Custom Songbooks

Topic: CRS Versions
Larry Holcomb believes Lynn Rohrbough’s Cooperative Recreation Service (CRS) began publishing custom songbooks in 1940. [1]  The first may have been a collection for the American Country Life Association. [2]  One suspects it was commissioned by someone at Ohio State University or Ohio Wesleyan University who was active in the organization. [3]

Custom songbooks were not invented by Rohrbough, although there are aspects he may have rediscovered.  The first seems to have been produced by Carl Edward Zander [4] and Wes Klusmann for Boy Scouts in California.  The exact history does not emerge until they copyrighted a book in 1938 for the YMCA. [5]

The one I own is the “28th printing” from 1938. [6]  The format is the same as that used by CRS in the 1930s: 3 6/16" wide by 6 7/16" long. [7]  This booklet’s cover is thin cardboard while the pages are heavy stock.  It is held together with two staples.

The Boy Scouts of America was organized in 1910 by a committee that hoped to merge the programs of Ernest Thompson Seton and Daniel Beard with the British program of Robert Baden-Powell.  Since none of the men involved had an interest in administration, the group hired James Edward West as manger.  He quickly dispatched Seton and Beard, and treated the organization as a business. [8]

A number of Scout councils had organized camps on their own that combined Scouting programs with those of private boys’ camps in New England.  In 1918, West reduced costs when he transferred the burden of troop organization over to local churches.  In 1926, he replaced existing camp programs with troop camping.  Councils provided safe sites, and local troop leaders provided manpower. [9]

Zander’s name first appears as a council executive and camp director in 1924 and 1925; [10] after that troop camping prevailed.  Klusmann’s name first appears when he was associated with the Woodcraft League of America in 1928. [11]  That group was sponsored by Seton. [12]

Local councils circumvented West’s limited camping programs in small ways.  Zander and Klusmann did not copyright their songbooks for the Boy Scouts.  Instead, they seem to have created a private business, Songs ’n’ Things, in Berkeley.  Both were the sons of entrepreneurs.  Klusmann’s father sold pharmaceutical supplies, [13] while Zander’s was “a musician who played, taught, and had a music store.” [14]

According to historians for the Crescent Bay BSA District, the first book was called Camp Songs for Boy Scouts.  It contained fifty songs and “circulated widely throughout the scout camps of Southern California and beyond.” [15]

Camping and youth group organizations were strong in California and other groups asked for copies.  That led the two men to issue Camp Songs: Popular Edition, which they modified for different markets by including songs specific to each group.

The two Boy Scout field executives modified the “21st printing” by substituting Camp Josepho’s name in place of “popular edition” and added a four-page insert in the middle that had no page numbers.  Later, they altered the “23rd printing” by adding an eight-page section of Josepho’s songs that were numbered in sequence. [16]

My 1938 copy of Camp Songs does not contain music, only the lyrics with notes on the tunes.

In 1939, Zander and Klusmann introduced a second collection, Camp Songs ’n’ Things [17] that does have music.  It also includes some stunts.

 

Printing did not mean print run, but version of the master songbook.  The date refers to the copyright date of the title, not the date of the publication.

 

As you can see, the type is in two fonts.  The constant information is darker than the text that changes.  They may well have had one plate where they made the substitutions.  Crescent Bay says their “21st printing” was from 1942 and their “23rd printing” from 1945.

My “1938” copy of Camp Songs: Popular Edition contains “Walking at Night” with a credit to the National Recreation Association.  The first publication was 1940 in Augustus Zanzig’s Singing America. [18]  As mentioned in the post for 26 September 2021, Zanzig was traveling around the country collecting songs, and may well have introduced this in California before he issued his songbook. [19]

Zander and Klusmann’s use of dates and version numbers makes it difficult to know exactly when the two men introduced particular songs.  The only time limit would be 1943, when Klusmann moved to New York to work in the national BSA office, [20] although Crescent Lake indicates Zander must have continued the business a few years longer.  His family remembers “him in his den packing up and shipping out Songs 'N Things books” years after he was “out of Scouting.” [21]

Graphics
1.  Camp Songs, front cover.
2.  “Each Campfire Lights Anew.”  Camp Songs, page 50.
3.  “Each Campfire Lights Anew.”  Camp Songs ’n’ Things, page 94.
4.  Camp Songs, inside back cover.

End Notes
Zander and Klusmann are mentioned in the posts for 5 December 2021, 13 March 2022, and 20 March 2022.

1.  Larry Nial Holcomb.  “A History of the Cooperative Recreation Service.”  PhD dissertation.  University of Michigan, 1972.  102.  Reconstructing this phase of CRS’s history is difficult for several reasons.  Rohrbough’s memory cannot always be trusted.  Business records before 1960 had been destroyed by the time Holcomb was working with Rohrbough. [23]  Few songbooks carry dates of publication, and often that information is not reliable.  In their place, one must compare songbooks looking for internal evidence.  Rohrbough did not keep copies of everything he produced, and Holcomb amassed his collection from rummaging through the storeroom and talking to friends. [24]  I have been buying copies on-line, and that is limited to those that survived sixty or seventy years.  When my information differs from his, I assume his usually is correct and my source is later than his.

