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The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 15 (2004)

Rural Enterprise and the Northern Economy
in the Early Republic: The New Jersey
Charcoal Venture as a Test Case

Kenryu HASHIKAWA*I
In 1973, Herbert Gutman reminded historians that workers’ experiences in the factory must be understood in the context of the habits andassumptions acquired from their experiences previous to their entry into
the factory, or simply put, their culture. He pointed out that from 1815
through 1920, the working class was constantly being formed in America
as new generations of workers, ﬁrst-timers in the factory coming fromrural agricultural communities or European villages where people not
only followed a seasonal cycle of work but allowed regular relaxation topunctuate intensive labor, continued to join the industrial workforce. He
illustrated his thesis by showing that native-born workers of the earlynineteenth century shared important patterns in work habits with theturn-of-the-century immigrant workers. Both groups inconvenienced
their employers by their failure to observe regular work hours. To cite
one of Gutman’s own examples, at Martha Furnace, an iron furnace insouthern New Jersey, during the 1800s and the 1810s the furnace manager wrote: “all hands drunk”; “Jacob Ventling hunting”; “molders all
agree to quit work and went to the beach.”1
Copyright © 2004 Kenryu Hashikawa. All rights reserved. This work may be used, withthis notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work may be distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without permission from the author.
*Assistant Professor, Chiba University

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In a 2002 article in William and Mary Quarterly, Thomas Doerﬂinger
uses the same primary source. Carefully reconstructing employment andwork patterns from the diary Gutman cited and paying attention to notjust skilled full-time workers but unskilled and part-time workers,
Doerﬂinger concludes that in the 1800s and 1810s Martha Furnace was“managed in a rather decentralized and unregimented way. Drinking andﬁghting were tolerated, workers were rarely ﬁred permanently, and little effort was made to increase labor productivity.” He shows that the
furnace workforce consisted of full-time skilled furnace workers andteamsters, unskilled full-time workers such as ore raisers, and part-timeteamsters, artisans, and wood-choppers. The unskilled full-time workers included among others “a transient population of men who tramped
the woods of South Jersey.” In the part-time categories were many local
farmers and landless farm laborers. In each category there were those
who exhibited characteristics noted by Gutman, such as disregard for
punctuality. For Doerﬂinger, however, the ultimate point about Martha
Furnace is that despite the conﬂicts that arose as a result of workers’
unpredictable behavior, “these stafﬁng strategies were successful.” As amanufacturing unit hiring many types of employees and operating inworking order, Martha was a part of mature rural capitalism.2
Gutman placed Martha Furnace in the history of industrialization andworking-class formation. His purpose was to show that American industrialization did not oblige the immigrants to lose their culture and,accordingly, directions along which to organize their lives. Their work
habits learned in their places of origin in Europe, far from being lostwhen they arrived in the United States, informed the way they spent timein the factory. By linking Martha Furnace to industrial manufactures andimmigrant laborers of later periods, however, he presented early nineteenth-century manufactures as part of the history of strife between
capital and the emerging working class. For Doerﬂinger, a detailed demonstration of how the workers failed to internalize modern work habits
was not an end in itself but a step towards answering another question,
one with substantial bearing on the historiography of early America: howan enterprise relying on these workers was undertaken. Here he is challenging a premise that the economic culture of a geographic region, encompassing all kinds of economic activities, may be represented by thework habits of its inhabitants: if workers from the countryside had ideas
about work that conﬂicted with employers’ expectations, the countryside should accordingly be an environment unfriendly to manufacture.

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In this view, Martha Furnace, located in the countryside, might well havebeen affected negatively.
Doerﬂinger’s article is a response to an inﬂuential thesis on the natureof rural farmers’ economic behavior from the colonial period throughthe early republic. Conducting painstaking research in farmers’ accountbooks, Christopher Clark and others argued from the late 1970s that
farmers were not proﬁt maximizers. According to these historians, earning security on the farm was the foremost goal for farmers. They did notconcentrate on any single commercial crop for disposal in the market,
but grew a variety of crops they needed for their family. What they could
not raise on the farm they obtained not by paying cash, which was scarce,
but by exchanging goods and the labor of cattle and family members withneighbors in the local community. Inhabited by farmers with this mindset, the argument runs, the countryside was not friendly to capitalism.
This view in no small way inspired the market revolution thesis, which
explains that market relations came to the farmers from the outside, often
from the cities, around the 1820s.3 It is in this context that Doerﬂinger
calls Martha Furnace “an anomaly” for its not hiring farmhands to raise
food crops on the premises but relying on the outside market for foodstuffs and its employing manufacturing and service workers as a capitalist institution, and proceeds to examine how that anomaly existed.
However, he ends up pointing out that Martha Furnace was successful
and less of an anomaly than part of a pattern common in the Mid-Atlantic
region: manufactures such as ﬂour milling, pottery, salt-making, glassmaking, and paper-making existed in the countryside from the earlyeighteenth century.4
A more recent view on farmers would allow us to link the securityoriented farmers with capitalist enterprises more fully than Doerﬂinger
suggests. Today historians consider the eighteenth-century farm “composite.” Farmers grew crops in larger quantity than their family could
consume, for both family use and disposal in the market. They had toattend to both these objectives to maintain and bequeath a farm for the
next generation. They had to obtain cash in order to buy and accumulateland, which guaranteed that all the sons would have a farm; when prices
fell dangerously low, cash income from the sale of produce declined but
crops grown for home consumption provided security. Farmers pursued
proﬁt, but not in such a way as to put the security of their families on theline—therefore they were not the perfect liberal capitalists either.5 Thisview suggests that the accepted trajectory from cultivation for home use

