Women's Work 1863 - US Women as Root, Bark, & Seed Gatherers.

Women Gathering Roots? Engraved by R D Havell after George Walker Published by Robinson and Son Leeds

When the grass is bowed by the sparkling dew, & the hills shrouded in mist, plants exhale most freely their sweet odors. They are then gathered & sold to manufacturers, who prepare from them oils, essences, & perfumeries. 

An old Quaker lady on Tenth street, Philadelphia, keeping an herb store, told me that she purchases her herbs mostly of men, but some women do bring them to sell. 

It requires a knowledge of botany to gather them, & the stage of the moon must be observed. Digging roots, & gathering plants, at all seasons, is a hard business. 

At another herb store, Í learned that the prices paid gatherers depend much on the kind of herb, the difficulty of obtaining it, & the season when it is gathered. A woman may earn $1 a week, or she may earn as much as $10. 

The roots & herbs are bought by weight. Many are purchased fresh in market, but some of the gatherers dry them. They are sent from different parts of the Union to the cities & towns. One told me that she would rather purchase herbs & seed put up by women, for they are neater & more careful with their work. She sells most in spring & fall. An Indian doctress told me barks must be gathered in the spring & fall, when they are full of sap; & roots, when the leaves are faded or dead. She sometimes makes $20 worth of syrup in a day. She says the business requires some knowledge of plants, experience in the times of gathering, amount of drying, &c. 

The Employments of Women: A Cyclopaedia of Woman's Work by Virginia Panny Published Boston, MA. by Walker, Wise & Company. 1863

To read about women's changing roles in the 2nd half of the 19th century. see:
Boorstin, Daniel. The Americans: The Democratic Experience. New York:Random House, 1973.
Clinton, Catherine. The Other Civil War: American Women in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Hill and Wang, 1984.
Cott, Nancy. A Heritage of Her Own: Toward a New Social History of Women. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979.
Cott Nancy. History of Women in the United States, Part 6, Working the Land. New York: K. G. Saur, 1992.
Degler, Carl. At Odds: Women and the Family from Revolution to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.
Green, Harvey. The Light of the Home: An Intimate View of the Lives of Women in Victorian America. New York: Pantheon Books, 1983.
Juster, Norton. So Sweet to Labor: Rural Women in America 1865-1895. New York: The Viking Press, 1979.
Kessler-Harris, Alice. Out to Work: A History of Wage Earning Women in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982
Mintz, Stephen and Susan Kellogg. Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life. New York: Free Press; London: Collier Macmillan, 1988.
Ryan, Mary P. Womanhood in America front he Colonial Times to the Present. New York: F. Watts, 1983.
Smith-Rosenberg, Caroll. Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Strasser, Susan. Never Done: A History of American Housework. New York Pantheon Books, 1982.
Welter, Barbara. Dimity Convictions : the American Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Athens : Ohio University Press, 1976.

Black & White Apprentice Gardeners from Philadelphia to Charleston

The growth of professional gardening trades in 18th century America spawned a need for apprentices to assist the craftsmen in their daily chores while training to become the professional gardeners of the future.

Apprentice gardeners were young boys sent to live away from home to learn the trade of gardener. They were usually placed by their parents or guardians or by the courts as orphans to serve under master or tradesmen gardeners for a given period.

Under such an arrangement, intended for the mutual benefit of both the gardener and the young student-laborer, the master contracted to supply instruction, & generally food & lodging, or a weekly sum as an equivalent to what those necessities would cost. The parents of the apprentice gardener would agree to that their charge would be of service to the master gardener his apprenticeship as their part of the contract.

The terms of apprenticeship was generally 3 years. But in America, it is apparent that boys as young as 8 were contracted out to gardeners, and they often served longer than 3 years. Custom and laws called for apprenticeship to end at the age when the attained "manhood."

In England, few could expect to attain to the rank either of master-gardener or tradesman, who had not served an apprenticeship to the one or the other. On the American side of the Atlantic, because the trade & gardens were generally less developed, advancement in the field of gardening was more open to those who never served an apprenticeship.

