A Bodwell family story · A Family's Life in America

Axe, Ox and Plow

What farming was like for Henry Bodwell, and for the Bodwells who carried the plow west

A family of farmers

For most of their history, the Bodwells were farmers. There were soldiers, ministers, granite men and one governor among them, but behind nearly all of them stood a farm. Most Bodwell men for two hundred years spent their lives clearing land, plowing it, and handing it on. Most Bodwell women spent theirs feeding, clothing and nursing the families who worked it.

This story tries to show what that life was like, starting with Henry in the fork of the Merrimack and Spickett rivers, and following his descendants as they moved to new frontiers in northern New England, Upper Canada, Ohio and Kansas.

A hundred acres of trees

In 1693 Henry and Bethia were given a hundred acres on the north bank of the Merrimack. Almost all of it was forest: oak, pine, chestnut, maple and hemlock, some of the trees centuries old and several feet across. Before the land could feed anyone, the trees had to go.

There were no chainsaws and no machines. Henry had an axe, his own strength, and probably a yoke of oxen. Clearing an acre of old forest by hand took a man something like a month of hard work. A family that cleared five or ten acres a year was doing well. It took most of a lifetime to turn a forest lot into a working farm.

Settlers learned some shortcuts, many of them from Native farmers. One was "girdling": cutting a ring of bark all the way around a tree so that it died standing. Corn could then be planted underneath, in the light that came through the bare branches. Another was burning. Felled trees were piled into heaps and set alight, and the ashes fertilized the first crops. Some farmers leached the ashes to make potash and sold it, one of the few ways a new farm could earn cash.

The stumps were the worst of it. They could take years to rot. For the first few seasons the family plowed around them, or simply hoed between them. When they were finally soft enough, they were dug out and dragged away with oxen and chains.

The stones

Then there were the rocks. The glaciers had left New England soil full of stones, and every winter the frost heaved up a new crop of them. Every spring the family picked them up, loaded them on a sledge called a stone boat, hauled them to the edge of the field, and stacked them.

That is where New England's stone walls came from. Most of them weren't built as walls at all. They were the piles of rock that generations of farm families cleared from their fields. The walls in the woods around Methuen are a record of that labor, built a few stones at a time over a hundred years and more.

The farming year

The work never stopped, but it changed with the seasons.

Spring meant plowing, if the family had a plow and oxen to pull it, and planting. Corn was the great crop, planted in hills in the Native way, often with beans and squash beside it. Rye, oats, barley, flax and wheat went in too. Spring was also the time of the great fish runs. Shad, alewives and salmon crowded up the Merrimack every year, and the falls next to Henry's land were one of the best fishing places on the river. Fish were eaten fresh, salted for later, and sometimes put in the hills of corn as fertilizer.

Summer meant hoeing, endlessly, to keep the weeds down, then haying. The hay had to be cut by hand with a scythe, dried in the sun, raked and carted in before rain spoiled it. A family's cattle depended on it to survive the winter.

Autumn meant harvest: cutting grain with a sickle, husking corn, digging roots, picking apples, pressing cider and slaughtering hogs. Meat was salted, smoked or packed in barrels, and the whole winter's food was put by.

Winter brought no rest. It was the season for cutting firewood, perhaps twenty or thirty cords a year to feed a big open hearth. It was also the time for threshing grain with a flail, mending tools, hauling logs over the snow, and clearing more land.

The women's work

Half the work of the farm happened in and around the house, and it was just as heavy.

Bethia and her daughters cooked every meal over an open fire, carried every bucket of water, and baked bread for a household of a dozen or more. They milked the cows and made butter and cheese. They kept the garden, raised the poultry, and preserved food for the winter. They spun flax and wool into thread, wove it into cloth, and sewed every garment the family wore. They made soap and candles. They nursed the sick and delivered each other's babies. And for much of her married life, Bethia did all of this while pregnant or caring for an infant.

Nothing on the farm was bought that could be made. A family like Henry's sold or traded only a little: some cattle, grain, fish, potash or lumber, in exchange for iron tools, salt, glass and gunpowder.

Farming with a gun nearby

For Henry, there was one more thing to think about. His farm sat on the edge of the frontier during two long wars, and raiding parties crossed the river near his land. Men worked the fields in groups, with muskets stacked nearby. A family caught alone in the fields could be killed or carried off to Canada. Farming in the 1690s and early 1700s took courage as well as strength.

Running out of land

By the time Henry's grandchildren grew up, the problem was no longer too many trees. It was too many sons.

A farm could support one family. With eight or ten children in each generation, it could not be divided among all of them without making every piece too small to live on. Usually one son inherited the homestead and the others had to find land of their own. In the 1700s that meant going north and west, to the new towns of New Hampshire and Maine, and later much farther.

So the Bodwells began to scatter. Each time they did, they faced the same work Henry had faced: a forest to clear, or later a prairie to break, and a farm to build from nothing.

The hill farms of the north

Many Bodwells settled the hill country of New Hampshire and Maine. Places like Andover, Maine, where Ira Willis Bodwell raised his family in the 1850s and 1860s, were cleared by the same methods Henry had used a century and a half earlier.