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to commercial farming is overdrawn. Also open to reconsideration fromthis perspective, we may note, are the association between the city andthe market and the reverse equation of the countryside with an inclination
toward self-sufﬁciency. In early America few farms were completely
dissociated from the market, and the countryside was not divorced fromthe city. Farmers in New Jersey, where Martha Furnace was located, ﬁt
this framework well. In the early republic, New Jersey was a rural statebordered by New York and Philadelphia, the largest cities of the day.
New Jersey farmers managed composite farms from the early days ofsettlement to take advantage of their proximity to the urban markets.
They cultivated wheat, corn, rye, and many other crops for family consumption and for sale to the urban merchants. Some farm animals andfarm products such as sheep, salted pork, and apple cider also found their
way to the cities.6
Doerﬂinger’s analysis of early manufactures and the composite farmthesis would reinforce each other if we expand the scope of the composite farm thesis a little. Now that historians think that farmers sent
produce to the cities and remained security-oriented, we can hypothesize that some wealthy farmers might commence market-oriented but
characteristically rural ventures without ceasing to be farmers. Farmers
chopped and hauled wood and drove teams in order to meet the needs ofthe family. If carried out on a slightly larger scale and pieced together,
these mundane activities formed commercial enterprises. And otherfarmers and farm laborers participated in those enterprises as workers.
Though farming was a full-time occupation because different crops must
be planted and reaped at different periods throughout the year, farmers
and farm laborers were able to earn some income from time to time as
skilled and unskilled workers doing essentially what they did to manage
their farms. A focus on these enterprises allows us to see ﬂexibility andcertain dynamism in the rural economy. Some enterprises, rural work
habits, and concern with security stood side by side in the countryside.
This article argues that rural capitalism consonant with Doerﬂinger’s
rural manufacture was fairly common in the countryside in the early
republic. This capitalism took the form of obscure capitalist ventures that
operated within the overall structures of rural work habits and culture.
By presenting a case study of charcoal production and delivery, this article attempts to identify characteristics broadly applicable to these enterprises including the question of whether they were marked by efﬁciency
and discipline, or by the relative lack of control as Doerﬂinger noted. The

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two following sections discuss one charcoal venture. The concluding section offers preliminary generalizations about the concept of rural enterprise and what it illuminates about the countryside in the early republic.
II
Much of southern New Jersey, particularly the wooded area called thePine Barrens, was of sandy soil and infertile, and was sparsely inhabited until after the Revolution. Wealthy New Jersey farmers who owned
tracts there knew, however, that there was an abundance of trees andother natural resources there to exploit. From the early days of settlement, wood was shipped out for use in the cities, both for fuel andbuilding. As Doerﬂinger noted, substantial enterprises based on theseresources, such as iron furnaces, ﬂour mills and saw mills, were notabsent for long.7 Charcoal was one of the items these manufactures
required. Iron furnaces in southern New Jersey used charcoal (along withshells, which served as ﬂux) to heat the locally-mined bog iron ore andburn off the non-iron materials. Furnaces had extensive wood tracts intheir vicinity, as charcoal, a bulky and fragile article, was best produced
nearby. Making charcoal involved several types of work, some requiring skill. Choppers cut wood in certain lengths; the collier and his men
put the wood in a mound-like shape, and covered it with turf and sand.
After setting ﬁre to the mound, day and night the collier and his assistants watched the smoke coming out of the holes poked in the mound.
They were to control the ﬁre carefully so wood would not burn too wellinside the mound and turn into ashes. It took some 14 days to turn wood
into charcoal.8
Then demand for charcoal increased in the cities as a new source offuel came into use there: anthracite coal. In 1820, anthracite coal shippedfrom the Schuylkill, Lackawanna, and Lehigh mines amounted to only
365 tons; in 1830, it had increased to 174,734 tons. Scientists conducted experiments and showed that anthracite coal was a much more efﬁcient and cheaper source of heat than wood. Inventors devised so manycooking stoves (also called furnaces) for home use with a claim to evermore efﬁcient use of coal that the author of a housekeeping book complained that inventors had “every object in view, but that of promoting
good cooking.”9 As anthracite coal needed heating before it began toburn, newspapers and books on household management featured articles
on how to kindle it, designating charcoal as the best material with whichHashikawa Kenryu(p97) 6/2 04.7.18 0:14 PM ページ 102