In Philadelphia, market or truck gardener Richard Collings, who kept a covered seed & plant stall at the Jersey Market, adverised in the 1770 Pennsylvania Gazette, "Any person that has a boy that inclines to learn the art and mystery of a Gardiner, my apply." Market or truck gardeners & farmers grew produce to sell at the markets that supplied food for the growing populations of urban dwellers along the Atlantic coast in the 18th century. They grew culinary vegetables & fruits. Some grew only the more common hardy edibles for the kitchen, such as cabbage, pease, & turnips. Others supplied plants for propagation, such as cauliflowers, celery, & artichoke-plants, & pot-herbs, as mint and thyme. The most ambitious market growers grew items in hot-houses, & produced mushrooms, melons, pineapples, & other more exotic fruits over a longer growing season.
Young men who had apprenticed to other trades were sometimes called into garden service during the growing season. In Annapolis, craftsman William Faris used his clockmaking apprentice as garden help on several occasions.

In Maryland, several young boys were employed as apprentices by both professional gardeners & directly by owners of private gardens. In 1788, at age 8, William Lucas was bound out to Joseph Bignall, a professional gardener. Another 8-year-old, William Martin, was apprenticed to Jacob Eichelberger at his private residence in Baltimore County in 1786, to learn the art of gardening.
A lad named Cornelius Lary was bound out by his older sister at the age of 10, as a gardening apprentice to John Toon, who operated Toon’s Garden in Baltimore County. Toon’s Garden was one of several commercial pleasure gardens operating in the Baltimore area at the turn of the century. In the 1800-1801 Baltimore City directory, the 10-acre Toon’s Gardens was described as being “situated about two miles down the [Patapsco] river…on an elevated situation,” & was said to “command a view of the city & bay...During the summer months,” the directory recounted, “a great concourse of citizens make excursions by land & water to these Gardens…with all kinds of refreshments.”

Andrew Smith was a Charleston, South Carolina, gardener in 1795, who advertised to train apprentices in the “art of gardening” in the March 12 edition of the City Gazette and The Daily Advertiser, "THE Subscriber has taken a lease of Widderburn Lodge, formerly called the Grove; he will take in apprentices for three years, to be instructed in the art of gardening and farming in general, to the best advantage; as great improvement will be made on the farm, in the garden, orchard, and in the common field, the sooner they were to enter to work the better. He does not wish any gentleman to send any negro unless of good principles, obedient to orders, and of a good genius. There is good accommodations on the farm for negros of every size and description. Andrew Smith."

Also in Charleston, South Carolina, gardener John Bryant, active in that city between 1795-1810, advertised for an apprentice to help him in 1796. “An Apprentice is wanted to the above business, either white or colored. A Lad that is honest and industrious will meet with every encouragement.”

Occasionally gardeners advertised their need for apprentices through help-wanted notices in local newspapers. When the enterprising William Booth was establishing his nursery, he advertised, on March 2 1795, in the Federal Intelligence & Baltimore Daily Gazette, that he was looking for one or two boys between the ages of 10 & 12 to serve as apprentice gardeners. As ad inducement, Booth noted that in several years such trainees would be capable of managing the gardens of gentlemen’s county seats around Baltimore, which, he declared, were “going to ruin, for the want of a skillful gardener.”

Booth’s ad reflected the post-Revolutionary trends in professional gardening in the 18th-century Mid-Atlantic & South. White indentured & convict servants from the British Isles & black slaves had toiled side by side to design & maintain Mid-Atlantic & South gardens before the war with England.
After the Revolution, growing numbers of immigrant European, Caribbean, & British independent gardeners, assisted by white apprentices & free & slave blacks, took over the work. The American Revolution was the turning point in the development of independent gardening in the newly emerging capitalist nation, However, some aspects of Mid-Atlantic & South gardening did not change until the Civil War.

John Renauld was a gardener who immigrated from Rambouillet, France to Charleston some years after his birth in 1772. His only newspaper notice occurred in the Charleston City Gazette and Daily Advertiser when he lost his young garden apprentice on July 7. 1806. "Strayed, From the subscriber, a small new Negro Boy named JIM; about four feet 5 or 6 inches high; slender make and this vissage; has a scar on the right side of his face- above his eye; had on an oznaburgs shirt and blue cassimere trowsers. Whoever will deliver the said Boy at No. 34 Tradd-street, shall receive a reward of Five Dollars. JOHN RENAULD."