2.  American Country Life Association.  Songs.  1940 according to Holcomb.  104.

3.  The American Country Life Association was founded in 1919. [25]  Paul Vogt of Ohio State University [26] and Bruce Melvin of Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware, Ohio, [32] were early supporters of the group.  Both had left the state by the mid-1920s, but others remained active.  OSU hosted the 1935 national conference. [36]  I have not found the names of anyone active in the group in the 1940s in Ohio.

4.  When he was publishing songbooks, Zander used the name Carl.  Later, he used Edward.  I will use his full name to make clear he is the person being discussed.

5.  Carl E. Zander and Wes H. Klusmann.  Camp Songs: Popular Edition.  Los Angeles: 4 May 1938; edition for Y. M. C. A.  Item AA 269978 in United States Copyright Office.  Catalog of Copyright Entries. Part 1.  Number 7, 1938.  785.

6.  Carl E. Zander and Wes H. Klusmann.  Camp Songs: Popular Edition.  Berkeley, California: Songs ’n’ Things, copyright 1938, 28th printing.

7.  The post for 12 December 2021 has a photograph of the CRS Handy II cover from 1930.

8.  Patricia Averill.  Camp Songs, Folk Songs.  Bloomington, Indiana: Xlibris, 2014.  367–368.

9.  Averill.  368.

10.  Alan O’Connor, Gerry Albright, Cliff Curtice, Irene Fujimoto, Frank Glick, Howard Herlihy, John Nopel, Bill Soncrant, Janette Soncrant, and George Williams.  “History of the Golden Empire Council: Boy Scouts of America.”  Sacramento, California: Golden Empire BSA Council, 1996.  33.

11.  Item.  Eagle Rock Sentinel, Los Angeles, California, 20:6:24 February 1928.
12. Averill.  145.

13.  The National Corporation Reporter, 8:130:1894, lists The William H. Klusmann [37] Company as a manufacturer and dealer in “essential oils, juices of plants and vegetables, drugs.”

14.  BG.  “Carl Edward Zander Sr.”  Find a Grave website, 8 February 2021.

15.  Crescent Bay Historical Project.  “Camp Josepho - Song Books.”  Crescent Bay District, West Los Angeles BSA Council website, Jeff Morley webmaster.

16.  Crescent Bay Council.

17.  My copy is Carl E. Zander and Wes H. Klusmann.  Camp Songs ’n’ Things.  Berkeley, California: Songs ’n’ Things, copyrighted 1939, ninth printing.  I could not verify the copyright status from the Library of Congress catalogs available on the internet.  Except for the use of music, it has the same format as Camp Songs.

18.  Augustus D. Zanzig.  Singing America.  Boston: C. C. Birchard and Company, 1940.

19.  The post for 5 December 2021 provides evidence that Zanzig was spreading songs before he published Singing America.

21.  “Regional Meeting.”  Oakland Tribune, Oakland, California, 14 March 1943.  23.  Among those attending was “Wes H. Klusmann, National director of camping.”

22.  Carl Edward Zander’s family.  Email, 3 November 2021.
23.  Holcomb.  104.

24.  Holcomb.  104.  “Most of those that the author found were located in the shelves of surplus and reference books at the CRS headquarters--an enormous but incomplete source.  Others were found in the private libraries of many longtime friends of the Rohrboughs.  Titles, dates, and purchasing groups of some additional custom songbooks were discovered in various advertising flyers of the CRS.”

25.  Merwin Swanson.  “The ‘Country Life Movement’ and the American Churches.”  Church History 46:358–373:1977.  369.

26.  Vogt published his text on Rural Sociology in 1918 [27] while he was at OSU. [28] He took a position with the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1916 promoting improvements in rural churches. [29]  He left that job in 1926 [30] and was living in Philadelphia in 1923. [31]

27.  Paul Leroy Vogt.  Introduction to Rural Sociology.  New York: Appleton, 1918.
28.  “Paul Leroy Vogt.”  Everybody Wiki website.
29.  Swanson.  367.
30.  Swanson.  371.
31.  American Country Life Association.  Proceedings, 1923 conference.  201.

32.  Melvin was on the association’s committee on teaching of rural sociology in 1923 while at Ohio Wesleyan. [33]  In 1926, he was at Cornell. [34]  In 1938, he was promoting on recreation programs as ways to prevent delinquency in rural areas. [35]

33.  American Country Life Association, 1923.  200.

34.  Bruce L. Melvin.  “Methods of Social Research.”  Listed in “Preliminary Program of the Twenty-First Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Society” published by American Journal of Sociology 32:471–476:1926.  472.

35.  Bruce Lee Melvin and Elna Nielsen Smith.  Rural Youth: Their Situation and Prospects.  Washington DC: Works Progress Administration, Division of Social Research, 1938.  83.

36.  Fred R. Yoder.  Review of “Country Life Programs.”  Rural Sociology 1:530:1936.

37.  “Wesley Herman Klusmann.”  Ancestry website.  It blocks information on his father, William H. Klusmann.