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to heat the coal. Also, according to a Philadelphia magazine, “there are
not less than one thousand furnaces in this city, for culinary purposes,
which, during the summer months, consume nothing else than charcoal,”because anthracite coal generated more heat than was needed for cooking
in summer. It now made sense for merchants keen on new lines of trade
to ship charcoal from wooded areas like southern New Jersey.10
Samuel G. Wright (1781–1845) was a rural entrepreneur who left
records of rural charcoal production for the urban market. A wealthy
Quaker based in Monmouth County, New Jersey, and a store owner in
Philadelphia in the 1820s, he held vast tracts of land in New Jersey,
Delaware, Pennsylvania and elsewhere. Natural resources in his property informed many of his enterprises, which ranged from cordwood
production to managing iron furnaces. In the late 1820s he ran one furnace in Delaware and another in New Jersey called Dover Furnace inMonmouth County.11 In 1828, ﬁnancially assisted by his lawyer Charles
Higbee, Wright contracted with a merchant in the port town of New
Brunswick, New Jersey, for a venture in charcoal production and delivery. Wright was to oversee the making of charcoal at a tract called
Greenwood and transport 10,000 bushels of it per month to a wharf inthe village of Forked River in southern Monmouth County (now Ocean
County). This was not supposed to be a cumbersome undertaking. With
many furnaces in operation in southern New Jersey, charcoal production
was already a part of the rural landscape. Many local farmers and millers
contracted to provide the furnaces with ﬂour, beef, and other provisions.
He had only to hire workers and see that provisions be sent to theGreenwood tract.12 John H. Bostwick, Wright’s partner in the venture,agreed to ship the charcoal from Forked River to the New York market.
For a merchant dealing in lumber and fuel such as planks, boards andjoists and Schuylkill coal at his store at New Brunswick after July 1826,
it was probably natural to take on the shipment of another type of fuelproduced in the forest.13
Extant sources do not permit a full analysis into the way labor wasorganized at the Greenwood tract, but we can conﬁrm Doerﬂinger’s pointthat the rural labor force was a diverse lot. According to one ledger,
Wright hired 147 men for this venture in two years. We can get someidea about them by listing the types of work performed according to themonth the workers settled their accounts (Table).
The Table shows that chopping, an unskilled task, was extensive in
winter. The venture started in February 1828 with short-term employ-Hashikawa Kenryu(p97) 6/2 04.7.18 0:14 PM ページ 103

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ment of a large number of choppers. Of the 147 men involved, at least
68 were choppers, hired at the piece rate of 40 cents per cord (35 cents
per cord later) and did nothing else. Of those who were choppers in 1828,
twenty-seven were discharged by the end of June, and in 1829, sixteen
quit between January and the end of May. While it is not possible to trace
where all the choppers came from, we know that some of them camefrom Wright’s Dover Furnace. In 1828 at least eight Dover Furnace
workers chopped from February through the end of March, and theiraccounts at Greenwood were transferred to furnace account books. The
next time identiﬁable Dover Furnace workers came to Greenwood forchopping was in mid-October 1828. Presumably choppers at DoverFurnace too, they (there were probably more of them than we can identify from the account book entries) were sent when the stock of cordwood at Greenwood became thin. In the “multiple” category in the Table
were smaller numbers of men who stayed into the summer for additional chopping and other services. Local farmer and miller Isiah Reeves did
all kinds of odd jobs, from chopping wood to boarding hands to sawing
boards to carting hay for mules to delivering two loads of charcoal as apart-time teamster. William Springsteen and John Joseph worked on theroad 2 and 3/4 days and 4 and 1/4 days respectively in July 1828 besides
chopping.14
Wright’s account book also gives us names of skilled workers. Probably the collier Henry Moore and his men started charring with the coming of spring. Moore was credited for producing 63,140 bushels ofcharcoal in 1828 and 157,375 bushels in 1829 at 2 and 1/4 cents per
bushel, but the account book offers no clue as to when he worked hardand slacked. It reveals more about the delivery of charcoal at the wharf
in teams, another skilled work. After June 1, 1828, the number of fulltime teamsters jumped from one to four, and in 1829 there were at least
ﬁve and as many as eight teamsters delivering from April throughDecember. They were hired not by the day but at ten dollars per month.
Horatio Hayes drove for three months and seven days from late April
through August 1, 1828, and again for three months from September 1
through November 30 the same year. George Timmons drove for sevenmonths and ﬁve days from late May through December 24, 1829.15
Not all workers at Greenwood came from Dover Furnace. Six workers dealt with Wright both at his farm called Merino Hill in Upper
Freehold Township and at Greenwood. Two, including the above-mentioned teamster George Timmons, worked in Dover Furnace as well as