As visiting English agriculturalist Richard Parkinson pointed out about the Chesapeake and the South at the end of the 18th-century, “where the livelihood is got out of the poor soil--it is pinched & screwed out of the negro.”

Garden Labor - Family

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Family Garden Helpers

Surprisingly, landed gentry & small town merchants & artisans generally employed the same kinds of help in the garden during the latter half of the 18th century in the Mid-Atlantic & Upper South. (That region usually includes Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Washington DC, & Virginia; but my research seldom is all-inclusive for the entire area.)

While there are not many records of exactly who was working in the garden during the growing season, there are a few. Hard-working Annapolis craftsman William Faris used apprenticed & indentured white servants, free & slave blacks, & his own family to maintain his Annapolis garden. Here the use of garden labor between the artisan & the gentry differed.

At the homes of the gentry, the family seldom helped with garden tasks, except that the wives usually managed the daily activities of the kitchen garden and the poultry yard, as well as daily tasks of the house staff.

All of craftsman Faris' children, who were living close to home between 1792 & 1804, (when Faris was recording daily in his diary) helped in the garden, usually assisting a slave or temporary hired help.

Faris’ unmarried sons still living in Annapolis, who had apprenticed under their father before going out on their own as professional clockmakers & silversmiths, continued to serve as occasional garden labor for their aging father, who was 64 years old in 1792. One son was 27, & the other was 23 in 1792.
The craftsman’s unmarried daughters all helped in the garden, until they left home. Faris first mentioned his youngest daughter’s helping in the garden in 1794, when she was fifteen. His two oldest daughters, unmarried & heavily into the Annapolis social scene, also assisted in Faris’s garden in 1799, when the eldest was 25 & her sister was 24.

Notation of garden work by Faris’s wife, Priscilla, appears only once. In his diary Faris noted that she was usually employed at “woman’s work.” She fed & sewed clothing for her family & helped Faris with his need for extra hands by raising a large family.

British agriculturalist Richard Parkinson & his family rented a farm in Baltimore County for several years at the end of the century before returning to England, where he wrote of his American experiences. Parkinson also noted that his children helped with gardening & farming chores but that his wife did not.

Garden Labor - Who was William Byrd's Virginia gardener?

Tracing William Byrd II's gardener "Tom" in the records of Westover & Williamsburg, seems to point to Thomas Creas (c 1662-1757) as one of the earliest professional gardeners in Virginia.

In Virginia early in the 18C, a succession of professional gardeners, who were not serving under an indenture, worked at institutions of the royal government in Williamsburg, including the Governor’s Palace & the College of William & Mary. Some of these professional gardeners held pristine credentials. James Road, an assistant to George London, Royal Gardener to King William & Queen Mary, was sent to Virginia in 1694, to collect plants for shipment back to Hampton Court Palace. He also probably to laid out the earliest gardens at the new college in Williamsburg. London had served as a gardener at Versailles & had traveled to Holland to study their smaller flower gardens, as well.

It is possible that James Road's supervising gardener George London (1681-1714) actually drew up the plans for the gardens at the College of William & Mary. Virginia planter John Walker wrote to John Evelyn in 1694. He received a reply to his particular query in May of 1694, in which Eveyln wrote, "Mr. London (his Majs Gardner here) who has an ingenious Servant of his, in Virginia, not unknown I presume to you by this time; being sent thither on purpose to make & plant the Garden, designed for the new Colledge, newly built in yr Country." The servant was London's assistant at Hampton Court, James Road.

The College, which was formally established by Royal Charter in 1693, began as a 330-acre tract of land purchased from Col. Thomas Ballard. William & Mary's 1st chancellor was Henry Compton, bishop of London. He was a serious gardener & horticulturalist who helped train George London to become a gardener.

Upon James Road's return to London, he was followed by gardener Richard Hickman. Soon after Hickman's appointment, the records indicate that Thomas Creas or Crease (c 1662-1757) was paid to assist Hickman in getting the gardens in order. After that, only Crease's name was associated with the ongoing management of the gardens at the Governor’s Palace for an unusually long tenure, from 1726, until he died in 1756.

