This is a transcription of Darrell A. Norris’ paper delivered at the 2006 Sisson Gathering. Horizontal lines indicate original page divisions. Many sections of the text were illustrated by overhead transparencies and slides. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ THE SPREAD OF NEW ENGLAND CULTURAL TRAITS: CONTEXTS FOR THE SISSON DIASPORA Darrell A. Norris* Annual Meeting, Sisson Family Reunion Rochester, NY, Saturday, June 24, 2006 * Professor of Geography SUNY Geneseo Geneseo, NY 14454 Email: Norris@geneseo.edu ------------------------------------------------------------------------ DARRELL NORRIS is a Professor of Geography at the State University of New York College at Geneseo, where he has taught since 1981. Born in England, Darrell was educated at Cambridge University, and emigrated to Canada in 1968, where he earned graduate degrees at McGill University, Montreal, and McMaster University in Hamilton. Darrell’s research and teaching background has focused on the North American cultural landscape, population mobility, consumer behavior, and popular culture. His current research is exploring the evolving geography of the Web, especially Web-based “mail-order” brides. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ I am not a genealogist. The background and credentials I bring to this remarkable confluence of Sissons are tangential at best – a professional career characterized by a fascination with culture, particularly material culture, and several research projects which centrally engaged aspects of human migration as a core theme in processes as varied as the vicissitudes of nineteenth century retail business, early transportation and tourism, the formation of the pioneer farmscape, and the social fabric of nineteenth century cities. My speech this evening will therefore try to engage a saga central to the Sisson experience for close to four centuries, that is to say the spread of aspects of the New England cultural realm in the still evolving American landscape. Part of that saga, obviously, is the migration of New Englanders, the Sissons included, from a seventeenth century southern New England hearth. Less well-known but certainly worth exploring is, to borrow the phrase coined by the great Penn State geographer Peirce Lewis, the ‘cultural spoor’ of New Englanders, the many traces of their material and non-material cultural landscape that have shaped and continue to color the American scene. California excepted, for example, to speak, albeit somewhat lazily, of ‘Blue’ states is to articulate just one element of a New England tradition of community, commonwealth, and social responsibility that came to color those states touched most by the diaspora of New Englanders – New York, the eastern and upper Midwest, and the Pacific Northwest. Genealogy, as you are probably aware, is a less popular pursuit in England than it is in the United States, most notable New England. Like many English-born, I know little of my roots beyond my English-born grandparents, who were fisher-folk in Brixham, Devon. (Brixham, incidentally, was the penultimate English port-of-call of the Mayflower, and Mayflower II was built there is 1971, 350 years after its namesake’s trans-Atlantic voyage. My mother’s parents were Galician Jews and we know nothing of them except my East London grandfather’s failure to anticipate the future of internal combustion. He just kept on repairing bicycles. English diffidence toward genealogy has I think, several underlying causes. When genealogy and heraldry were nearly synonymous, all but one or two percent of the English population were effectively denied significant roots by dint of their subordinate class status. Moreover, when roots were patently millennial and lost in the mists of Anglo-Saxon, Danish, Celtic or other distant forebears in non-literate unrecorded societies, the quest for family lineage was bound to be frustrated and generally speculative at best. Sleuthing medieval Sissons ------------------------------------------------------------------------ guarantees few needles and many haystacks. And finally, as Peter Laslett and others have shown, English society even before the industrial revolution was remarkable peripatetic, often substituting geographical movement for upward social mobility. And the mass movement to cities in the first century of the Industrial Revolution before 1850 accentuated this fact of social life in much of the British Isles. The Brixham Norrises, incidentally, were an exception to this rule; they were resolutely Devon folk, rarely straying beyond the bounds of their regional accept and way of life. They were the rule to which the likes of Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh were very much the exception. My own grandfather ventured beyond the West County fisheries just once, hired as a second mate on the ship that retrieved Lord Byron’s remains from Greece. English diffidence, as you know and reflect, is not shared by New Englanders and their descendants. Perhaps that has to do with the role of family and, especially, village communities in southern New England’s agrarian landscape before the factory system emerged on the cusp of the nineteenth century. Perhaps too it reflects the sheer extent of record-keeping and family narratives in what , with the possible exception of Iceland and Sweden, was the world’s most literate society in the eighteenth century. Primers, diaries, family Bibles, sewing samplers and other cultural elements all attest to the emphasis placed on education, literacy, and – by extension – and engagement with family roots and branches. But perhaps the paramount factor was a shared and fairly egalitarian experience – stepping ashore in a new world some time during the seventeenth century, with relatively little and certainly not very diverse immigration thereafter. This experience framed what geographers term the New England cultural hearth, a landscape which, through growing emigration would come to color the landscape of the late colonial era and the westward expansion of the United States. Wilbur Zelinsky, also a Penn State geographer, is the most