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Backcountry Feasts: A Taste of History
| Article
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11906 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1987 |
2,169 Words |
| Author
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Kay Moss
Kay Moss directs the Schiele Eighteenth Century Backcountry
Lifeways program and coauthored The Backcountry Housewife,
Volume I: A Study of Eighteenth Century Foods. |
A laboratory - equipped with iron kettles rather than Erlenmeyer flasks, and with broadax, drawknife, and froe instead of scalpel and forceps - is for studying early tastes.
The Backcountry Farm at the Schiele Museum in Gastonia, North Carolina, is a historical research station where the researchers dress in frock and trousers or shift and petticoat. These re-created pioneers are often tired and dirty, sometimes limp from August heat or shivering in subfreezing temperatures.
The subjects for the Backcountry Lifeways studies program are the social history, material culture, and technologies of the common folk who settled the Carolina piedmont during the second half of the eighteenth century.
Who were these early backcountry folk? What were their everyday pursuits? How did they interact with the local environment? What did they think and feel? These questions may never be fully answered. Yet, the challenge lies in uncovering new clues to come closer to the true picture.
In eighteenth-century America, the frontier lay just beyond the fall line, in the piedmont and mountain regions of the Atlantic Coast states. This area was referred to as the backcountry, the back parts, the up-country, the back settlements, the frontier, or simply the wilderness.
Most of the eighteenth-century settlers of the backcountry had origins in the Rhine valley of Germany or in northern Ireland. Along with these Germans and "Scotch-Irish," or Ulster Scots, were some English, French, Swiss, Welsh, Africans, and a sprinkling of others.
In the early 1700s, immigrants arriving at the ports of Pennsylvania found conditions too crowded and the inhabitants inhospitable. The lure of cheap fertile lands led new colonists to move inland, gradually pushing westward and southward in a leapfrog fashion down the Great Wagon Road through the Valley of Virginia. Simultaneously, a steady flow of new colonists struck out from Charleston to the northwest. By the mid-eighteenth century, these two streams of settlers had reached North Carolina. Before the outbreak of the War for Independence, the backcountry was heavily settled and the migratory push toward the west, the frontier with which we are more familiar, had begun.
The social fabric of the backcountry during the eighteenth century
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