden design from tipping too far toward the purely ornamental.

When an English visitor wrote of one Maryland plantation, he observed, “the adjacent grounds are so judiciously disposed that utility and taste are everywhere.” These were the pretty & practical gardens of conservative new republicans.

American Seed Catalogs from Smithsonian Institution Libraries

2011-05-31T09:30:00.005-04:00

George Washington’s Mount Vernon Garden Revamped for Authenticity

2011-05-31T09:14:00.000-04:00

.
George Washington’s Mount Vernon pleasure garden revamped for authenticity

From The Washington Post by Adrian Higgins, Published: May 29, 2011

Ellen Epstein has stopped to smell the sweet williams in the Upper Garden at Mount Vernon. The art appraiser from Katonah, N.Y., has been to George Washington’s riverside home several times, but not for at least 10 years, and the place has changed somehow. “I remember this garden wasn’t like this at all,” she said, looking up to take in the walled one-acre landscape.

As she surveys the fruit orchard, boxwood parterres and flower borders, a couple of gardeners plant clumps of golden-flowered calendulas near the grapevine trellises. They are putting the final touches on a fundamental reworking of Washington’s pleasure garden. Begun last August and now virtually complete, the new garden re-creates what experts believe is a far closer representation of the one Washington knew in the late 18th century.

Gone is the tall boxwood edging, along with the crescent flower beds at the apex of the garden. The paths are wider, the garden beds fewer but much larger. Bands of decorative plants wrap around what is essentially a vegetable garden — the area devoted to veggies has grown fivefold and occupies a quarter of the space. Even though the “high garden” was the landscape jewel of the estate, Washington “wasn’t about to let something beautiful take away from something that was necessary,” said Dean Norton, Mount Vernon’s director of horticulture.

Spring visitors such as Epstein are noticing the transformation of the Upper Garden, which is now less mannered but more striking. “One of the biggest shocks is the lack of boxwood, but the openness, they’re overwhelmed by it,” said Norton, standing on one of the new 10-foot-wide gravel paths.

For a century until the 1980s, George and Martha Washington’s status garden featured old, billowing English boxwood — long assumed to date to the Washingtons’ time — and a pair of formal rose gardens. It became as increasingly untenable as the idea that young George could not tell a lie — hybrid tea roses did not appear until the 1860s, and the boxwood, once the rings were counted, turned out to be not much older. Washington died at Mount Vernon in 1799, his widow in 1802.

The garden was redesigned 26 years ago in what was thought to be a much more authentic fashion. The rose beds were removed, but the crescent beds retained and more paths added, creating additional, small flower beds. “What was missing from that restoration was physical evidence for what the garden would have looked like,” said Esther White, Mount Vernon’s director of archaeology. “We knew the roses were wrong.” The changes had to accommodate the sacred but ailing and, as it turned out, unoriginal boxwood.

Six years ago, with the boxwood well on their way out, White got permission to conduct a winter dig of the garden. In a small section near the north entrance, the excavation revealed more than expected in what had been a historically unyielding site and led to a four-month dig the next year in more clement weather.

The 15-member archaeology team hit pay dirt, discovering what turned out to be Washington’s first known use of this site, as a nursery for holding fruit trees in the 1760s. With an additional 13 months of digs between 2008 and last year, White and her team found a total of six garden iterations on the site and were able to piece together the layout for the walled, bullet-shaped pleasure garden that was first mapped in the 1780s.

Years ago, Norton thought this plan, by Samuel Vaughan, only depicted the Upper Garden as it looked when it was first built, before Washington embellished it. Now, he realizes, Vaughan was telling us what the garden looked like pretty much fully formed.

In rebuilding the garden — the construction took place between August and November — crews brought in 350 cubic yards of soil and compost. Bulbs were planted in late 2010, the remaining plantings this spring. Eight mature apple, pear and cherry trees were moved to the orchard bed.

In late spring, the beds of decorative plants feature a mixture of all sorts of heirloom plants — bulbs, annuals, perennials, biennials, shrubs and roses. The gardeners have planted vegetables in strict rows, including peas, beans, beets, lettuce, potatoes, spinach and lots of cabbage-family plants.

Washington mentioned very few ornamental plants in his writings, but his gardener’s weekly reports left a trove of information about what was being planted and, often, where.

Which raises the question: Why weren’t these detailed reports used earlier to fashion the Upper Garden? The answer, of course, is that while the new garden speaks to Washington the man, the previous, embroidered versions told of Washington the myth. (The Upper Garden’s twin, the Lower Garden, remains an idealized Colonial Revival fruit and vegetable garden.)

“The [Upper] Garden became a reflection of everything we in the 19th and 20th century think about Washington, this romanticized view of the 18th-century man, strolling his pleasure garden, taking in the colors, the fragrances,” White said. “It’s our projection. One of the things the project did was to make people wipe clean their idea of what the garden should be. We all started again.”

The plant varieties and the medley of ornamentals around the vegetables seem alien and constrained to the modern gardener, but in Washington’s day, the Upper Garden was a horticultural spectacle and undoubtedly impressed the many visitors that the Washingtons entertained.

Among wealthy, important plantation owners in Virginia and Maryland, such gardens were a display of status. “It’s something you did with surplus people and time,” said Barbara Heath, a professor of archaeology at the University of Tennessee and adviser for the project. “Most people couldn’t afford the time or the labor or had the knowledge to create a great garden. It was the elite who used the landscape to say, ‘This is who we are.’ ”

For Epstein and her friend Oudia Felker, the strange old garden — stripped of its romantic flourish — is perfect.

“This is magnificent,” said Felker, of Venice, Fla. “Can you imagine never knowing how many people you’re going to have for dinner and being able to pick enough to accommodate 16, 20 people?” she said.

“If this is what it is, this is what it is,” Epstein said. “I want to see how he actually lived.”
.

American Seed Catalogs from Smithsonian Institution Libraries

2011-05-21T11:19:00.000-04:00

Slaves & Rice Cultivation in Georgetown County, South Carolina

2011-05-20T12:44:00.001-04:00

.
Salves and Rice Cultivation in Georgetown County, South Carolina

The intricate steps involved in planting, cultivating, harvesting, and preparing rice required an immense labor force. Planters stated that African slaves were particularly suited to provide that labor force for two reasons: 1) rice was grown in some areas of Africa and there was evidence that some slaves were familiar with the methods of cultivation practiced there, and 2) it was thought that the slaves, by virtue of their racial characteristics, were better able than white laborers to withstand the extreme heat and humidity of the tidal swamps and therefore would be more productive workers. Rice cultivation resulted in a dramatic increase in the numbers of slaves owned by South Carolinians before the American Revolution.

In 1680, four-fifths of South Carolina's population was white. However, black slaves outnumbered white residents two to one in 1720, and by 1740, slaves constituted nearly 90% of the population. Much of the growing slave population came from the West Coast of Africa, a region that had gained notoriety by exporting its large rice surpluses.

While there is no consensus on how rice first reached the American coast, there is much debate over the contribution of African-born slaves to its successful cultivation. New research demonstrates that the European planters lacked prior knowledge of rice farming, while uncovering the long history of skilled rice cultivation in West Africa. Furthermore, Islamic, Portuguese, and Dutch traders all encountered and documented extensive rice cultivation in Africa before South Carolina was even settled.

At first rice was treated like other crops, it was planted in fields and watered by rains. By the mid-18th century, planters used inland swamps to grow rice by accumulating water in a reservoir, then releasing the stored water as needed during the growing season for weeding and watering. Similarly, prior records detail Africans controlling springs and run off with earthen embankments for the same purposes of weeding and watering.

Soon after this method emerged, a second evolution occurred, this time to tidewater production, a technique that had already been perfected by West African farmers. Instead of depending upon a reservoir of water, this technique required skilled manipulation of tidal flows and saline-freshwater interactions to attain high levels of productivity in the floodplains of rivers and streams. Changing from inland swamp cultivation to tidal production created higher expectations from plantation owners. Slaves became responsible for five acres of rice, three more than had been possible previously. Because of this new evidence coming to light, some historians contend that African-born slaves provided critical expertise in the cultivation of rice in South Carolina. The detailed and extensive rice cultivating systems increased demand for slave imports in South Carolina, doubling the slave population between 1750 and 1770. These slaves faced long days of backbreaking work and difficult tasks.

A slave's daily work on an antebellum rice plantation was divided into tasks. Each field hand was given a task--usually nine or ten hours' hard work--or a fraction of a task to complete each day according to his or her ability. The tasks were assigned by the driver, a slave appointed to supervise the daily work of the field hands. The driver held the most important position in the slave hierarchy on the rice plantation. His job was second only to the overseer in terms of responsibility.

The driver's job was particularly important because each step of the planting, growing, and harvesting process was crucial to the success or failure of the year's crop. In the spring, the land was harrowed and plowed in preparation for planting. Around the first of April rice seed was sown by hand using a small hoe. The first flooding of the field, the sprout flow, barely covered the seed and lasted only until the grain sprouted. The water was then drained to keep the delicate sprout from floating away, and the rice was allowed to grow for approximately three weeks. Around the first of May any grass growing among the sprouts was weeded by hoe and the field was flooded by the point flow to cover just the tops of the plants. After a few days the water was gradually drained until it half covered the plants. It remained at this level--the long flow--until the rice was strong enough to stand. More weeding followed and then the water was slowly drained completely off the field. The ground around the plants was hoed to encourage the growth and extension of the roots. After about three weeks, the field was hoed and weeded again, at which time--around mid-June or the first of July--the lay-by flow was added and gradually increased until the plants were completely submerged. This flow was kept on the field for about two months with fresh water periodically introduced and stagnant water run off by the tidal flow through small floodgates called trunks.

Rice planted in the first week of April was usually ready for harvesting by the first week of September. After the lay-by flow was withdrawn, just before the grain was fully ripe, the rice was cut with large sickles known as rice hooks and laid on the ground on the stubble. After it had dried overnight, the cut rice was tied into sheaves and taken by flatboat to the threshing yard. In the colonial period, threshing was most often done by beating the stalks with flails. This process was simple but time consuming. If the rice was to be sold rough, it was then shipped to the agent; otherwise, it was husked and cleaned--again, usually by hand. By the mid-19th century most of the larger plantations operated pounding and/or threshing mills which were driven by steam engines. After the rice had been prepared, it was packed in barrels, or tierces, and shipped to the market at Georgetown or Charleston. In 1850 a rice plantation in the Georgetown County area produced an average yield of 300,000 pounds of rice. The yield had increased to 500,000 pounds by 1860.

See National Park Service
.

American Seed Catalogs from Smithsonian Institution Libraries

2011-05-20T12:43:00.004-04:00

Food - Some Edible Plants from John Gerard's 1633 Herbal

2011-05-20T12:05:00.003-04:00

.
John Gerard. Herball or General Historie of Plantes. 1633

Although John Gerard reported on a variety of edible plants in his herbal, eating vegetables was not particularly popular in 17th and 18th-century British Colonial America. In 1705, Robert Beverly, in his The History and Present State of Virginia (1705), wrote: “A Kitchen-Garden don’t thrive better or faster in any part of the Universe, than there [Virginia]. They have all the Culinary Plants that grow in England, and in far greater perfection.” But in fact, he observed that typical attempts at gardening in Virginia were not “fit to bear the name of gardens.”

Swiss traveler Frances Michel visiting the Williamsburg, Virginia area late in 1702, reported, “The inhabitants pay little attention to garden plants except lettuce, although most everything grows here.”

Almonds
"Amygdalus. Of the Almond Tree.
There is drawne out of sweet Almonds, with liquor added, a white iuice like milke... Almonds taken before meate do stop the belly, and nourish but little; notwithstanding many excellent meates and medicines are therewith made for sundry griefes, yea very delicat and wholsome meates, as Almond butter, creame of Almonds, marchpane, and such like, which dry and stay the belly more than the extracted iuyce or milke; and they are also as good for the chest and lungs."

Apple
"Malus Carbonaria. Of the Apple tree.
The tame and graffed Apple trees are planted and set in gardens and orchards made for that purpose... I haue seene in the pastures and hedge-rows about the grounds of a worshipful gentleman... so many trees of all sorts, that the seruants drinke for the most part no other drinke but that which is made of Apples; The quantity is such, that by the report of the Gentleman himselfe, the Parson hath for tithe many hogsheads of Syder...
Rosted apples are alwaies better than the raw, the harm whereof is both mended by the fire, and may also be corrected by adding vnto them seeds or spices."

Apricot
"Armeniaca malus maior. Of the Aprecocke or Abrecocke tree.
Aprecocks are cold and moist in the second degree, but yet not so moist as Peaches, for which cause they do not so soone or easily putrifie, and they are also more wholesome for the stomacke, and pleasant to the taste; yet do they likewise putrifie, and yeeld but little nourishment, and the same cold, moist, and full of excrements: being taken after meate they corrupt and putrifie in the stomacke; being first eaten before other meate they easily descend, and cause the other meates to passe downe the sooner, like as also the Peaches do."

Artichoke
"Cinara. Artichoke.
The nailes, that is, the white and thicke parts which are in the bottome of the outward scales or flakes of the fruit of the Artichoke, and also the middle pulpe whereon the downy seed stands, are eaten both raw with pepper and salt, and commonly boyled with the broth of fat flesh, with pepper added, and are accounted a dainty dish, being pleasant to the taste, and good to procure bodily lust: so likewise the middle ribs of the leaues being made white and tender by good cherishing and looking to, are brought to the table as a great seruice together with other junkets: they are eaten with pepper and salt as be the raw Artichokes... But it is best to eate the Artichoke boyled... Some write, that if the buds of yong Artichokes be first steeped in wine, and eaten, they prouoke vrine, and stir vp the lust of the body."

Asparagus
"Asparagus. Sperage, or Asparagus.
...The first sprouts or naked tender shoots hereof be oftentimes sodden in flesh broth and eaten, or boyled in faire water, and seasoned with oyle, vineger, salt, and pepper, then are serued at mens tables for a sallad; they are pleasant to the taste, easily concocted, and gently loose the belly..."

Banana/Plantain
"Musa fructus. Of Adams Apple tree, or the West-Indian Plantaine.
...Aprill 10. 1633. my much honored friend... gaue me a plant he receiued from the Bermuda's... The fruit which I receiued was not ripe, but greene, each of them was about the bignesse of a large Beane... This stalke with the fruit thereon I hanged vp in my shop, where it became ripe about the beginning of May, and lasted vntil Iune: the pulp or meat was very soft and tender, and it did eate somewhat like a Muske-Melon...
The fruit hereof yeeldeth but little nourishment: it is good for the heate of the breast, lungs, and bladder: it stoppeth the liuer, and hurteth the stomacke if too much of it be eaten, and procureth loosenesse in the belly: whereupon it is requisit for such as are of a cold constitution, in the eating thereof to put vnto it a little Ginger or other spice."

Barley
"Hordeum Distichon. Common Barley.
...it serueth for Ptisana, Polenta, Maza, Malt, ale and Beere. The making whereof if any be desirous to learne, let them reade Lobelius Aduersaria, in the chapter of Barley... There be sundry sorts of Confections made of Barley, as Polenta, Ptisana, made of water and husked or hulled barley, and such like. Polenta is the meate made of parched Barley...Maza is made of parched Barley tempered with water... Hesychius doth interpret maza to be Barley meale mixed with water and oyle."

Bastard Parsley
" Caucalis. Bastard Parsley.
Dioscorides saith, that bastard Parsley is a pot-herbe which is eaten either raw or boiled, and prouoketh vrine. Pliny doth reckon it vp also among the pot-herbes; Galen addeth, that it is preserued in pickle for sallades in winter. "

Bastard Saffron
"Carthamus siue Cnicus. Bastard Saffron.
The seed vsed as aforesaid [bruised and strained into honied water or the broth of a chicken -- ed.], and srained into milke, causeth it to curdle and yeeld much cruds..."

Bay
"Laurus. Of the Bay or Laurell tree.
The later Physitions doe oftentimes vse to boyle the leaues of Laurell with diuers meats, especially fishes, and by so doing there happeneth no desire of vomiting: but the meat seasoned herewith becommeth more sauory and better for the stomacke."

Beets
"Beta alba. White Beets.
...the white Beete is a cold and moist pot-herbe...Being eaten when it is boyled, it quickly descendeth... especially being taken with the broth wherein it is sodden..."

Beta rubra, Beta rubra Romana. Red Beets, Red Roman Beets.

...The great and beautiful Beet last described may be vsed in winter for a salad herbe, with vinegar, oyle, and salt, and is not onely pleasant to the taste, but also delightfull to the eye.

The greater red Beet or Roman Beet, boyled and eaten with oyle, vineger and pepper, is a most excellent and delicate sallad: but what might be made of the red and beautifull root (which is to be preferred before the leaues, as well in beauty as in goodnesse) I refer vnto the curious and cunning cooke, who no doubt when he hath had the view thereof, and is assured that it is both good and wholesome, will make thereof many and diuers dishes, both faire and good."

Bell-Flowers
"Viola Mariana. Bell-Floures or Couentry-Bells.
"The root is cold and somewhat binding, and not vsed in physicke, but only for a sallet root boyled and eaten with oyle, vinegar, and pepper."

Borage
"Borago. Borage.
...Those of our time do vse the floures in sallads, to exhilerate and make the mind glad... The leaues boyled among other pot-herbes do much preuaile in making the belly soluble..."

Buckwheat
"Tragopyron. Buck-wheat.
...Bread made of the meale of Buck-wheat is of easie digestion, and speedily passeth through the belly, but yeeldeth little nourishment"

Burnet
"Pimpinella hortensis... Garden Burnet.
...The lesser Burnet is pleasant to be eaten in sallads, in which it is thought to make the heart merry and glad, as also being put into wine, to which it yeeldeth a certaine grace in the drinking."

Capers
"Capparis. Capers.
They stir vp an appetite to meat... They are eaten boiled (the salt first washed off) with oile and vineger, as other sallads be, and sometimes are boiled with meat."

Caraway
"Carum, siue Carcum.
Caruwaies.
It consumeth winde, it is delightfull to the stomacke and taste... the root may be sodden, and eaten as the Parsenep or Carrot is.
The seeds confected, or made with sugar into Comfits, are very good for the stomacke..."

