Maryland - 5th Blog

Material Conditions

Most businessmen in Colonial Maryland were merchants running single proprietorships. To be successful, a single proprietor had to be a jack of all trades. His place of business looked something like a warehouse, with various inventory sitting around. Communication became a major challenge for these businessmen. In some cases, a message could take 3 weeks to over a month to receive a reply. Therefore, the pace of business for those proprietors was very slow. Some studies have indicated that these proprietorships would transact only 2 or 3 business deals per day, on average.
Small business ownership in Maryland was presented with great uncertainty because these businesses were not specialized and streamlined, therefore they tended to be highly inefficient.
Finally, the proprietors of those businesses often had other obligations such as participation in local government , which served to further slow down their business.

FOOD

Corn provided the main part of a colonists diet in the 1600s. Affordable and versatile, corn could be carried with colonial travelers quite easily when on trips of exploration or business. How was the corn prepared? The corn was dried and then ground into a fine powder. From this powdered form, a colonists could make Indian Pudding which consisted of ground corn boiled in bags, and sweetened with sugar or honey. Additionally, creative colonists would add various kinds of berries to the corn mix. One of the most popular dishes was called "Sukquattah hash", which consisted of "corn seethed like beans."

PEOPLE

On average women were slightly older than men.
Why were there less women in Colonial Maryland than men? Perhaps it was reluctance on the part of women to sign away five years of their life in indentured servitude. Maybe it was not considered socially acceptable for a young English woman to venture across the Atlantic Ocean to the colony of Maryland. Unquestionably there was reluctance on the part of the merchants and trappers who believed women were not the productive servants men were.

Why did women come to Colonial Maryland? The primary reasons were to get a husband, and to get some land. Both were plentiful in the new colony. And because of the approximately 3 to 1 ratio of men to women, a female settler in Maryland had greater social power than did their counterparts in England.

Death of Husband meant remarriage for widows with sons not old enough to "make tobacco."
Some wives had to help their husbands work in the fields. Perhaps as many as 20% of colonial wives helped their husbands perform manual labor.

Daughters of colonial immigrants married much younger than their mothers a vital register in Somerset County, Maryland showed that some daughters married as young as age 12, and the mean average age of daughters marrying was 16 1/2. Many of the girls who got married were already pregnant, about 20%. Native born Maryland girls bore more children than immigrant women did because they were younger and had more childbearing years in which to produce children. This had the net effect of slowly increasing the native Maryland population.


SOURCES:

The Tempo of Mercantile Life in Colonial America Author(s): Arthur H. Cole Source: The Business History Review, Vol. 33, No. 3 (Autumn, 1959), pp. 277-299 Published by: The President and Fellows of Harvard College Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3111947 Accessed: 25/09/2008 06:16


American Origins and Regional Institutions: The Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake Author(s): Robert D. Mitchell Source: Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 73, No. 3 (Sep., 1983), pp. 404-420 Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the Association of American Geographers Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2562729 Accessed: 25/09/2008 06:14

The Planter's Wife: The Experience of White Women in Seventeenth-Century Maryland Author(s): Lois Green Carr and Lorena S. Walsh Source: The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 34, No. 4 (Oct., 1977), pp. 542-571 Published by: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2936182