Barbados Tobacco

Topic: Gullah History
The lack of labor was the greatest impediment to settling Barbados: it was uninhabited.  Henry Winthrop arrived on the first ship in 1627.  After working a few months, he calculated in August that he needed “to have every year some 2 or 3 servants over, and to have them bound to me for 3 years for so much a year, some 5 pounds or 6 pounds a year.” [1]  By October, when he asked his father to “send me over 2 or 3 men that they be bound to serve me,” [2] he told him to offer “not above 10 pounds a year.” [3]

By then, what had begun as an expedient in Virginia had become the norm.  Agriculture was not mechanized, and men capable of physical labor were needed to plant and harvest crops.  If one was not encouraging families to migrate like New England, then one had to have indentured servants as help.  Even in Massachusetts, many arrived with two or more servants. [4]

Winthrop’s sponsor, William Courteen [5] established the colony to grow tobacco.  Seeds and skilled Arawak workers from Guyana were the first thing his agent, Henry Powell, supplied. [6]  When Winthrop wrote in August, he already had “a crop of tobacco on the ground,” [7] and may have begun realizing its labor requirements.

The market for tobacco already existed.  Nicholas Monardes’ account of its medicinal qualities had been translated into English in 1577, [8] while Walter Raleigh had introduced smoking to the court of Elizabeth I in 1586. [9]  Information on how to grow it probably came from the Arawak and Gervase Markham’s translation of The Country Farm in 1616. [10]  It warned the seeds are so tiny, individuals neede to start a number in a single hole, then transplant them later. [11]  That is twice the labor of wheat, after time is spent clearing a field.

The first results showed there still was much to learn.  Winthrop was told his tobacco was “very ill-conditioned, foul, and full of stalks, and evil colored” and not seen as at all satisfactory by English grocers. [12]

The introduction of a new crop occurs in three phases.  During the pioneer period legends arise that ascribe the success to one individual who shares his knowledge freely.  Melissa Morris summarizes what she calls tobacco’s “origin story” as:

“the French ambassador Jean Nicot was visiting the gardens of the Portuguese king, and someone gave him a tobacco plant from Florida.  Nicot carried the plant back to France, where he made people aware of it and its medicinal properties.  In some versions, he even goes on to cure several people of a whole host of different ailments.” [13]

Historians counter legends with Guinness lists of names of men who deserve credit, including more specific details on how Nicot acquired his seeds.

A great innovator appears in the second phase who makes the plant a commercial success.  John Rolfe saw local Natives growing the North American species when he arrived in Virginia in 1610.  From that he knew it would grow. [14]  However, he realized the local Nicotiana rustica could not compete with the Nicotiana tabacum being produced by the Spanish. [15]  He procured seeds from the Trinidad-Guyana area in 1612, [16] but still had an inferior product.  It was only after a man named Lambert found a better way to dry the leaves [17] that Rolfe had success on the London market in 1617. [18]

Barbados initiated tobacco production during the third phase when men imitate the work of their predecessors, sometimes making improvements, sometimes failing.  The Arawak obviously were not curing their tobacco like Rolfe.

Before Winthrop could react, James Hay sent a group from Saint Kitts to take over Barbados in 1628. [19]  He had financed a colony there in 1623, [20] but attracted various investors with competing interests.  As a result, “the settlers were prone to violent conflict among themselves.” [21]  When the Spanish attacked neighboring Nevis [22] in 1629, the indentured servants ran away and “swam aboard and told them where” the English hide their provisions, and how the island stood. [23]

As is obvious from the behavior of the indentured servants, planters on Saint Kitts and Nevis had more exploitive views of labor than Winthrop professed.  Later in 1629, the Barbados governor responded to complaints of abusive treatment by threatening to give their servants to better masters.  The planters rebelled, and the governor was recalled by Hay. [24]

Henry Colt spent two weeks in the harbor at Barbados in 1631.  While his ship was stopped on its way to Saint Kitts, forty indentured servants “stole away in a Dutch” ship. [25]  They came on board his ship uninvited, and hung around for hours to avoid work. [26]  He found their masters were prone to drunkenness and quarrels. [27]

The labor contracts in Barbados were merging several English traditions. [28]  As mentioned in the post for 7 November 2021, men in rural areas agreed to do specified work for a year at a set wage.  Winthrop had this in mind when he told his uncle he expected to pay two men an annual wage from the hundred pounds he was being paid by Courteen [29] to raise tobacco.

When his father sent two boys from London, he was working under the rules of the apprenticeship system. [30]  This was changing rapidly in London, not so much in form, as in numbers.  The population of the city had more than doubled in size between 1550 and 1600, when it was about 200,000. [31]  Bruce Robinson suggests the growth came from activities at court and the port. [32]

However, life expectancy was low in the city, [33] with only seventeen good years between 1618 and 1661.  Three plagues killed 20% of the population [34] each time in 1603, 1625, and 1636–1641; epidemics raged in thirteen years. [35]  Only 10% of live births lived to age 45, with 36% dead before age five, 24% by age 15, and 15% more before age 25. [36]  At one time apprenticeships were used to train individuals to perpetuate businesses; now skilled tradesmen and merchants needed apprentices just to stay in business.