Carob
"Ceratia siliqua, sive Ceratonia. Of the Carob tree, or Saint Iohns Bread.
...the fruit or long cods... are of a sweet taste, and are eaten of diuers, but not before they be gathered and dried; for being as yet green, though ripe, they are vnpleasant to be eaten by reason of their ill fauoured taste..."

Carrot
"Pastinaca sativa tenuifolia, Pastinaca satiua atro-rubens.
Carrots.
The root of the yellow Carrot is most commonly boiled with fat flesh and eaten... The red Carrot is of like facultie with the yellow."

Cherry
"Cerasus vulgaris. Of the Cherrie Tree.
The best and principall Cherries be those that are somewhat sower: those little sweet ones which be wilde and soonest ripe be the worst: they containe bad juice, they very soon putrifie, and do ingender ill bloud... The late ripe Cherries which the French-men keep dried against winter, and are by them called Morelle, and we after the same name call them Morell Cherries, are dry, and do somewhat binde; these being dried are pleasant to the taste, and wholesome for the stomacke, like as Prunes be, and do stop the belly. Generally all the kindes of Cherries are cold and moist of temperature, although some more cold and moist than others: the which being eaten before meat doe soften the belly very gently... Many excellent Tarts and other pleasant meats are made with Cherries, sugar, and other delicat spices, whereof to write were to small purpose."

Chervil
"Cerefolium Cheruill.
Cheruill is held to be one of the pot-herbes, it is pleasant to the stomacke and taste... It is vsed very much among the Dutch people in a kinde of Loololly or hotch-pot which they do eate, called Warmus. The leaues of sweet Cheruill are exceeding good, wholesome, and pleasant, among other sallad herbs, giuing the taste of Anise seed vnto the rest... The seeds eaten as a sallad whilest hey are yet greene, with oyle, vineger, and pepper, exceed all other sallads by many degrees, both in pleasantnesse of taste, sweetnesse of smell, and wholsomnesse for the cold and feeble stomacke.
The roots are likewise most excellent in a sallad, if they be boyled and after dressed as the cunning Cooke knoweth how better than my selfe: notwithstanding I doe vse to eate them with oile and vineger, being first boyled; which is very good for old people that are dull and without courage; it reioyceth and comforteth the heart, and increaseth their lust and strength."

Chestnut
"Castanea. Of the Chestnut tree.
Our common Chestnuts are very dry and binding, and be nither hot nor cold, but in a mean betweene both: yet haue they in them a certaine windinesse, and by reason of this, vnlesse the shell be firest cut, they skip suddenly with a cracke out of the fire whilest they be rosting... Being boiled or rosted they are not of so hard digestion... Some affirme, that of raw Chestnuts dried, and afterwards turned into meale, there is made a kinde of bread: yet it must needs be, that this should be dry and brittle, hardly concocted, and verie slow in passing thorow the belly..."

Citrus Fruit
"Malus. Of the Citron, Limon, Orange, and Assyrian Apple trees.
[the rind of the Pomecitron] is good to be eaten against a stinking breath, for it maketh the breath sweet; and being so taken it comforteth the cold stomacke exceedingly. The white, sound, and hard pulpe is now and then eaten, but very hardly concocted, and ingendreth a grosse, cold, and phlegmaticke iuyce; but being condite with sugar, it is both pleasant in taste, and easie to be digested, more nourishing, and lesse apt to obstruction and binding or stopping.
Galen reporteth, that the inner iuice of the Pomecitron was not wont to be eaten, but it is now vsed for sauce; and being often vsed, it represseth choler which is in the stomacke, and procures appetite..."

Clove Gillyflowers
"Caryophyllus. Cloue Gillofloure.
The conserue made of the floures of the Cloue Gillofloure and sugar, is exceeding cordial, and wonderfully aboue measure doth comfort the heart, being eaten now and then."

Coconut
"Nux Indica arbor. Of the Indian Nut tree.
...next vnto the shell vpon the inside there cleueth a white cornelly substance firme and sollid, of the colour and taste of a blanched Almond: within the cauitie or hollownes thereof is contained a most delectable liquor like vnto milke, an dof a most pleasant taste.
...The distilled liquor is called Sula; and the oile that is made thereof, Copra... The Indians do vse to cut the twigs and tender branches toward the euening, at the ends whereof they haue bottle gourds, hollow canes, and such like things, fit to receiue the water that droppeth from the branches thereof, which pleasant liquor they drinke in stead of wine, from the which is drawne a strong and comfortable Aqua Vitae... Likewise they make of the shell of the Nut, cups to drike in, which we likewise vse in England, garnished with siluer for the same purposes. The kernell serueth them for bread and meat; the milkie iuice doth serue to coole and refresh their wearied spirits: out of the kernel when it is stamped, is pressed a most precious oile, not onely good for meat, but also for medicine..."

Coriander
"Coriandrum. Corianders.
Coriander seed prepared and couered with sugar, as comfits, taken after meat closeth vp the mouth of the stomacke, staieth vomiting, and helpeth digestion... The manner how to prepare Coriander, both for meat and medicine. Take the seed well and sufficiently dried, whereupon poure some wine and vinegar, and so leaue them to infuse or steepe foure and twentie houres, then take them forth and drie them, and keepe them for your vse."

Corne-Marigold
"Chrysanthemum. Corne-Marigold.
The stalkes and leaues of Corne Marigold, as Dioscorides saith, are eaten as other pot-herbes are."

Cow Parsnips
"Sphondylium. Cow Parsnep.
The people of Polonia and Lituania vse to make drinke with the decoction of this herbe, and leuen or some other thing made of meale, which is vsed in stead of beere and other ordinarie drinke."

Cowslips of Jerusalem
"Pulmonaria... Cowslips of Jerusalem.
The leaues are vsed among pot-herbes."

Cress
"Nasturtium hortense. Garden Cresses.
...Galen saith that the Cresses may be eaten with bread Velutiobsonium, and so the Antient Spartanes vsually did; and the low-Countrie men many times doe, who commonly vse to feed of Cresses with bread and butter. It is eaten with other sallade hearbes, as Tarragon and Rocket..."

Cucumber
"Cucumis... Cucumbers.
Cucumber (saith my Author) taken in meats, is good for the stomack and other parts troubled with heat... [a cure]The fruit cut in pieces or chopped as herbes to the pot and boiled in a small pipkin with a piece of mutton, being made into potage with Ote-meale, euen as herb potage are made, whereof a messe eaten to break-fast, as much to dinner, and the like to supper; taken in this manner for the space of three weekes... doth perfectly cure all manner of sawce-flegme and copper faces... "

"Palma. Of the Date tree.
...the fruit is ripe in September, and being then gathered they are dried in the Sunne, that they may be the better both transported into other countries far distant, as also preserued from rotting at home... All manner of Dates whatsoeuer are hard of digestion, and cause head-ache: the worser sort be those that be dry and binding, as the Egyptian Dates; but the soft, moist, and sweet ones are lesse hurtfull... The Dates which grow in colder regions, when they cannot come to perfect ripenesse, if they be eaten too plentifully, do fill the body full of raw humors, ingender winde, and oft times cause the leprosie... There is made hereof both by the cunning Confectioners and Cookes, diuers excellent cordiall, comfortable, and nourishing medicines, and that procure lust of the body very mightily."

Fennell Gyant
" Ferula. Herbe Ferula, or Fennell Gyant.
...It is reported to be eaten in Apulia rosted in the embers, first wrapped in leaues or in old clouts, with pepper and salt; which, as they say, is a pleasant sweet food, that stirreth vp lust, as they report."

Figs
"Ficus. Of the Fig tree.
The dry Figs do nourish better than the greene or new Figs; notwithstanding they ingender not very good bloud, for such people as do feed much thereon doe become lowsie... Dioscorides saith, that the white liquor of the Fig tree, and the iuice of the leaues, do curdle milke as rennet doth, and dissolve the milke that is cluttered in the stomacke, as doth vinegar."

Filberts
"Nux Auellana, sive Corylus. Of the Hasell tree.
...this kernell is sweet and pleasant vnto the taste... Hasell Nuts newly gathered, and not as yet dry, containe in them a certaine superfluous moisture, by reason whereof they are windie: not onely the new gathered Nuts, but the dry also, be very hard of digestion; for they are of an earthy and cold essence, and of an hard and sound substance, for which cause also they very slowly passe thorow the belly, therefore they are troublesome and clogging to the stomacke, cause head-ache, especially when they be eaten in too great a quantitie. The kernells of Nuts made into milke like Almonds do mightily bind the belly, and are good for the laske and the bloudy flix."

Flax
"Linum sativum. Garden Flaxe.
...Galen in his first booke of the faculties of nourishments saith, that diuers vse the seed hereof parched as a sustenacne [sic] with Garum, no otherwise than made salt. They also vse it mixed with hony, some likewise put it among bread but it is hurtfull to the stomacke, and hard of digestion... at Middleborough in Zeland, where for want of graine and other corne, most of the Citizens were faine to eate bread and cakes made hereof with hony and oile, who were in short time after swolne in the belly below the short ribs, faces, & other parts of their bodies in such sort, that a great number were brought to their graues thereby..."

Ginger
"Zingiberis. Of Ginger.
Ginger, as Dioscorides reporteth, is right good with meate in sauces, or otherwise in conditures: for it is of an heating and digesting qualitie canded, greene or condited Ginger is hot and moist in qualitie, prouoking Venerie: and being dried, it heateth or drieth in the third degree."

Gooseberry
"Vua Crispa. Of Goose-berrie, or Fea-berry Bush.
The fruit is vsed in diuers sauces for meate, as those that are skilfull in cookerie can better tel than my selfe. They are vsed in broths in stead of Veriuice, chich maketh the broth not onely pleasant to the taste, but greatly profitable to such as are troubled with a hot burning ague...The young and tender leaues eaten raw in a sallad, prouoke vrine, and driue forth the stone and grauell."

Gourds
"Cucurbita... Gourds.
The Gourds are cherished in the gardens of these cold regions rather for pleasure than for profit: in the hot coutries where they cope to ripenesse there are sometimes eaten, but with small delight; especially they are kept for the rindes, wherein they put Turpentine, Oyle, Hony, and also serue them for pales to fetch water in, and many other like vses...
The pulpe also is eaten sodden... But being baked in an ouen or fried in a pan it loseth the most part of his naturall moisture..."

Guayaua
"Guayava arboris ramus. Of the Guayaua, or Orange-Bay.
The fruit is vsually eaten, the rinde being first taken off; it is pleasing to the palate, wholesome and easie of concoction... if rosted, it is good both for the sound and sicke; for so handled it is wholsommer, and of a more pleasing taste..."

Hemp
"Cannabis. Hempe.
The seed of Hempe, as Galen writeth in his bookes of the faculties of simple medicines, is hard of digestion, hurtfull to the stomacke and head, and containeth in it an ill iuyce: notwithstanding some do vse to eate the same parched, cum alijs tragematis, with other junkets... Matthiolus saith, that the seed giuen to hens causeth them to lay egges more plentifully."

Hops
"Lupus salictarius. Hops.
The buds or first sprouts which come forth in the Spring are vsed to be eaten in sallads... The floures are vsed to season Beere or Ale with, and too many do cause bitternesse thereof... The floures make bread light, and the lumpe to be sooner and easilier leauened, if the meale be tempered with liquor wherein they haue been boyled."

Horseradish
"Raphanus rusticanus. Horse Radish.
...Horse Radish stamped with a little vineger put thereto, is commonly vsed among the Germanes for sauce to eate fish with, and such like meates, as we doe mustard; but this kinde of sauce doth heate the stomacke better, and causeth better digestion than mustard."

Houseleek
"Sedum minus. Lesser Houseleekes or Prickmadams.
...is vsed in many places in sallads, in which it hath a fine relish, and a pleasant taste..."

Jerusalem Artichoke
"Flos Solis Pyramidalis. Jerusalem Artichoke.
These rootes are dressed in diuers waies; some boile them in water, and after stew them with sacke and butter, adding a little Ginger: others bake them in pies, putting Marrow, Dates, Ginger, Raisons of the Sun, Sacke, &c. Others some other way, as they are led by their skill in Cookerie. But in my iudgement, which way soeuer they be drest and eaten they stirre and cause a filthie loathsome stinking winde within the bodie, thereby causing the belly to bee pained and tormented, and are a meat more fit for swine, than men..."

Kidney Beans
"Phaseolus [and] Smilax. Of Kidney Beane.
The fruit and cods of Kidney Beanes boiled together before they be ripe, and buttered, and so eaten with their cods, are exceeding delicate meat, and do not ingender winde as the other Pulses doe. They doe also gently loose the belly, prouoke vrine, and ingender good bloud reasonably well; but if you eat them when they be ripe, they are neither toothsome nor wholsome. Therefore they are to be taken whilest they are yet greene and tender, which are first boiled vntill they be tender; then is the tib or sinew that doth run alongst the cod to be taken away; then must they be put into a stone pipkin, r some other vessell with butter, and set to the fire againe to stew, or boile gently: which meat is very wholsome, nourishing, and of a pleasant taste."

Lettuce
"Lactuca. Lettuce.
...Lettuce maketh a pleasant sallad, being eaten raw with vineger, oyle, and a little salt: but if it be boyled it is sooner digested, and nourisheth more. It is serued in these dayes, and in these countries in the beginning of supper, and eaten first before any other meate: which also Martiall testifieth to be done in his time, maruelling why some did vse it for a seruice at the end of supper, in these verses...

Tell me why Lettuce, which our Grandsires last did eate,
Is now of late become, to be the first of meate?

Notwithstanding it may now and then be eaten at both those times to the health of the body: for being taken before meat it doth many times stir vp appetite: and eaten after supper it keepeth away drunkennesse which commeth by the wine; and that is by reason that it stayeth the vapors from rising vp into the head."

Liquorice
"Glycyrrhiza vulgaris. Of Liquorice.
...with the juice of Licorice, Ginger, and other spices, there is made a certaine bread or cakes, called Ginger-bread, which is very good against the cough, and all the infirmities of the lungs and brest: which is cast into moulds, some of one fashion, and some of another...
These things concerning Liquorice hath also Theophrastus: viz. that with this and with cheese made of Mares milke the Scythians were reported to be able to liue eleuen or twelue dayes."

Mad Apples [eggplant?]
"Mala insana. Madde or raging Apples.
...The people of Tolledo do eat them with great deuotion being boiled with fat flesh, putting thereto some scraped cheese, which they do keepe in vineger, honie, or salt pickell all Winter to procure lust. Petrus Bellonius, and Hermolaus Barbarus, report that in Egypt and Barbary they vse to eat the fruit of Mala insana boiled or rosted vnder ashes, with oile, vineger, & pepper, as people vse to eat Mushroms. But I rather wish English men to content themselues with the meat and sauce of our owne Countrey, than with fruit and sauce eaten with such perill: for doubtlesse these apples haue a mischievuous qualitie, the vse whereof is vtterly to be forsaken..."

Marigold
"Calendula. Marigold.
The yellow leaues of the floures are dried and kept throughout Dutchland against Winter, to put into broths, in physicall potions, and for diuers other purposes, in such quantity, that in some Grocers or Spice-sellers houses are to be found barrels filled with them, and retailed by the penny more or lesse, insomuch that no broths are well made without dried Marigolds."

Marjoram
" Mariorana. Marierome.
The leaues are excellent good to be put into all odoriferous ointments, waters, pouders, broths, and meates."

Melons or Pompions
" Pepo... Melons, or Pompions.
The pulpe of the Pompion is neuer eaten raw, but boiled... The fruit boiled in milke and buttered, is not onely a good wholesome meat for mans body, but being so prepare, is also a most physicall medicine for such as haue an hot stomacke... The flesh or pulpe of the same sliced and fried in a pan with butter, is also a good and wholesome meat: but baked with apples in an ouen, it doth fil the body with flatuous or windie belchings, and is food vtterly vnwholesome for such as liue idlely; but vnto robustious and rustick people nothing hurteth that filleth the belly."

Mint
"Mentha. Mints.
Garden Mint taken in meat or drinke warmeth and strengtheneth the stomacke... and causeth good digestion."

Mulberry
"Morus. Of the Mulberrie tree.
These Mulberries taken in meat, and also before meat, do very speedily passe through the belly, by reason of the moisture and slipperinesse of their substance, and make a passage for other meats, as Galen saith. They are good to quench thirst, they stir vp and appetite to meat, they are not hurtfull to the stomacke, but they nourish the body very little, being taken in the second place, or after meat..."

Mustard
"Sinapi sativum. Garden Mustard.
...The seed of Mustard pound with vinger, is an excellent sauce, good to be eaten with any grosse meates either fish or flesh, because it doth helpe digestion, warmeth the stomacke, and prouoketh appetite."

Oats
"Avena Vesca. Common Otes.
...is vsed in many countries to make sundry sorts of bread; as in Lancashire, where it is their chiefest bread corne for Iannocks, Hauer cakes, Tharffe cakes, and those which are called generally Oten cakes; and for the most part they call the graine Hauer, whereof they do likewise make drink for want of Barley."

Olive
"Olea sativa. Of the Oliue Tree.
The Oliues which be so ripe as that either they fall off themselues, or be ready to fall... be moderately hot and moist, yet being eaten they yeeld to the body little nourishment. The vnripe oliues are dry and binding. Tose that are preserued in pickle, called Colymbades, do dry vp the ouermuch moisture of the stomacke, they remoue the loathing of meate, stirre vp an appetite; but there is no nourishment at all that is to be looked for in them, much lesse good nourishment."

Onions
"Cepa. Onions.
...The Onion being eaten, yea though it be boyled, causeth head-ache, hurteth the eyes, and maketh a man dimme sighted, dulleth the sences, ingendreth windinesse, and prouoketh ouermuch sleepe, especially being eaten raw. ...There is also another small kinde of Onion, called... Scallions... It is vsed to be eaten in sallads."

Orach
"Atriplex. Orach.
Dioscorides writeth, That the garden Orach is both moist and cold, and that it is eaten boyled as other sallad herbes are...."

Parsley
"Apium hortense. Garden Parsley.
The leaues are pleasant in sauces and broth, in which besides that they giue a pleasant taste, they be also singular good to take away stoppings, and to prouoke vrine: which thing the roots likewise do notable performe if they be boiled in broth: they be also delightfull to the taste, and agreeable to the stomacke."

