Of living history, Carlyle and New Salem

The most requested story today on the Slate.com electronic magazine website was freelance witer Emily Yoffe's account of her "brief, inspiring career" as a living history interpreter at the Claude Moore Colonial Farm in northern Virginia. Yoffe, who has written a book about dogs and contributes often to Slate on a variety of topics, took on the character of "Chastity Crump" at the 1771-era farmstead. Mistress Crump, Yoffe explained, was "a middle-aged spinster from a neighboring farm who liked to visit ... and help with chores." She was put to work on a workbench called a "shaving horse" trimming tobacco sticks with a knife, among other things, and she loved it:

During my time at Claude Moore I heard many interpreters say they were drawn to the 18th century because life was simpler then. I never bought that. It didn't seem so simple to watch your arm putrefy or lose your teeth in your 20s, or bury most of your children. But as I got up to get home in time for carpool, I did feel a deep longing to stay on my wooden horse and just scrape sticks. Once humans spent most of their days doing useful things with their hands, and I realized that we were designed to get a deep satisfaction from this. As [interpreter Katherine] Hughes put it, "You have the feeling people were supposed to do this kind of work, rather than data entry, which is amazingly horrible."

And Yoffe thought she understood why:

Almost as soon as the Industrial Revolution arrived, people began mourning its efficiency. As Thomas Carlyle wrote in Signs of the Times in 1829, "[T]he living artisan is driven from his workshop, to make room for a speedier, inanimate one. The shuttle drops from the fingers of the weaver, and falls into iron fingers that ply it faster … nothing is left to be accomplished by old natural methods." The children who came to visit Claude Moore understood this loss. Several interpreters warned me that when I set children to various tasks they could do on the farm, from hoeing, to carding wool, to dipping candles, I would have a hard time getting them to stop. At a farm-skills training day, we all took turns learning how to crack dried corn on the hominy block, smashing a 3-foot-long wooden pestle against a hollowed-out log. One mother could not pull her 10-year-old son away and finally pleaded, "You have done a great job. So please stop pounding!" I had a vision of a new approach to our modern psychological problems. Psychiatrists would throw away children's Ritalin and their parents' Lexapro and prescribe a few hours a day of tobacco stick making or hominy cracking.

That makes a lot of sense to me, both from volunteering in the 1830s living history village at New Salem and from my research into 19th-century popular culture. In another context I once quoted an old settler who noticed a great change about the time the industrial revolution came to Illinois:

Speaking to the Sangamon County Old Settlers' Society in 1879, Judge Milton Hay spoke of the "[o]ld habits and old industries" that "disappeared on the appearance of the locomotive" in the mid-1840s. Along with public schools, servants and a market-oriented agricultural economy, he recalled the introduction of choirs, "fiddles" and sermons "The [much shorter] 'forty-minute' sermon began to be preached,' he said, as "men and women no longer divided off on each side of the church; the minister ceased to line off the hymn for the congregation, and the congregation quit singing."

Judge Hay, clearly, was motivated by nostalgia. And the county histories I've consulted in the State Historical Library are full of nostalgia for spinning wheels, leather britches, log houses and all the accoutrements of frontier, i.e. pre-industrial, life.

The other part rings true, as well. The craft I demonstrate at New Salem is music, playing fiddle tunes or folk hymns on an old-style dulcimer, but I've felt what Yoffe felt when she was whittling tobacco sticks. I think all of us who volunteer at New Salem have felt it at one time or another, in one way or another. And even on hot August afternoons, I've been reluctant to hop in the car, turn on the air conditioner and head back to Springfield and the 21st century.