Title: Joseph and Lucy Smith’s Tunbridge Farm; an Archaeology and Landscape Study
Authors: Mark L. Staker and Donald L. Enders
Publisher: John Whitmer Books, Independence, MO
Genre: Religious Non-Fiction
Year Published: 2021
Number of Pages: 113
Binding: Paperback
ISBN: 9781934901212
Price: $14.95
Reviewed by Kevin Folkman for the Association for Mormon Letters
Years ago, I lived in the same neighborhood as Don Enders, co-author with Mark Staker of Joseph and Lucy Smith’s Tunbridge Farm, and learned about his work as an archaeologist for the Church History department. He quickly disabused us of similarities to Indiana Jones by describing excavating the waste pit under the outhouses belonging to Brigham Young and other early church leaders in Nauvoo. They were considered treasure troves of information about the lives of the people who lived there. Much of the typical household trash often ended up in these pits, documenting elements of the lives of the families who used them. Broken pieces of china could give clues as to the economic status of a household. Fruit and vegetable seeds spoke to the diet consumed by the families. It was my first introduction to the painstakingly detailed work of examining a site for historical clues about the times and culture vital to historical research.
Enders and Staker, along with many volunteers, did archaeological research and excavation work on the Smith family farm in Tunbridge Township, Vermont, for several weeks in 2016 and 2017. It is the site where the senior Joseph Smith moved with his new wife, Lucy, immediately after their marriage. The Smiths settled on a plot of land owned by Joseph’s father, Asael Smith, and farmed by Asael and some of his other sons.
When I think of a farm, I recall the 160 acres in Southern Idaho farmed by one of my uncles and my grandparents when I was a child in the 1950s and 1960s. That farm was mostly flat with a few small hills, a creek, and many large fields that were used to grow crops in rotation. It also supported a small dairy of some 40-odd cows with adjacent pastureland. The Smith family farm in Tunbridge, Enders, and Staker point out, was nothing like those recollections of my childhood. The plot had a meadow in the middle, too wet for traditional crops, and was bounded by two large rocky hills. Even after over 200 years, the authors were able to determine how the Smith family probably used the land and made their livings. They found a variety of apples likely grown by the Smiths, along with evidence of growing hops, making maple syrup, and harvesting sedge grass, an alternative to alfalfa that grew well in the damp meadow. The tools for coming to these conclusions include both the traditional archival research of the historian, supplemented by onsite observation and excavations.
Staker and Enders have divided their short book (70 pages of text) into eight brief chapters describing the original disposition of the land, how much the various plots cost and were paid for, a description of the physical features of the farm, the Smith family home, other outbuildings and their potential uses, and the eventual move to Sharon Vermont, where Joseph Smith, Jr, was born. A final chapter gives context to Lucy Smith’s own first vision in relation to the physical layout of the Smith farm and the religious context of the time.
I learned quite a bit from reading Joseph and Lucy Smith’s Tunbridge Farm. For example, Staker and Enders point out that the construction of a rock fence can determine how the land around it was used, with different elements for a fence intended to keep livestock out, as opposed to a fence constructed by the annual removal of rocks from a cultivated field. The authors were able to identify five different kinds of apples potentially grown by the Smiths for cider. They excavated the foundations of structures long since torn down to determine the construction and use of the home and outbuildings. In one case, several nails were found in the excavation of a large shed. One type of L-shaped nail was found, normally used in securing barrel heads, suggesting that the building might have been used as a cooperage, one of the trades of Asael Smith and his sons. However, the building had a dirt floor. A careful cooper would not lay the staves for a barrel on a dirt floor and still find it useful in holding water, cider, or beer. The L-shaped nails of the time were also used in securing wood for a door or stairs where ordinary nails would loosen over time. Wood ash and other evidence of a kiln were found in a corner of the building, indicating that the tall structure likely was used for drying hops to be used for brewing beer.
The authors devote a significant part of their narrative to how women on farms contributed to the success or failure of the venture. The home, garden, well, dairy cattle, pasture lands, and other major elements of a family farm were the exclusive domain of the women. Eggs, pork, vegetables, fruit, and milk were all staples of a family diet provided with little involvement by the men of the household. Men were busy with clearing land, building stone fences, and managing cash crops, rarely interfering in the management of the vital farm activities overseen by the women of the household. This echoed my own experiences of farming as I spent summers in Idaho with my grandparents. My grandmother baked four or five loaves of bread each day, kept a chicken coop full of laying hens, managed a large vegetable garden where I learned how to weed, and preserved fruit, vegetables, and even beef in neat mason jars kept in a cool cellar beneath their house. I helped my grandfather, uncle, and cousins with thinning sugar beets, baling alfalfa for cattle feed, and “picking rocks,” a practice that needed to be repeated every couple of years as cold frosts pushed buried rocks to the surface of the fields in the spring. My young farm life spanned both the worlds of the women and the men of the farm, familiar worlds that Enders and Staker brought to my recollection.
Examining deeds, municipal records, land transfers, and other documents from the time also shed light on the economic status and prospects of the extended Smith family. An example is given of how Jesse Smith, one of Joseph’s brothers, sold 50 acres of his holdings for $200 cash, then the same day purchased the land back for four $50 promissory notes, indicating a need for cash and a reluctance to give up the land he owned. A long history of mortgages, second mortgages, and multiple promissory notes all point to a tenuous hold on economic stability for all the Smith family.
Tunbridge Farm might not appeal to all readers, but I found it engaging as a glimpse into unfamiliar aspects of historical research. Its brevity may be one of its strengths. A three-hundred-page treatise on all of these archaeological details might end up being a bit tedious for the average reader, but at 70 pages with another 38 pages of endnotes, Staker and Enders seem to have hit a sweet spot. As an introduction to how archaeology and landscape studies can supplement other aspects of historical research, Joseph and Lucy Smith’s Tunbridge Farm was for me something both familiar and new, reminding me of the contributions of both the men and the women in trying to earn a living off the soil of a late 18th-century farm. If you have not been exposed to the role that archaeology can play in historical research, Tunbridge Farm would be a good place to start.