Parsnips
"Pastinaca latifolia sativa. Garden Parsneps.
The Parsneps nourish more than doe the Turneps or the Carrots... There is a good and pleasant food or bread made of the roots of Parsneps, as my friend Mr. Plat hath set forth in his booke of experiments, which I haue made no triall of, nor meane to do."

Peach
"Persica alba. Of the Peach tree.
Peaches be cold and moist, and that in the second degree; they haue a juice and also a substance that doth easily putrifie, which yeeldeth no nourishment, but bringeth hurt, especially if they be eaten after other meates; for then they cause the other meates to putrifie. But they are lesse hurtfull if they be taken first; for by reason that they are moist and slippery, they easily and quickly descend; and by making the belly slippery, they cause other meates to slip downe the sooner."

Pear
"Pyra. Of the Peare tree.
To write of Pears and Apples in particular, would require a particular volume: the stocke or kindred of Pears are not to be numbred: euery country hath his peculiar fruit... Wine made of the iuice of peares called in English, Perry, is soluble, purgeth those that are not accustomed to drinke thereof, especially when it is new; notwithstanding it is as wholsome a drink being taken in small qunatitie as wine; it comforteth and warmeth the stomacke, and causeth good digestion."

Peas
"Pisum maius. Of Peason.
Galen writeth, that Peason are in their whole substance like vnto Beanes, and be eaten after the same manner that Beans are..."

Peppers
"Capsicum. Ginnie or Indian Pepper.
...Ginnie pepper hath the taste of pepper, but not the power or vertue, notwithstanding in Spaine and sundrie parts of the Indies they do vse to dresse their meate therewith, as we doe with Calecute pepper: but (saith my Authour) it hath in it a malicious qualitie, whereby it is an enemy to the liuer and other of the entrails... It is said to die or colour like Saffron; and being receiued in such sort as Saffron is vsually taken, it warmeth the stomacke, and helpeth greatly the digestion of meates."

Plum
"Prunus Domestica. Of the Plum tree.
Plummes that be ripe and new gathered from the tree, what sort soeuer they are of, do moisten and coole, and yeeld vnto the body very little nourishment, and the same nothing good at all: for as Plummes do very quickly rot, so is also the iuice of them apt to putrifie in the body, and likewise to cause the meat to putrifie which is taken with them... Dried Plums, commonly called Prunes, are wholsomer, and more pleasant to the stomack, they teeld more nonrishment, and better, and such as cannot easily putrifie..."

Pine tree
"Pinus sativa, sive domestica. Of the Pine Tree.
The kernels of these nuts...[?] yeeldeth a thicke and good iuice, and nourisheth much, yet it is not altogether easie of digestion, and therefore it is mixed with preserues, or boyled with sugar."

Pinks
"Caryophyllus. Pinks or wilde Gillofloures.
The conserue made of the floures of the Cloue Gillofloure and sugar, is exceeding cordial, and wonderfully aboue measure doth comfort the heart, being eaten now and then."

Pistachio
"Pistacia. Of Fisticke Nuts.
The kernels of the Fisticke Nuts are oftentimes eaten as be those of the Pine Apples; they be of temperature hot and moist; they are not so easily concocted, but much easier than common nuts... The kernels of Fisticke nuts condited, or made into comfits, with sugar, and eaten, doe procure bodily lust, vnstop the lungs and the brest, are good against the shortnesse of breath, and are an excellent preseruatiue medicine being ministred in wine against the bitings of all manner of wilde beasts."

Pomegranate
"Malus Granata, siue Punica. Of the Pomegranat tree.
As there be sundry sorts of Apples, Peares, Plums, and such like fruits, so there are two sorts of Pomegranates, the garden and the wilde... the fruit of the garden Pomegranat is of three sorts; one hauing a soure iuyce or liquor; another hauing a very sweet and pleasant liquor, and the third the taste of wine... The iuicie grains of the Pomegranate are good to be eaten, hauing in them a meetly good iuice: they are wholesome for the stomacke..."

Poppy
"Papauer. Garden Poppies.
...This seed, as Galen saith in his booke of the Faculties of nourishments, is good to season bread with; but the white is better than the black. He also addeth, that the same is cold and causeth sleepe, and yeeldeth no commendable nourishment to the body; it is often vsed in comfits, serued at the table with other iunketting dishes. The oile which is pressed out of it is pleasant and delightfull to be eaten, and is taken with bread or any other waies in meat, without any sence of cooling."

Potato
"Battata Virginiana, siue Virginianorum, & Pappus. Virginian Potatoes.
The temperature and vertues be referred vnto the common [sweet] Potatoes, being likewise a food, as also a meate for pleasure, equall in goodnesse and wholesomenesse vnto the same, being either rosted in the embers, or boyled and eaten with oyle, vinegar, and pepper, or dressed any other way by the hand of some cunning in cookerie."

Quince
"Malus Cotonea. Of the Quince Tree.
Quinces be cold and dry in the second degree, and also very much binding, especially when they be raw: they haue likewise in them a certaine superfluous and excrementall moisture, which will not suffer them to lie long without rotting. they are seldom eaten rawe: being rosted or baked they be more pleasant... Simeon Sethi writeth, that the woman with childe, which eateth many Quinces during the time of her breeding, shall bring forth wise children, and of good vnderstanding.
The Marmalade, or Cotininate, made of Quinces and sugar, is good and profitable for the strengthening of the stomacke, that it may retaine and keepe the meat therein vntill it be perfectly digested... which Cotiniate is made in this manner: Take faire Quinces, pare them, cut them in pieces, and cast away the core, then put vnto euery pound of Quinces a pound of sugar, and to euery pound of sugar a pinte of water: these must bee boiled together ouer a still fire till they be very soft, then let it be strained or rather rubbed through a strainer, or an hairy sieue, which is better, and then set it ouer the fire to boile againe, vntill it be stiffe, and so box it vp, and as it cooleth put thereto a little Rose water, and a few graines of Muske, well mingled together, which will giue a goodly taste vnto the Cotiniat. This is the way to make Marmalade:
Take whole Quinces and boile them in water vntill they be as soft as a scalded codling or apple, then pill off the skin, and cut off the flesh, and stampe it in a stone mortar; then straine it as you did the Cotiniate; afterward put it into a pan to drie, but not to seeth at all: and vnto euery pound of the flesh of Quinces, put three quarters of a pound of sugar, and in the cooling you may put in rose water and a little Muske, as was said before... Many other excellent, dainty and wholesome confections are to be made of Quinces, as ielly of Quinces, and such odde conceits, which for breuitie sake I do now let passe."

Radish
"Raphanus sativus. Radish.
...Radish are eaten raw with bread in stead of other food... for the most part, they are vsed in sauce with meates to procure appetite, and in that sort they ingender blood lesse faulty, than eaten alone or with bread onely..."

Rape-Cole
"Caulorapum rotundum. Of Rape-Cole.
There is nothing set downe of the faculties of these plants, but are accounted for daintie meate, contending with the Cabbage Cole in goodnesse and pleasant taste."

Rice
"Oryza. Rice.
...In England we vse to make with milke and Rice a certaine food or pottage, which doth both meanly binde the belly, and also nourish. Many other good kindes of food is made with this graine, as those that are skilfull in cookerie can tell."

Rose
"Rosa. Of Roses.
The distilled water of roses... being put into iunketting dishes, cakes, sauces, and many other pleasant things, giueth a fine and delectable taste...
The conserue of Roses... is thus made: Take the leaues [petals] of Roses, the nails cut off, one pound, put them into a clean pan; then put thereto a pinte and a halfe of scalding water, stirring them together with a woodden slice, so let them stand to mascerate, close couered some two or three houres; then set them to the fire slowly to boyle, adding thereto three pounds of sugar in powder, letting them to samper together according to discretion, some houre or more; then keepe it for your vse.
The same made another way, but better by many degrees: take Roses at your pleasure, put them to boyle in faire water, hauing regard to the quantity; for if you haue many roses, you may take the more water; if fewer, the lesse water will serue: the which you shall boyle at the least three or foure houres, euen as you would boyle a piece of meat, vntill in the eating they be very tender, at which time the roses will lose their colour, that you would thinke your labour lost, and the thing spoyled. But proceed, for though the Roses haue lost their colour, the water hath gotten the tincture thereof; then shall you adde vnto one pound of Roses, foure pound of fine sugar in pure powder, and so according to the rest of the roses. Thus shall you let them boyle gently after the Sugar is put therto, continually stirring it with a woodden Spatula vntill it be cold, whereof one pound weight is worth six pound of the crude or raw conserue, as well for the vertues and goodnesse in taste, as also for the beautifull colour.
The making of the crude or raw conserue is very well knowne, as also Sugar roset, and diuers other pretty things made of roses and sugar, which are impertent vnto our historie, because I intend neither to make thereof an Apothecaries shop, nor a Sugar bakers storehouse, leauing the rest for our cunning confectioners."

Rosemary
"Rosmarinum Coronarium. Of Rosemarie.
Tragus writeth, that Rosemarie is spice in the Germane Kitchins, and other cold countries... The floures made vp into plates with sugar after the manner of Sugar Roset and eaten, comfort the heart, and make it merry, quicken the spirits, and make them more liuely."

Saffron
"Crocus. Saffron.
...The chiues steeped in water, serue to illumine or (as we say) limne pictures and imagerie, as also to colour sundry meats and confections. It is with good successe giuen to procure bodily lust. The confections called Crocomagna, Oxycroceum, and Diacurcuma, with diuers other emplaisters and electuaries cannot be made without this Saffron."

Sage
"Saluia. Sage.
No man needs to doubt of the wholesomnesse of Sage Ale, being brewed as it should be with Sage, Scabious, Betony, Spikenard, Squinanth, and Fennel seeds.."

Sesame
"Sesamum, siue Sisamum. Of the oylie Pulse called Sesamum.
...Men do not greedily feed of it alone, but make cakes thereof with honey, ... it is also mixed with bread..."

Sorrell
"Oxalis. Sorrell.
Sorrell doth vndoutedly coole and mightily dry; but because it is soure it likewise cutteth tough humors. The iuyce hereof in Sommer time is a profitable sauce in many meates, and pleasant to the taste... The leaues of Sorrell taken in good quantitie, stamped and strained into some Ale, and a posset made thereof, cooleth the sicke bodie, quencheth the thirst, and allayeth the heat of such as are troubled with a pestilent feuer, hot ague, or any great inflammation within. The leaues sodden, and eaten in manner of a Spinach tart, or eaten as meate, softneth and loosneth the belly, and doth attemper and coole the bloud exceedingly."

Spinach
"Spinacia. Spinach.
It is eaten boiled, but yeeldeth little or no nourishment at all: it is something windie, and easily causeth a desire to vomit: it is vsed in sallades when it is young and tender. This herbe of all other pot-herbes and sallade herbes maketh the greatest diuersitie of meates and sallades."

Sugar Cane
"Arundo Saccharina. Sugar Cane.
...Of the iuyce of this Reed is made the most pleasant and profitable sweet, called Sugar; whereof is made infinite confectures, syrups, and such like, as also preseruing and conseruing of sundry fruits, herbes, and flowers, as Roses, Violets, Rosemary flowers, and such like, which still retaine with them the name of Sugar, as Sugar Roset, Sugar violet, &c. The which to write of would require a peculiar volume... it is not my purpose to make of my booke a Confectionarie, a Sugar Bakers furnace, a Gentlewomans preseruing pan..." [followed by a short description of sugar refining]

Sunflower
"Flos Solis maior. the floure of the Sun, or the Marigold of Peru.
...the buds before they be floured, boiled and eaten with butter, vineger, and pepper, after the manner of Artichokes, are exceeding pleasant meat, surpassing the Artichoke far in procuring bodily lust. The same buds with the stalks neere vnto the top (the hairinesse being taken away) broiled vpon a gridiron, and afterward eaten with oile, vineger, and pepper, haue the like property..."

[Sweet] Potato
"Sisarum Peruvianum, siue Batata Hispanorum. Potato's.
The Potato roots are among the Spaniards, Italians, Indians, and many other nations common and ordinarie meate; which no doubt are of mighty and nourishing parts... being tosted in the embers they lose much of their windinesse, especially being eaten sopped in wine.
Of these roots may be made conserues no lesse toothsome, wholesome, and dainty than of the flesh of Quinces: and likewise those comfortable and delicate meats called in shops Morselli, Placentulae, and diuers other such like.
These Roots may serue as a ground or foundation whereon the cunning Confectioner or Sugar-Baker may worke and frame many comfortable delicate Conserues, and restoratiue sweete meates.
They are vsed to be eaten rosted in the ashes. Some when they be so rosted infuse them and sop them in Wine; and others to giue them the greater grace in eating, do boyle them with prunes, and so eate them. And likewise others dresse them (being first rosted) with Oyle, Vineger, and salt, euerie man according to his owne taste and liking. Notwithstanding howsoeuer they bee dressed, they comfort, nourish, and strengthen the body, procuring bodily lust, and that with greedinesse."

Tarragon
"Draco herba. Tarragon.
...Tarragon is hot and drie in the third degree, and not to be eaten alone in sallades, but ioyned with other herbes, as Lettuce, Purslain, and such like..."

Tomato
"Poma Amoris. Apples of Loue.
...In Spaine and those hot Regions they vse to eat the Apples prepared and boiled with pepper, salt, and oile: but they yeeld very little nourishment to the bodie, and the same nought and corrupt. Likewise they doe eat the Apples with oile, vineger and pepper mixed together for sauce to their meate, euen as we in these cold Countries doe Mustard."

Tulip
"Tulipa. Tulipa, or the Dalmatian Cap.
...The roots preserued with sugar, or otherwise dressed, may be eaten, and are no vnpleasant nor any way offensiue meat, but rather good and nourishing."

Turnip
"Rapum majus. Turnep.
...The bulbous or knobbed root, which is properly called Rapum or Turnep... is many times eaten raw, especially of the poore people in Wales, but most commonly boiled... It auaileth not a little after what manner it is prepared; for being boyled in water, or in a certaine broth, it is more moist, and sooner descendeth, and maketh the body more soluble; but being rosted or baked it drieth, and ingendreth lesse winde, and yet it is not altogether without winde... The young and tender shootes or springs of Turneps at their first comming forth of the ground, boiled and eaten as a sallade, prouoke vrine."

Violets
"Viola. Violets.
"There is likewise made of Violes and sugar certain plates called Sugar Violet, or Violet tables, or Plate, which is most pleasant and wholesome..."

Walnut
"Nux Iuglans. Of the Wall-nut tree.
The fresh kernels of the nuts newly gathered are pleasant to the taste... The dry nuts are hot and dry, and those more which become oily and ranke... The greene and tender Nuts boiled in Sugar and eaten as Suckad, are a most pleasant and delectable meate, comfort the stomacke, and expell poyson... Milke made of the kernels, as Almond milke is made, cooleth and pleaseth the appetite of the languishing sicke body."

White Endive
"Intybum satiua. Garden Endiue.
...Endiue being sowen in the spring quickly commeth vp to floure, which seedeth in haruest, and afterward dieth. But being sowen in Iuly it remaineth till winter, at which time it is taken vp by the roots, and laid in the sunne or aire for the space of two houres; then will the leaues be tough, and easily endure to be wrapped vpon an heape, and buried in the earth with the roots vpward, where no earth can get within it (which if it did, would cause rottennesse) the which so couered may be taken vp at times conuenient, and vsed in sallades all the winter..."

See Cindy Renfrow's Culinary Gleanings
.

American Seed Catalogs from Smithsonian Institution Libraries

2011-05-09T21:33:00.006-04:00

Virginian John Tayloe III - Minute Book 1805 - Gardeners’ Work

2011-05-09T21:32:00.001-04:00

.
John Tayloe III, Minute Book for the Year 1805 - Gardeners’ Work
From the Tayloe papers at the Virginia Historical Society, Mss1 T2118a8

The primary property he is concerned with here is Mt. Airy in Warsaw, VA, but he also records work done at six other properties: Old House, Forklands, Marske, Menoken and Doctor’s Hall in Richmond County and Hopyard in King George County. (Much other work by a variety of workmen is recorded in addition to the gardener’s work transcribed below.)

January 5, 1805
Gardeners Work – grubbing Plumb trees, cutting wood, cleaning snow from about the houses, cutting ice, etc etc.

January 9
Boys mending gardeners shoes

January 12th
Gardeners Work Viz –
Cutting wood, cleaning out greenhouse, wheeling manure, sweeping chimneys. Getting trees to plant in lawn and nursery, etc.

Saturday, January 26th
Rainy day
Mt. Airy Gardeners Work Viz—
Cutting wood, watering Green and hot Houses – making Bean sticks – getting Broom Straw

Saturday, February 2nd
Joiners repairing wheelbarrows for Gardeners
Gardeners Work Viz—
Making hot beds. Getting mould for ditto. making Bean poles and Pea Sticks – cutting wood, cleaning in the Lawn. picking large Grass from Bowling Green

Saturday 9th February
Gardeners Work Viz—
Wheeling manure and making hot beds. picking the Bowling Green. Cutting wood for hot houses. watered Green and hot houses and cleaned them out etc

Saturday 16th February 1805
Gardeners work as follows Viz—
Grubbing up apple trees and set them in the Nursery
Sowed Peas picked and raked large Grass off
Bowling Green walks & made hot beds. cut
wood. watered Green & hot houses etc

Saturday 23rd February
Gardeners work as follows Viz—
Wheeling manure making Hot Beds
Picking walks & wheeling off the Grass
took up young trees at Menokin and set
them in nursery watered Green and
Hot Houses etc etc

Saturday March 2nd
Gardeners Work Viz—

Monday 25th [February] Made hot bed & picked walks

Tuesday 26th Planted onions, Sow’d Beets, Carrots, etc.

Wednesday 27th Dug ground. Sowed Onions, Watered Gn & H House

Thursday 28th Wheeled manure made hot beds

Friday March 1 Raked and Rolled the Bolling Green

Saturday 2nd Dug Ground watered Green & hot houses

Saturday March 9th
Gardeners Work
Getting the Squares in order for Peas etc
fitting up Cucumber fraimes
planting apple trees at [illegible] Sowed Peas etc etc

Monday March 11
Jobbers & hands from other properties are trimming up in the park

Saturday March 16th
Gardeners Work Viz as follows—
Planted Apple Trees at Marske. uncovered
Asparagus and forked up the Bed
Dressed the Borders. wheeled manure lined
the hot Beds. Sowed Peas and Beans. cutted
Wood. Watered Green & hot Houses etc etc

Saturday 30th March
Gardeners Work Viz—
Dressed up Front Yard. dug
Ground in Garden. Sewed Peas. Beets. Carrots
and Parsneps. Dressed up Green & hot houses.

