Notes from the Ironbound: If The Democratic Primary Field Was a University History Department

My time in grad school: six years of misery under a Klobuchar, six more to recover and graduate with a Sanders.

On April 6, 2019, I delivered a version of the following as the keynote speech for the SUNY Plattsburgh Department of History’s annual awards luncheon and honor society induction ceremony. I am the history librarian and occasionally teach as an adjunct for the department. With this talk I wanted to draw on my own experiences to inspire especially the students becoming teachers to embrace local resources as an excellent way to get their students engaged with history.

First, thanks to the History department faculty for inviting me to speak. And second, congratulations to all of the students being inducted into Phi Alpha Theta today. I work with a number of different departments on campus and I know how challenging your program is, and the level of work you have all done to excel.

Many of you, I know, are going to become teachers, in either primary or secondary school. Some of you are going to go into museum, library, or archival work. And perhaps some of you are going to follow your professors’ path and attend graduate school in history. In all these fields you will be educators. Even if you’re going into a different career, you’re still citizens, and you’ve been historically trained — you may find yourselves needing or wanting to educate your community about history.

This talk is about teaching history in all these aspects. I’ve titled it “Teaching History from the Local” and not “Teaching Local History” — you’ll see the difference.

I want to begin with my own, somewhat unusual, path into history teaching, because I think it will illuminate some of the other things I have to say.

My undergraduate degree was in anthropology, not history. I worked for a number of years as an archaeologist, mostly for Colonial Williamsburg. If you haven’t been there, Colonial Williamsburg is a large open-air living history museum in Tidewater Virginia. They have a research arm that does a great deal of historical, archaeological, and architectural research. So with CW I excavated historic sites — notably a seventeenth-century plantation house, a colonial theater, and a colonial coffeehouse.

Eventually I decided to pursue a doctorate in history and chose William and Mary because of its close links to Colonial Williamsburg and their history department’s willingness to accept students from material culture and archaeological backgrounds.

For eight summers in graduate school I taught in a program my advisor ran, for high school students while I was in graduate school. It was called the National Institute for American History and Democracy — NIAHD for short. The course was for college credit and ran for three weeks. Every day we would take the students to a different historic site. Often, because of Prof. Whittenburg’s connections, we would get a behind the scenes tour. At the same time, the students would read a serious scholarly article dealing directly with the history of the site we were visiting.

When we visited Bacon’s Castle, a seventeenth-century brick house in Surry County, Virginia, they read an article by T. H. Breen about the origins of Bacon’s Rebellion in labor practices and race and class divisions. When we visited Colonial Williamsburg, where every day there were living-history performances of aspects of the American Revolution, they might read an article by Woody Holton on enslaved persons’ contribution to triggering the war in Virginia.

I found that the site visits and the readings reinforced each other, not because they said the same things, but because they said different things about the same topics.

Sites and readings reinforce each other, not because they say the same thing, but because they say different things about the same thing. As a broad generalization, historic sites tell a sort of Whig history, emphasizing the march of progress; we chose readings that cut across that with a social-history perspective. The combination really clicked with the students; by giving them two very different interpretations of the same people, place, or event it allowed them to begin contrasting those and, eventually, judging between them.

I’m not posting a dichotomy here between material culture as non-scholarly and historical reading as scholarly. As my advisor told me when I was first moving from archaeology to history, “Archaeology is too important to be left to the archaeologists.”

This program worked tremendously well at helping students engage with history. As I began teaching here at Plattsburgh, I thought back to that experience to try to understand why NIAHD worked, and how I could incorporate that into the American Revolution course I taught last year.

First, there are an amazing number of historic sites close by Williamsburg. Monticello is two hours away; Mount Vernon two and a half. There are a number of Civil War sites within ninety minutes: Fredericksburg, Richmond, Petersburg, Fort Monroe. And within twenty minutes there’s Colonial Williamsburg, Jamestown, and Yorktown.

Second, there is a massive amount of excellent scholarship published on Virginia in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. And this scholarship has been written over decades or centuries, incorporating many different historiographical perspectives examining the same people, places, and events.

In trying to replicate aspects of NIAHD with my Revolution class I found the latter to be the biggest problem. There is simply not enough scholarly history on Plattsburgh and the North Country, or for that matter on most places, to replicate what can be done with Tidewater Virginia.