While London was prospering, population growth in England dropped to 50%, from 79% in the previous half century [37] that coincided with the inflation mentioned in the post for 7 November 2021.  The population increase on a fixed quantity of land meant per capital income increased 5% between 1600 and 1690, rather than the 12% before. [38]  With less money, men married later. [39]

Anthony Garvan notes that, among emigrants who settled Connecticut in the 1630s, a family head and his oldest son might be classed as yeomen, while the younger sons were listed as husbandmen. [40]  Both were rural, but the yeoman “generally had a freehold.” [41]  Usage suggests the husbandman was “a kind of meaner yeoman who might with the improvement of his estate become a yeoman himself.” [42]

The answer, as suggested by Garvan, was leaving. [43]  In Hampshire in southern England, John Graunt found one parish increased by 300 during a forty year period, while 300 to 400 went to London.  Rather than adapt to urban life, another 400 went to rural colonies in the New World, including the Carribelands. [44]

Barbados never improved its tobacco.  In 1650, it still was considered “the worst that grows in the world.” [45]  Enslaving the Arawak by the men from Saint Kitts stopped any cultural exchange that might have helped. [46]  The high-handed treatment of the planters kept them from experimenting. [47]  Henry Colt complained he never saw anyone working in 1631. [48]  Mistreating indentured servants made it difficult to get them to do more than the minimum work.

At this point Barbados was not a successful model for others, although its evolving attitude toward labor would persist in South Carolina.

End Notes
1.  Henry Winthrop.  Letter to Thomas Fones, his uncle, 22 August 1627.  Quoted by N. Darnell Davis.  Cavaliers and Roundheads in Barbados.  Georgetown, British Guiana: Argosy Press, 1887.  32.  His source is the Winthrop papers in the Massachusetts Historical Collections. Spelling modernized; the original is: “I do intend to have everye yere some 2 or 3 servents over, and to have them bound to me for 3 yerres for so muche a yere, some 5 lbs or 6 lbs a yere.”

2.  Henry Winthrop.  Letter to John Winthrop, 15 October 1627.  Quoted by Davis, 33.  Spelling modernized; the original is: “send me ouer 2 or 3 men yt they be bound to searve me.”  John Winthrop was active in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

3.  Henry Winthrop, 15 October 1627.  Spelling modernized; the original is “not aboue 10 pd a yere.”

4.  Anthony N. B. Garvan.  Architecture and Town Planning in Colonial Connecticut.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951.  9.

5.  Courteen is mentioned in the posts for 31 October 2021 and 7 November 2021.
6.  Powell and the Arawak are mentioned in the post for 30 October 2021.

7.  Henry Winthrop, 22 August 1627.  Quoted by Davis.  32.  “We have a crop of tobacco on the ground.”

8.  Nicholas Monardes.  The Newe Founde Worlde.  Seville: Alonso Escrivano, 1574.  Translated by John Frampton as Joyfull Newes out of the Newe Found Worlde.  London: Willyam Norton, 1577.  Reissued by London: Constable, 1925.
 
9.  E. R. Billings.  Tobacco: Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce.  Hartford, Connecticut: American Publishing Company, 1875.  Chapters 3 and 4.

10.  Charles Estienne and Jean Liebault.  Praedium Rusticum.  1554.  Translated from Latin into French by Estienne as Maison Rustique in 1564.  Translated into English as The Country Farme by Gervase Markham.  London: Adam Jslip for John Bill, 1616. [49]  Individuals were growing different species of tobacco in their gardens according to Monardes [50] and Gerard. [51]

11.  Estienne.  Quoted by Billings.  Chapter 1.  He Anglicized Estienne’s name to Stevens.

“For to sow it, you must make a hole in the earth with your finger and that as deep as your finger is long, then you must cast into the same hole ten or twelve seeds of the said Nicotiana together, and fill up the hole again: for it is so small, as that if you should put in but four or five seeds the earth would choake it: and if the time be dry, you must water the place easily some five days after: And when the herb is grown out of the earth, inasmuch as every seed will have put up his sprout and stalk, and that the small thready roots are intangled the one within the other, you must with a great knife make a composs within the earth in the places about this plot where they grow and take up the earth and all together, and cast them into a bucket full of water, to the end that the earth may be seperated, and the small and tender impes swim about the water; and so you shall sunder them one after another without breaking of them.”

Methods became more complex later in Virginia with the use of seed beds.

12.  John Winthrop.  Letter to Henry Winthrop, 30 January 1628.  Quoted by Davis.  36.  His source is Robert C. Winthrop.  Life and Letters of John Winthrop, Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company, at Their Emigration to New England, 1630.  Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1864.

13.  Melissa N. Morris.  “Cultivating Colonies: Tobacco and the Upstart Empires, 1580-1640.”  PhD dissertation.  Columbia University, 2017.  76–77.

14.  Lee Pelham Cotton.  “Tobacco: The Early History of a New World Crop.”  National Park Service, Historic Jamestown website.

15.  Morris has maps showing the distribution of the two species on page 61.

16.  Melvin Herndon.  Tobacco in Colonial Virginia.  Williamsburg, Virginia: Virginia 350th Anniversary Celebration Corporation, 1957.  2.