Saturday, 6th April
Gardeners Work Viz—
Made 2 hot Beds for mellons. Dressed up the Pleasure . planted Potatoes. sticked Peas. Picked Broom Grass, watered and Cleaned out Green & Hot houses etc

Saturday 13th April
Gardeners Work Viz— worked the Kitchen Garden dressed the Borders – Hoed Gravel Walks Cleaned Nursery & Kitchen Yard. watered Green & hot houses etc etc

Saturday 20th April
Gardeners Work Viz—

Monday 15th – Holy Day

Tuesday 16 – Rolled the Grass & Gravel & cleaned Walks

Wednesday 17th – ditto

Thursday 18th – ditto

Friday 19th –ditto

Saturday 20th –Watered Green & hot houses and weeded Kitchen Garden

Saturday 27th April
Gardeners Work Viz—
Worked the Kitchen Garden Picked Grass. Dressed the flower Borders Rolled the Bowling Green & Walks. planted Beanes, watered Green & Hot houses, frames etc etc

Saturday 4th May
Gardeners Work Viz—
Mowed the Garden. Hoed the Gravel walks [pricked ?] the edging cleaned out & watered the Green & Hot houses. planted Beanes Dressed up the court. Made up compost for Gne House Plants etc

Saturday May 11
Gardeners Work Viz—

Monday – Mowed the Bowling Green & Gravel Walk watered the Green House & Frames

Tuesday – Mowed and weed in the Kitchen Garden

Wednesday – ditto, Hoed & Raked the Gravel Walks

Thursday – weeded in the Kitchen Garden and dressed the Borders round the Bowling Green

Friday – mowed the Banks in the Garden and wed the asparagus Beds

Saturday – Watered & Cleaned out the Green House etc

Saturday May 19
Gardeners Work Viz—

Monday Dug ground etc—

Tuesday – wed in the nursery timed trees etc

Wednesday – dug Ground in Kitchen Garden etc

Thursday – [illegible] take trees out G. H.

Friday – ditto

Saturday – Ditto

Saturday 25th May 1805
Gardeners Work Viz—

Monday 20th – Finished taking the plants out G’ House

Tuesday 21 – Mowed, watered & wed in the Kitchen Garden

Wednesday 22 – Mowed & Rolled the Bolling Green, watered the Green House Plants &
work ‘d the K. Garden

Thursday 23rd – Mowed in front the Green House. Hoe’d the flower Plats

Friday 24 –Mowed in the Kitchen Garden

Saturday 25 – ditto & Dressed up the court

Saturday 1st June 1805
Gardeners Work Viz—
Cleaned the Serpenhtine Walk. Shifted the young pines. Cleaned before the Green House watered the Green House plants. Wed in the Kitchen Garden. Raked the Gravel Walks.

Saturday June 8th 1805
Gardeners Work Viz—
Mowed round Serpentine walk. Watered Green House Plants. Wed in the Kitchen Garden. Cleaned fore Court. Dug Ground Planted Cabbages etc etc etc

Saturday 15th June 1805
Gardeners Work Viz—
Hoed the Gravel Walks and wed in the Kitchen Garden. Got [married?]

Saturday 22nd June 1805
Gardeners Work Viz— Mowed weeds in the Lawn. Wed in Garden Mowed and Rolled Bowling Green—mowed four Court Watered Plants etc

Saturday 29th June 1805
Gardening Viz
Mowed. Watered plants. Weeded flower Borders etc. Godfrey & dick in harvest field

Saturday 6th July 1805
Gardeners Work Viz—
Weed in Kitchen Garden, Dug Ground, dressed flower Boarders. Hoed and Raked Gravel Walks etc etc.

Saturday 13th July
Doctors Hall [crude drawing of a hand pointing at this entry]
Plough horse died Saturday morning—when cut open his maw was full Pby Worms
[other notes of livestock dead also marked with pointing hand]

Gardeners Work Viz—

8th Monday worked in the Kitchen Garden

9th Tuesday – watered the plants and cut wood for Lime Kiln

10th Wednesday – Put up a lime Kiln

11th Thursday – Dug Ground and watered plants

12 Friday – Ditto

13 Saturday – Ditto Watered plants Raked the Gravel etc etc

Saturday 20th July 1805
Gardeners Work Viz—
Dug Ground in kitchen Garden Cleaned fore Court. planted Beans Weed and Watered [peas? Pears?] Dick attending [sessions?]

Saturday 27th July 1805
Gardeners Work Viz—
Hoed & Raked the Gravel Walks Wed in the Kitchen Garden dug Ground Watered Plants – etc
etc

Saturday 4th August 1805
Gardeners Work Viz—
[illegible] watered Plants, worked in the Garden. Dug Ground, Planted, Peas Beans & Sowed turneps

Saturday 10th August 1805
Gardeners Viz.
Mowed & weed the Kitchen Garden---Cleaned out the fraiming Ground – made up Compost, Planted Ceder trees weed the flower Borders etc etc

Saturday 17th August 1805
Gardeners Work Viz
Worked in the Kitchen Garden
Watered Green House Plants
Hoe’d Raked the Gravel walks
Trimed Hedges, pricked the Grass [illegible] the Walks

Saturday 24th Aug’t 1805
Gardeners Work Viz—
Watered Green house Plants. Dug Ground weed Turneps. Rolled the Walks. Mowed four Court. Hoed the Gravel

Saturday 31st August 1805
Gardeners Work Viz—
Watered Green house plants. Worked the Kitchen Garden. Mowed around the walks. Trimed hedging Rolled the Grass. Cleaned up Kitchen Yard etc etc

Saturday 7th September 1805
Gardeners Work Viz—
Worked in the Kitchen Garden Cleaned the fore court – Raked the Gravel etc etc

Saturday 14th September 1805
Gardeners Work Viz—
Triming the Hedges. Working the Kitchen Garden. Mowed the Grass watered the Plants. Wheeled Manure. Hoed the gravel Walks. Cleaned out Serpentine Walk Cleaned out the Framing Ground etc etc

Saturday 21st September 1805
Gardeners Work Viz

Monday 16th – Mowed & wed in Kitchen Garden

Tuesday 17th – Mowed the Bowling Green & rolled Walks

Wednesday 18th – Ditto

Thursday 19th – mowed the Banks in the Garden & Dug Strawberrys

Friday 20th – Ditto Kitchen & nursery yards etc

Saturday 21st – Layed down a Cistern in Garden

Saturday 28th Sept 1805
Gardeners Work Viz—
Putting Plants in Green House & made up Compost

Saturday 5th October 1805
Gardeners Work Viz

Monday 30th – mowed & made up compost

Tuesday 1st October Ditto

Wednesday 2nd – Gathered apples at Old House

Tursday 3rd – Wheeled Manure

Friday 4th – Ditto—

Saturday 5th – Ditto
Dick sick 3 days this week

Gardeners work –
Putting Plants in Green & fixing [fitting?] it out for Winter

Saturday 12th October 1805
Gardeners Work

Monday 7th --- Dug Ground Watered Green house assisted in packing up things for [Gdy?]

Tuesday 8th – assisted in loading carts & Waggons

Wednesday 9th – Wheeled manure and trimed hedges

Thursday 10th – Dug up asparagus Beds

Friday 11th – Cleaned up before the Greenhouse

Saturday 12th – Cleaned the fore court

Saturday 19th October 1805
Gardeners Work Viz—
Watered Green & Hot houses. Wheeled manure covered asparagus Beds Dug Ground in Kitchen Garden etc

Saturday 26th October 1805
Gardeners Work Viz—
Dug Ground Wheel’d manure. Cleaned the flue of Hot Houses dug holes around the house for
Scaffold poles, watered & cleaned out Green & Hot Houses etc etc.

[At Mt. Airy, Maisons are getting posts from the woods and jobbers are setting posts for scaffold]
Saturday 2nd November
Gardeners Work Viz—
[Cut?] away the Greens Dug wheel ‘d manure trimed trees, watered green & hot houses Dug up & set out Rasberry Buses etc

Saturday 9th November 1805
Gardeners Work Viz—
Dug Ground. Wheeld manure. Trimed trees & bushes. Planted trees around the Serpentine Walk. Watered & cleaned out Green & hot houses—assisted about raising scaffold

Saturday 16th November 1805
Gardenrs Work, Viz
Planting trees of different kinds in fruitery
Planted Plumb & Apricots at Bottom of Garden
Dug Ground Watered and Cleaned Green & hot houses

Saturday 23rd November
Gardeners Work Viz—
Dug Borders in Kitchen Garden. Wheeled manure. Began to Dig the flower Borders assisted to raise Scaffold planted a row of different kinds of Shrubs around the Bowling Green. Watered the Green & hot houses – cut wood for the Sheds etc etc

Saturday 30th November 1805
Gardeners Work Viz—
Began to dig the flower Plats Planting edging watered green & hot houses
.

American Seed Catalogs from Smithsonian Institution Libraries

2011-05-03T14:10:00.000-04:00

Today in History - 1802 Washington DC Incorporated - History of Capitol Hill & Gardens

2011-05-03T13:55:00.000-04:00

.
On this day in 1802, Washington DC was incorporated as a city. And it is a great opportunity to look at the development of the gardens around the White House and the United States Capitol.

Classical Temple Dedicated to Liberty, Justice, and Peace. James Trenchard. Temple of Liberty. The Columbian Magazine, (Philadelphia) 1788, Library of Congress.

Below this engraving was written,

"Behold a Fabric now to Freedom rear'd,
Approved by friends, and ev'n Foes rever'd,
Where Justice, too, and Peace, by us ador'd,
Shall heal each Wrong, and keep ensheath'd the Sword,
Approach then, Concord, fair Columbia's Son,
And faithful Clio, write that "We Are One."

In 1788, Philadelphia's Columbian Magazine published an engraving by James Trenchard called the Temple of Liberty. Trenchard, born in 1746, at Penns Neck in Salem County, New Jersey, was an engraver & seal cutter in Philadelphia, and the artist for many of the plates for the Columbian Magazine, whose circulation was the largest of any 18th century magazine published in America.

The engraving of a classical temple building depicts statues on the roof, including Libertas (liberty), Justicia or Themis (justice), & Ceres (peace). Libertas is at the peak with the others on the corners. In the background a rising sun radiating beams of light with one shining upon Libertas holding her staff & freedom cap. Emerging from the pure, bright sunlight in the distance is the new nation--lady Columbia with an eagle headdress. Standing below is Concordia holding a horn of plenty; Columbia's winged son holding a scroll with CONSTITUTION written on it; and Clio, the muse of history, beginning to write the history of the new nation. Scrolling across the front of the classical temple are the words: SACRED TO LIBERTY, JUSTICE AND PEACE.

While studying 18th century buildings which were sited on the highest prospect, I kept running into depictions of the United States Capitol building, America's Temple of Liberty.

Dr. William Thornton [Sketch of Section of Monument and Conference Room], c. 1797 Prints and Photographs Division Library of Congress. Thornton's drawings and concept won the contest to design the capitol.

Built on what came to be called Capitol Hill, its grounds changed greatly over the first half of the 19th century. I thought you might enjoy seeing the various depictions of the changing landscape.

Dr. William Thornton [East Elevation for North Wing], 1795-1797 Prints and Photographs Division Library of Congress.

Fierce competition over the site of the capital city had raged for years, reaching its height during the First Federal Congress, in New York between 1789 - 1790.

Dr. William Thornton [Plan of Ground Story of the Capitol,] c. 1795-1797 Prints and Photographs Division Library of Congress.

The always clever Alexander Hamilton helped broker a compromise in which the federal government would assume the war debt incurred during the Revolution, in exchange for support from northern states for locating the capital further south than New York or Philadelphia.

Dr. William Thornton's winning plan for the Capitol of the United States of America.

The compromise between the advocates for the North and those favoring a Southern location ended the feuding by agreeing on a nearly neutral location on the Potomac River, equidistant between North & South, and easily defended. (It had been George Washington's choice all along, and it was Hamilton's goal to please the General.)

c 1800 A View of the Capitol of Washington Watercolor by William Birch.

The agreement called for a 100-square mile federal district to be located somewhere along the Potomac River at a site to be chosen by fellow river-property owner, George Washington. Washington picked the junction of the Potomac & Anacostia Rivers. He then chose Pierre Charles L'Enfant, a military artist who had served under him at Valley Forge, to design the new federal city.

An 1801 View of George Town and the Federal City, or the City of Washington before its development into the federal city. Color aquatint by T. Cartwright of London after George Beck of Philadelphia. Published by Atkins & Nightingale of London and Philadelphia.

The Capitol of the United States crowns what was then Jenkins Hill in Washington, D.C., and houses the legislative branch of government, the House of Representatives & the Senate.

1806 Benjamin Latrobe View of the Capitol of the United States.

Pierre Charles L'Enfant chose Jenkins Hill as the site for the United States Capitol building, which rose 88 feet above the Potomac River, and sat 1 mile from the White House. L'Enfant declared, it "stands as a pedestal waiting for a monument."

A view of the still undeveloped East Branch of Potomac River at Washington. Watercolor by August Kollner (1813-1906) in 1839.

"Jenkins Hill" was owned at that time by the well-to-do Marylander Daniel Carroll of Duddington, and it stood on a tract of land originally known by the more classically-inspired name of "New Troy."

1814 George Munger (1781-1825). United States Capitol after the British burned the capitol.

Thomas Jefferson came up with the name Capitol Hill, consciously invoking the famous temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline Hill in ancient Rome. The building would be America's Temple of Liberty.

Depiction of the United States Capitol before the fire of 1814.

George Washinton & his allies wanted buildings that would embody the nation's hoped-for future. "In our Idea the Capitol ought in point of prosperity to be on a grand Scale, and that a Republic especially ought not to be sparing of expenses on an Edifice for such purposes."

1815 1st known depiction of the Capitol in Relation to Its Grounds by Benjamin Henry Latrobe [Plan of the Mall and the Capitol Grounds], Geography and Map Division Library of Congress.

The 1792 competition for its design was won by Dr. William Thornton (1759–1828), a physcian & an amateur architect, with a proposal for a Palladian-inspired building featuring a central domed rotunda flanked by the Senate & House wings.

Watercolor Presented to Marquis de Lafayette to Commemorate His 1824 Visit to Capitol. Charles Burton's West Front of the Capitol of the United States. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

President George Washington, dressed in masonic attire, laid the cornerstone in 1793, in a masonic ceremony.

1828 Contrast Between the Temple of Liberty and Nearby Log Cabins by John Rubens Smith. [West Front of the Capitol]. Prints and Photographs Division Library of Congress.

Construction proceeded slowly under a succession of architects, including Stephen Hallet (1793), George Hadfield (1795-98) and James Hoban (1798-1802), architect of the White House, who completed the Senate wing in 1800.

1830-40 Early Perspective Drawing of Completed Capitol Attributed to George Strickland [Perspective drawing of the Capitol from the Northeast,] In the Collection of the Architect of the Capitol.

Though the building was incomplete, the Capitol held its first session of United States Congress on November 17, 1800.

Das Capitol in Washington. Steel engraving by E. Grünenwald after an earlier drawing by H. Brown. Published in 1851.

Benjamin Latrobe took over in 1803; by 1811 he had renovated the Senate wing and completed the House wing.

1839 Capitol Overlooks Pastoral Landscape by Russell Smith. Capitol from Mr. Elliot's Garden. In the Collection of the Architect of the Capitol.

Benjamin Latrobe first considered the Capitol building in relation to its grounds and made a watercolor of the possible landscape design in 1815.

1839 Charles Fenderich's Elevation of the Eastern Front of the Capitol of the United States.

The Senate wing was completed in 1800, while the House wing was completed in 1811. However, the House of Representatives moved into the House wing in 1807.

August Kollner (1813-1906). West Front of the United States Capitol. New York: Goupil, Vibert, & Co., 1839. Library of Congress.

The Capitol was burned by British troops in 1814; and in the following year, Latrobe began its reconstruction and redesign.

1840 W.H. Bartlett's Ascent to the Capitol in Nathaniel P. Willis, American Scenery, vol. 1. London Virtue.

Boston architect Charles Bullfinch succeeded him in 1818; and completed the building, with only slight modifications of Latrobe's master plan, in 1830.

1840 W.H. Bartlett's View of the Capitol at Washington in Nathaniel P. Willis, American Scenery, vol. 1. London Virtue.

By 1837, the Washington Guide reported, The Capitol Square has been enlarged to the west, by taking in that part of the Mall extending from the circular road to First street, west; making about eight acres additional. This space has been properly graded and planted with trees and shrubs by Mr. James Maher, the public gardener:—the other part of the square was planted by the late John Foy, a man of excellent talents and taste. A good substantial stone wall, surmounted by an iron-railing, surrounds the whole square. When the walks are completed, and the water-fountains arranged, this square will afford the most beautiful and healthful walks: a subject well deserving public attention.

1839 South Gateway of the Capitol at Washington, D.C. showing stone walls & iron rails. Gray and sepia wash drawing by August Kollner (1813-1906).

The Capitol Grounds cover approximately 274 acres, with the grounds proper consisting mostly of lawns, walkways, streets, drives, and planting areas.

Daguerreotype by John C. Plumbe, Jr., taken about 1846, is the earliest known photographic image of the Capitol. Library of Congress.

Finally, on June 23, 1874, Congress passed an act making Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) the first landscape architect of the United States Capitol.

Arieal view of the United States Capitol.

The neoclassical Capitol building (or as Pierre L'Enfant called it in 1791--Congress House) has housed the legislative chambers of the U.S. Congress since 1800, and was home to the U.S. Supreme Court from 1800 until 1935. Presidential inaugurations are traditionally held here, the physical symbol of the United States of America, the Temple of Liberty.
.

American Seed Catalogs from Smithsonian Institution Libraries

2011-05-03T12:20:00.007-04:00

Today in History - Washington DC Incorporated - History of White House Gardens

2011-05-03T12:17:00.006-04:00

.
On this day in 1802, Washington DC was incorporated as a city. And it is a great opportunity to look at the development of the gardens around the White House and the United States Capitol.