There is history, but it’s not scholarly. There’s scholarship relating to the region, but we only get a passing mention, if that. And even when there are single works, they’re not part of a larger historiography. I’m thinking here of Philip G. White’s Beekmantown, an excellent quantitative social history study of Beekmantown and Plattsburgh. There are no other works in conversation with it.

We do, however, have a surprising number of historic sites and museums. Ticonderoga is only ninety minutes away, for example. And we have quite a few smaller museums here in Clinton County. But they aren’t as well funded, and not as deeply studies or interpreted, as those in Tidewater Virginia.

What I concluded as I was teaching my Revolution course was that students needed to read, in depth, local primary sources, and then interpret those in the light of secondary sources that dealt with the same topics in areas regions similar to ours.

In that course, students read, transcribed, and shared among themselves a series of letters from the 1810s between General Benjamin Mooers of Plattsburgh, commander of the New York militia in the War of 1812, and his wife Elizabeth. These are all held in the Kent-Delord collection in SUNY Plattsburgh’s Special Collections. We discovered that these letters have rarely been cited. Those who have used them were primarily interested in military history, and therefore in Benjamin’s letters rather than Elizabeth’s.

But, we found, there’s an absolute wealth of social and cultural history that can be mined from these letters. Some students wrote about the development of Gen. Mooers’s militia. Others focused on Benjamin and Elizabeth’s extensive discussions of travel and communication between Plattsburgh and Albany, where Benjamin frequently traveled after the war as a state legislator. Of course, this is the era when the Erie Canal, and the attendant transformation of travel and commerce in New York, was become more than just a gleam in a merchant’s eye.

Two other topics in particular revealed aspects of local history that are themselves worthy of further study. First, some students noticed that Elizabeth wrote a great deal about religious matters. These included an acrimonious split in her own congregation. This brought to mind the tensions of the Second Great Awakening, of which so much has been written, especially dealing with Western New York’s Burned-Over District of a decade later. Were the struggles here in Plattsburgh an early example of the same tensions there?

Second, a couple of students noted the letters in early 1816 commented on the weather. It was unusually cold and dark. There was a haze in the air, and plants bloomed late if at all. The Mooers family couldn’t have known, but they were experiencing the effects of the explosion of Mount Tambora in modern-day Indonesia, resulting in a volcanic winter and what became know as the “Year Without a Summer.” There are plenty of primary-source accounts of this unusual weather in the Northern United States, but Elizabeth noted a specific historical effect of the agricultural failures it caused: more Canadians were coming southwards across the border, looking for work, than ever before.

To return to your roles as future teachers: The point of all this isn’t to say that you and your students should all study Plattsburgh — though we would be delighted if you did — but that these neglected histories are out there, not just in Plattsburgh, but everywhere. And the resources to study them exist everywhere those histories do. But you’ll need to seek out those resources.

For secondary sources, you will unfortunately lose access to the college’s databases after you graduate. But your local public libraries often have subscriptions to these databases or can get materials through interlibrary loan. And the New York Public Library offers free library cards to state residents, and those cards allow you online access to many historical database, including a number we don’t have access to via the college.

As for primary sources, there are understudied collections and underutilized resources everywhere. Every county in the state has a county historian. Many towns and cities have the same. These are great people to talk to — they often combine knowledge of the area with an academic history degree. There are local academic libraries like ours with archives. Public libraries often have their own archival collections. Local historical societies and museums often have resources of their own. In many cases, the collections haven’t been properly indexed, because that requires a great deal of staff time and funding to do well. So you and your students will need to spend time exploring. But the people involved with these institutions will be eager to work with you.

I’ll leave you with this: remember that that the gap in scholarship on regions like Plattsburgh and the North Country provides an opportunity to begin doing original research. Yes, getting your facts right is essential, but you can do more, by asking not only “what happened here?” and also tying those local events, people and places to the larger historical trends that you’re uniquely placed to identify by way of your rigorous training as historians.

As we drove by a small sugar house, we saw smoke and steam rising from the vents in the roof – they were making syrup today.