17.  Morris.  96.  Her source is The Records of the Virginia Company of London, edited by Susan Myra Kingsbury.  Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1905.  III:92.  Lambert is a critical figure who has been lost in the tale of the great innovator who saved the Virginia colony from economic oblivion. It is odd no settler with named Lambert has been identified since so much research has been on done on the history of Jamestown and early Virginia.

18.  Herndon.  2.

19.  Davis.  44.  This is mentioned in the post for 31 October 2021.

20.  Roy E. Schreiber.  “The First Carlisle, Sir James Hay, First Earl of Carlisle as Courtier, Diplomat and Entrepreneur, 1580–1636.”  American Philosophical Society Transactions 74(7):1–155:1984.  170.

21.  Schreiber.  174.

22.  Nevis is two miles from Saint Kitts.  During the ice age, when water levels were lower, they were one island. [52]

23.  John Hilton.  Relation of the First Settlement of St. Christophers and Nevins.  29 April 1675.  Reprinted in Vincent T. Harlow.  Colonising Expeditions to the West Indies and Guiana, 1623-1667.  London: The Hakluyt Society, 1925; since reprinted.  10.  Paraphrase of “runn away from vs and Swimed aboard & told them were w hid our provissions, & in what case our Islands stood in.”  Original document in British Museum, Egerton MSS 2395.

24.  Larry Gragg.  Englishmen Transplanted: The English colonization of Barbados, 1627–1660.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.  36.  His source is Gary A. Puckrein.  Little England: Plantation Society and Anglo-Barbadian Politics, 1627-1700.  New York: New York University Press, 1984.  37–9.

25.  Henry Colt.  “The Voyage of Sir Henrye Colt Knight to the Ilands of the Antilleas.”  Cambridge University Library MSS, Mm. 3, 9.  74 in Harlow.  “Forty of ye seruants when I was now ther, stoll away in a Dutch pinnace.”

26.  Colt.  65–66.
27.  Colt.  66.

28.  John Wareing.  Indentured Migration and the Servant Trade from London to America, 1618-1718.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.  40.  “The colonial indenture system originated in conditions of husbandry in England, and were temporary, contractual, and provided maintenance for the servant [ . . . ] also influenced by the system of apprenticeship for adolescents, the Vagrancy Laws, and the practices of the Virginia Company in binding their servants.”

29.  Henry Winthrop, 22 August 1627.  Quoted by Davis.  32.  He wrote: “paid 100 pounds a piece for our labors.”  [“paid 100li a yere apeece for or labors.”]

30.  John Winthrop.  Quoted by Davis.  36.  “but I knew not what to do for their binding, being not able to walk or write, and they being but youths.”  Winthrop had been sick that winter.

31.  Stephen Alford.  London’s Triumph: Merchants, Adventurers, and Money in Shakespeare’s City.  New York: Bloomsbury, 2017.  13.
 
32.  Bruce Robinson.  “London: Brighter Lights, Bigger City.”  BBC website, 17 February 2011.

33.  Economists at the London School of Economics show “natural increase varied widely across the city in the early seventeenth century, with the wealthier central parishes experiencing a positive natural increase outside plague years, the surrounding poorer parishes suffering an average deficit of 10 per cent, but with average deficits of 30 per cent occurring in the out-parishes.” [53]

34.  Neil Cummins, Morgan Kelly and Cormac Ó Gráda. “Living Standards and Plague in London, 1560–1665.”  Economic History Review 69:3–34:2016.  4.
 
35.  John Graunt.  Natural and Political Observations, Mentioned in a following Index, and made upon the Bills of Mortality.  London: Tho. Roycroft for John Martin, James Allestry, and Tho. Dicas, 1662, second edition.  27.  The 14 plague years were 1603, 1625, 1636 which lasted 12 years, and 1642.  Sickly years in which the death rate was higher than in subsequent years were 1618, 1620, 1623, 1624, 1632, 1633, 1634, 1649, 1652, 1654. 1656, 1658, and 1661.  That left 17 good years in the 44 years between 1618 and 1661.

36.  Graunt.  58.

37.  Stephen Broadberry, Stephen, Bruce Campbell, Alexander Klein, Mark Overton, and Bas van Leeuwen.  “British Economic Growth, 1270-1870.”  14 July 2010.  52.

38.  Broadberry.  53.

39.  Broadberry.  25.  “Although it is not known when it first became the norm, late marriage is known to have been prevalent in early modern England.”

40.  Garvan.  8.
41.  Garvan.  8.
42.  Garvan.  9.

43.  Garvan.  9.  He believed the servant group “was generally made up of countrymen; rural distress shared with the husbandmen made both groups migrate and the husbandman paid the poorer servant’s fare in return for his promise of labor.”

44.  Graunt.  61.  The parish suffered its greatest mortality from the plague in 1638. [54]

45.  Richard Ligon.  A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes.  London: Peter Parker, 1673.  113.  The original is “theirs at Barbadoes is the worft I think that growes in the world.”

46.  For more on the Arawak, see the post for 31 October 2021.
47.  Harlow.  67, note 1.

48.  Colt.  67.  “In ten days travel about them, I never saw any man at work.” [“in 10 days trauayle about them, I neuer saw any man at work.”

