In Horace Greeley’s Recollections of a Busy Life of 1869, the by-then famous New York newspaper editor vividly described the difficulties of his family endured as they struggled to make a living as poor farmers in early nineteenth-century New England.

Excerpts from Recollection of a Busy Life by Horace Greeley

Our tenancy of the “Beard Farm,” in Bedford, answered very nearly to my seventh and eighth years. That was a large and naturally good farm, but in a state of dilapidation: over-grown with bushes and briers, its fences in ruins, and the buildings barely able to stand alone,—the large two-story house more especially far gone. My father had let his own farm, on shares, to a younger brother, whom he wished and hoped thus to serve, while he was led to expect payment for whatever improvements he should make on that which he had taken instead. He was disappointed every way; his health failed, and he was for nearly a year unable to work; his brother did not prosper on our place; while the promises which had lured us to the larger sphere of effort were not made good…Our fortunes, manifestly, waned there; and I think we were all soberly glad to return to our own snugger house and smaller farm, in the Spring of 1820…I believe neither of us boys went to school at all that Summer, though I was but nine years old, and my brother not eight until June.

All in vain. The times were what is termed “hard,”—that is, almost everyone owed, and scarcely any one could pay. The rapid strides of British manufactures, impelled by the steam-engine, spinning-jenny, and power-loom, had utterly undermined the homely household fabrications whereof Londonderry was a prominent American focus; my mother still carded her wool and flax, spun her yarn, and wove her woollen, linen, and tow cloth; but they found no market at living prices; our hops sold for little more than the cost of bagging; and, in short, we were bankrupt. I presume my father had never been quite out of debt since he bought his place; but sickness, rash indorsements (a family failing), and bad luck generally, had swelled his indebtedness to something like $1,000,—which all we had in the world would not, at current prices, pay. In fact, I do not know how much property would have paid $1,000 in New Hampshire in 1820, when almost every one was hopelessly involved, every third farm was in the sheriff’s hand, and every poor man leaving for “the West” who could raise the money requisite for getting away. Everything was cheap,—dog cheap,—British goods especially so; yet the comparatively rich were often embarrassed, and the poor were often compulsorily idle, and on the brink of famine…

We had finished our Summer tillage and our haying, when a very heavy rain set in, near the end of August. I think its second day was a Saturday; and still the rain poured till far into the night. Father was absent on business; but our mother gathered her little ones around her, and delighted us with stories and prospects of good things she purposed to do for us in the better days she hoped to see. Father did not return till after we children were fast asleep; and, when he did, it was with tidings that our ill-fortune was about to culminate. I guess he was scarcely surprised, though we young ones ruefully were, when, about sunrise on Monday morning, the sheriff and sundry other officials, with two or three of our principal creditors, appeared, and—first formally demanding payments of their claims—proceeded to levy on farm, stock, implements, household stuff, and nearly all our worldly possessions but the clothes we stood in. There had been no writ issued till then,—of course, no trial, no judgment,—but it was a word and a blow in those days, and the blow first, in the matter of debt-collecting by legal process. Father left the premises directly, apprehending arrest and imprisonment, and was invisible all day; the rest of us repaired to a friendly neighbor’s, and the work of levying went on in our absence. It were needless to add that all we had was swallowed up, and our debts not much lessened. Our farm, which had cost us $1,350, and which had been considerably improved in our hands, was appraised and set off to creditors at $500…Thus, when night fell, we were as bankrupt a family as well could be.

We returned to our devastated house; and the rest of us stayed there while father took a journey on foot westward, in quest of a new home. He stopped in the township of Hampton, Washington County, N. Y., and worked there two or three months…He returned to us in due time, and, on the 1st of January, 1821, we all started in a hired two-horse sleigh, with the little worldly gear that was left us, for the township of Westhaven, Vermont, where father had hired, for $16 per annum, a small house, in which, after an intensely cold journey, we were installed three days later…When we first set our stakes there, father was thirty-eight and mother was thirty-three years old. I was not quite ten; my brother and two sisters, eight, six, and four respectively. A third sister…was born two years later…

We now made the acquaintance of genuine poverty,—not beggary, nor dependence, but the manly American sort. Our sum total of worldly goods, including furniture, bedding, and the clothes we stood in, may have been worth $200; but, as we had afterward to pay that amount on old New Hampshire debts, our material possessions may be fairly represented by zero…Yet, we never needed nor ran into debt for anything; never were without meal, meat, and wood, and very rarely without money. Father went to chopping [wood] at fifty cents per day, without repining or apprehension; and we children all went to school till Spring…

Before the Spring of 1821 opened, father had taken a job of clearing fifty acres of wild land, a mile north of our cot; and here he and his sons were employed, save in Winter, for the next two years.