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Wright’s farm and Greenwood. Of these eight, we know that three werechoppers and four were teamsters. Benjamin Parker worked on Wright’s
farm from September 1825 and chopped at Greenwood from February
14 through April 30, 1828, and again from October 4, 1828 through May
29, 1829. William Tice worked at Wright’s farm for nine months fromMarch 10, 1828; the next year he delivered charcoal from April 4, 1829
through December 12, 1829. Aaron Brown, another teamster, was actually not a farm laborer but a local shoemaker. In January 1829 andJanuary 1831 he settled accounts with Wright at Merino Hill in shoes,
boots, slippers, and mending shoes, and drove teams from April 11, 1829
through December 12, 1829 for the charcoal venture. All these men
entered the realm of the local exchange economy one year as farm laborers or local artisans and that of wage labor the next year, showing thatthe boundary separating agriculture and rural enterprises was porous. It
is important in this connection that scheduling intensive chopping fromlate fall through early spring made it easy for farm laborers to take part.
None of the three choppers who worked both at Wright’s farm and forthe charcoal venture picked up the axe when the Merino Hill farm musthave been busy in summer with reaping wheat and hay.16
The foregoing analysis of Wright’s labor force provides clues on how
Wright employed workers and conﬁrms what Doerﬂinger has written
about workers at Martha Furnace. The charcoal venture hired a variety
of workers for both skilled and unskilled tasks on full- and part-timebases. Many were wage workers at Dover Furnace, but there were also
local farmers doing odd jobs and Wright’s farm laborers earning extra
income in the charcoal venture when they had time to spare. Rural enterprises like charcoal production were not divorced from the agricultural
economy of the area, but stood beside it and shared the same labor force.
In the countryside people did not always restrict their labor to the farm
alone, but moved back and forth between various kinds of work.
III
This section analyzes Bostwick’s letters to Wright and Wright’s memoranda. These sources allow us a glimpse of what Bostwick thought of
Wright’s collier and teamsters. They also show how the badly-supervised way of work, common to all the workers in the venture, made it
difﬁcult to manage rural enterprises successfully.
Bostwick’s letters reveal a great deal about the delivery and transfer

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of charcoal at Forked River. Soon after delivery began on June 1, 1828,
Bostwick began to send angry letters, telling Wright that it was just notgoing well. He was to hire an agent to see that the charcoal was on board
the vessels and according to Wright’s summary of the contract, “hisagent was by my consent the mutual agent of both.” Wright’s teamsters,
Bostwick charged, did not share this view. “The carter was to deliver thecoal in the scow” with the assistance of the agent, yet this “they refuse
to do . . . they have dumped every load.” They did not care about a man
who was not in Wright’s employ, Bostwick fumed, and asked him to
make them cooperate. Wright understood the circumstances differently.
Bostwick was complaining, he noted, “[k]nowing as he did that it frequently happened, there was no Scow for days and if there they were
loaded.” The fact was that no effort was made to synchronize the arrivalof the vessel with the delivery of charcoal at the wharf. Sometimes charcoal was simply not the priority cargo for the vessel. Not being able toput the charcoal aboard the vessel right away, the teamsters left it on thelanding, and in Wright’s words, “the ground was covered with coal tothe distance of over 100 yards from the landing.” As teams came andwent from various quarters to the landing with their cargoes, inevitably
they “pass[ed] over it” and “great loss was sustained.”17
Secondly, the charcoal was dirty, containing much soil, brands (pieces
of wood not completely charred), and sand. Bostwick insisted that “thesand and dirt weighed as much as the good coal” in the ﬁrst cargo. He
charged that obliging him to rake the charcoal from sand and dirt constituted a breach of contract. Wright countered that the carters and teamsters traveled ten miles to Forked River with their cargo, suggesting thateven clean charcoal inevitably became a little dirty on its way to the landing. Bostwick refused to accept this excuse, stating that Wright “mustcalculate an [sic] great Loss in measurement for every mile you cart,”
and that “the colier may spin his measure out to my Loss.” The poor quality of the charcoal was a serious problem crying for solution, for it
inevitably led to disagreement over its quantity between measurements
at Greenwood and New York. Bostwick demanded that the charcoal beweighed at Forked River landing. He also pointed out that old dead wood
would not make good charcoal, and warned that irregularity in the lengthof the charcoal would lead to further deduction. For these two he held
Wright’s collier Henry Moore responsible and asked that he do a betterjob.18Wright and Bostwick tried to solve the problems. They agreed to have