Initially President Geoge Washington (1789–1797) chose French engineer & architect Pierre-Charles L'Enfant (1754-1825) to draw a plan of the city of Washington, envisioning a setting of terraced formal gardens descending to Tiber Creek.

1791 Thomas Jefferson, [Proposed Plan of Federal City], March 1791, Ink on paper, Thomas Jefferson Papers, Manuscript Division Library of Congress.

When Washington & L'Enfant mapped out the "President's Park," in 1791, Washington sketched reflecting pools & terraced gardens falling toward the water from an executive palace rivaling Versailles on 82 acres. When finally completed, the White House was about a quarter of the size L'Enfant dreamed of, but gardens would surround the residence.

1792 Pierre Charles L'Enfant, Plan of the City of Washington, March 1792, Library of Congress

Washington expressed a desire to plant an American species botanical garden. To expand the grounds around the proposed White House, Washington purchased the land for what is now the South lawn from a tobacco planter named Davy Burns, while the North grounds originally belonged to the Pierce family before falling into the hands of speculators.

The cornerstone of the President’s House was laid October 13, 1792. When the White House was first occupied in 1800, the site of the South Lawn was an open meadow gradually descending to a large marsh, the Tiber Creek, & to the Potomac River beyond.

c 1793 Elevation of the north side of the White House, by James Hoban. Maryland Historical Society.

After Washington dismissed L’Enfant for insubordination, the design of the White House was thrown open to an architectural competition in 1792. James Hoban (1758–1831), an Irish-born & trained architect then living in Charleston, South Carolina, won the design competition for the White House. Hoban immigrated to the United States working as an architect & builder in Philadelphia & Charleston, from 1785 until his move to the nation’s capital in 1792.

1800 Etching of Original design of White House. Library of Congress.

When John Adams (1797–1801), the 1st President to live in Hoban's proposed mansion, moved into the house in 1800, one Washingtonian wrote that the grounds were "at present in great confusion, having on it old brick kilns, pits to contain water used by the brick makers."

1803 White House by Nicholas King in the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

One of practical President Adam's first suggestions was to plant a vegetable garden to cut the growing food bill for the White House. Unfortunately Adams had headed back to Massachusettes, before his garden was planted.

c 1804 Jefferson's White House. Library of Congress.

Benjamin Latrobe (1764-1820) noted in 1803, "The surrounding Ground was chiefly used for Brick yards, it was enclosed in a rough post and rail fence." Presidents were faced with a scraggly, unpromising vista of tobacco-depleted clay soil scattered with abandoned workers' cottages bordered by a malarial swamp. The greatest majority of presidential landscaping efforts would be consumed with grading & filling projects throughout the 19th century.

1807 (1824) Benjamin Henry Latrobe's South Face Proposal to Jefferson. Library of Congress.

In 1801, President Thomas Jefferson (1801-09) began planning improvements for the White House gardens & grounds, including a stone wall around the house. Jefferson, who was always arranging & rearranging the grounds at Monticello, was the first president to devise an overall landscape plan for the grounds. The plan included a fence, as well as grading & planting the south grounds for more privacy. Jefferson kept geraniums, strawberries, figs and orange trees in pots & boxes in the windows of his office.

1807 (1824) Plans for the White House East Front by Benjamin Henry Latrobe in 1807. Library of Congress.

Jefferson wanted groves of trees, and he picked the location for the flower garden. Fences & walls were eventually built, where he had specified. He also directed the planting of numerous trees between 1802 -1806. Jefferson completed grading of the South Lawn, building up mounds on either side of a central lawn, similar to the 100-foot diameter mounds he built at his villa retreat Poplar Forest for his retirement in 1809.

1807 Charles Jensen. Stranger in America. Frontispiece. Library of Congress.

President Jefferson & his surveyor of public buildings, Benjamin Latrobe located a triumphal arch as a main entry point to the grounds, just southeast of the White House. Jefferson's arc of triumph was flanked by two memorial weeping willow trees. “No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth ... but though an old man, I am but a young gardener," he wrote to a friend from his Poplar Forest retreat in 1811.

1807 Latrobe White House Library of Congress.

William Stebbins described the grounds around the White House in Washington D. C. in 1810, "Extended my walk alone to the President's house: -- a handsome edifice, tho' like the capitol of free stone: the south yard principally made ground, bank'd up by a common stone wall: a plain picket fence on each side, the passage way to the house on the north: --some of the pickets lying on the ground."

Hostilities with Great Britain, begun in 1812, culminated in the invasion of Washington on August 24, 1814. British troops entered the defenseless city; ate a dinner prepared for the fleeing President at the White House; and then torched the building, destroying all but the outer walls and most of the plantings.

Paul Jennings, President James Madison's (1809–1817) personal slave who witnessed the burning, reports that it was the Madison's White House gardener, and not Dolley Madison who saved the portrait of George Washington from burning with the White House.

Jennings wrote, It has often been stated in print, that when Mrs. Madison escaped from the White House, she cut out from the frame the large portrait of Washington (now in one of the parlors there), and carried it off. This is totally false. She had no time for doing it. It would have required a ladder to get it down. All she carried off was the silver in her reticule, as the British were thought to be but a few squares off, and were expected every moment.

John Susé (a Frenchman, then door-keeper, and still living) and Magraw, the President's gardener, took it down and sent it off on a wagon, with some large silver urns and such other valuables as could be hastily got hold of. When the British did arrive, they ate up the very dinner, and drank the wines, &c., that I had prepared for the President's party.

Jefferson's 1809 Poplar Forest with earthen mounds planted with trees subsituting for traditonal pavilions and lines of trees forming Palladian“wings” or “hyphens.” (Thank you C. Allan Brown.)

At the urging of James Madison, Congress decided to rebuild rather than move the capital to another city. Hoban returned to reconstruct the President’s House, as it had been before the fire. President James Monroe (1817–1825) moved into a new house in the autumn of 1817.

While the White House was being rebuilt after the 1814 fire, James Monroe increased tree plantings on the grounds based on plans by architect Charles Bulfinch. Monroe (1817–25) named the first "Gardener to the President of the United States," Charles Bizet, giving him a salary of $450 a year.

When Bizet left the White House, he went to work for James Madsion at his private home Montpelier where he was paid $700 a year. A number of President Madison's slaves were trained as assistant gardeners, one of whom took over as head gardener, when Bizet returned home to France. Madison's garden contained a mixture of vegetables, fruit trees, flowers, & ornamental shrubs.

Mary Cutts, Dolley Madison's niece, left a description of Madison's Montpelier garden, "At some distance from the house was the garden laid off in the shape of a horseshoe by an experienced French gardener, who lived many years on the place; his name was Beazee; he and his wife came to Virginia at the time of the French Revolution and left Mr. Madison shortly before his death to return to "La belle France." They were great favorites with the negroes, some of whom they taught to speak French. Madame Beazee contrived a hat to shade Mrs. Madison's eyes; it was hideous, but she liked it and when she took her morning rambles always called for her "Beazee bonet."

"The choicest fruits, especially pears, were raised in abundance, figs bore their two crops every summer, which Mr. Madison liked to gather himself arbors of grapes, over which he exercised the same authority. It was a paradise of roses and other flowers, to say nothing of the strawberries, and vegetables; every rare plant and fruit was sent to him by his admiring friends, who knew his taste, and they were carefully studied and reared by the gardener and his black aids."

1814 White House on Fire. William Strickland, engraver. Library of Congress.

The front of the White House was used as a common for fairs & parades until 1822, when Pennsylvania the avenue was cut through the north side of the President’s Park & soon after a public park was established.

1814 A view of the president's house in the city of Washington after the conflagration of the 24th of August 1814. Library of Congress.

The federal government used Charles Bulfinch’s (1763–1844) planting scheme for a thick grove of trees for the square north of the White House & named the park in honor of General Lafayette in 1824-1825.

1818 Robert King, A Map of the City of Washington in the District of Columbia, Library of Congress.

When John Quincy Adams followed Monroe into office 1825-1829, he replaced gardener Bizet with John Ousley, who remained the White House gardener for the next 27 years. Adams was the first President to actually develop the flower gardens, that Jefferson had earlier plotted out.

Instead of using seedlings as Jefferson had for his groves, Adams was first to plant ornamental trees. As an avid gardener himself, Adams personally enjoyed planting seedlings that included fruit trees, herbs & vegetables.

In the summer of 1827, the president wrote in his diary, "In this small garden of not less than two acres there are forest and fruit trees, shrubs, hedges, (succulent) vegetables, kitchen and medicinal herbs, hothouse plants, flowers and weeds to the amount I conjecture of at least one thousand."

1820 The White House in 1820, a painting by George Catlin.

Adams himself planted herbs & vegetables, & after Congress passed a resolution to encourage planting mulberry trees as a way of fostering a silkworm industry, he planted a white mulberry on the White House grounds determined to nurture silkworms. While a U.S. silk industry never took root, one of Adams' plantings did, surviving until 1990.

Washington City, 1820 Baroness Hyde Neuville.

Adams, who had served abroad as a diplomat, solicited plant specimens from consulates around the world as well as planting the 5 varieties of oak native to D.C. Adams was attracted to the idea of establishing a collection of uniquely American species on the grounds.

1830s Detail of Lithograph by D. W. Kellog & Co. Library of Congress.

During the 1830's President Andrew Jackson (1829–1837) became a big supporter of the White House gardens hiring several laborers to assist White House gardener John Ousley. During Jackson's term elm, maple, & sycamore trees were planted for the first time. He had walks laid out among garden beds filled with foxglove, dragonhead, sweet William and daisies.

The famous Jackson magnolias were added to the White House grounds in 1835, which he planted in honor of his wife Rachel, who died shortly before he took office in 1829. The oldest surviving trees on the property now are those two southern magnolias (Magnolia grandiflora) at the east end of what is now the Rose Garden.

1830s Garden Beds at the White House. Library of Congress.

About this time, square & rectangular garden beds were no longer in fashion. They could be oval, circle, diamond, star, crescent, or any shape other than a rectangle or square. Flowers were planted for their botanical significance.

Reportedly Jackson enjoyed naked morning dips in the Potomac, followed by weeding in the his garden. Perhaps because he actually worked in the White House gardens, Jackson spared no expense in providing house gardeners with the best grub hoes & mole traps, and it was during Jackson's term that the grounds began to look presentable.

In 1835, after a fire at Mount Vernon, George Washington's descendants presented Jackson with a feather palm that the first president had grown from seed. Jackson built an orangery to store the memorial plant. Citrus fruits for medicinal & culinary purposes shared the warm new space with pots of camellias, which were brought in to decorate White House parties.

Politics invaded the garden during Martin Van Buren's term from 1837 to 1841. Leafing through White House bills, Rep. Charles Ogle of Pennsylvania declared that Van Buren had been busy "constructing fountains, paving footways, planting, transplanting, pruning and dressing horse chestnuts, lindens, beds and borders, training and irrigating honey suckles, trumpet creepers, primroses, lady slippers...and preparing beautiful bouquets for the palace saloons."

1848 August Kollner (1813-1906) The President's House showing the statue.

President James K. Polk (1845–1849) placed a bronze statue of Thomas Jefferson by P. J. David d'Angers on the North Lawn in 1848, where it stood for 27 years before being moved to the Capitol. Polk saw a parallel between himself & the earlier expansionist. The statue stood in the center of the lawn, which was cut regularly & rolled & seasonally decorated with flower beds. Cut off from the driveway by a fence, this small garden was open to the public every day.

1846 First Known Photo of the White House

John Watt was appointed "Gardener for the Kitchen garden belonging to the Presidents House" in 1852. Two years later, in May 1854, he was given control over all the laborers on the grounds of the Presidential Mansion, causing the Public Gardener to entreat the Commissioner of Public Buildings and Parks to write Congress to fund additional staff.

"... having ascertained that Mr. Watt was the most competent person to take charge of the grounds around the President's Mansion, I appointed him to that duty, he still receiving only the pay of a laborer [$40 month]. This involved the necessity of dividing the force under Mr. Maher (the Public Gardener). Nine of the men were left under him, and the other six were placed under Mr. Watt."

Beginning in the term of President Franklin Pierce (1853–57), the president's expanding hothouses were emblematic of the nations's indoor gardening craze, eventually spilling over with the botanical specimins from Commodore Perry's adventures in China and Japan.

1860 The south grounds, showing the first greenhouse, built on the west terrace in 1857. Historical Society of Washington, D.C.

In 1850, the noted landscape gardener Andrew Jackson Downing (1815–1852) developed a landscape plan for the President’s House & the Mall. He attempted to soften the geometry of the L'Enfant plan, incorporating a semicircular southern boundary & some serpentine paths. He enlarged the South Lawn, creating a large circular ground he named the "Parade or President's Park" borderd by densely planted shrubs and trees.

Gardener Watt ran into some controversy just as the Civil War was heating up. He became friends with Mary Todd Lincoln and agreed to help her hide some of her excessive spending by inflating the gardening bills he charged to the government to such an extent that the president had to be informed. Lincoln was incensed, refunded his wife's excesses, and fired Watts in early 1862.

In 1867, garden responsibilities for the White House were transfered to the US Army Corps of Engineers. By 1871, Downing's plan for tree planting was initiated, as Ulysses S. Grant extends the grounds south beyond Jefferson's stone wall and had a great round pool dug into the South Lawn.

1890 Photo of the Proliferation of Greenhouses at the White House during the 19th Century.

After the Civil War, Julia Grant began the tradition of White House garden parties and substituted floral bouquets for social calls. Her husband added a billiard room between the greenhouse and the mansion. But the gardens surrounding the White House even today evolved from Downing's earlier plans.

Hundreds of trees were planted under Rutherford B. Hayes, who initiated the tradition of plantings commemorative trees to represent each President and state. Hayes employed Henry Pfister as his gardener. Pfister remainded through the early 20th century, helping Edith Roosevelt design and install a colonial style garden.

Undated Photo of Grass Cutting on the White House Lawn.
.

American Seed Catalogs from Smithsonian Institution Libraries

2011-04-26T22:16:00.001-04:00

Vegetable Recipes from Virginia's Mary Randolph 1762-1828

2011-04-26T22:09:00.000-04:00

.
CAPER SAUCE

Is made by mixing a sufficient quantity of capers, and adding them to the melted butter, with a little of the liquor from the capers; where capers cannot be obtained, pickled nasturtiums make a very good substitute, or even green pickle minced and put with the butter.
.

American Seed Catalogs from Smithsonian Institution Libraries

2011-04-26T22:07:00.000-04:00

Mushroom Sauce - Vegetable Recipes from Virginia's Mary Randolph 1762-1828

2011-04-26T22:06:00.000-04:00

.
MUSHROOM SAUCE

CLEAN and wash one quart of fresh mushrooms, cut them in two, and put them into a stew-pan, with a little salt, a blade of mace, and a little butter; stew them gently for half an hour, and then add half a pint of cream, and the yelks of two eggs beat very well--keep stirring it till it boils up. Put it over the fowls or turkies--or you may put it on a dish with a piece of fried bread first buttered--then toasted brown, and just dipped into boiling water. This is very good sauce for white fowls of all kinds.
.

American Seed Catalogs from Smithsonian Institution Libraries

2011-04-26T22:03:00.002-04:00

The Frugal Houswife Available in America 1772

2011-04-26T22:02:00.006-04:00

.
A cookbook available in the early American republic was

Susannah Carter
The Frugal Housewife, or Complete Woman Cook;...Also The Making of English Wines. New York: G. & R. Waite, no. 64, Maiden-Lane. 1803

Little is known of Susannah Carter, the author of The Frugal Housewife, which was first published as early as 1765 in London and Dublin, and was first reprinted in America in 1772. The 1772 edition was re-printed in America by Benjamin Edes and John Gil, well-known Boston printers, journalists, and booksellers, famous for publishing the works of many Revolutionary writers, and for their role in instigating the Boston Tea Party.

The Frugal Housewife made no mention of colonial cooking or common American ingredients. It wasn't until 1803 that "an appendix containing several new receipts adapted to the American mode of cooking" was added. This probably was not the work of Susannah Carter, but the result of an editing job by the American publisher in order to attract American readers. the identical appendix appeared 2 years later in the first American edition of The Art of Cookery by Hannah Glasse (Alexandria, 1805), a cookbook very popular in its native England.

The Frugal Housewife was one of several English cookbooks that sold well in America. It strongly influenced the aforementioned Amelia Simmons' American Cookery (1796), the first cookbook authored by an American, and containing not just English fare, but dishes based on American ingredients and common to the early country. Much of Simmons' work is original, but much is copied, verbatim or near verbatim, from The Frugal Housewife - a customary and acceptable practice at the time. Susannah Carter's book eventually saw six American editions; many of her British recipes became American standards via Amelia Simmons, even as the success of American Cookery inspired the Americanization of The Frugal Housewife.

This is the 1803 appendix pertaining to items raised in a garden.

AN APPENDIX, CONTAINING SEVERAL NEW RECEPTS ADAPTED TO THE AMERICAN MODE OF COOKING.

To make a baked Indian Pudding.
ONE quart of boiled milk to five spoonfuls of Indian Meal, one gill of molasses, and salt to your taste; putting it in the oven to bake when it is cold.

An Indian Pudding boiled.
One quart of milk, and three half-pints of Indian meal, and a gill of molasses, then put it in a cloth, and let it boil seven, or eight hours. The water boiling when it is put in. Water may be used instead of milk in case you have none.

To make Mush.
Boil a pot of water, according to the quantity you wish to make, and then stir in the meal till it becomes quite thick, stirring it all the time to keep out the lumps, season with salt, and eat it it with milk or molasses.

Buck-Wheat Cakes.
Take milk-warm water, a little salt, a table spoonful of yeast, and then stir in your buck-wheat till it becomes of the thickness of batter; and then let it enjoy a moderate warmth for one night to raise it, bake the same on a griddle, greasing it first to prevent them from sticking.

To make Pumpkin Pie.
Take the Pumpkin and peel the rind off, then stew it till it is quite soft, and put thereto one pint of pumpkin, one pint of milk, one glass of malaga wine, one glass of rosewater, if you like it, seven eggs, half a pound of fresh butter, one small nutmeg, and sugar and salt to your taste.

