Women not only had their own responsibilities on an Adirondack farm, they tackled heavier chores as well when husbands went off to the lumber woods, or trapping, or guiding. Women were also important as farm laborers when the man was at home as many farms were small and couldn't support hired men for more than occasional periods of intense work, such as harvest time.

In September of 1865, Julia Baker Kellogg recorded in her diary: "Wesley (her husband) sick. Mother, Melissa, Jane, and I dug and picked up thirty bushels of potatoes. I harnessed the horses and drawed them down."

Lucelia Mills Clark was an energetic woman who homesteaded near Cranberry Lake, New York, with her husband Henry and eight children in 1888. She wrote somewhat dryly of her husband's ill-timed return in 1905 and her own resulting responsibilities, "Snowed hard all night and all day. H. (Henry, the husband) did not get home and I waded to the river with the axe to cut a water hole. The children let the cows out and we got them watered and back to the barn when H. came. The snow was to my knees and above part of the time."

Women tended vegetable gardens, looked after the hens and chickens, made cream into butter, picked berries, helped dig potatoes, boil sap, and harvest hay. Butter and maple syrup were important sources of cash.

Large vegetable gardens were fixtures of most Adirondack homes. Canning technology did not become available to housewives until after the Civil War. Before that perishable fruits and vegetables were part of the daily diet only when they were in season. Julia Baker Kellogg of Minerva first reported putting things "up" in jars in 1877.

Potatoes, squash, carrots, turnips, and parsnips -- foods that can be stored in a root cellar -- carried many a family through the winter months. The underground root cellar had to be cool enough to preserve the food, but also warm enough so that produce would not freeze on long Adirondack nights. The cellar had to be dry to discourage mold, and tightly constructed to keep out hungry mice and other rodents.

Drying, pickling, or preserving could also save garden produce. Crops such as beans, corn, apples, and herbs could be dried in the sun. Winter meals on a farm often included a variety of pickles, relishes, and berry jams.

Women were in charge of the kitchen garden. Lucelia Mills Clark of Cranberry Lake generally had her garden in by the beginning of June; she started some plants indoors in eggshells.

Mrs. Clark kept a daily journal for almost forty years. On June 12, 1906 she reported that there was a "hard frost last night but we covered every thing so it did not do much harm." "Everything" she covered may have been a good deal of area - she had sixty bushels of turnips in 1897, and two hundred twenty-five celery plants in 1917.

Lucelia Mills Clark was an ambitious gardener. Over the years she recorded plantings of tomatoes, onions, rutabagas, beets, pumpkins, radishes, celery, peas, lettuce, castor beans, cabbage, parsnips, string beans, sweet corn, rhubarb, spinach, peppers, and eggplants.

Copyright 2000 The Adirondack Museum. All rights reserved. Click here for details of acceptable use.