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the charcoal measured twice by two disinterested persons. Wright agreed
to hire a man to oversee the ﬁlling of the boxes in the woods in the second year. He also invested in horses, teams (hence the increase in thenumber of teamsters in the second year), built a charcoal storage at
Forked River, improved the landing, and opened a new road, causeway,
and bridge to Forked River. Engaging farmworkers from his own farmas teamsters was perhaps a part of his effort to ensure that the charcoal
suffer as little damage as possible. Things were not improving despite
all these measures, however. Wright and Bostwick contracted for anallowance of 200 bushels for brands, but this provision was not of much
help. Almost four months after delivery started, the charcoal was raked
at Forked River and still needed “Raking repeatedly . . . at New York
before we could send it out of the vessels.” Next year, Bostwick’s agent
David Nevius continued to be struck by the dirtiness of the charcoal.
Wright on the other hand complained that Bostwick sent Nevius without prior consultation, and disparaged the way Nevius measured thecharcoal. He “shake[s] it down,” Wright wrote. “I fear’d that he was not
only wasting coal by the bushels but by the thousands.”19
One cause of the discord was perhaps the fact that charcoal was being
turned to new uses in the urban market, where a different set of considerations mattered. The charcoal charred locally for rural iron furnaces
did not change hands the way commercial articles did in the market. How
much the collier might charge could concern furnace managers, but theyrarely discussed the quality of the charcoal produced. After all, furnaces
consumed quantities of charcoal together with iron ore, and the qualityof individual charcoal pieces was not the most important matter underthat treatment.20 The likelihood was that a different set of concerns dictated charcoal marketing in New York. Intended for household use, it
was supposed to be “merchantable,” i.e., attractive as a commercial article for anyone visiting the market or store for it. Bostwick had good reason to rake the charcoal: prospective buyers simply passed dirty charcoal
by, as they needed a much smaller quantity than iron furnaces did andcould compare it with charcoal in other stores. It is not clear whether colliers in southern New Jersey were aware of these concerns.21
The Greenwood charcoal-making business had an unhappy ending. In
1829 Bostwick was increasingly tired of the continuing dispute on
weight and quality. Toward the end of the year Bostwick’s agent Nevius
began to leave some charcoal at Forked River, not bothering to clean andship it.22 Repelled by the venture itself, Bostwick refused to provideHashikawa Kenryu(p97) 6/2 04.7.18 0:14 PM ページ 107

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Wright with ﬁnancial support. At the end of 1829, Wright saw him in
New York, and found him “determined to drive us out of the contract.”“I was well persuaded,” Wright noted, “he was tired of it himself.” There
were 8,000 bushels of charcoal remaining in the coal house at the Forked
River landing. Wright put teams, horses, and other appurtenances up for
public sale in March 1830, but the proceeds amounted to only $1,463
and fell far short of the investment in the seven heavy teams ($3,091),
let alone that in roads and the storage building. Wright did not sue
Bostwick immediately, but his associate Charles Higbee prodded him
into it. By 1832 Wright was struggling to go after those who owed
Bostwick in order to recover the loss.23
IV
Samuel G. Wright’s charcoal business was a good example of petty
enterprises that took place in rural areas surrounding the cities. There
was nothing particularly modern about making charcoal. It was the newcircumstances—the rise of anthracite coal—that tempted Wright and no
doubt others into organizing a business with it. In the early nineteenth
century, exploitation of wood in southern New Jersey was more andmore closely tied to the demand in the cities. Forest exploitation becamea basis on which the linkage between the cities and the countryside wasmultiplied and thickened, one new link spawning another. The increaseof these crisscrossing networks, one suspects, was the substance of thechanges in the early if not later phase of what historians have called themarket revolution. And this kind of enterprise required few innovative
moves such as the introduction of machinery. Rural enterprises simply
put old practices to new ends. Ranging from chopping and shipping ofwood to iron manufactures perhaps, rural enterprises were not a part ofindustrialization in the strictest sense of the term. They nonetheless madeimportant contributions to the northern economy of the period.
Labor organization and the quality of the article did not always cooperate with the entrepreneur’s design. What Thomas Doerﬂinger has
found with Martha Furnace was true of Wright’s charcoal venture,
though this article parts company with Doerﬂinger here. Martha Furnace
continued operation until mid-century and could be considered a success, but many other rural enterprises did not fare so well. Wright could
engage workers and assign tasks (many of which were commonly performed on the farms), but it was harder for him to make them work well

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all the time. Bostwick’s complaints about the low quality of the charcoal
suggest that even if we allow for exaggeration, Wright’s colliers andteamsters did not work well enough. Brands were not removed. With all
the investment in stages and road improvements, driving charcoal-ladenstages for ten miles without damaging the cargo would still have required
extraordinary care. Investing larger and larger sums of money solved
some problems, but not all.24 The same probably applies to Bostwick andthe captain of the vessel he engaged, for Bostwick hardly appeared tocontrol the vessel captain’s views about timeliness. It is almost certainthat the vessel moved about the Mid-Atlantic coastal area with, at best,a very loosely-prearranged schedule. The vessels’ failure to load anddeliver charcoal in any regular, coordinated fashion, and the concomitant deterioration of the charcoal at the wharf, testify that too many people involved had their own standards about their performance while
engaged, and few took to heart such modern concepts as timeliness andefﬁciency.
In addition, the partnership form in which the venture was started left
too much room for each partner to maneuver in carrying it on on one’s
own terms. Neither Wright nor Bostwick had authority over the other.
Each of them defended workers he hired and blamed those hired by thepartner, for which the actual behavior of the workers, agents, and vessel
captain involved provided ample causes. The discord between Wrightand Bostwick demonstrates that rural enterprises were jerry-built. It is
hardly surprising that ventures like this were usually short-lived.
Rural enterprises like this one remind historians of the diversity ofactivities that contributed to economic development during the early
republic. Not just the Erie Canal and the large mechanized factories in
Lowell, but inconspicuous and often unsuccessful ventures made theircontributions. The northern economy in the early nineteenth century consisted of innumerable developmental possibilities, and many people
attempted to beneﬁt from them, not by transforming their lives but bychanneling familiar lines of activities. So long as natural resources werelocally available and there was demand in the cities nearby, rural enterprises sprang up to provide the linkage. For the petty entrepreneurs who
undertook them, the early decades of the nineteenth century did not represent a thorough break but substantial continuity from the colonial period, though on the horizon were more opportunities for gain and equally
greater risk.25 Some rural enterprises continued to the mid-century andperhaps thereafter though industrialization made them invisible; othersHashikawa Kenryu(p97) 6/2 04.7.18 0:14 PM ページ 109

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ran up against a stone wall. The problem of getting workers to perform
constantly well undercut the earning potential of rural enterprises. The
modern concept of control and efﬁciency did not penetrate the traditionof agriculture-based work habits. Ultimately when local natural resources ran out, the only way to survive was to cease to be rural enterprises: they would have had to create a wider regional network fortransport of required resources from elsewhere, which would haveentailed an injection of substantial ﬁnancial resources (an option rural
landowners and other small-scale entrepreneurs could ill afford). And
the fragile bond of partnership was increasingly inadequate in maintaining and overseeing such extensive networks.26
Lastly, separating rural enterprises from mid-century industrialization
this way raises a question about periodization. The market revolution
thesis divides US history in two: the pre-modern (communal and preindustrial) period and the modern or liberal (commercial and industrial)
period starting some time in the 1820s. If we follow Doerﬂinger, however, and assume that not just preindustrial rural manufacture but rural
enterprises in general were common from around the 1720s, we would
divide it in three parts--the industrial era comes last, preceded by the eraof rural enterprises, which in turn is preceded by another era, one inwhich rural enterprises might be harder to ﬁnd. Some recent synthetic
works on the colonial period imply that this ﬁrst, yet-to-be-fully-deﬁned
era ended when transatlantic immigrants created a stable agriculturalsocial order in New England, the Mid-Atlantic region, and the South,
respectively. One hopes that further reﬁning the concept of rural enterprise will contribute to the debate on this issue as well.27
NOTES
The author thanks Hagley Museum and Library, New Jersey Historical Commission,
Matsushita International Foundation, and the Library Company of Philadelphia forﬁnancial support.
1
Herbert G. Gutman, “Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, 1815–
1919,” American Historical Review 78:3 (June 1973), 531–588, 545 (quotes).
2
Thomas Doerﬂinger, “Rural Capitalism in the Iron Country: Stafﬁng a Forest Factory, 1808–1815,” William and Mary Quarterly (hereafter WMQ) 59:1 (January 2002),
3–38, particularly 26, 29, 30. Quotes are from 8 and 27.
3Foundational arguments include James Henretta, “Families and Farms: Mentalité in
Pre-Industrial America,” WMQ 35:1 (January 1978), 3–32; Michael Merrill, “Cash Is
Good to Eat: Self-Sufﬁciency and Exchange in the Rural Economy of the United States,”
Radical History Review 4 (1977), 42–71; and Christopher Clark, “Household Economy,