It is unclear whether Creas was born, & perhaps trained, in the England. Some report that Thomas Creas was the head gardener at the Governor's Palace during the administration of Alexander Sportswood who served from 1710-1722. Others speculate that Creas came over from England with Governor Hugh Drysdale in 1722. Drysdale was the 1st Governor to occupy the new Governor's Palace in Williamsburg, from 1722-1726.

Others suggest that Crease may have begun his gardening work at Westover, the home of William Byrd II. Byrd calls his gardener Tom in his early journals & refers to a gardener "Tom Cross" in 1720. The same "Tom Cross" carried at least one letter from Byrd's Williamsburg brother-in-law John Custis during one of his visits to Westover.  Byrd, Custis, & Tom Cross/Creas were all accomplished gardeners.

Two years before his appearance in the Governor's Palace records, in 1724, Creas was identified as a "gardener of Williamsburg, married & owning a half acre lot." His house was on the land now supporting the "Taliaferro-Cole" house.  The earliest record relating to this property appears in a deed of trust, December 15, 1724, in which deed the lot number, 352, is noted & the owner's name, Thomas Creas:
December 15, 1724. Creas, Thomas - Gardener
Mary, his wife
to
Keith, William
Ferguson, Patrick
Consideration: 5 shillings All that messuage or dwelling house wherein the said Thomas Creas, & Mary, his said wife, now live & all that lot or half acre of land described in the plot of the said city by the figures 352, situate, lying & being in the city of Williamsburg, & all kitchens, stables thereto belonging. (York County Records, Deeds, Bonds, III, p. 439.) The above deed of trust was acknowledged on January 18, 1724/5.

In a lease given by John Custis to James Spiers, joyner & cabinetmaker, on October 26, 1744, a lot is described as "one lot of ground, with the houses & garden thereunto belonging, it being the house next to Thomas Craze's..." 

According to York County, Virginia, records Creas married the widow of Gabriel Maupin, Marie Hersent, in 1724. Gabriel Maupin, his wife Marie, & family had sailed to the Huguenot settlement at Manakintown, in Virginia, in 1699-1700, after passing through the Spittalsfield (now Bethnell Green) "suburb" of London in the late 1690s.

Gabriel had operated a tavern in Williamsburg from 1714-1718. After her husband died, Marie ran the tavern from 1719-1723. When she married Creas in 1724, they operated the tavern together. Marie, born in France, died in Williamsburg in 1748.

Creas began to be "paid for his Service & labourerers in assisting in putting in order the Gardens belonging to the Governor's house" in 1726. He also was "Gardener to the College, in Williamsburg."

In addition to operating a tavern in Williamsburg, Thomas Creas supplemented his income by selling plants. In January 1737/38, he placed an ad in the Virginia Gazette (Virginia Gazette, Parks, ed.), "Gentlemen & others, may be supply'd with good Garden Pease, Beans & several other sorts Flower Roots; likewise Trees of several sorts & sizes, fit to plant, as ornaments in Gentlemen's gardens...Thomas Crease--Gardener to the College in Williamsburg." 

On May 9, 1739, Crease placed another ad in the Virginia Gazette, May 4, 1739, "Notice is hereby given, That the Subscriber, Now living in Williamsburg, designs to leave this Colony, in order to go to Great-Britain ——. It is therefore desired of all Persons who are indebted to him, to come to his Shop, or to the House of Mr. Thomas Crase, in Williamsburg, & pay their just Debts Hugh Orr" 

When Creas died in 1756, his estate was valued at 166.4.3 pounds, & he owned 6 slaves according to his January 1757 inventory. His will, which was proved in York County on January 17, 1757, named a brother Thomas Hornsby & his wife Margaret, & friend Hugh Orr & Catherine, his wife. In his will, dated February 26, 1756, & probated January 17, 1757, Thomas Creas, gardener, living in Williamsburg, appointed Thomas Hornsby, his brother, & Hugh Orr executors. (York County Records, Wills, Inventories, Book 20, p. 414.)