The hill farms were hard. The soil was thin and stony and the growing season was short. Families kept sheep and cattle, grew hay and potatoes, cut timber and made maple sugar. When the rich prairie land of the Midwest opened up in the 1800s, and the railroads could bring western grain east more cheaply than the hills could grow it, many of those farms were abandoned. Today a great deal of that land has gone back to forest. Walk through it and you will still find stone walls and cellar holes in the woods.

Into the woods again: Upper Canada

One line of Henry's descendants, through his son James and grandson Eliphalet, took the family across the border. James Bodwell Sr. (1764–1853) settled in Dereham Township in Oxford County, in what is now Ontario. The township was still heavy forest, so the Canadian Bodwells began exactly as Henry had: with an axe, a log cabin, and years of clearing.

Their success shows in Elgin Hall at Mount Elgin, the family's later house. A family that started with a log cabin in the woods ended up with a fine brick home, built from the profits of land it had cleared itself.

Ohio: the first West

In 1788 a party of New England men floated down the Ohio River and founded Marietta, the first American settlement in the Northwest Territory. Family research suggests a Bodwell was among them. Others followed. A William Bodwell, for example, appears in Athens County, Ohio.

The Ohio country was richer than anything back east. The soil was deep and black, with almost no stones. But it was covered in some of the biggest hardwood forest on the continent, and the clearing was enormous work. Settlers girdled the trees and planted corn in the "deadenings" while the dead giants stood around them, sometimes for years.

The new country brought new dangers. The river bottoms bred malaria, which settlers called "the ague." It brought shaking chills and fever every few days, and in the first years of settlement almost everyone had it. Another disease, "milk sick," came from cows that had eaten white snakeroot in the woods, and it killed many people who drank their milk. It is best known now as the illness that killed Abraham Lincoln's mother in Indiana.

Ohio was also, of course, Native land. The Shawnee, Miami, Delaware and other nations fought hard to keep it, and the early settlements were fortified. Peace came only after the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794 and the treaty that followed, which forced the Native nations to give up most of what is now Ohio.

Kansas: breaking the prairie

The Bodwells who went to Kansas in the 1850s and after faced a completely different problem. On the prairie there were almost no trees at all.

The ground was covered by tall grass whose roots formed a tough, tangled sod many inches deep. Breaking it for the first time took a special heavy "breaking plow" and several yoke of oxen, and it was slow, brutal work. Once broken, the soil was wonderfully rich. But the first crop on new sod was usually a poor one, often corn planted straight into cuts made with an axe.

With no timber, families built houses from what they had. Many lived first in dugouts cut into a hillside, or in houses built from blocks of the prairie sod itself. Sod houses were warm in winter and cool in summer, but they leaked mud when it rained, and snakes and insects came through the walls. Fuel was a constant problem. Families burned dried buffalo and cattle dung, corn cobs, and twisted bundles of prairie hay.

The weather could ruin a family in a season. In 1860 a terrible drought struck Kansas and many settlers gave up and went home. Prairie fires could sweep across miles in an afternoon. Blizzards came with little warning. In the summer of 1874 clouds of grasshoppers, so thick they darkened the sky, descended on the plains and ate almost everything that grew, even the handles of tools.

The pull of the prairie lasted into the twentieth century. In 1909 Albert Monroe Bodwell and his wife Estelle went to Tripp County, South Dakota, among the founders of the new town of Monroe. Their church started in their own home with six members. It met in a tent sent by the Methodist district, and then in a sod church 20 by 34 feet, dedicated in August 1911. The song books were paid for with five dollars from the sale of three live rattlesnakes. Albert caught them.

Kansas in the 1850s was also violent for reasons that had nothing to do with farming. Proslavery and Free-State settlers fought over whether Kansas would allow slavery, and the territory became known as "Bleeding Kansas." The family's best-known Kansas Bodwell, the Rev. Lewis Bodwell of Topeka, was a Free-State minister and survived Quantrill's raid on Lawrence in 1863. Farming there in those years meant choosing a side.

What the work made

From Henry's hundred acres of forest to the prairie sod of Kansas, the work was much the same in spirit: hard, endless, done by hand, and done by the whole family. Every generation that moved started over almost from scratch.

It made them tough, and it made them adaptable. It also left marks on the land that are still there: the stone walls of Methuen, the clearings of Dereham Township, the farms of Ohio and Kansas. Most of us now live a long way from any of it. But for two hundred years and more, the family's story was written in fields, one acre at a time.

Questions for the family's researchers

• Which Bodwells actually went to Kansas to farm, and when? The tree could be searched for births and deaths in Kansas.
• Who was the Bodwell at Marietta in 1788, and did his family stay in Ohio?
• Do any Bodwell farm account books, diaries or letters survive? Even a page would bring this story to life.
• Are there photographs of Bodwell farms: the Methuen homestead, Elgin Hall, a Kansas sod house, an Andover hill farm?
• The agricultural schedules of the U.S. census for 1850–1880 list each farm's acres, livestock and crops. They would show exactly what individual Bodwell families raised.