Farm to Census Table: Expanding Interpretations of Farmsteads through Documentary Archaeology

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Comprised of state and federal censuses, city directories, and town vital records, the documentary records associated with the Hassanamesit Woods Augustus Salisbury site in Grafton, Massachusetts are not uncommon for 19th-century farmsteads. However, by researching the lives of each resident family to their full extent, several patterns in geographical and socioeconomic mobility emerged, creating a compelling image of a highly-mobile working class attempting to navigate a period of rapid socioeconomic change brought about by industrialization. This research demonstrates the interpretive potential of researching both a single property through time as well as the trajectories of the individual people who moved through it. Knowing that rural labor networks frequently extended outside of the family of the owner-operator expands our notions of what constitutes a “typical” farmstead, forcing us to reconsider the material and spatial signatures of labor on these sites.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow