'Convenient and fet to be cooked in': Making space for the kitchen in central Delaware, 1760-1820

This thesis examines the kitchen as an agent of social and domestic change in central Delaware between 1760 and 1820. The American Revolution and early years of the Republic brought many social changes to the country and its new citizens. During this period of civic unrest and reorganization, rural farm families found new ways to organize their domestic environment by renegotiating the space within their house. The kitchen and its workspace arguably reflected the most significant variability of domestic spaces in these years. While some families continued to incorporate their kitchen into a one-room house, other families explored the total detachment of the kitchen into a separate building away from the main house. Still yet, other families compromised both options by adjoining a separate and distinct room onto the main block of the house creating a service wing that was neither fully incorporated nor fully detached. This thesis finds that variance in kitchen configuration reflected a combination of changing economic circumstances, evolving stages of the family lifecycle and shifting world views. Although each of these kitchen configurations occurred with varying frequencies outside of the 1760-1820 period, their synchronicity at the time of the Revolution and Early Republic in central Delaware attests to a climate of uncertainty and experimentalism in a period of social transformation. To understand the kitchen of 1760-1820 and those who used it, this thesis utilizes probate inventories and orphans court valuations of 65 families in Little Creek and Duck Creek Hundred in northern Kent County. The overlap between these two documents allows us to understand not only what form the kitchen might have taken but also what materials were stored or used inside. By grasping the importance of the kitchen in all its configurations, this thesis begins to shed light on the kitchen not only as a container of workspace but also as an agent in its own right, operating in relationship with the house and the rest of society.