49.  “ESTIENNE, Charles.”  Donald Heald website.
50.  Monardes.  1:75.

51.  John Gerard.  The Herbal.  1633 edition reprinted by Dover Publications of New York City in 1975.  356–358.  His first edition was published in London by John Norton in 1597.

52.  “Nevis.”  Wikipedia website.
53.  Cummins.  5.
54.  Graunt.  62.

Barbados Land Usage

Topic: Gullah History
Histories of Barbados are replete with examples of large plantations.  When James Hay [1] won his grant from Charles I in 1627, he turned 10,000 acres over to a syndicate of his creditors headed by Marmaduke Rawdon. [2]  They recruited seventy settlers with promises of a hundred acres, or 7,000 of their acres. [3]  In 1629, their agent made 140 more grants for 15,872 acres of the original 10,000. [4]

These grants could be subdivided and resold.  Alison Games says former indentured servants were not promised land at the end of their contracts, but could buy it.  They had so little money, they often pooled their resources into partnerships that purchased an average of 2.5 acres. [5]

Hilary Beckles found outside the original 10,000 acre allocation, 776 grants were made between 1628 and 1638 that were at least ten acres. [6]  Ronnie Hughs lists nine men who received a hundred or more acres with the first large grant made in 1630. [7]  These few larger grants accounted for most of the acreage, for Beckles found the average size was 95.78 acres each, and, combined with the original grant, represented 84,329 acres.

Barbados is not elastic like Virginia, where men could claim land in the wilderness beyond the original grant.  It is an island, with finite resources.  Today, its area is 167 square miles, or 106,880 acres.  However, not all that land can be farmed.  Only 16.28% is considered arable, or 11,258 acres. [8]

The island is the exposed section of an ocean ridge formed at the point where one tectonic plate is sinking under another. [9]  The limestone base is covered by a veneer of coral, which means soils are easily depleted.  Henry Colt thought planters were fooling themselves in 1631.  He noticed the soil was “loose sand” and that the ground they thought the most fertile was “but the leaves and ashes of your trees.  Dig but half a foot deep and the will be found nothing else but clay.” [10]  By the 1670s, Richard Blome noted settlers already were leaving worn out plantations for Jamaica. [11]

Perhaps the greatest limiting factor was the island has no water sources: potable water had to be collected in cisterns when it rained. [12]  This, more than anything, perpetuated medieval patterns of land usage.

The Roman concept of settlements organized in grids and joined by connecting roads was long lost in England, [13] and not reintroduced until Christopher Wren rebuilt London after the fire of 1666. [14]  In its place, families lived in settlements [15] near a church and worked land divided into narrow strips. [16]  The best fronted the only road, but many only could be reached by crossing the land of another person. [17]

Anthony Garvan believes settlers in Connecticut imported modified versions of this settlement pattern.  Before 1645, every township included a nuclear village, [18] with lands distributed along a single road whose purpose was allowing “every land owner to access his land.” [19]  As shown in the plan for Weathersfield, the land was laid out in long narrow strips that extended from the road to the township boundaries and crossed whatever terrain existed.  Some strips spanned land, water, and an island. [20]

Richard Ligon drew the map of Barbados shown above in or before 1657.  The detail below shows the twenty-one-mile strip of waterfront on the west side of the island served as a road.  No roads yet existed into the interior.  If one wanted to market one’s crop, one had to be very close to the water.  Richard Dunn has counted 285 plantations, [21] which would make their average width 452.5'.

The one difference between Connecticut and Barbados was the use of surveys.  Garvan says they were introduced in the Netherlands by the Duke of Alba as a way of asserting control on towns. [22]  The lots on the Weathersfield plot are straight lines.  It would be hard to imagine a straight line on Ligon’s map. [23]

Oliver Rackham says the narrow fields in England developed when oxen were used, and reflected the needs of those animals. [24]  The strips in Barbados may have been adjudicated like everything else relating to land of the island, by who brought a boundary area into cultivation first and was able to enforce it against his neighbors.

Graphics
Richard Ligon.  Map of Barbados in A True and Exact History of Barbadoes, 1657.  Reproduction from copy in Bryn Mawr Library posted on National Humanities Center website, 2006.

End Notes
1.  Hay, the Earl of Carlisle, is mentioned in the post for 7 November 2021.

2.  Historians argue over who instigated the claim on Barbados.  Some believe it was Rawdon’s idea and that he used his Hay’s indebtedness as leverage to get him to act. [25]  Others think Hay was responsible, [26] since he also invested in the Virginia Company and the settlement of Saint Kitts. [27]

3.  Larry Gragg.  Englishmen Transplanted: The English colonization of Barbados, 1627–1660.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.  33.

4.  Gragg.  36.

5.  Alison Games.  Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World.  Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999.  126.

6.  Hilary MacDonald Beckles.  “White Labour in Black Slave Plantation Society and Economy: A Case Study of Indentured Labour in Seventeenth Century Barbados.”  PhD dissertation.  The University of Hull, August 1980.  His source is Some Memoirs of the First Settlement of the Island of Barbados.  Barbados: Wm. Beeby, 1741.  l–25.

