Joseph and Lucy Smith's Tunbridge Farm

Joseph and Lucy Smith's Tunbridge Farm is a small book (70 pages) about a small subject, the farm Asael Smith bought in Tunbridge that was partially purchased by Joseph Smith Sr. and occupied by him for six years after his marriage to Lucy Mack. Though small in size, the book is packed with interest. It is a masterful example of the archaeologist's art, exemplifying what can be learned when clues from the ground interact with literary sources. In 2016 and 2017, Mark Staker and Donald Enders conducted digs at the Joseph and Lucy Smith site, funded largely by themselves and manned by local supporters. Augmenting their discoveries with research in the written records, they have pulled together a portrait of life on the Smith farm. For a person like myself who is interested in farm life, the results are spectacular.I had not realized that the farm purchased in the Tunbridge Gore by Asael Smith consisted primarily of two hills with an intervening fen. Fens are open fields where water accumulates so the ground is too damp to cultivate. They are primarily useful for the grasses that can be cut and stored for winter feed. The Smith's two hills were too steep to plow and so were only good for grazing or perhaps orchards. The limited possibilities did not, however, deter Asael Smith. Staker and Enders tell us that the Smith ancestors in England had worked fens and the Smith property in Topsfield likely had fens on it. For generations, the Smiths had made a living from fens. They could harvest the cord grass for winter feed, run cows on the hillsides in the summer, and probably supplement their income with lumber construction or cooperage. Likely the women processed the milk from the cows into butter and cheese. The family may have grown apples or hops and made cider or beer. Wild apple trees still grow on the property. The Smiths purchased this somewhat contorted property because they knew how to work it.Much of the fun of the book is to observe the archaeological mind at work. How do you tell if a piece of property was plowed or not? Plowed fields produce stones. The frost pushes up rocks each year and the farmer in preparing the fields to plow has to move these stones to the side along the fence line. The grass of pasture land, by contrast, held the rocks in place below the surface. Fence lines with stones piled at the edges thus indicate a field that was once plowed. Another sign of plowing is the absence of pillows in the earth. When falling trees are uprooted, they leave pits in the soil next to the mound left by the decaying tree. Plowing smooths out these ups and downs. In grazing areas, the mounds and pits remain. The undulations in the Smith's land confirm the hypothesis that the land was not plowed.So are conclusions like these worth all the effort? The Smiths grazed cows and dairy farmed rather than plowing fields and planting corn. Is that news? Perhaps not. We have long known this about Vermont hill agriculture. The book's contribution is its method as much as its findings. The descriptions of how the conclusions are reached provides a kind of experiential learning. The reader is made to feel what it was like for two or three men to move stones weighing as much as a ton on a sled to plant in the foundation of a house. The same with the descriptions of construction of the early huts with elm bark roofs and doors made of hide. “These settlers cut the elm bark into large sheets and laid it flat over rafters with the smooth side down and fastened at regular intervals with long poles over the whole. Such roofs were watertight and could be built without using nails” (25). Reading such passages, you feel what life was like in your hands and muscles, as well as in your mind. When we learn the original Asael Smith hut in Vermont was 10 x 14 and housed ten people the first year, we can feel the confinement of winter living and the delight when warmer air allowed people to live outdoors. Good archaeology requires imagination as well as reasoning, and Staker and Enders help their readers to imagine how primitive farm life felt. The book is memorable because it is so tactile.Analysis of the remains continues with remnants of ceramics and tools found at the dig, and then goes on to a reconstruction of the religious situation in the Tunbridge-Randolph vicinity. Here Staker and Enders leave the ground for the archives where they find evidence of a divide between a strong, rationalist Universalist population, including Asael and Joseph Sr. among them, and an emotive collection of Shouting Methodists and others yearning for expressive religion. The split divided Joseph and Lucy and was mended only bit by bit. At their Tunbridge farm following the return from Randolph, Lucy had a vision that took place in the meadow before their house. Here she saw Joseph as a glorious undulating tree standing before a stream, thus revealing inadvertently her admiration and love for him. Some years later in 1811, Joseph had the first of the dream-visions that Lucy recorded, doubtlessly grateful that her husband felt some of her passion for religion. Though abating, the divide between them remained open until their son provided the ultimate reunification in 1830.I enjoyed every page of this book. I can't say that Staker and Enders left every stone unturned. No archaeologists can claim that. But they enable us to imagine the life of toil that the Smiths led and speculate on how their experience prepared them for what lay ahead

Archaeology · Art · Art history · Portrait · Subject (documents) · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies · Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies · History