| The primary focus of New England community and material studies has been the Massachusetts Bay and the Connecticut River Valley in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For a variety of reasons, the central uplands--the area in between, where permanent settlement began nearly a century after Plymouth Colony was founded--has not received comparable attention. It lacks the intrigue of early colonies, where a variety of English ways collided on a new and foreign land. In the central uplands, men and women from increasingly similar New World traditions moved westward to repeat the toilsome tasks of clearing and cultivating and homesteading that were undertaken several generations earlier along the Seaboard and River Valley. While those regions flourished socially, economically, and culturally in the early eighteenth century, full "coming of age" in the central uplands occurred after turnpikes and canals opened in the early nineteenth century, and coincided with regional mass production of inexpensive commodities and the frenzied growth of a young nation. As a result, distinctive, highly refined, regional styles like those identified for earlier-settled areas did not develop. By the time hinterlands towns like Sturbridge matured, the prevailing standards of comfortable habitation could be achieved by patronizing local warerooms and stores filled with ready-made goods.; This study probes the material, social, cultural, and economic worlds of rural central New England in the eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries through a detailed analysis of probate records, architecture, primary documents, and nineteenth-century narratives for the town of Sturbridge, Massachusetts. It begins with a prologue that presents background and rationale, discussion of meaning in objects, a primer on the probate system, review of methodology, sources, and the inventory data base, evaluation of the probate system, and explanation of the face-to-face world of local exchange that shaped the contours of social and economic life. Thereafter, chapters present a chronological narrative of people and their possessions in the context of local society, economy, and culture. In addition to presenting regional historical and material analysis, this study offers a new perspective on methods for decoding and interpreting probate inventories to understand past material conditions. |
