Intern Update: A Farmer's Diary

Ryan Bachman, a graduate student at James Madison University, is working as an intern at CHS this summer, creating a Finding Aid to our archives collection. He will be posting highlights from the archives throughout the summer. This is the first post in the series for this year.

The vault at the Cornwall Historical Society is full of diaries and journals written by Cornwall residents over the past two centuries. In 1859, East Cornwall farmer Seelye Hart purchased his first diary from Pratt and Foster’s general store. For the next several decades, Hart kept a daily record of life on his College Street farm. His notes reveal not only the everyday details of operating a nineteenth-century farm, but also a wealth of information on social life in the community. In all, there are six volumes of Hart’s diaries in the historical society vault, and this week’s installment to the historical society blog comes from his first volume.

Page from Seelye Hart's Diary
(Collection of Cornwall Historical Society)

In 1859, twenty-eight year old Seelye Hart and his twenty-six year old wife Jeanette lived on College Street with Jeanette’s widowed mother Marie, their two young sons, Reuben and Elias, and their dog Rover. Every night after work, Seelye sat with his diary and recorded the events that occurred during the day. Topics in Seelye’s entries range from everyday struggles on a New England farm, such as digging large stones out of his fields, to worries that his baby son Elias’ cough may have been indicative of the croup, to musings about Rover chasing woodchucks around the family garden. Entries from the last week of February are especially useful in showing the contrast of hard work and leisure time that Cornwall farmers experienced in the mid-nineteenth century.

February 1859 was unusually warm for northwestern Connecticut. After a long day of work on his farm, Seelye excitedly recorded the happiness he felt working to the tune of “blue birds singing.” In the midst of the unseasonable warm spell, the Hart farm welcomed the birth of three healthy calves. In addition to the newcomers, the Harts already owned twelve milk cows, and after making a delivery to Pratt and Foster’s general store in West Cornwall, Seelye noted matter-of-factly that his farm had sold 3,778 pounds of cheese in the past year—Pratt and Foster used their store’s location along the railroad tracks to ship massive amounts of dairy products to urban locations like New York City. However, the Harts’ lives did not revolve solely around work, as Seelye’s late-February recollections reveal.

On February 24, Seelye and Jeanette left their two sons in the care of their grandmother, and went to a cotillion in Litchfield with their friend Eve. Cotillions in rural New England resembled square dances, and according to Seelye, couples danced to the accompaniment of fiddles, mandolins, and bass viols. The cotillion was held at the home of wealthy farmer, Daniel Dickinson, and lasted late into the night; Seelye and Jeanette didn’t arrive back at their farm until 4:30 AM. In spite of their late night out, they woke up at their usual time later that morning, and Seelye spent the day helping his father build an earthen dam while Jeanette worked at preparing oysters for a family dinner that evening. The cotillion was one of many such events that Seelye and Jeanette spent their leisure time enjoying, and Seelye’s diary is an interesting window into the social lives of farmers in rural Cornwall during the 1850s.