Manchester’s Working-Class History 250 Years Ago

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What was life like among working-class townspeople 250 years ago in the province of Massachusetts Bay?

At its new summer exhibit, the Manchester Historical Museum will invite the public to time-travel back to the lives and work of the people of this small town when it was all about seafaring, farming, and home-making.

The exhibit captures old Manchester by means of video clips, period re-enactors, artifacts and furnishings, old prints and illustrations, house histories, and a unique collection of old fishing gear from the days of the town’s thriving codfishery.

Manchester in 1772 was home to 900 people living in 65 houses, with a limited number of surnames, including 28 Lee families and 20 Allen families.  A few were prosperous, but none was rich.  Most were involved in the offshore codfishery, either as fishermen working the fishing grounds off the coast of Nova Scotia, or as shoremen in the town’s fish yards, where the catches of fish were “cured” (made suitable for shipment overseas) as the world’s only transportable high-protein food.

Fishing was a big business, but it did not earn much for the fishermen; the real profit was in the exchange of “salt cod” for other goods, which was the business of the merchants of Salem, Boston, and Marblehead.

Fishing families and other working-class people of small coastal towns have generally been marginalized if not omitted from interpretations of the past and from the standard histories.  In “Manchester 1772” they are restored to their place at the heart of the town and its culture.  Through large text-panels, the visitor experiences old Manchester in terms of:

  • The Town and its topography
  • The Families and their lifestyles
  • Their Work (codfishing, home-making, farming)
  • Their Houses and the architectural styles 
  • The Church, their beliefs, and their pastor
  • Their Politics, as war with Britain approached
  • Bereavement—death and its causes.

“Manchester is best-known for its Turn of the Century heyday as a summer resort and seasonal home of the wealthy,” notes MHM president Orestes (Rus) Brown.  “This time, we’re taking a look at an earlier Manchester, one that has no vacations or seasonal residents. It was a hard-working place that had stayed the same for generations, a small town in a British colony just before the upheaval of the Revolutionary War and then the new American republic. How did these people live and work? What were their expectations and experiences? Our exhibit will give visitors some of the answers and some feeling for the lives of those who came before.”

A major feature of the new exhibit is the array of artifacts from the days of the codfishery, both the gear of a fisherman and some of the relics of the fish-yards, where the fish was cured prior to shipment.

“A fishyard was the scene of lots of activity in the 1700s—young boys and old men laying out tons of split codfish on the drying racks, or flakes,” said Robert Booth, Director & Curator of the Museum.  “As the Sacred Cod in the State House attests, this was the biggest business in the province, and certainly in this town—but we never get to see how the actual work was done. Here is an attempt to recapture some of that.

“Beyond fishing, we get a look at farming, and at some of the elements of domestic life and labor. It is a challenge to orient the visitor to a place that has not existed for 250 years,” said Booth. 

“But small towns, and close-knit communities, were the heart and soul of the province and the basic unit of the spirit of liberty. In a small town, everyone grew up together in a barter system, interdependent and related, satisfied that this was where they belonged. In some ways these elements are still present in Manchester, and in others it is a lost world, but worth a visit to see how the people and their way of life can be fitted back into the modern landscape.”

“Manchester 1772: A Small Town on The Eve of Revolution” opens to the public Saturday, July 24 at 10 a.m. and closes, perhaps appropriately, on Labor Day, Sept. 5 at 5 p.m.