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.
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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.