Dough Nuts.
To one pound of flour, put one quarter of a pound of butter, one quarter of a pound of sugar, and two spoonfuls of yeast; mix them all together in warm milk or water, of the thickness of bread, let it raise, and make them in what form you please, boil your fat (consisting of hog's lard), and put them in.

To make Cranberry Tarts.
To one pound of flour three quarters of a pound of butter, then stew your Cranberry's to a jelly, putting good brown sugar in to sweeten them, strain the cranberry's, and then put them in your patty-pans for baking in a moderate oven for half an hour.

To pickle Peppers.
Take your peppers and cut a slit in the side of them, put them in cold salt and water for twelve hours, then take them out and put them in fresh salt and water, and hang them over the fire in a brass kettle, letting the water be as hot as you can bear your band in, let them remain over the fire till they turn yellow, when they turn yellow, shift the water, and put them in more salt and water of the same warmth; then cover them with cabbage leaves till they turn green, when they are done, drain the salt and water off, then boil your vinegar, and pour it over them: they will be fit for use in three days.

To pickle Beets.
Put into a gallon of cold vinegar as many beets as the vinegar will hold, and put thereto half an ounce of whole pepper, half an ounce of all spice, a little ginger, if you like it, and one head of garlic.

Note. Boil the beets in clear water, with their dirt on as they are taken out of the earth, then take them out and peal them, and when the vinegar is cold put them in, and in two days they will be fit for use. The spice must be boiled in the vinegar.

To make Peach Sweetmeats.
To one pound of Peaches put half a pound of good brown sugar, with half a pint of water to dissolve it, first clarifying it with an egg; then boil the peaches and sugar together, skimming the egg off, which will rise on the top, till it is of the thickness of a jelly. If you wish to do them whole, do not peel them, but put them into boiling water, and give them a boil, then take them out and wipe them dry.-- Pears are done the same way.

Quince Sweetmeats.
To one pound of quinces put three quarters of a pound of good brown sugar: the quinces boiled. With respect to the rest follow the above receipt.

Green Gage Sweetmeats.
Make a syrup just as you do for quinces; only allowing one pound of sugar, to one pound of gages.-- Plumbs and damsons are made the same way.

A Receipt to make Maple Sugar.
Make an incision in a number of maple trees, at the same time, about the middle of February, and receive the juice of them in wooden or earthen vessels. Strain this juice (after it is drawn from the sediment) and boil it in a wide mouthed kettle. Place the kettle directly over the fire, in such a manner that the flame shall not play upon its sides. Skim the liquor when it is boiling. When it is reduced to a thick syrup and cooled, strain it again, and let it settle for two or three days, in which time it will be fit for granulating. This operation is performed by filling the kettle half full of syrup, and boiling it a second time. To prevent its boiling over, add to it a piece of fresh butter or fat of the size of a walnut. You may easily determine when it is sufficiently boiled to granulate, by cooling a little of it. It must then be put into bags or baskets, through which the water, will drain. This sugar, if refined by the usual process, may be made into as good single or double refined loaves, as were ever made from the sugar obtained from the juice of the West India cane.

To make Maple Molasses.
This may be done three ways.
1. From the thick syrup, obtained by boiling after it is strained for granulation.
2. From the drainings of the sugar after it is granulated.
3. From the last runnings of the tree [which will not granulate] reduced by evaporation to the consistence of molasses.

To make Maple Beer.
To every four gallons of water when boiling, add one quart of maple molasses. When the liquor is cooled to blood heat, put in as much yeast as is necessary to ferment it. Malt or bran may be added to this beer, when agreeable. If a table spoonful of the essence of spruce be added to the above quantities of water and molasses, it makes a most delicious and wholesome drink.

Receipt to make the famous Thieves Vinegar.
Take of wormwood, thyme, rosemary, lavender, sage, rue and mint, each a handful; pour on them a quart of the best wine vinegar, set them eight days in moderate hot ashes, shake them now and then thoroughly, then squeeze the juice out of the contents through a clean cloth; to which add two ounces of camphire. The use thereof is to rinse the mouth, and wash there with under the arm pits, neck and shoulders, temples, palms of the hands, and feet, morning and evening; and to smell frequently thereat, has its salutary effects. N. B. The above receipt did prove an efficacious remedy against the plague in London, when it raged there in the year 1665.

To make Spruce Beer out of the Essence.
For a cask of eighteen gallons take seven ounces of the Essence of Spruce, and fourteen pounds of molasses; mix them with a few gallons of hot water; put it into the cask; then fill the cask with cold water, stir it well, make it about lukewarm; then add about two parts of a pint of good yeast or the grounds of porter; let it stand about four or five days to work, then bung it up tight, and let it stand two or three days, and it will be fit for immediate use after it has been bottled.

To make Spruce Beer out of Shed Spruce.
To one quart of Shed Spruce, two gallons of cold water, and so on in proportion to the quantity you wish to make, then add one pint of molasses to every two gallons, let it boil four or five hours and stand till it is luke-warm, then put one pint of yeast to ten gallons, let it work, then put it into your cask, and bung it up tight, and in two days it will be fit for use.

To make a Bath Pudding.
Take one pint of new milk, six eggs beat well in the milk, four table spoonfuls of fine flour, three table spoonfuls of yeast, three spoonfuls of rose-water, and three spoonfuls of Malaga wine; grate into it a small nutmeg, sweetened with fine soft sugar to your taste; mix them all well together, and let them stand one hour before they are to be baked: bake them in eight small patty-pans, and one large one for the middle of the dish; butter the patty-pans; put them in a fierce oven, and in fifteen minutes they will be done.

To make a pot Pie.
Make a crust and put it round the sides of your pot, then cut your meat in small pieces, of whatever kind the pot-pie is to be made of, and season it with pepper and salt, then put it in the pot and fill it with water, close it with paste on the top; it will take three hours doing.

To make Short Gingerbread.
One pound of superfine flour, to half a pound of good fresh butter, and so on in proportion to the quantity you wish to make, beat your butter till it froths, half an ounce of ginger, a few carraway seeds, and one pound of sugar, roll it out thin and bake it.
Common gingerbread is made the same way, only molasses instead of sugar.

To make Whafles.
One pound of sugar, one pound of flour, one pound of butter, half an ounce of cinnamon, one glass of rose water; make it in balls as big as a nutmeg, and put them in your whafle iron to bake.

To make Crullers.
One pound of flour to half a pound of good brown-sugar, and half a pound of butter, let your hog's lard be boiling, then make them into what form you please, and put them in to fry.

From The Historic American Cookbook Project: Feeding America
.

American Seed Catalogs from Smithsonian Institution Libraries

2011-04-26T22:00:00.000-04:00

Desserts, Breads, and Puddings from Amelia Simmons 1798 Cookbook

2011-04-26T21:59:00.002-04:00

.
Desserts, Breads, and Puddings from Amelia Simmons 1798 Cookbook

Apple Pie.
Stew and strain the apples, to every three pints, grate the peal of a fresh lemon, add cinnamon, mace, rose-water and sugar to your taste--and bake in paste No. 3.

Every species of fruit such as peas, plums, rasberries, black berries may be only sweetened, without spices--and bake in paste No. 3.

Currant Pies.
Take green, full grown currants, and one third their quantity of sugar, proceeding as above.

A buttered apple Pie.
Pare, quarter and core tart apples, lay in paste No. 3. cover with the same; bake half an hour, when drawn, gently raise the top crust, add sugar, butter, cinnamon, mace, wine or rose-water q: s:

P U D D I N G S.

A Rice Pudding.
One quarter of a pound rice, a stick of cinnamon, to a quart of milk (stired often to keep from burning) and boil quick, cool and add half a nutmeg, 4 spoons rose-water, 8 eggs; butter or puff paste a dish and pour the above composition into it, and bake one and half hour.

No. 2. Boil 6 ounces rice in a quart milk, on a slow fire 'till tender, stir in one pound butter, interim beet 14 eggs, add to the pudding when cold with sugar, salt, rose-water and spices to your taste, adding raisins or currants bake as No. 1.

No. 3. 8 spoons rice boiled in 2 quarts milk, when cooled, add 8 eggs, 6 ounces butter, wine, sugar and spices, q: s: bake 2 hours.

No. 4. Boil in water half pound ground rice till soft, add 2 quarts milk and scald, cool and add 8 eggs, 6 ounces butter, 1 pound raisins, salt, cinnamon and a small nutmeg, bake 2 hours.

No. 5. A cheap one, half pint rice, 2 quarts milk, salt, butter, allspice, put cold into a hot oven, bake 2 and half hours.

No. 6. Put 6 ounces rice into water, or milk and water, let it swell or soak tender, then boil gently, stirring in a little butter, when cool stir in a quart cream, 6 or 8 eggs well beaten, and add cinnamon, nutmeg, and sugar to your taste, bake.

N. B. The mode of introducing the ingredients, is a material point; in all cases where eggs are mentioned it is understood to be well beat; whites and yolks and the spices, fine and settled.

A Nice Indian Pudding.
No. 1. 3 pints scalded milk, 7 spoons fine Indian meal, stir well together while hot, let stand till cooled; add 7 eggs, half pound raisins, 4 ounces butter, spice and sugar, bake one and half hour.

No. 2. 3 pints scalded milk to one pint meal salted; cool, add 2 eggs, 4 ounces butter, sugar or molasses and spice q: s: it will require two and half hours baking.

No. 3. Salt a pint of meal, wet with one quart milk, sweeten and put into a strong cloth, brass or bell metal vessel, stone or earthen pot, secure from wet and boil 12 hours.

A Sunderland Pudding.
Whip 6 eggs, half the whites, take half a nutmeg, one pint cream and a little salt, 4 spoons fine flour, oil or butter pans, cups or bowls, bake in a quick oven one hour. Eat with sweet sauce.

A Whitpot.
Cut half a loaf of bread in slices, pour thereon 2 quarts milk, 6 eggs, rose-water, nutmeg and half pound of sugar; put into a dish and cover with paste, No. 1. bake slow 1 hour.

A Bread Pudding.
One pound soft bread or biscuit soaked in one quart milk, run thro' a sieve or cullender, add 7 eggs, three quarters of a pound sugar, one quarter of a pound butter, nutmeg or cinnamon, one gill rose-water, one pound stoned raisins, half pint cream, bake three quarters of an hour, middling oven.

A Flour Pudding.
Seven eggs, one quarter of a pound of sugar, and a tea spoon of salt, beat and put to one quart milk, 5 spoons of flour, cinnamon and nutmeg to your taste, bake half an hour, and serve up with sweet sauce.

A boiled Flour Pudding.
One quart milk, 9 eggs, 7 spoons flour, a little salt, put into a strong cloth and boiled three quarters of an hour.

A Cream Almond Pudding.
Boil gently a little mace and half a nutmeg (grated) in a quart cream; when cool, beat 8 yolks and 3 whites, strain and mix with one spoon flour one quarter of a pound almonds; settled, add one spoon rose-water, and by degrees the cold cream and beat well together; wet a thick cloth and flour it, and pour in the pudding, boil hard half an hour, take out, pour over it melted butter and sugar.

An apple Pudding Dumplin.
Put into paste, quartered apples, lye in a cloth and boil two hours, serve with sweet sauce.

Pears, Plumbs, &c.
Are done the same way.

Potatoe Pudding.
Baked. No. 1. One pound boiled potatoes, one pound sugar, half a pound butter, 10 eggs.

No. 2. One pound boiled potatoes mashed, three quarters of a pound of butter, 3 gills milk or cream, the juice of one lemon and the peal grated, half a pound sugar, half nutmeg, 7 eggs (taking out 3 whites,) 2 spoons rose-water.

Apple Pudding.
One pound apple sifted, one pound sugar, 9 eggs, one quarter of a pound butter, one quart sweet cream, one gill rose-water, a cinnamon, a green lemon peal grated (if sweet apples, add the juice of half a lemon, put on to paste No. 7. Currants, raisins and citron some add, but good without them.

Carrot Pudding.
A coffee cup full of boiled and strained carrots, 5 eggs, 2 ounces sugar and butter each, cinnamon and rose water to your taste, baked in a deep dish without paste.

A Crookneck, or Winter Squash Pudding.
Core, boil and skin a good squash, and bruize it well; take 6 large apples, pared, cored, and stewed tender, mix together; add 6 or 7 spoonsful of dry bread or biscuit, rendered fine as meal, half pint milk or cream, 2 spoons of rose-water, 2 do. wine, 5 or 6 eggs, beaten and strained, nutmeg, salt and sugar to your taste, one spoon flour, beat all smartly together, bake.

The above is a good receipt for Pompkins, Potatoes or Yams, adding more moistening or milk and rose water, and to the two latter a few black or Lisbon currants, or dry whortleberries scattered in, will make it better.

Pompkin.
No. 1. One quart stewed and strained, 3 pints cream, 9 beaten eggs, sugar, mace, nutmeg and ginger, laid into paste No. 7 or 3, and with a dough spur, cross and chequer it, and baked in dishes three quarters of an hour.

No. 2. One quart of milk, 1 pint pompkin, 4 eggs, molasses, allspice and ginger in a crust, bake 1 hour.

Orange Pudding.
Put sixteen yolks with half a pound butter melted, grate in the rinds of two Seville oranges, beat in half pound of fine Sugar, add two spoons orange water, two of rose water, one gill of wine, half pint cream, two naples biscuit or the crumbs of a fine loaf, or roll soaked in cream, mix all together, put it into rich puff-paste, which let be double round the edges of the dish; bake like a custard.

A Lemon Pudding.
1. Grate the yellow of the peals of three lemons, then take two whole lemons, roll under your hand on the table till soft, taking care not to burst them, cut and squeeze them into the grated peals.

2. Take ten ounces soft wheat bread, and put a pint of scalded white wine thereto, let soak and put to No. 1.

3. Beat four whites and eight yolks, and put to above, adding three quarters of a pound of melted butter, (which let be very fresh and good) one pound fine sugar, beat all together till thoroughly mixed.

4. Lay paste No. 7 or 9 on a dish, plate or saucers, and fill with above composition.

5. Bake near 1 hour, and when baked--stick on pieces of paste, cut with a jagging iron or a doughspur to your fancy, baked lightly on a floured paper; garnished thus, they may be served hot or cold.

Puff Pastes for Tarts.
No. 1. Rub one pound of butter into one pound of flour, whip 2 whites and add with cold water and one yolk; make into paste, roll in, in six or seven times one pound of butter, flowring it each roll. This is good for any small thing.

No. 2. Rub 6 pound of butter into fourteen pound of flour, eight eggs, add cold water, make a stiff paste.

No. 3. To any quantity of flour, rub in three fourths of its weight of butter, (12 eggs to a peck) rub in one third or half, and roll in the rest.

No. 4. Into two quarts flour (salted) and wet stiff with cold water roll in, in nine or ten times one and half pound of butter.

No. 5. One pound flour, three fourths of a pound of butter, beat well.

No. 6. To one pound of flour rub in one fourth of a pound of butter wet with three eggs and rolled in a half pound of butter.

A Paste for Sweet Meats.
No. 7. Rub one third of one pound of butter, and one pound of lard into two pound of flour, wet with four whites well beaten; water q: s: to make a paste, roll in the residue of shortening in ten or twelve rollings--bake quick.

No. 8. Rub in one and half pound of suet to six pounds, of flour, and a spoonful of salt, wet with cream, roll in, in six or eight times, two and half pounds of butter--good for a chicken or meat pie.

Royal Paste.
No. 9. Rub half a pound of butter into 1 pound of flour, four whites beat to a foam, add two yolks, two ounces of fine sugar; roll often, rubbing one third, and rolling two thirds of the butter is best; excellent for tarts and apple cakes.

C U S T A R D S
1. One pint cream sweetened to your taste, warmed hot; stir in sweet wine, till curdled, grate in cinnamon and nutmeg.

2. Sweeten a quart of milk, add nutmeg, wine, brandy, rose-water and six eggs; bake in tea cups or dishes, or boil in water, taking care that it don't boil into the cups.

3. Put a stick of cinnamon to one quart of milk, boil well, add six eggs, two spoons of rose-water--bake.

4. Boiled Custard--One pint of cream, two ounces of almonds, two spoons of rose-water, or orange flower water, some mace; boil thick, then stir in sweetening, and lade off into china cups, and serve up.

Rice Custard.
Boil a little mace, a quartered nutmeg in a quart of cream, add rice (well boiled) while boiling sweeten and flavor with orange or rose-water, putting into cups or dishes, when cooled, set to serve up.

A Rich Custard.
Four eggs beat and put to one quarter cream, sweetened to your taste, half a nutmeg, and a little cinnamon--baked.

A sick bed Custard.
Scald a quart of milk, sweeten and salt a little, whip 3 eggs and stir in, bake on coals in a pewter vessel.

TARTS--Apple Tarts.
Stew and strain the apples, add cinnamon, rose-water, wine and sugar to your taste, lay in paste, royal, squeeze thereon orange juice--bake gently.

Cramberries.
Stewed, strained and sweetened, put into paste No. 9, and baked gently.

Marmolade, laid into paste No. 1, baked gently.

Apricots, must be neither pared, cut or stoned, but put in whole, and sugar sifted over them, as above.

Orange or Lemon Tart.
Take 6 large lemons, rub them well in salt, put them into salt and water and let rest 2 days, change them daily in fresh water, 14 days, then cut slices and mince as fine as you can and boil them 2 or 3 hours till tender, then take 6 pippins, pare, quarter and core them, boil in 1 pint fair water till the pippins break, then put the half of the pippins, with all the liquor to the orange or lemon, and add one pound sugar, boil all together one quarter of an hour, put into a gallipot and squeeze thereto a fresh orange, one spoon of which, with a spoon of the pulp of the pippin, laid into a thin royal paste, laid into small shallow pans or saucers, brushed with melted butter, and some superfine sugar sifted thereon, with a gentle baking, will be very good.

N. B. pastry pans, or saucers, must be buttered lightly before the paste is laid on. If glass or China be used, have only a top crust, you can garnish with cut paste, like a lemon pudding or serve on paste No. 7.

Gooseberry Tart.
Lay clean berries and sift over them sugar, then berries and sugar till a deep dish be filled, cover with paste No. 9, and bake some what more than other tarts.

Grapes, must be cut in two and stoned and done like a Gooseberry.

