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10. Commerce and Community: A Case Study of the Rural Broommaking Business in Antebellum Massachusetts
- University of Massachusetts Press
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10 When first published in 1984, Greg Nobles’s essay on Hadley’s broomcorn craze joined a larger conversation about the market revolution in nineteenth-century New England, and matters no less important than the nature and evolution of capitalism in the early American republic. Nobles’s study not only advanced historical understanding of the evolving rural economy, but also illuminated more cultural matters, such as the emergence of new standards of cleanliness that created a market for so many brooms. Since the year this important essay appeared, scholars of the evolution of “capitalism in the countryside” have cultivated a rich picture of the ways in which rural families adapted to economic change, tracking the slow retreat of a world dominated by face-to-face exchanges among neighbors and relatives and the rise of a new world in which transactions became increasingly impersonal and anonymous. Such changes cannot be seen as either an overall gain or an overall loss; rather they were part of ongoing cycles of change that benefited some families at the expense of others. Commerce and Community A Case Study of the Rural Broommaking Business in Antebellum Massachusetts Gregory H. Nobles In 1797 Levi Dickinson, a farmer in Hadley, Massachusetts, planted a few hills of a strange-looking variety of corn that was virtually useless as food and produced little more than long tassels of brush. Dickinson harvested the brush, dried it, tied it around sticks, and thus made twenty or thirty brooms, most of which he peddled to neighbors in the town. The following year he planted about half an acre of this broom corn, and the year after that a whole acre. By 1800 he and his sons were making several hundred brooms and selling them not just in Hadley but as far west as Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and as far south as New London , Connecticut. Many of Dickinson’s neighbors ridiculed him, however, 232 sneering that broommaking was Indian work, too low for white men; as his son would later recall, “We were sometimes mortified with taunts.” But Levi Dickinson turned aside the insults and kept on making brooms, even insisting that the local broom business would someday be one of the greatest in the county. He turned out to be right. By 1850 Massachusetts was second only to New York in broommaking, producing well over a million brooms that would be sold throughout the United States and as far away as South America. More important in light of Levi Dickinson’s earlier prediction, the bulk of that production came from Dickinson’s own Hampshire County and from his own town of Hadley.1 On one level this brief sketch of Levi Dickinson suggests a classic portrait of the Yankee farmer as entrepreneur—the independent innovator who tried something new in order to make a little extra money, gradually expanded his operation, and eventually did well enough not only to silence the skeptics but even to lead some of them to follow his example. More to the point, that small portrait of the individual farmer fits into a much broader landscape depicting the economic transformation of rural New England up through the first half of the nineteenth century. Almost from the beginning of white settlement in the seventeenth century, many New England farmers had been involved in a network of trade that reached as far as England and the West Indies, but it was especially the government-sponsored drive for internal improvements in the wake of the American Revolution that accelerated the integration of rural people into a national—indeed global—system of commercial capitalism. Linked to northern cities by an expanding transportation network of turnpikes and canals, inland farm villages became an increasingly important source of supply to match a growing national demand, and even more farm families began to engage regularly in market exchange, producing not only surplus crops but a variety of homemade goods—cloth, shoes, palm leaf hats, and the like—to be traded for cash or credit with rural merchants or urban commission agents.2 In some cases, in fact, the increasing emphasis on production for market exchange seemed to bring about a gradual but nonetheless radical change both in the nature of the community and in the lives of the people themselves. Alan Dawley ’s study of Lynn, Massachusetts, and Jonathan Prude’s work on Oxford and Dudley, Massachusetts, both show very strikingly how in the early part of the nineteenth century the inhabitants’ increased involvement...