Commercial versus Private Life: The Fairchild Family Homestead on the Lake Michigan Dunes, Sheboygan County, Wisconsin

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Fairchild site, located on dune land along the Lake Michigan in Sheboygan County, was the home of the Fairchild family, who moved from New York state to Sheboygan County in 1846. The family engaged in a variety of economic pursuits, notably including pound net fishing. Investigations of the site, located mere meters from the Lake Michigan shore, were expected to yield information related to the pound net fishing industry, as the Fairchild family had achieved considerable success therein. However, the material culture assemblage instead reflects the mass-produced items which are typical of most domestic assemblages from sites of this time, with few fishing tools identified. Similarly, the faunal assemblage does not reflect the family’s success in the fishing industry, but rather reflects a typical market-purchased nineteenth century American diet. These findings reflect the phenomenon of increasing separation of domestic and commercial life in the nineteenth century, particularly for middle-class families, even in cases where commercial activity likely occurred near the residence. Any structures related to fishing on the Fairchild property are lost to time and Lake Michigan. What is left behind is evidence of a fairly typical middle class nineteenth century domestic life - and surprisingly few fish.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51373