S Y L L A B U B S

To make a fine Syllabub from the Cow.
Sweeten a quart of cyder with double refined sugar, grate nutmeg into it, then milk your cow into your liquor, when you have thus added what quantity of milk you think proper, pour half a pint or more, in proportion to the quantity of syllabub you make, of the sweetest cream you can get all over it.

A Whipt Syllabub.
Take two porringers of cream and one of white wine, grate in the skin of a lemon, take the whites of three eggs, sweeten it to your taste, then whip it with a whisk, take off the froth as it rises and put it into your syllabub glasses or pots, and they are fit for use.

To make a fine Cream.
Take a pint of cream, sweeten it to your pallate, grate a little nutmeg, put in a spoonful of orange flower water, and rose water, and two spoonfuls of wine; beat up four eggs and two whites, stir it all together one way over the fire till it is thick, have cups ready and pour it in.

Lemon Cream.
Take the juice of four large lemons, half a pint of water, a pound of double refined sugar beaten fine, the whites of seven eggs and the yolk of one beaten very well; mix altogether, strain it, set it on a gentle fire, stirring it all the while and skim it clean, put into it the peel of one lemon, when it is very hot, but not to boil; take out the lemon peal and pour it into china dishes.

Raspberry Cream.
Take a quart of thick sweet cream and boil it two or three wallops, then take it off the fire and strain some juices of raspberries into it to your taste, stir it a good while before you put your juice in, that it may be almost cold, when you put it to it, and afterwards stir it one way for almost a quarter of an hour; then sweeten it to your taste and when it is cold you may send it up.

Whipt Cream.
Take a quart of cream and the whites of 8 eggs beaten with half a pint of wine; mix it together and sweeten it to your taste with double refined sugar, you may perfume it (if you please) with musk or Amber gum tied in a rag and steeped a little in the cream, whip it up with a whisk and a bit of a lemon peel tyed in the middle of the whisk, take off the froth with a spoon, and put into glasses.

A Trifle.
Fill a dish with biscuit finely broken, rusk and spiced cake, wet with wine, then pour a good boil'd custard, (not too thick) over the rusk, and put a syllabub over that; garnish with jelly and flowers.

C A K E.

Plumb Cake.
Mix one pound currants, one drachm nutmeg, mace and cinnamon each, a little salt, one pound of citron, orange peal candied, and almonds bleach'd, 6 pound of flour, (well dry'd) beat 21 eggs, and add with 1 quart new ale yeast, half pint of wine, 3 half pints of cream and raisins, q: s:

Plain Cake. Nine pound of flour, 3 pound of sugar, 3 pound of butter, 1 quart emptins, 1 quart milk, 9 eggs, 1 ounce of spice, 1 gill of rose-water, 1 gill of wine.

Another. Three quarters of a pound of sugar, 1 pound of butter, and 6 eggs work'd into 1 pound of flour.

A rich Cake.
Rub 2 pound of butter into 5 pound of flour, add 15 eggs (not much beaten) 1 pint of emptins, 1 pint of wine, kneed up stiff like biscuit, cover well and put by and let rise over night.

To 2 and a half pound raisins, add 1 gill brandy, to soak over night, or if new half an hour in the morning, add them with 1 gill rose-water and 2 and half pound of loaf sugar, 1 ounce cinnamon, work well and bake as loaf cake, No. 1.

Potatoe Cake.
Boil potatoes, peal and pound them, add yolks of eggs, wine and melted butter work with flour into paste, shape as you please, bake and pour over them melted butter, wine and sugar.

Johnny Cake, or Hoe Cake.
Scald 1 pint of milk and put to 3 pints of indian meal, and half pint of flower--bake before the fire. Or scald with milk two thirds of the indian meal, or wet two thirds with boiling water, add salt, molasses and shortening, work up with cold water pretty stiff, and bake as above.

Indian Slapjack.
One quart of milk, 1 pint of indian meal, 4 eggs, 4 spoons of flour, little salt, beat together, baked on gridles, or fry in a dry pan, or baked in a pan which has been rub'd with suet, lard or butter.

Loaf Cakes.
No. 1. Rub 6 pound of sugar, 2 pound of lard, 3 pound of butter into 12 pound of flour, add 18 eggs, 1 quart of milk, 2 ounces of cinnamon, 2 small nutmegs, a tea cup of coriander seed, each pounded fine and sifted, add one pint of brandy, half a pint of wine, 6 pound of stoned raisins, 1 pint of emptins, in it having dried your flour in the oven, dry and roll the sugar fine, rub your shortning and sugar half an hour, it will render the cake much whiter and lighter, heat the oven with dry wood, for 1 and a half hours, if large pans be used, it will then require 2 hours baking, and in proportion for smaller loaves. To frost it. Whip 6 whites, during the baking, add 3 pound of sifted loaf sugar and put on thick, as it comes hot from the oven. Some return the frosted loaf into the oven, it injures and yellows it, if the frosting be put on immediately it does best without being returned into the oven.

Another. No. 2. Rub 4 pound of sugar, 3 and a half pound of shortning, (half butter and half lard) into 9 pound of flour, 1 dozen of eggs, 2 ounces of cinnamon, 1 pint of milk, 3 spoonfuls coriander seed, 3 gills of brandy, 1 gill of wine, 3 gills of emptins, 4 pounds of raisins.

Another. No. 3. Six pound of flour, 3 of sugar, 2 and a half pound of shortning, (half butter, half lard) 6 eggs, 1 nutmeg, 1 ounce of cinnamon and 1 ounce of coriander seed, 1 pint of emptins, 2 gills brandy, 1 pint of milk and 3 pounds of raisins.

Another. No. 4. Five pound of flour, 2 pound of butter, 2 and a half pounds of loaf sugar, 2 and a half pounds of raisins, 15 eggs, 1 pint of wine, 1 pint of emptins, 1 ounce of cinnamon, 1 gill rose-water, 1 gill of brandy--baked like No. 1.

Another Plain Cake.
No. 5. Two quarts milk, 3 pound of sugar, 3 pound of shortning, warmed hot, add a quart of sweet cyder, this curdle, add 18 eggs, allspice and orange to your taste, or fennel, carroway or coriander seeds; put to 9 pounds of flour, 3 pints emptins, and bake well.

Cookies.
One pound sugar boiled slowly in half pint water, scum well and cool, add two tea spoons pearl ash dissolved in milk, then two and half pounds flour, rub in 4 ounces butter, and two large spoons of finely powdered coriander seed, wet with above; make roles half an inch thick and cut to the shape you please; bake fifteen or twenty minutes in a slack oven--good three weeks.

Another Christmas Cookey.
To three pound flour, sprinkle a tea cup of fine powdered coriander seed, rub in one pound butter, and one and half pound sugar, dissolve three tea spoonfuls of pearl ash in a tea cup of milk, kneed all together well, roll three quarters of an inch thick, and cut or stamp into shape and size you please, bake slowly fifteen or twenty minutes; tho' hard and dry at first, if put into an earthen pot, and dry cellar, or damp room, they will be finer, softer and better when six months old.

Molasses Gingerbread.
One table spoon of cinnamon, some coriander or allspice, put to four tea spoons pearl ash, dissolved in half pint water, four pound flour, one quart molasses, four ounces butter, (if in summer rub in the butter, if in winter, warm the butter and molasses and pour to the spiced flour,) knead well 'till stiff, the more the better, the lighter and whiter it will be; bake brisk fifteen minutes; don't scorch; before it is put in, wash it with whites and sugar beat together.

Gingerbread Cakes, or butter and sugar Gingerbread.
No. 1. Three pounds of flour, a grated nutmeg, two ounces ginger, one pound sugar, three small spoons pearl ash dissolved in cream, one pound butter, four eggs, knead it stiff, shape it to your fancy, bake 15 minutes.

Soft Gingerbread to be baked in pans.
No. 2. Rub three pounds of sugar, two pounds of butter, into four pounds of flour, add 20 eggs, 4 ounces ginger, 4 spoons rose water, bake as No. 1.

Butter drop do.
No. 3. Rub one quarter of a pound of butter, one pound sugar, sprinkled with mace, into one pound and a quarter flour, add four eggs, one glass rose water, bake as No. 1.

Gingerbread.
No. 4. Three pound sugar, half pound butter, quarter of a pound of ginger, one doz. eggs, one glass rose water, rub into three pounds, bake as No. 1.

A cheap seed Cake.
Rub one pound sugar, half an ounce allspice into four quarts flour, into which pour one pound butter, melted in one pint milk, nine eggs, one gill emptins, (carroway seed and currants, or raisins if you please) make into two loaves, bake one and half hour.

Queens Cake.
Whip half pound butter to a cream, add 1 pound sugar, ten eggs, one glass wine, half gill rose water, and spices to your taste, all worked into one and a quarter pound flour, put into pans, cover with paper, and bake in a quick well heat oven, 12 or 16 minutes.

Pound Cake.
One pound sugar, one pound butter, one pound flour, one pound or ten eggs, rose water one gill, spices to your taste; watch it well, it will bake in a slow oven in 15 minutes.

Another (called) Pound Cake.
Work three quarters of a pound butter, one pound of good sugar, 'till very white, whip ten whites to a foam, add the yolks and beat together, add one spoon rose water, 2 of brandy, and put the whole to one and a quarter of a pound flour, if yet too soft add flour and bake slowly.

Soft Cakes in little pans.
One and half pound sugar, half pound butter, rubbed into two pounds flour, add one glass wine, one do. rose water, 18 eggs and a nutmeg.

A light Cake to bake in small cups.
Half a pound sugar, half a pound butter, rubbed into two pounds flour, one glass wine, one do. rose water, two do. emptins, a nutmeg, cinnamon and currants.

Shrewsbury Cake.
One pound butter, three quarters of a pound sugar, a little mace, four eggs mixed and beat with your hand, till very light, put the composition to one pound flour, roll into small cakes--bake with a light oven.

N.B. In all cakes where spices are named, it is supposed that they be pounded fine and sifted; sugar must be dryed and rolled fine; flour, dryed in an oven; eggs well beat or whipped into a raging foam.

Diet Bread.
One pound sugar, 9 eggs, beat for an hour, add to 14 ounces flour, spoonful rose water, one do. cinnamon or coriander, bake quick.

R U S K.--To make.
No. 1. Rub in half pound sugar, half pound butter, to four pound flour, add pint milk, pint emptins; when risen well, bake in pans ten minutes, fast.

No. 2. One pound sugar, one pound butter, six eggs, rubbed into 5 pounds flour, one quart emptins and wet with milk, sufficient to bake, as above.

No. 3. One pound sugar, one pound butter, rubbed into 6 or 8 pounds of flour, 12 eggs, one pint emptins, wet soft with milk, and bake.

No. 4. P. C. rusk. Put fifteen eggs to 4 pounds flour and make into large biscuit; and bake double, or one top of another.

No. 5. One pint milk, one pint emptins, to be laid over night in spunge, in morning, melt three quarters of a pound butter, one pound sugar, in another pint of milk, add luke warm, beat till it rise well.

No. 6. Three quarters of a pound butter, 1 pound sugar, 12 eggs, one quart of milk, put as much flour as they will wet, a spoon of cinnamon, gill emptins,let it stand till very puffy or light; roll into small cakes and let it stand on oiled tins while the oven is heating, bake 15 minutes in a quick oven, then wash the top with sugar and whites, while hot.

Biscuit.
One pound flour, one ounce butter, one egg, wet with milk and break while oven is heating, and in the same proportion.

Butter Biscuit.
One pint each milk and emptins, laid into flour, in sponges; next morning add one pound butter melted, not hot, and knead into as much flower as will with another pint of warmed milk, be of a sufficient consistence to make soft--some melt the butter in the milk.

A Butter Drop.
Four yolks, two whites, one pound flour, a quarter of a pound butter, one pound sugar, two spoons rose water, a little mace, baked in tin pans.

P R E S E R V E S.

For Preserving Quinces.
Take a peck of Quinces, pare them, take out the core with a sharp knife, if you wish to have them whole; boil parings and cores with two pound frost grapes, in 3 quarts water, boil the liqour an hour and an half, or till it is thick, strain it thro' a coarse hair sieve, add one and a quarter pound sugar to every pound of quince; put the sugar into the sirup, scald and scim it till it is clear, put the quinces into the sirup, cut up two oranges and mix with the quince, hang them over a gentle fire for five hours, then put them in a stone pot for use, let them in a dry cool place.

For preserving Quinces in Loaf Sugar.
Take a peck of Quinces, put them into a kettle of cold water, hang them over the fire, boil them till they are soft, then take them out with a fork, when cold, pare them, quarter or halve them, if you like; take their weight of loaf sugar, put into a bell-metal kettle
or sauce pan, with one quart of water, scald and skim it till it is very clear, then put in your Quinces, let them boil in the sirup for half an hour, add oranges as before if you like, then put them in stone pots for use.

For preserving Strawberries.
Take two quarts of Strawberries, squeeze them through a cloth, add half a pint of water and two pound sugar, put it into a sauce pan, scald and skim it, take two pound of Strawberries with stems on, set your sauce pan on a chaffing dish, put as many Strawberries into the dish as you can with the stems up without bruising them, let them boil for about ten minutes, then take them out gently with a fork and put them into a stone pot for use; when you have done the whole turn the sirup into the pot, when hot; set them in a cool place for use.

Currants and Cherries may be done in the same way, by adding a little more sugar.

The American Citron.
Take the rine of a large watermelon not too ripe, cut it into small pieces, take two pound of loaf sugar, one pint of water, put it all into a kettle, let it boil gently for four hours, then put it into pots for use.

To keep White Bullace, Pears, Plumbs, or Damsons, &c. for tarts or pies.
Gather them when full grown, and just as they begin to turn, pick all the largest out, save about two thirds of the fruit, to the other third put as much water as you think will cover them, boil and skim them; when the fruit is boiled very soft, strain it through a coarse hair sieve; and to every quart of this liquor put a pound and a half of sugar, boil it, and skim it very well; then throw in your fruit, just give them a scald; take them off the fire, and when cold, put them into bottles with wide mouths, pour your sirup over them, lay a piece of white paper over them, and cover them with oil.

To make Marmalade.
To two pounds of quinces, put three quarters of a pound of sugar and a pint of spring water; then put them over the fire, and boil them till they are tender; then take them up and bruise them; then put them into the liquor, let it boil three quarters of an hour, and then put it into your pots or saucers.

To preserve Mulberries whole.
Set some mulberries over the fire in a skillet or preserving pan; draw from them a pint of juice when it is strained; then take three pounds of sugar beaten very fine, wet the sugar with the pint of juice, boil up your sugar and skim it, put in two pounds of ripe mulberries, and let them stand in the sirup till they are thoroughly warm, then set them on the fire, and let them boil very gently; do them but half enough, so put them by in the sirup till next day, then boil them gently again; when the sirup is pretty thick, and will stand in round drops when it is cold, they are done enough, so put all into a gallipot for use.

To preserve Goosberries, Damsons, or Plumbs.
Gather them when dry, full grown, and not ripe; pick them one by one, put them into glass bottles that are very clean and dry, and cork them close with new corks; then put a kettle of water on the fire, and put in the bottles with care; wet not the corks, but let the water come up to the necks; make a gentle fire till they are a little codled and turn white; do not take them up till cold, then pitch the corks all over, or wax them close and thick; then set them in a cool dry cellar.

To preserve Peaches.
Put your peaches in boiling water, just give them a scald, but don't let them boil, take them out, and put them in cold water, then dry them in a sieve, and put them in long wide mouthed bottles: to half a dozen peaches take a quarter pound of sugar,clarify it, pour it over your peaches, and fill the bottles with brandy, stop them close, and keep them in a close place.

To preserve Apricots.
Take your apricots and pare them, then stone what you can whole; give them a light boiling in a pint of water, or according to your quantity of fruit; then take the weight of your apricots in sugar, and take the liquor which you boil them in, and your sugar, and boil it till it comes to a sirup, and give them a light boiling, taking off the scum as it rises; when the sirup jellies, it is enough; then take up the apricots, and cover them with the jelly, and put cut paper over them, and lay them down when cold. Or, take your plumbs before they have stones in them, which you many know by putting a pin through them, then codle them in many waters, till they are as green as grass; peel them and codle them again; you must take the weight of them in sugar and make a sirup; put to your sugar a pint of water; then put them in, set them on the fire to boil slowly, till they be clear, skimming them often, and they will be very green. Put them up in glasses, and keep them for use.

To preserve Cherries.
Take two pounds of cherries, one pound and a half of sugar, half a pint of fair water, melt some sugar in it; when it is melted, put in your other sugar and your cherries; then boil them softly, till all the sugar be melted; then boil them fast, and skim them; take them off two or three times and shake them, and put them on again, and let them boil fast; and when they are of a good colour, and the sirup will stand, they are boiled enough.

To preserve Raspberries.
Chuse raspberries that are not too ripe, and take the weight of them in sugar, wet your sugar with a little water, and put in your berries, and let them boil softly; take heed of breaking them; when they are clear, take them up, and boil the sirup till it be thick enough, then put them in again; and when they are cold, put them up in glasses.

To preserve Currants.
Take the weight of the currants in sugar, pick out the seeds; take to a pound of sugar, half a pint of water, let it melt; then put in your currants and let them do very leisurely, skim them, and take them up, let the sirup boil; then put them on again; and when they are clear, and the sirup thick enough, take them off, and when they are cold, put them up in glasses.

To preserve Plumbs.
Take your plumbs before they have stones in them, which you may know by putting a pin through them, then codle them in many waters till they are as green as grass, peel them and codle them again; you must take the weight of them in sugar, a pint of water, then put them in, set them on the fire, to boil slowly till they be clear, skimming them often, and they will be very green; put them up in glasses and keep them for use.

Currant Jelly.
Having stripped the currants from the stalks, put them in a stone jar, stop it close, set it in a kettle of boiling water, half way the jar, let it boil half an hour, take it out and strain the juice through a coarse hair sieve, to a pint of juice put a pound of sugar, set it over a fine quick fire in a preserving pan, or a bell-metal skillet, keep stiring it all the time till the sugar be melted, then skim the skum off as fast as it rises. When the jelly is very clear and fine, pour it into earthen or china cups, when cold, cut white papers just the bigness of the top of the pot, and lay on the jelly, dip those papers in brandy, then cover the top of the pot and prick it full of holes, set it in a dry place; you may put some into glasses for present use.

