Homegrown

         Foods from home were plentiful in 1845 as the people prepared for Thanksgiving, which was only two weeks before Mary Ferrin and Jesse Upton were married in the Kingdom.

 

        Local farmers produced all kinds of vegetables, including a good deal of corn and an enormous crop of onions, nearly 120,000 bushels a year!   Many farmers kept oxen and raised some fine flocks of turkeys.  

        "Up to 1870, one could find Danvers farmers at Thanksgiving time around the Market House in Salem with their turkeys for sale.  On Saturdays the farmers came from the surrounding towns with all kinds of produce.  In order to show what they had to sell, they would have a forked stick on the side of the wagon with a sample of the vegetables stuck on the end of  it," reported William L. Hyde in "Reminiscences of Danvers in the Forties and Fifties".

The Derby Square market, as seen from Front Street, circa late 1800s.
Courtesy Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum

        The Kings were largely farmers.  We know some of their culture from Hannah Goodale King, wife of Samuel King.  In a December 20, 1849 letter to her son, Eben, she reports:

Dear Son, my time has been so much taken up of late that I have not had an                        opportunity of writing to you and now it is almost 9 o’clock.   James has a bad                    cold and cough but I think he will soon be better.  Mr. Ferren has had another                    attack of disenterry and sore mouth but he seems to be getting better.  The                        new house [being built in the Kingdom for Henry and Asenath Ferrin King] is                almost done. They are painting the inside. The wood work is graining and the                wall is light green. I mean in the kitchen. I think they will not paper much this                   winter.  I believe James has a hundred barrels of onions now in the cellar.  They            said it seems quite homeish.   I think they will move next month.  Michael has                    got him a place up in Middletown at the depot at $9 per month to saw wood                        and keep the water from freezing...."

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        The principal crop raised in Danvers for the market at that time was onions; they were grown  from Maple street west to Hog Hill , and then to the Gardner farm  in Salem, as well as the area between the Waters River and Andover Street.  "Nearly every family from Hutchinson's corner to Wilson's corner was engaged in the cultivation of this vegetable," wrote Hyde.

        "It was a great deal of work to get the very large crop of onions ready for the market.  The large part of this crop was sold at wholesale in the Boston market and had to be hauled over the road, very few going by railroad.  The usual custom was to dry them thoroughly in the field and then haul them under cover, making three assortments of them.  The large ones were topped close to the onion.  The tops on the medium sizes were left on and were braided on rye straw, shoe thread being used for this purpose.  This work was largely done by female help, five or six hundred bunches being a good day's work, and they were paid so much per hundred and earned good wages.  The small ones were use for pickles.  The custom of bunching is now nearly if not quite obsolete.  

        "The large onions were loaded in bulk into wagons that were set on axles,  The one horse loads contained forty to fifty bushels, or about eight hundred bunches.  The drivers started at midnight, getting into Boston at daylight, paying toll on the turnpike.  Sometimes fifteen or twenty loads would be in line.  It was not an unusual sight to see thirty or forty loads standing at the lower end of Quincy Market house and way down on both sides of Commercial street.  At that time Massachusetts and Connecticut supplied all New England and the provinces.

        "The hired help on the farm came from States of Maine and New Hampshire and the Provinces, and was exceedingly good.  The usual custom was to hire the men rom March 1st to November 1st, eight months.  Wages would be seven or eight dollar a month for the first season, the men often times working for the same parties a number of seasons."