We’d never been to Wayne LaPier and Family Maple Sugar House before, and we’d just come from a pancake breakfast at another maple farm. But the woodpile stacked to the side of the building suggested that LaPier’s was an old-fashioned operation, one that still ran on wood for fuel rather than gas or electric. And a sign out front advertised an open house.

Inside we met Wayne LaPier, 75 years old, who has run this operation since 1985 when he bought it from his father. He’s standing next to the evaporator, the key piece of equipment in making maple syrup, and the producer of the smoke and steam that alerted us a boil was taking place.

Sap used to be collected in wooden or metal pails and then carried to the syrup house. Now a system of plastic tubing connects the trees and gravity carries the sap down to a drum for collection.

Those drums are gathered when they fill, brought to the syrup house, and poured into a larger collection tank.

Sap from nearby trees bypasses the collection drums and is pulled directly into the sugar house via a simple vacuum system hidden in a back closet.

In another closet sits this reverse osmosis machine. It takes the sap from the collection drums and vacuum system and rather like a household water filter, separates the water from the impurities – except in this case it’s the “impurities” that become the syrup. The process cuts the fuel needed for running the evaporator by two-thirds.

After going through the RO system, the syrup is stored in an overhead vat and gradually drained into the evaporator. Wayne bought this evaporator when he took over the operation in 1985. It’s made by the Canadian company Dominion & Grimm. Matthew Thomas’s Maple Sugar History blog has a short history of the firm, including an advertisement from 1909 with an evaporator that looks very much like this one.

There’s a pile of wood ready to be burned.

The rest of the family is moving the wood into place…

…so Wayne can keep the fire going.

Sap boils inside the evaporator, further reducing the water content.

Wayne uses a hygrometer to test the syrup from the evaporator. When the syrup reaches a particular density, it’s nearly ready for consumption.

It only needs to run through a series of filters…

…and the result is fresh, warm syrup, with a flavor much richer than even good syrup that has been packaged and stored.

Reader, should you ever have the chance to drink hot maple syrup right from the evaporator, please, do not pass it by.

Thanks to Wayne LaPier, Christine, and the rest of the family for letting us stay for an hour, answering all our questions, and giving us a taste of the syrup at its best.

Herdan-Zuckmayer, Alice. The Farm in the Green Mountains. Translated from German by Ida H. Washington and Carol E. Washington. New York Review of Books, 2017. Originally written 1948.

Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer, her husband (“Zuck”), and their children escaped Austria in the early 1940s. They arrived in the United States and settled for five years on a farm in Vermont. The Farm in the Green Mountains is a collection of essays adapted from Alice’s letters to friends back in Europe, telling them of her new life, so very different from that before exile. Where in Europe Alice and Zuck had been intellectuals, with servants to do the housework, in Vermont they learned to be farmers: cooking and cleaning, raising chickens and goats, chopping wood and drawing water. They find themselves among neighbors who have integrated the life of the farm and that of the mind. The two turn out to be not opposed, but complementary, and Alice’s concluding elegies to a college and its library bring the two together.

The essays are written simply and directly, with plain language setting out observations of everyday life. My favorites are “The Telephone” and “The Standard” (the latter referring to the town newspaper) describe the formation of close-knit communities among a thin rural population. Others tell of the upkeep of the farm animals, the mighty efforts required to warm the farmhouse in the Vermont winter, and the extraordinary difficulty of traveling through that winter on icy, dirt roads, in an era before electrification. The spectres of the Holocaust and of World War II are always in the background, but only in “The Rats” – about nothing more than a temporary infestation of vermin – is it clear how much of a hold the horrors in Europe still held over Alice and her family.

Thomas, Matthew M. Maple King: The Making of a Maple Sugar Empire. Published by author, 2018.

The eponymous “Maple King” of Matthew Thomas’s book is George C. Cary (1864-1931), founder of the Cary Maple Sugar Company of St. Johnsbury, Vermont. In Thomas’s telling Cary was not only a producer of maple products, but a key figure in the modernization of the industry. Before Cary, maple sugar was produced a few hundred pounds at a time by small farmers and sold to consumers for household use. But after Cary, maple sugar had become a commodity. Small producers sold to large “packers,” who mixed their purchases together and sold a standardized product measured in tons rather than pounds. The primary purchaser was now large commercial interests rather than individuals.

