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Class 4 visits a farm of olden days
Threshing wheat is fun, Class 4 girls discovered last week — that is, when you only have to do it for two minutes. The students tried their hands at using a flail, a rather primitive assembly of wood and leather that Colonial-era farm workers once used to break up wheat, and were all smiles as they whacked happily at piles of harvested grain. But when they heard that farmers in the 1750s had to perform the same repetitive whacking motion for nine hours straight, from sunup to sundown, those smiles faded rather quickly.
Such tastes of Colonial farm life characterized Class 4’s trip last week to Philipsburg Manor in Sleepy Hollow, New York, a former wheat farm and mill that was, centuries ago, owned by Frederick Philipse, a manager of the Dutch East India Company. Today, the Philipsburg Manor property is surrounded by the trappings of modern life; there’s a CVS a few blocks south, rows of yellow school buses in the parking lot and an office building across the street. Within its borders, however, wheat is grown, animals raised, and grain milled into flour in the way they were more than 250 years ago.
Chapin students visited the manor as part of their English and geography curriculum, picking up hands-on lessons about how 18th-century farm life looked, smelled and felt. They assembled a wooden bucket with the help of a guide playing the part of a cooper, fitting together rounded slats and slipping on a metal hoop to make the bucket watertight. They practiced shelling corn, using sharp-edged seashells to separate the kernels from the cob, and saw how Colonial settlers wasted nothing, finding household uses for even the parts of the corn that couldn’t be eaten. They made the acquaintance of the farm’s two 9-month-old oxen, Jake and Josh, who will soon — when they’re old enough — be put to legitimate work on the property. And the girls worked together to push around a heavy, wheel-shaped stone, which in the 1750s was powered by water to grind wheat into flour.
Teachers Lynette Engel and Lisa Moy made sure the students learned not only how a Colonial farm operated, but also about the farm’s place in history. Philipsburg guides explained that the wheat grown at Philipsburg Manor produced flour used to feed the slaves on Dutch East India Company plantations in the Caribbean, where the land was too valuable for its sugar crop to waste on growing something like wheat. The guides explained how the New York area sent wheat to the islands, which in turn sent rum and sugar to Europe, which ordered more slaves brought from Africa, creating the triangle of business and trade that is emblematic of the Colonial period studied in Class 4.
Click here for a photo gallery from Philipsburg Manor
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