Industrious, Ingenious Artisans

As a college sophomore, I was fortunate to be one of the summer interns at Old Sturbridge Village, an outdoor museum in Sturbridge, Massachusetts, depicting rural New England during the early national period. My group’s mentor was Richard Rabinowitz, a graduate student at Harvard but, soon enough, director of education at the museum, where he initiated role-playing by the staff and tutored us in the presentation of everyday life in such a community. In addition to working as a costumed interpreter, each intern undertook a research project. One student explored cleanliness, particularly the manufacture and use of soap; another studied the formation and use of a nearby rural social library; still another surveyed the changing geography of New England town commons.¹ I studied the reaction of the orthodox ministry to my hometown of Ware, Massachusetts, during its transformation from farming to factory village.² As I read David Jaffee’s A New Nation of Goods, I realized that I had been engaged (albeit without the benefit of four subsequent decades of scholarship) in a similar project to understand the intersection of culture and commerce in rural communities on the cusp of the industrial era.

Rabinowitz’s signature exercise was to enter a restored building and “read” a room as one does a poem or story; that is, absorb and interpret everything from its physical dimensions to its seemingly most insignificant furnishings in order to assess what transpired therein. His eye changed an empty meetinghouse into a building where a minister preached fervid revival sermons. A parlor in a large home conspicuously placed on the town common spoke of a well-to-do-family who taught their daughters to play on a pianoforte imported from London, served tea in Staffordshire china, and had their portraits painted by an itinerant artist. A back shed on a farm told of the seasonal nature of agricultural work, the farmer in bad weather making barrels or pails with his cooper’s tools, and then bartering or selling his wares to the town’s store, where he could acquire locally made pottery or tin ware. As in the exhibits Rabinowitz (as head of the American History Workshop) recently has designed for the New-York Historical Society, his magic wand made inanimate objects come alive and beg to tell their stories.³

And so it is with Jaffee, who provides a benchmark for the interpretation of material culture in the new nation, and particularly for how rural artisans and entrepreneurs prepared the way for the full-scale industrialism (and attendant consumerism) that followed. Although he gestures toward the middle states, the author is most at home in New England and the adjoining Hudson River Valley, where an indigenous manufacturing movement, its artisans “producing an ever mounting number of affordable goods for their neighbors” (p. xii), first began. Jaffe gives us a Cook’s tour of the factories, workshops, and studios from which issued an incessant flow of goods and information whose purchase signaled participation in a swelling market revolution.

Jaffe’s method is much like that of the limner he describes who used a camera obscura—a mechanical device by which an artist enlarges his subject even as it keeps its proper proportions. The author starts with a commonplace object—a globe, a clock, a piece of furniture, a painting, a map—and then connects its manufacture and sale to the transformation of economy, society, and culture. As he moves from the late eighteenth century through the 1840s—concentrating on chair-making, clock-making, portrait painting, and book publication—he delights and surprises on virtually every page, bringing us the harvest of three decades of work in museums and archives.

This is no mere antiquarian endeavor, however, for Jaffe argues that previous historians of industrialization have underestimated the importance of such local manufacture prior to (and often, alongside of) the rise of large-scale factories that they associate with the Lowell mills and other highly capitalized ventures...