7.  Ronnie Hughes.  “Presugar Land Distributiion in Barbados.”  Department of History seminar paper.  University of West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados, November 1980.  Table reproduced on “1630-1644: Land holdings of 100 acres or more” on Roots Web website.  Beckles thanks “Hughes, from the University of the West Indies, for his greatly valued assistance while working on the manuscripts in the Barbados Archives” in his Acknowledgments.

8.  “Geography of Barbados.”  Wikipedia website.  The exact numbers probably were slightly different in 1630.

9.  R. C. Speed.  “Geology of Barbados: Implications for an Accretionary Origin.”  International Geological Congress, 26, Paris, 7–17 July 1980.  Proceedings 259–265.

10.  Henry Colt.  “The Voyage of Sir Henrye Colt Knight to the Ilands of the Antilleas.”  Cambridge University Library MSS, Mm. 3, 9.  In Vincent T. Harlow.  Colonising Expeditions to the West Indies and Guiana, 1623-1667.  London: The Hakluyt Society, 1925; since reprinted.  67.  Spelling modernized; the original is “For your soyle yt is naught, nothinge ele but loose sand.  Your growned wch you esteeme ye best is but ye leaues & ashes of your trees.  Digg but half a foot deep & the wilbe found nothinge else but Clay.”  To clear the land, they cut trees and burned them in place.

11.  Richard Blome.  A Description of the Island of Jamaica.  London: T. Milbourn for Robert Clavel, 1672.  Cited by Laura Hollsten.  “Controlling Nature and Transforming Landscapes in the Early Modern Caribbean.”  Global Environment 1:80–113:2008.  It was after this period that planters began using manure to keep their land productive.

12.  Ligon. 28.  Copy on internet from Missouri Botanical Garden.

13.  Anthony N. B. Garvan.  Architecture and Town Planning in Colonial Connecticut.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951.  29.  There probably are more recent works on this subject, but Garvan was chairman of my graduate school department and he and this book are what influenced my thinking.

Oliver Rackham.  The History of the Countryside.  London: J. M. Dent, 1986.  164.  He thought the period of the Black Death was the “high water mark of the open field.” [28]  After that time, large landowners began converting land to sheep pasture by replacing the strips and common land into enclosed areas.  Tenants were evicted. [29]  Enclosures were more common where men had left during the plague or where warfare was a problem, like along the border with Scotland. [30]

14.  Garvan.  33.
15.  Rackham. 178.
16.  Rackham.  164.
17.  Rackham.  165.
18.  Garvan.  40.
19.  Garvan.  42.
20.  Garvan.  52.

21.  Richard S. Dunn.  Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972.  29.

22.  Garvan.  19.

23.  Beckles says Rawdon’s syndicate hired a surveyor, John Swan, to “organise their land into large tenanted estates.” [31]  That does not mean Swan was using geometry rather than the older system of metes and bounds.

24.  Rackham.  165.

25.  Gary Puckrein.  “Did Sir William Courteen Really Own Barbados?”  Huntington Library Quarterly 44(2):135–149:1981.

N. Darnell Davis.  Cavaliers and Roundheads in Barbados.  Georgetown, British Guiana: Argosy Press, 1887.  51.

26.  Roy E. Schreiber.  “The First Carlisle, Sir James Hay, First Earl of Carlisle as Courtier, Diplomat and Entrepreneur, 1580–1636.”  American Philosophical Society Transactions 74(7):1–155:1984.  “Though it is possible that the merchant-financiers who backed the earl forced him into these disputed projects, it is difficult to believe he was incapable of deflecting their schemes had he been so inclined” (page 139).

27.  Schreiber.  Virginia, 168; Saint Kitts, 170.
28.  Rackham.  170.

29.  Wilhelm Hasbach.  Die englischen Landarbeiter in den letzten hundert Jahren und die Einhegungen.  Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot, 1894.  Translated as A History of the English Agricultural Labourer by Ruth Kenyon.  London: P . S . King and Son, 1908.  33–34.

30.  Hasbach.  29.

31.  Beckles.  16.  His source is: John Oldmixon.  The British Empire in America.  London: John Nicholson, Benjamin Tooke, Richard Parker and Ralph Smith, 1708.  2:1.

Barbados Views of Land

Topic: Gullah History
The Earliest settlers in South Carolina may not have brought the plantation system with them, if for no other reason than they did not yet have a crop requiring slave labor.  What they did bring, though, were views of land usage and labor practices they learned as young men in England.

Thus, if one were to begin at the beginning, as proposed in the post for 14 October 2021, one would start with the Duke of Normandy landing on the British island in 1066.  William confiscated lands of those who opposed him, and redistributed them to 180 of his supporters.  However, ownership remained in his hands, and it was granted in return for military support. [1]  Knight’s heirs had to prove their military skills before grants were renewed.  Land without title has little value, and, after William passed, nobles found ways to define ownership as something that could be inherited and disposed of by individuals. [2]

The next milestone in the history of land ownership was the Bubonic Plague, which killed 40% to 60% of the English population, after it entered the island in 1348. [3]  Arable land reverted to waste because not enough men were available to cultivate it, and no markets existed for agricultural products.  With scarce labor, wages and standards of living improved for survivors.

