General History of Connecticut, from Its First Settlement Under George Fenwick to its Latest Period of Amity with Great BritainPeters, Samuel
History
General History of Connecticut, from Its First Settlement Under George Fenwick to its Latest Period of Amity with Great Britain
Peters, Samuel
Connecticut -- History -- Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775; Connecticut -- History -- Revolution, 1775-1783
The face of the country resembles Devonshire, Gloucestershire, Surrey,
and Kent. The farmers divide their lands into four, five, and ten
acres, with stone walls or post and rails. The roads from north to
south are generally level and good; from east to west hilly, and bad
for carriages. The various fruits are in greater perfection than in
England. The peach and apple are more luscious, beautiful, and large;
1000 peaches are produced from one tree; five or six barrels of cider
from one apple tree. Cider is the common drink at table. The
inhabitants have a method of purifying cider by frost and separating
the watery part from the spirit, which, being secured in proper
vessels, and colored by Indian-corn, becomes in three months so much
like Madeira wine, that Europeans drink it without perceiving the
difference. They make peachy and perry, grape, cherry, and currant
wines, and good beer of pumpkin, molasses, bran of wheat, spruce, and
malt. The spruce is the leaves and limbs of the fir tree; their malt
is made of maize, barley, oats, rye, chets, and wheat. The pumpkin, or
pompion, is one of the greatest blessings, and held very sacred in
New-England. It is a native of America. From one seed often grow forty
pumpkins, each weighing from forty to sixty pounds, and, when ripe, of
the colour of a marigold. Each pumpkin contains about 500 seeds,
which, being boiled to a jelly, is the Indian infallible cure for the
strangury. Of its meat are made beer, bread, custards, sauce,
molasses, vinegar, and, on thanksgiving days, pies, as a substitute
for what the Blue Laws brand as anti-christian minced pies. Its skin,
or shell, serves as a cap to cut the hair by, (as already mentioned,)
and very useful lanthorns. There are no trees, grain, or fruits,
growing in England but what will grow in Connecticut. The English oak
has been thought much superior to the American. Whatever policy may be
in this opinion, I will venture to say there is no truth in it in
respect to the white oak in Connecticut, which is tough, close, hard,
and elastic as the whalebone dried. The red, black, and chestnut oak
are, indeed, much inferior to the white oak. The ash, elm, beech,
chestnut, walnut, hazel, sassafras, sumach, maple, and butternut, are
the chief timber trees of this province, and grow to an amazing bulk.
The last is a native of America, and takes its name from a nut it
produces, of the shape and size of a pullet’s egg, which contains a
meat much larger than an English walnut, in taste like fresh butter;
it also makes an excellent pickle. The butternut furnishes fine but
tender boards; and its bark dyes black, and cures cutaneous disorders.
In February this tree yields a sap, of which are made sugar, molasses,
and vinegar. The upland maple also affords a sap equally good, and
both saps make a pleasant beverage without boiling, and the best punch
ever drank in Connecticut.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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