American Cookery, or the art of dressing viands, fish, poultry, and vegetables, and the best modes of making pastes, puffs, pies, tarts, puddings, custards, and preserves, and all kinds of cakes, from the imperial plum to plain cake: Adapted to this country, and all grades of life.
By Amelia Simmons
Hartford: Printed for Simeon Butler, Northampton, (1798)

Note: This information also appears in a book which is essentially a pirated editon of Amelia Simmons' American Cookery (1798).
The New-England cookery, or the art of dressing all kinds of flesh, fish, and vegetables, and the best modes of making pastes, puffs, pies, tarts, puddings, custards and preserves, and all kinds of cakes, from the imperial plumb to the plain cake. Particularly adapted to this part of our country.
By Lucy Emerson
Montpelier, VT: Printed for Josiah Parks, 1808.
.

American Seed Catalogs from Smithsonian Institution Libraries

2011-04-26T21:56:00.000-04:00

Gaspacho - Vegetable Recipes from Virginia's Mary Randolph 1762-1828

2011-04-26T21:54:00.000-04:00

.
GASPACHO--SPANISH

PUT some soft biscuit or toasted bread in the bottom of a sallad bowl, put in a layer of sliced tomatos with the skin taken off, and one of sliced cucumbers, sprinkled with pepper, salt, and chopped onion; do this until the bowl is full; stew some tomatos quite soft, strain the juice, mix in some mustard, oil, and water, and pour over it; make it two hours before it is eaten.
.

American Seed Catalogs from Smithsonian Institution Libraries

2011-04-26T21:50:00.000-04:00

On Fruits, Vegetables, & Herbs from Amelia Simmons 1798 Cookbook

2011-04-26T21:48:00.002-04:00

.
On Fruits, Vegetables, & Herbs 1798 Amelia Simmons Cookbook

ROOTS and VEGETABLES--and the best cook cannot alter the first quality, they must be good, or the cook will be disappointed.

Potatoes, take rank for universal use, profit and early acquirement. The smooth skin, known by the name of How's Potatoe, is the most mealy and richest flavor'd; the yellow rusticoat next best; the red, and red rusticoat are tolerable; and the yellow Spanish have their value--those cultivated from imported feed on sandy or dry loomy lands, are best for table use; though the red or either will produce more in rich, loomy, highly manured garden grounds; new lands and a sand foil, afford the richest flavor'd; and most mealy Potatoe much depends on the ground on which they grow--more on the species of Potatoes planted--and still more from foreign feeds--and each may be known by attention to connoisseurs; for a good potatoe comes up in many branches of cookery, as herein after prescribed.--All potatoes should be dug before the rainy seasons in the fall, well dryed in the sun, kept from frost and dampness during the winter, in the spring removed from the cellar to a dry loft, and spread thin, and frequently stirred and dryed, or they will grow and be thereby injured for cookery.

A roast Potatoe is brought on with roast Beef, a Steake, a Chop, or Fricassee; good boiled with a boiled dish; make an excellent stuffing for a turkey, water or wild fowl; make a good pie, and a good starch for many uses. All potatoes run out, or depreciate in America; a fresh importation of the Spanish might restore them to table use.

It would swell this treatise too much to say every thing that is useful, to prepare a good table, but I may be pardoned by observing, that the Irish have preserved a genuine mealy rich Potatoe, for a century, which takes rank of any known in any other kingdom; and I have heard that they renew their feed by planting and cultivating the Seed Ball, which grows on the tine. The manner of their managing it to keep up the excellency of that root, would better suit a treatise on agriculture and gardening than this--and be inserted in a book which would be read by the farmer, instead of his aimiable daughter. If no one treats on the subject, it may appear in the next edition.

Onions--The Medeira white is best in market, esteemed softer flavored, and not so fiery, but the high red, round hard onions are the best; if you consult cheapness, the largest are best; if you consult taste and softness, the very smallest are the most delicate, and used at the first tables. Onions grow in the richest, highest cultivated ground, and better and better year after year, on the same ground.

Beets, grow on any ground, but best on loom, or light gravel grounds; the red is the richest and best approved; the white has a sickish sweetness, which is disliked by many.

Parsnips, are a valuable root, cultivated best in rich old grounds, and doubly deep plowed, late sown, they grow thrifty, and are not so prongy; they may be kept any where and any how, so that they do not grow with heat, or are nipped with frost; if frosted, let them thaw on earth; they are richer flavored when plowed out of the ground in April, having stood out during the winter, though they will not last long after, and commonly more sticky and hard in the centre.

Carrots, are managed as it respects plowing and rich ground, similarly to Parsnips. The yellow are better than the orange and red; middling siz'd, that is, a foot long and two inches thick at the top end, are better than over grown ones; they are cultivated best with onions, sowed very thin, and mixed with other seeds, while young or six weeks after sown, especially if with onions on true onion ground. They are good with veal cookery, rich in soups, excellent with hash, in May and June.

Garlicks, though used by the French, are better adapted to the uses of medicine than cookery.

Asparagus--the mode of cultivation belongs to gardening; your business is only to cut and dress, the largest is best, the growth of a day sufficient, six inches long, and cut just above the ground; many cut below the surface, under an idea of getting tender shoots, and preserving the bed; but it enfeebles the root: dig round it and it will be wet with the juices--but if cut above ground, and just as the dew is going off, the sun will either reduce the juice, or send it back to nourish the root--its an excellent vegetable.

Parsley, of the three kinds, the thickest and branchiest is the best, is sown among onions, or in a bed by itself, may be drying for winter use; tho' a method which I have experienced is much better--In September, I dig my roots, procure an old thin stave dry cask, bore holes an inch diameter in every stave, 6 inches asunder round the cask, and up to the top--take first a half bushel of rich garden mold and put into the cask, then run the roots through the staves, leaving the branches outside, press the earth tight about the root within, and thus continue on thro' the respective stories, till the cask is full; it being filled, run an iron bar thro' the center of the dirt in the cask, and fill with water, let stand on the fourth and east side of a building till frosty night, then remove it, (by slinging a rope around the cask) into the cellar; where, during the winter, I clip with my scissars the fresh parsley, which my neighbors or myself have occasion for; and in the spring transplant the roots in the bed in the garden, or in any unused corner--or let stand upon the wharf, or the wash shed. Its an useful mode of cultivation, and a pleasurably tasted herb, and much used in garnishing viands.

Raddish, Salmon coloured is the best, purple next best--white--turnip--each are produced from southern feeds, annually. They grow thriftiest sown among onions. The turnip Raddish will last well through the winter.

Artichokes--the Jerusalem is best, are cultivated like potatoes, (tho' their stocks grow 7 feet high) and may be preserved like the turnip raddish, or pickled--they like,

Horse Raddish, once in the garden, can scarcely ever be totally eradicated, plowing or digging them up with that view, seems at times rather to increase and spread them.

Cucumbers, are of many kinds; the prickly is best for pickles, but generally bitter; the white is difficult to raise and tender; choose the bright green, smooth and proper sized.

Melons-- The Water Melons is cultivated on sandy soils only, above latitude 41 1-2, if a stratum of land be dug from a well, it will bring the first year good Water Melons; the red cored are highest flavored; a hard rine proves them ripe.

Muskmelons, are various, the rough skinned is best to eat; the short, round, fair skinned, is best for Mangoes.

Lettuce, is of various kinds; the purple spotted leaf is generally the tenderest, and free from bitter--your taste must guide your market.

Cabbage, requires a page, they are so multifarious. Note, all Cabbages have a higher relish that grow on new unmanured grounds; if grown in an old town and on old gardens, they have a rankness, which at times, may be perceived by a fresh air traveller. This observation has been experienced for years--that Cabbages require new ground, more than Turnips.

The Low Dutch, only will do in old gardens.

The Early Yorkshire, must have rich foils, they will not answer for winter, they are easily cultivated, and frequently bro't to market in the fall, but will not last the winter.

The Green Savoy, with the richest crinkles, is fine and tender; and altho' they do not head like the Dutch or Yorkshire, yet the tenderness of the out leaves is a counterpoise, it will last through the winter, and are high flavored.

The Yellow Savoy, takes next rank, but will not last so long; all Cabbages will mix, and participate of other species, like Indian Corn; they are culled, best in plants; and a true gardener will, in the plant describe those which will head, and which will not. This is new, but a fact.

The gradations in the Savoy Cabbage are discerned by the leaf; the richest and most scollup'd, and crinkled, and thickest Green Savoy, falls little short of a Colliflower.

The red and redest small tight heads, are best for slaw, it will not boil well, comes out black or blue, and tinges other things with which it is boiled.

To boil Cabbage.
If your cabbage is large, cut it into quarters; if small, cut it in halves; let your water boil, then put in a little salt, and next your cabbage with a little more salt upon it; make your water boil as soon as possible, and when the stalk is tender, take up your cabbage into a cullender, or sieve, that the water may drain off, and send it to table as hot as you can.
Savoys are dressed in the same manner.

B E A N S.

The Clabboard Bean, is easiest cultivated and collected, are good for string beans, will shell--must be poled.

The Windsor Bean, is an earlier, good string, or shell Bean.

Crambury Bean, is rich, but not universally approved equal to the other two.

Frost Bean, is good only to shell.

Six Weeks Bean, is a yellowish Bean, and early brought forward, and tolerable.

Lazy Bean, is tough, and needs no pole.

English Bean what they denominate the Horse Bean, is mealy when young, is profitable, easily cultivated, and may be grown on worn out grounds; as they may be raised by boys, I cannot but recommend the more extensive cultivation of them.

The Small White Bean, is best for winter use, and excellent.

Calivanse, are run out, a yellow small bush, a black speck or eye, are tough and tasteless, and little worth in cookery, and scarcely bear exportation,

Peas--Green Peas.

The Crown Imperial, takes rank in point of flavor, they blossom, purple and white on the top of the vines, will run from three to five feet high, should be set in light sandy soil only, or they run too much to vines.

The Crown Pea, is second in richness of flavor.

The Rondehaval, is large and bitterish.

Early Carlton, is produced first in the season--good.

Marrow Fats, green, yellow, and is large, easily cultivated, not equal to others.

Sugar Pea, needs no bush, the pods are tender and good to eat, easily cultivated.

Spanish Manratto, is a rich Pea, requires a strong high bush.

All Peas should be picked carefully from the vines as soon as dew is off, shelled and cleaned without water, and boiled immediately; they are thus the richest flavored.

To boil all kinds of Garden Stuff. In dressing all sorts of kitchen garden herbs, take care they are clean washed; that there be no small snails, or caterpillars between the leaves; and that all the coarse, outer leaves, and the tops that have received any injury by the weather, be taken off; next wash them in a good deal of water, and put them into a cullender to drain, care must likewise be taken, that your pot or sauce pan be clean, well tinned, and free from sand, or grease.

To keep Green Peas till Christmas.
Take young peas, shell them, put them in a cullender to drain, then lay a cloth four or five times double on a table, then spread them on, dry them very well, and have your bottles ready, fill them, cover them with mutton suet fat when it is a little soft; fill the necks almost to the top, cork them, tie a bladder and a leather over them and set them in a dry cool place.

To boil French Beans.
Take your beans and string them, cut in two and then across, when you have done them all, sprinkle them over with salt, stir them together, as soon as your water boils put them in and make them boil up quick, they will be soon done and they will look of a better green than when growing in the garden; if they are very young, only break off the ends, then break in two and dress them in the same manner.

To boil broad Beans.
Beans require a great deal of water and it is not best to shell them till just before they are ready to go into the pot, when the water boils put them in with some picked parsley and some salt, make them boil up quick, when you see them begin to fall, they are done enough, strain them off, garnish the dish with boiled parsley and send plain butter in a cup or boat.

To boil green Peas.
When your peas are shelled and the water boils, which should not be much more than will cover them, put them in with a few leaves of mint, as soon as they boil put in a piece of butter as big as a walnut, and stir them about, when they are done enough, strain them off, and sprinkle in a little salt, shake them till the water drains off, send them hot to the table with melted butter in a cup or boat.

To boil Asparagus.
First cut the white ends off about six inches from the head, and scrape them from the green part downward very clean, as you scrape them, throw them into a pan of clear water, and after a little soaking, tie them up in small even bundles, when your water boils, put them in, and boil them quick; but by over boiling they will lose their heads; cut a slice of bread for a toast, and toast it brown on both sides; when your asparagus is done, take it up carefully; dip the toast in the asparagus water, and lay it in the bottom of your dish; then lay the heads of the asparagus on it, with the white ends outwards; pour a little melted butter over the heads; cut an orange into small pieces, and stick them between for garnish.

Herbs, useful in Cookery.

Thyme, is good in soups and stuffings.

Sweet Marjoram, is used in Turkeys.

Summer Savory, ditto, and in Sausages and salted Beef, and legs of Pork.

Sage, is used in Cheese and Pork, but not generally approved.

Parsley, good in soups, and to garnish roast Beef, excellent with bread and butter in the spring.

Penny Royal, is a high aromatic, although a spontaneous herb in old ploughed fields, yet might be more generally cultivated in gardens, and used in cookery and medicines.

Sweet Thyme, is most useful and best approved in cookery.

F R U I T S.

Pears, There are many different kinds; but the large Bell Pear, sometimes called the Pound Pear, the yellowest is the best, and in the same town they differ essentially.

Hard Winter Pear, are innumerable in their qualities, are good in sauces, and baked.

Harvest and Summer Pear are a tolerable desert, are much improved in this country, as all other fruits are by grafting and innoculation.

Apples, are still more various, yet rigidly retain their own species, and are highly useful in families, and ought to be more universally cultivated, excepting in the most compactest cities. There is not a single family but might set a tree in some otherwise useless spot, which might serve the two fold use of shade and fruit; on which 12 or 14 kinds of fruit trees might easily be engrafted, and essentially preserve the orchard from the intrusions of boys, &c. which is too common in America. If the boy who thus planted a tree, and guarded and protected it in a useless corner, and carefully engrafted different fruits, was to be indulged free access into orchards, whilst the neglectful boy was prohibited--how many millions of fruit trees would spring into growth--and what a saving to the union. The net saving would in time extinguish the public debt, and enrich our cookery.

Currants, are easily grown from shoots trimmed off from old bunches, and set carelessly in the ground; they flourish on all soils, and make good jellies--their cultivation ought to be encouraged.

Black Currants, may be cultivated--but until they can be dryed, and until sugars are propagated, they are in a degree unprofitable.

Grapes, are natural to the climate; grow spontaneously in every state in the union, and ten degrees north of the line of the union. The Madeira, Lisbon and Malaga Grapes, are cultivated in gardens in this country, and are a rich treat or desert. Trifling attention only is necessary for their ample growth.

To dry Peaches.
Take the fairest and ripest peaches, pare them into fair water; take their weight in double refined sugar; of one half make a very thin sirup; then put in your peaches, boiling them till they look clear, then split and stone them, boil them till they are very tender, lay them a draining, take the other half of the sugar, and boil it almost to a candy; then put in your peaches, and let them lie all night, then lay them on a glass, and set them in a stove, till they are dry, if they are sugared too much, wipe them with a wet cloth a little; let the first sirup be very thin, a quart of water to a pound of sugar.

To pickle or make Mangoes of Melons.
Take green melons, as many as you please, and make a brine strong enough to bear an egg; then pour it boiling hot on the melons, keeping them down under the brine; let them stand five or six days; then take them out, slit them down on one side, take out all the seeds, scrape them well in the inside, and wash them clean with cold water; then take a clove of garlick, a little ginger and nutmeg sliced, and a little whole pepper; put all these proportionably into the melons, filling them up with mustard-seeds; then lay them in an earthen pot with the slit upwards, and take one part of mustard and two parts of vinegar, enough to cover them, pouring it upon them scalding hot, and keep them close stopped.

To pickle Barberries.
Take of white wine vinegar and water, of each an equal quantity; to every quart of this liquor, put in half a pound of cheap sugar, then pick the worst of your barberries and put into this liquor, and the best into glasses; then boil your pickle with the worst of your barberries, and skim it very clean, boil it till it looks of a fine colour, then let it stand to be cold, before you strain it; then strain it through a cloth, wringing it to get all the colour you can from the barberries; let it stand to cool and settle, then pour it clear into the glasses; in a little of the pickle, boil a little fennel; when cold, put a little bit at the top of the pot or glass, and cover it close with a bladder or leather. To every half pound of sugar, put a quarter of a pound of white salt.

To pickle Cucumbers.
Let your cucumbers be small, fresh gathered, and free from spots; then make a pickle of salt and water, strong enough to bear an egg; boil the pickle and skim it well, and then pour it upon your cucumbers, and stive them down for twenty four hours; then strain them out into a cullender, and dry them well with a cloth, and take the best white wine vinegar, with cloves, sliced mace, nutmeg, white pepper corns, long pepper, and races of ginger, (as much as you please) boil them up together, and then clap the cucumbers in, with a few vine leaves, and a little salt, and as soon as they begin to turn their colour, put them into jars, stive them down close, and when cold, tie on a bladder and leather.

To keep Damsons.
Take damsons when they are first ripe, pick them off carefully, wipe them clean, put them into snuff bottles, stop them up tight so that no air can get to them, nor water; put nothing into the bottles but plumbs, put the bottles into cold water, hang them over the fire, let them heat slowly, let the water boil slowly for half an hour, when the water is cold take out the bottles, set the bottles into a cold place, they will keep twelve months if the bottles are stopped tight, so as no air nor water can get to them. They will not keep long after the bottles are opened; the plumbs must be hard.

American Cookery, or the art of dressing viands, fish, poultry, and vegetables, and the best modes of making pastes, puffs, pies, tarts, puddings, custards, and preserves, and all kinds of cakes, from the imperial plum to plain cake: Adapted to this country, and all grades of life.
By Amelia Simmons
Hartford: Printed for Simeon Butler, Northampton, (1798)

Note: This information also appears in a book which is essentially a pirated editon of Amelia Simmons' American Cookery (1798).
The New-England cookery, or the art of dressing all kinds of flesh, fish, and vegetables, and the best modes of making pastes, puffs, pies, tarts, puddings, custards and preserves, and all kinds of cakes, from the imperial plumb to the plain cake. Particularly adapted to this part of our country.
By Lucy Emerson
Montpelier, VT: Printed for Josiah Parks, 1808.
.

American Seed Catalogs from Smithsonian Institution Libraries

2011-04-26T21:46:00.000-04:00