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Market Production, and the Rise of Capitalism in the Connecticut Valley, 1800–1860,”
Journal of Social History 13:2 (Winter 1979), 169–189. The most detailed explication
remains Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780–1860(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). On the market revolution see Charles Sellers,
The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), and Melvin Stokes and Stephen Conway, eds., The Market Revolutionin America: Social, Political, and Religious Expressions, 1800–1880 (Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 1996).
4
Doerﬂinger, “Rural Capitalism,” 37. An older study sees rural furnaces as selfcontained. Arthur C. Bining, Pennsylvania Iron Manufacture in the Eighteenth Century(Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Historical Commission, 1938). More recent studies on preindustrial rural manufactures include Arlene Palmer, “Glass Production in EighteenthCentury America: The Wisterburgh Enterprise,” Winterthur Portfolio 11 (1976), 75–
101; Brooke Hunter, “The Prospect of Independent Americans: The Grain Trade andEconomic Development during the 1780s,” Explorations in Early American Culture 5(2001), 260–287; Donna Rilling, “Sylvan Enterprise and the Philadelphia Hinterland,
1790–1860,” Pennsylvania History 67:2 (Spring 2000), 194–217; Kenryu Hashikawa,“A Grist Mill and Its Two Markets: Wheat and City-Country Relationship in the New
York-Philadelphia Area during the 1780s,” Amerika taiheiyo kenkyu [Paciﬁc andAmerican Studies] (the Center for Paciﬁc and American Studies, the University ofTokyo) 2 (Mar. 2002), 163–181.
5
Richard Lyman Bushman, “Markets and Composite Farms in Early America,”
WMQ 55:3 (July 1998), 351–374. Also Daniel Vickers, “Competency and Competition:
Economic Culture in Early America,” ibid., 47:1 (January 1990), 3–29. Also see thechallenge posed to Clark and others by Winifred B. Rothenberg, most fully developedin her From Market-Places to a Market Economy: The Transformation of Rural
Massachusetts, 1750–1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Allan
Kulikoff, “The Transition to Capitalism in Rural America,” WMQ 46:1 (January 1989),
120–144, summarizes the debate.
6Peter O. Wacker and Paul G. E. Clemens, Land Use in Early New Jersey: A
Historical Geography (Newark: New Jersey Historical Society, 1995), 7–11, 231–256;
Paul Clemens and Lucy Simler, “Rural Labor and the Farm Household in Chester
County, Pennsylvania, 1750–1820,” in Work and Labor in Early America, ed. Stephen
Innes (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 106–143.
7
Brendan McConville, These Daring Disturbers of the Public Peace: The Struggle
for Property and Power in Early New Jersey (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999),
94–98; Michael Williams, Americans and Their Forests: A Historical Geography(Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 79–80, 83–94, 157–160;
Diane Lindstrom, Economic Development of the Philadelphia Region, 1810–1850 (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1978), chapters 4 and 5; Doerﬂinger, “Rural Capitalism,” 9–11.
8
Robert J. Sim and Harry B. Weiss, Charcoal Burning in New Jersey from Early
Times to the Present (Trenton: New Jersey Agricultural Society, 1955), 20–31.
9
Journal of the American Institute in the City of New York 1:9 (Jun. 1836), 484;
Marcus Bull, Experiments to Determine the Comparative Value of the Principal
Varieties of Fuel Used in the United States, and also in Europe (Philadelphia: Judah
Dobson, 1827); [A Lady], The General Housekeeper’s Book, Comprising Advice on the
Conduct of Household Affairs in General (Philadelphia: William Marshall & Co., 1837),
32; Harold F. Wilson, The Jersey Shore: A Social and Economic History of the Counties
of Atlantic, Cape May, Monmouth and Ocean, 2 volumes (New York: Lewis Historical
Publishing Co., 1953), 361–366.

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10111

Frederick M. Binder, “Anthracite Coal Enters the American Home,” Pennsylvania
Magazine of History and Biography 82:1 (January 1958), 82–99; Thomas F. Gordon,
Gazetteer of the State of New Jersey (Trenton: Daniel Fenton, 1834), 2–3; Philadelphia
Gazette and Daily Advertiser, Oct. 17, 1826; Robert Roberts, The House Servant’s
Directory, or a Monitor for Private Families (Boston: Munroe & Francis, 1827), 159–
173; “Pine Lands of New Jersey,” Hazard’s Register of Pennsylvania 4:4 (July 25,1829), 63; Priscilla J. Brewer, From Fireplace to Cookstove: Technology and theDomestic Ideal in America (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 63–94.
11
On Wright, see Kenryu Hashikawa, “Rural Entrepreneurship in New Jersey during
the Early Republic” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2002), chapters 3 and 4.
12
Samuel G. Wright (hereafter SGW) ledger, 1824–1830, 86, 94, 123, 130, 139, 148;
John H. Bostwick to SGW, October 27, 1828, Wright Family Papers, Hagley Museumand Library (hereafter WFP). On the trade between iron furnaces and farmers in the vicinity, see Doerﬂinger, “Rural Capitalism,” 13; Michael V. Kennedy, “Furnace to Farm:
Capital, Labor, and Markets in the Pennsylvania Iron Industry, 1716–1789” (Ph.D. diss.,
Lehigh University, 1996); and receipts from millers Thomas Miller, Caleb Ivins, andPeter Crozier to Dover Furnace manager, WFP.
13
On Bostwick see advertisements in New Brunswick Fredonian, April 5, 12, June
28, July 26, November 22, 1826, October 1, 1828.
14
Greenwood charcoal-making ledger, 1, 4, 5, 10, 18, 20, 23, 27, 35, WFP.
15
Ibid., 23, 25, 34, 110.
16
Ibid., 1, 16, 19, 42, 53, 72, 88, 89, 99; SGW ledger, 1824–1830, 13, 15, 23, 36, 79,
92, 93, 125, 133, 140, 143, WFP.
17
Bostwick to SGW, July 19, 1828; Wright’s memorandum of the production anddelivery of charcoal for the ﬁrst year, WFP.
18
Bostwick to SGW, June 21, 1828, WFP. On the low quality of charcoal made fromdead trees, see Paul F. Paskoff, Industrial Evolution: Organization, Structure, and
Growth of the Pennsylvania Iron Industry 1750–1860 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1983), 142, note 5.
19
Bostwick to SGW, June 19, 21, September 12, October 27, 1828, October 4, 28,
1829; Bill for Bostwick’s debt to SGW and Charles Higbee; Wright’s memoranda of
the production and delivery of the charcoal, for the ﬁrst and second years; agreements
between SGW and John H. Bostwick, January 20, 1828 and January 20, 1829; David
Nevius to SGW, April 20, 1829, WFP.
20
Derick Barnard to SGW, November 24, 1822, February 4, 23, 1823, May 20, June4, 7, 14, July 5, 12, 13, 17, 1824; William D. Waples to SGW, July 7, August 8, October
9, December 11, 1821, March 25, 1824, WFP; Marcus Bull, one of the scientists interested in the comparative efﬁciency of fuel, reported that sand and dirt in charcoal pieces
made them inefﬁcient, and discussed how charcoal might be charred without sand. He
was not addressing urban charcoal retailers but furnace managers. Bull, Experiments,
51–60.
21
The following observation on coal cinders may apply to charcoal as well: “The cinders I see every day lying on the streets . . . would, if gathered up, afford fuel to manya poor family; yet I confess that I do not see how the evil is to be remedied. The cinders
get so mingled with ashes, that it is difﬁcult to separate them, and the servants will not
do it.” Roberts, The House Servant’s Directory, 166.
22
Bostwick to SGW, October 28, 1829; David Nevius to SGW, April 20, 1829, WFP.
23
Wright’s memoranda on the production and delivery of charcoal; bill for John H.
Bostwick against Charles Higbee and SGW; records of public sale, March 1830; Charles
Higbee to SGW, December 15, 1829, June 22, 1830, July 12, 28, August 19, andDecember 2, 1831, WFP. Also see Derick Barnard to SGW, February 28, March 1, 14,Hashikawa Kenryu(p97) 6/2 04.7.18 0:14 PM ページ 112