accessible commentator on the New England diaspora. It is to elements of that spread that we now turn our attention. PLACE-NAMING The first New Englanders left an English landscape full of place-names, most of them dating from the great age of settlement and woodland clearing between the end of the Roman rule and the Norman conquest, that is between the sixth and eleventh centuries. With few exceptions these place names combined personal possessives and descriptive common nouns. The ‘ing’ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ denoted ‘people,’ ‘ton’ meant ‘village,’ and ‘ham’ meant ‘farmstead,’ all in Anglo-Saxon. (There were of course Danish terms too.) Later, ‘leigh’ and ‘stead’ both connoted ‘clearing,’ while ‘ford’ and ‘burgh’ or ‘borough’ are self-explanatory. New Englanders articulated and gave meaning to their new landscape by borrowing and fixing the names of their English town, village and port origins in southern New England’s _tabula rasa_. And, given the regional concentrations by English origin this led to a parallel regionalism of the new toponymy, exemplified for instance by replica etymologies drawn from eastern and southwestern England, the two leading source areas of the emigrants. In England I grew up in Plymouth and nearby Plympton; the Massachusetts Plymouth also boasts a nearby Plympton. When New Englanders spearheaded western expansion, they carried place-naming as a key element of their cultural baggage, often across several generations of step-by-step movement. The case of Andover is a very good example of this ingrained habit, tracing New Englanders and their descendants across 250 years of westward expansion. Taken as a whole, we can trace this diaspora right across the mid-Atlantic states and the mid-West. And when settlers broke with established practice, as indeed happened quite often in western New York at the turn of the nineteenth century, the ‘new’ names simply joined the arsenal of those with specific New England roots. Hence Geneseo New York spawned Geneseos in Michigan and Illinois. And the key break with migratory rootedness had its origins in New York as well, when a late eighteenth century surveyor inspired perhaps by Jeffersonian classicism ascribed classically inspired names to a range of towns near Syracuse. Thereafter New England place-naming habits were interspersed with toponymic echoes of ancient Greece, Rome, and occasionally Egypt. As well, the personal possessive element enjoyed a marked revival in the nineteenth century, especially in the naming of small milling communities. SPEECH Accent and vocabulary both lie outside my areas of research. Suffice to say then that New England dialects and patterns of usage enjoyed much less generational carryover than was typical of place-naming. New Englanders enjoyed an absolute majority of the population in very few regions of trans-Appalachian settlement, while the fusion of disparate settler origins combined with a degree of rural isolation both contributed to a complex regional mosaic of pronunciation and usage. Speech patterns framed the formation of a Midwestern national ------------------------------------------------------------------------ hearth at the confluence of New England, Pennsylvania, and Southern migratory streams. The dominance of this new hearth and the aural national acceptance of its accents would be echoed by a small legion of television news anchors from the Midwest. More locally, even in a region of significant New England population origins in central and western New York, the Boston ‘frappe’ and Providence ‘cabinet’ never came to describe a milk shake, and the ‘grinder’ (and Pennsylvania ‘hoagie’ too) never identified a submarine sandwich. DEATH AND BURIAL While gravestones lie very much within the orbit of interest of genealogists, it is I think striking and a little disappointing to note that interest generally begins and ends with whatever vital information the gravestone provides. New Englanders’ habit of placing slate (or in the Connecticut Valley sandstone) memorials _outdoors_ for _ordinary_ folk coincided with the very first instances of this practices in British churchyards, where memorials had hitherto been place _inside_ churches for only a select few of the deceased. In other words, the New England gravestone was more cultural innovation than cultural baggage. Beginning with the work of Demos, Deetz, and Dethlefson, all in the 1970s, much has been learned about New England gravestones as a key element of the folk culture which evolved slowly from the early seventeenth to the eighteenth century. Let me try to provide a synopsis. First, the stones were overwhelmingly simple headboard forms, usually accompanied by footstones. Second, decorative motifs were common, beginning with austere skulls befitting Puritan attitudes toward the transitory nature of things earthly. By the eighteenth century the ominous skull had been replaced by more hopeful symbols, notably spirit-faces and winged angels. By the time of the Revolution it was socially acceptable, at least for ministers and other leading figures, to incorporate a portrait of the deceased. Admiration had replaced admonition. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Gravestone practices were very much an element of New Englanders’ cultural baggage a they moved west. An early example is Mendham, New Jersey, where we see the trappings of gravestone art from the church’s foundation in the 1730s to a set of changes which characterized most of the eastern United States around 1800. The simple headboard gave way to its classicized, often Palladian, form. Traditional motifs were replaced by classical urns, weeping willows, and pedestals. Local sandstone yielded to easily worked limestone, and itinerant carvers such as Uzal Ward were made obsolete by the advent of marble works. While this ------------------------------------------------------------------------ element of the New England diaspora does not become muted by the early nineteenth century, one encounters many legacies of New England practice well into the century in areas settled by New Englanders. Upstate