The work was rugged and grimy, but healthful…When we first attacked it, the snow was just going, and the water and slush were knee-deep. We were all indifferent choppers, when compared with those who usually grapple with great forests; and the job looked so formidable that travellers along the turnpike which skirted our task were accustomed to halt and comfort us with predictions that we boys would be grown men before we saw the end of it. But, cutting trees and bushes; chopping up great trunks into manageable lengths, drawing them together, rolling up and burning great heaps of logs; saving out here and there a log that would do to saw; digging out rotten pines from the soil wherein they had embedded themselves, so that they might dry sufficiently to burn; piling and burning brush and rotten or worthless sticks, and carting home such wood as served for fuel, we persevered until the job was done…

We had been farmers of the poorer class in New Hampshire; we took rank with day-laborers in Vermont. We had lived freely, though not lavishly, much less sumptuously, in our earlier home; here, we were compelled to observe a sterner frugality. The bread of our class in this section was almost exclusively made of rye,—Indian corn being little grown on the clay soil of Western Vermont,—and, though there are always about six women alive who know how to make of rye the best bread ever tasted, our mother was not one of these, and never learned their admirable art…

A precipitous ledge, eighty rods east of the turnpike from which we worked westward, afforded us good spring water, and supplied us also with rattlesnakes, whereof we killed some, which might have proved annoying to us barefoot boys, as we worked among the brush and weeds, had they caught the idea. Still, clearing land is pleasant work…We were to have had $7 per acre, with the use of a team, and half the wood suitable for timber and fuel; and, though $350, even in those days, was not large pay for two years’ work of a man and two boys, we were well satisfied. In the event, however, Mr. Minot [our employer] died before we had effected a settlement; when his estate was declared insolvent, and we were juggled out of a part of our pay.

Our third year in Vermont was spent two miles further west, where we inhabited and worked a little place known as Flea Knoll, while father ran a neighboring saw-mill on shares. As he sawed twelve hours on and twelve off, with a partner, I insisted on being his helper; but I think once working from noon till midnight satiated my ambition, and I never fully learned the art and mystery of sawing boards by water-power. My brother, though younger, was more persistent, and made greater progress. I gave that Summer pretty diligently to farming, with very meagre results. First, the season was wet till the 1st of June…Next came a long Summer of intense drouth, baking and cracking our fields, so that the hoe made no serious impression on their rock-like masses…Our crops amounted to little; while the water we drank here was so bad that the fever and ague struck down our parents in the Fall, and all of us children next Spring, when we beat a precipitous retreat from “Flea Knoll,”—where it was said that no family ever remained more than a year,—and returned to…[Westhaven]; living in a larger house just west of our former tenement, cultivating the adjacent land on shares, and clearing off some twenty acres more of young White Pine, for which we were to be paid by two years’ crops; which proved, in the main, a failure…

Thus ended my boyish experiences of farming, which may be said to have commenced in my sixth, and closed with my fifteenth year. During the whole period, though an eager and omnivorous reader, I never saw a book that treated of Agriculture and the natural sciences auxiliary thereto. I think I never saw even one copy of a periodical devoted mainly to farming; and I doubt that we ever harvested one bounteous crop. A good field of rye, or corn, or grass, or potatoes, we sometimes had; but we had more half crops than whole ones; and a good yield of any one product was generally balanced by two or three poor ones. I know I had the stuff in me for an efficient and successful farmer; but such training as I received at home would never have brought it out. And the moral I would deduce from my experience is simply this: Our farmers’ sons escape from their fathers’ calling whenever they can, because it is made a mindless, monotonous drudgery, instead of an ennobling, liberalizing, intellectual pursuit. Could I have known in my youth what a business farming sometimes is, always may be, and yet generally shall be, I would never have sought nor chosen any other. In the farmer’s calling, as I saw it followed, there was neither scope for expanding facilities, incitement to constant growth in knowledge, nor a spur to generous ambition. To preserve existence was its ordinary impulse; to get rich, its exceptional and most exalted aim. So I turned from it in dissatisfaction, if not in disgust, and sought a different sphere and vocation.



Horace Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life (New York: J. B. Ford, 1868), 48-50, 55-60. Edited by Old Sturbridge Village.