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20, 1832, Caleb S. Leyton to SGW, March 3, November 24, December 1, 1832; Barnard
to Gardiner H. Wright, September 26, 1832, WFP.
24
Doerﬂinger also notes that colliers working for Martha Furnace did poor jobs, failing to produce charcoal regularly. Doerﬂinger, “Rural Capitalism,” 27–28.
25
This view differs from the recent liberal understanding of the early republic. Compare with Joyce Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), and Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of
the American Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1991).
26
In 1850, New Jersey produced the largest amount of charcoal of all the states, equivalent to $167,085 (43.18 percent of the output of the whole country). United States,
Abstract of the Statistics of Manufactures, According to the Returns of the Seventh
Census, Jos. C. G. Kennedy, superintendent (n.p.: 1859; New York: Norman Ross Publishing, 1990), 33. For those few who successfully created a regional network to supply
raw materials, see Burton W. Folsom, Jr., Urban Capitalist: Entrepreneurship and City
Growth in Pennsylvania’s Lackawanna and Lehigh Regions, 1800–1920 (Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981). For a fuller discussion see Hashikawa,“Rural Entrepreneurship,” chapter 4.
27
See Allan Kulikoff, From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000) and Jon Butler, Becoming America: The
Revolution before 1776 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), two syntheses
couched in very different analytical languages.

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Table

113

The types of work performed at Greenwood (arranged by themonth of discharge), 1828 and 1829
1828

month of the last entry/settlement in ledger
Feb. Mar. Apr. May Jun. Jul. Aug. Sep. Oct. Nov. Dec.

Total
work performed: 8
cutting6
driving0
coaling0
multiple0other work
2
1829

16
13
0
0
0
3

7
5
0
0
0
2

3
2
0
0
0
1

3
1
0
0
2
0

0
0
0
0
0
0

1
1
0
0
0
0

2
0
1
0
0
1

0
0
0
0
0
0

6
1
1
0
3
1

1
1
0
0
0
0

month of the last entry/settlement in ledger
Jan. Feb. Mar. Apr. May Jun. Jul. Aug. Sep. Oct. Nov. Dec. 1830*

Total
work performed: 3
1
9
6
6
0
6
9
0
2 10 41
7
cutting
1
1
8
4
2
0
0
3
0
2
7
8
2
driving
0
0
0
1
0
0
0
1
0
0
0 11
1
coaling
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
2
0
multiple
1
0
0
1
2
0
1
1
0
0
0
5
3
other work
1
0
1
0
2
0
5
4
0
0
3 15
1
*those whose ﬁnal entry for debt or credit was entered in the ﬁrst few months of 1830
Source: Greenwood charcoal-making ledger, WFP.
Note: Those who settled their accounts within the ﬁrst seven days of the month are regarded here as having stopped working at the end of the preceding month. Those in the “otherwork” category were engaged in carting, loading, and work at Forked River. The “coaling” category includes coaling and other work involved, such as putting turf and sand on
the wood mound, and watching the smoke. This table replaces the table in page 257 of mydissertation, in which James Kemble is registered as having worked longer than he actuallydid. See page 51 of Greenwood charcoal-making ledger, WFP, for his account.