They Don’t Pay Rent: Newsletter #6

Greetings Canterbury history enthusiasts.

If you have been following along by reading our monthly Newsletters, you are aware we write to bring you in for a brief read and look at the purpose and goals of the Canterbury Historical Society, and the part we play here at the Cellar Hole Committee. 

You may remember that at the end of our last issue we suggested that this #6 would be about a recycled cellar hole. But not today.

As we pass the middle of our second year of documenting ancient stone ruins, we have 17 house sites under our belts. This is a good opportunity to take stock of the big picture. We have a large enough sample size to discover a trend in one major factor that leads to these specific homes being abandoned-Tenant farmers.

Seven of these sites supported a full array of structures found in a homestead, each of which is almost a complete economic entity by itself. The evidence includes structures that are large and served various functions compared with the others in the sample:

• A large house foundation
• A root cellar occupying a large percent of the foundation
• The ruin of a massive fireplace complex
• A large barn foundation
• Traces of sheds

Ten of these sites mostly represent houses with relatively small root cellars, and little evidence of any other structures. 

Lyford is not consistent in his characterization of the status of the people living at each site. Some of the terms used by him are residents, inhabitants, occupied by and sometimes tenants. Here we focus on the people who were tenants.

Here is a sample of the documentary photos from our survey (#19) of the leased site near the Gilmanton Town line.

The site we examined near the Gilmanton line has been researched by the owner, who discovered that the house was occupied by people who were farm workers for a large, prosperous farmstead nearby. Possibly that place was built specifically for these tenant farmers. It was just a barebones site with no evidence of any outbuildings, not even a barn. They must have been at least partly paid for their labor with food and milk.

Enter the most recent site we are still researching. It is a larger than usual tenant farm and even contains a small barn foundation. But the evidence is strong that the owner not only built the house, but located it in an unusual location, not where we would expect to find the homestead of a prosperous family.  It sits on a very steep slope extremely close to the road above it which now partly intrudes into the foundations. 

Maybe potatoes could be cultivated on the slope, but at best it is most suited for raising sheep. And we know why the house was large. It was built up on the top of the slope in the midst of a large expanse of ideal farmland where a wealthy family sited several large houses and moved one down the hill to this location.

Yes, this building seems to have been purposely moved to not only provide tenant housing, but to open up space at the family complex. While Lyford does list the names of the “occupants” he fails to mention that the place was owned by the family up on the hill. And one more fact. One of the tenants was a man, Nathan Chesley, who lived there with “Mrs Alfred Chesley”, probably his mother, and is undoubtedly the same Nathan Chesley who is reported to have resided at the farmstead near Gilmanton described above!

While we have yet to find details in the record about widespread use of tenant farmhands in Canterbury, we do know it was common practice throughout New England that some of the younger men of a family found their way to land ownership by working away from home. The same was true for others who had no prospects of being or becoming independent, or people who were outright indentured workers.

Finally, it makes sense that sited on marginal land, often remotely situated away from the village centers, the sparsely resourced tenant housing would be abandoned by many of the well- established homesteads as they moved out of farming. While we are not researching existing old houses, some of them were also abandoned. They include the seven other sites in our sample which are only home and barn foundations now because they did not become summer homes or country inns, or have not been rescued by folks who love old houses.

P.S.   If you’ve been enjoying these newsletters and our full homestead site reports but want to know more about the role of women in Canterbury land ownership, send us a note by email (cellarholesurveys@gmail.com), or text us at 603-848-2966.