Maple King is organized chronologically, and serves both as a biography of Cary himself and a history of the rise, fall, and rebirth of the Cary Maple Sugar Company and its associated brands. It makes sense to write the two together, for Cary and his business were, Thomas argues, inextricably intertwined. Cary began the company with the money he had made purchasing maple sugar to sell to tobacco manufacturers. It ran on credit through the 1910s and 1920s, much of that credit backed by Cary’s personal wealth. When Cary was no longer able to finance operations the company fell into bankruptcy.

The book begins with the limited scale of maple sugaring in the early nineteenth century and the industrial progress that began after the Civil War that transformed the maple products as it did the rest of American agriculture. It follows how Cary entered the maple sugar business and how he steadily moved from a role as middleman to become a producer, refiner, and marketer of maple products. Succeeding chapters detail Cary’s expansion beyond his own company, via the purchase of failing competitors, partnership with successful ones, and innovative marketing of his products. The culmination of this period was Cary’s dominance of bulk maple sugar production in the United States by the 1920s. But by the end of the decade business had slumped, hit hard by the Great Depression, as credit tightened and the tobacco companies that were Cary’s primary customers pushed for lower prices. The result was bankruptcy, after which pieces of the Cary empire were split off, sold, and sold again, up to the present day. Yet one brand in particular – Maple Grove Farms – has stayed strong.

One of my favorite things about Maple King is Thomas’s use of both documentary sources and material culture. Company documents, newspaper accounts, and archival photographs are key to the narrative. But Thomas is especially interested in the built landscape of the Cary maple empire, including the company plant and Cary’s residence in St. Johnsbury, the stores and restaurants that marketed Cary products to tourists, and the farms and sugarbushes in outlying areas where Cary sourced its raw materials.

Cary’s story is that of a self-made man, skilled in the world of business, not just rising to the top of an industry but creating one where there was none before. And what Cary created really was an industry: bulk purchasing, bulk refining, and the sale of a commoditized product. Today the iconic images associated with maple syrup include log cabins, trees hung with buckets, and a strapping man in a red and black checked shirt. These are very much the opposite of the landscape of mass production that Cary created. And yet, it was Cary’s own marketing machine that sold us the images of rustic sugaring.

When I first read Maple King I wondered how Cary’s business compared with another large maple sugar operation of the early twentieth century, Abbot Augustus Low’s Horse Shoe in the Adirondacks. I was happy to read on Thomas’s blog Maple Sugar History that his next book will be on Horse Shoe.

In the meantime, Maple King is an excellent narrative of the transformation of the maple sugar industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, well worth reading for anyone interested in the histories of maple sugar and maple syrup, Vermont, or industrialized agriculture and forestry.

January began poorly, as we had to say goodbye to our cat Simon. In late December he hurt himself somehow and couldn’t put weight on his left hind leg. The veterinarian at the emergency clinic took X-rays, which were negative, and suggested it was a soft tissue injury. We took Simon home but his condition did not improve. He stopped eating and spent most of his time curled up under the bed. Our own vet put Simon on an antibiotic and an appetite stimulant. But the next morning he was worse, lurching and stumbling and unable to hold his head straight. We went back to the vet. Given Simon was 14, had multiple and worsening issues, and was in pain, the right decision was obvious but still difficult.

The next week we visited my parents in the New Hampshire mountains and saw their cats, who are becoming much more tolerant of new people in the house.

I continued working on the maple sugar project, reading secondary sources on the 1790s attempts at commoditization: Taylor, William Cooper’s Town; Evans, The Holland Land Purchase; and Maxey, “The Union Farm.” There is also a very nice recent MA thesis by Mary Donchez, “A Sweet Legacy? Thomas Jefferson and the Development of the Maple Sugar Industry in Vermont”.

I went running 15 times, totalling 127 km. That’s much less than I was running during the fall. The February fitness challenge on Apple Watch is to walk or run a total of 390 km, which averages out to 14 km/day. I’ll have to boost my mileage again if I want to meet that goal. I don’t know how Apple figures out how to set monthly challenges but it seems to strike a good balance: tough but achievable.

And the spring semester began this week. I was back at the reference desk after a semester off. I’m also teaching information literacy classes and Zotero workshops, which will take up most of my time through February.