New York is a case in point, and the classicized headboard is the most common manifestation of the two-century evolution of the New England memorial. The more sedentary members of the audience may wish to explore this further by accessing the ‘virtual cemetery’ on-line. Get there easily by googling the two words ‘virtual cemetery’. It is a remarkable extensive national record of gravestones from all over the United States. STRUCTURES The New England house experienced a similar transition as an element of folk culture. Its roots were the simple one-room cottage with (unlike its Tidewater counterpart) an interior chimney breast to retain heat. Most of you will be familiar with the Cape Cod folk house, and, while Capes were a regional variant, most late colonial New England rural homes were also relatively small story-and-a-half clapboard houses, lacking only the plunging eaves characteristic of the Cape and its many revival expressions from the early twentieth century and – especially – the 1950s (viz. Levittown). The more substantial New England folk houses evolved gradually from the one-roomed cottage – the Garrison home, one-room deep with two full stories, the Saltbox with its distinctive roof line accommodating a long rear kitchen, and the New England Large home, with four rooms over four rooms incorporating, like all the region’s folk structures, a substantial central chimney. None of these forms, however, are much in evidence in areas extensively settled by New Englanders after the Revolution. There are two reasons for this. First, substantial homes shed the central chimney to yield a central entrance, bilaterally symmetric, and distinctly Georgian front façade. This transition was well underway _in_ New England before the great diaspora. Second, most homes were simple 1 ½ story houses which would be near-universally swept away and replaced by Greek Revival and, later, Italianate rural homes between _circa_ 1820 and the Civil War. Indeed, these simple 1 ½ story homes were replaced in New England as well. Hence our common misconceptions about the look and scale of colonial homes, misconceptions reinforced by the look and scale of their twentieth century revivals as well as by the surviving and generally substantial (but nonetheless unrepresentative) homes in the present-day New England landscape. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Barns became a commonplace feature of the New England landscape soon after annual harvests warranted capacious winter storage. The English tradition was the enclosed _barnyard_, flanked by a handful of functional spaces, including the barn itself. The New England variant of this form was the _connected barn_, a winter-sensitive practice which did not spread west with the diaspora of New Englanders. The standard colonial form came to be the so-called ‘English’ three-bay barn, with a central threshing floor and flanking grain or hay storage on both sides. This form was unsuited to wintering cattle, and when livestock numbers proliferated in the nineteenth century the _raised_ three-bay barn emerged, an exercise in gravitational adaption, with top-stored feed and bottom-expelled manure and urea from the cattle pens. The barn was generally built on a slope and routinely ramped to provide threshing floor access. The raised three-bay barn certainly did spread west wherever mixed farming was practiced. It was New England’s principal contribution to America’s new Midwestern farm landscape. Ohio’s Connecticut Reserve is a case in point. FENCES In a wonderful essay, J.K. Galbraith explored the bizarre economics of “farming an abandoned farm.” His point was that generations of naïve urbanites has infused the moribund New England farmscape with fresh capital and local employment, always doomed to failure, and always likely to yield stones as the only ‘crop’ of note. Stones there were a-plenty, and Colonial New Englanders adapted to this challenge by consigning field stones to bounding stone fences, often little more than piled rubble. The New England diaspora quickly turned its back on this practice. American fences in the wooded East were almost always simple ‘snake’ (aka worm, zig-zag, or Virginia rail fences) or, as farming prospered and fence wood became scarce, post-and-rail fences. In effect, nineteenth century farmers were ‘stonewalled’ by the effort needed to build the miles of stone walls that had characterized the New England farmscape. Cultural tradition has its limits. CONCLUSION While it is true to say that New England ancestry is an important strand in the saga of the Sissons, it is also clear that, as generations passed, they reflected the geographical and historical shifts which successively shed a wide variety of seventeenth and eighteenth century cultural ------------------------------------------------------------------------ norms. They ‘left’ England not only English, but regionally so. They were _not_ West-Countymen and doubtless saw their Devon, Dorset or Somerset brethren as a decidedly different breed. Later, they were English in the sense of _not_ being Dutch (a wide range of idioms attest to this colonial stigma). Later still they were New Englanders and _not_ English, and had evolved a distinct folk-cultural matrix which was springboard and baggage for their diaspora. This baggage certainly shaped the landscapes of their new west, but 1800 was in so many ways a watershed marked by the assault of ‘new’ popular culture and incipient industrialization on a very wide range of cultural norms. And so, as westward flow proceeded, the New England Sissons _became_ increasingly _American_, or at least northerners and Yankees and _not_ Southerners. By 1850, it would have become difficult to _see_ their New England background, and even to _hear_ it. It is a noble and challenging endeavor to trace a family across a dozen or more generations. The Sisson diaspora is a subset of the infinitely fascinating saga that has yielded a nation of close to three hundred million and landscapes of enduring fascination and very deep roots. Thank you for your interest, and may your genealogical quests prosper.