Harriett Bradley argues there was another reason land was abandoned: after several centuries of agriculture, it no longer was fertile.  When the land produced less for the same effort, poverty ensued. [4]  Landowners replaced the hierarchy of services with leases, and paid laborers only when they worked during plowing and harvesting times.  Landowners became “concerned with the problem of getting as much rent as possible.” [5]

Land became a burden.  Ambitious men looked to trade for wealth.  After Mary of Scotland became queen in 1553, joint-stock companies were given monopolies for foreign trade: the Muscovy Company was first in 1550. [6]

Trade patterns changed in the 1570s.  The Spanish introduced a new method for extracting silver from ore, and, within a few years, exports from South America increased ten-fold. [7]  Instead of using the new wealth to develop his country, [8] Philip II spent it trying to suppress Protestantism in what is now Belgium.  The center of European trade moved from Antwerp, Belguim, to Genoa, Italy, in 1572. [9]  Elizabeth chartered the Turkey Company in 1581 and East India Company in 1600 to pursue trade in the new commercial centers. [10]

Silver exports from South America reached their peak between 1580 and 1620. [11]  Gold was hoarded, and, with inflation, prices for wheat and fire wood rose steeply in England in the 1580s. [12]  David Fischer reports England entered a period of “deep depression,” and wealth became concentrated in the hands of the few. [13]

Many believed demographic recovery from the Black Death was the cause.  They reasoned that as the population grew, it expanded beyond the available food and firewood supply. [14]  As always, more factors were involved.  The climate veered abruptly toward the cold when crops failed between 1594 and 1597. [15]  This was followed by a return of epidemics and a major economic collapse between 1610 and 1622 [16] with an accompanying drop in the price of wool and textiles. [17]  The Thirty Years War, which began in 1618, probably did not help, although fighting was confined to the European continent.

The problems were not limited to the island.  On the continent, Fernand Braudel believes the influx of silver from the Spanish Empire was a factor, [18] especially when it led to devaluations of currencies.  He notes volatile prices affected merchants and entrepreneurs more than landowners, and so those with means began acquiring land. [19]

Presumably this turn to land also occurred in England, where there was little new land to be had.  Henry VIII already had seized the estates of the monasteries and sold them to raise money in the 1540s. [20]  James I tried to dominate Ireland with new colonies in Ulster.  However, London merchants did not believe the dangers of settling a hostile countryside were worth the investment in land.  They only contributed under duress. [21]

Something more promising appeared with the Great Drainage Act of 1600, which promised companies that drained swamps would receive a share of the recovered land in compensation.  James supported proposals to drain fens in the eastern part of the island where a large number of monasteries had been established, and then deposed.  Local lease holders objected violently, and little came of the first attempts [22] beyond the idea that companies could be rewarded if they claimed new lands that were “free or virtually free of any conflicting title or encumbrance.” [23]

Overseas colonies opened another source of wealth.  James chartered the Virginia Company in 1606 to protect English land claims on the continent between the French in Canada and the Spanish in Florida.  It was rechartered in 1609, with one company open to merchants from London and a second to men in Bristol. [24]  Unlike Ulster, this was popular: about 650 individuals and 50 London companies invested. [25]

Satisfaction did not last long: until John Rolfe produced a decent variety of tobacco in 1617, [26] the colony had no commercial crop, and depended on the company for supplies.  Some investors turned that need into an opportunity by organizing a separate company to supply the colony. [27]

The original Virginia company owned the land and the settlers were contract employees, much like the rural wage earners mentioned above.  When the first contracts came due in 1613, many planned to leave.  To retain them, the governor offered those who remained three-acre tenant farms. [28]

The first period for investors ended in 1616, but the company had no money to distribute.  Instead, it gave each of them fifty acres for private development.  It expanded the new idea that land could be substituted for cash in 1617 when it promised  fifty acres per person to anyone who paid the way for a settler, even if the person was an indentured servant or slave. [29]  The original investors began pooling their grants to create bigger plantations and hired their own contract laborers. [30]

The investors still were not satisfied, and Robert Rich was especially vocal.  His complaints led James to revoke the charter on 24 May 1624 and convert it into a royal colony, [31] thus diverting any profits to himself.  A few days later, on May 29, Parliament abolished such monopolies. [32]

Courteen began his settlement of Barbados after Parliament acted, with some idea of land ownership dervied from the Drainage Act.  However, James’ son, Charles I, was not one to admit the legitimacy of Parliamentary actions.  He reintroduced grants as “patents,” exploiting as exception to the Statute of Monopolies.  In 1627, he gave James Hay the rights to develop the Caribbean islands. [33]

This set in train thirty-three years of legal conflicts that ultimately involved the heirs of Courteen and Hay, and the creditors of both.  The details, which have been chronicled by Larry Gragg, [34] are outside the scope of this essay.  What is important is the attitude toward land and deeds.  Hay’s creditors sent their own agent to Barbados who took over Courteen’s settlement.  Land ownership still belonged to the strongest.  However, to gain trust from Courteen’s colonists, who had gone as contract employees, he granted them titles to the land they had worked.  Each time, threats arose to whoever was in power on the island, land was used to reward supporters.

Chaos continued until the Restoration of 1660, when Charles’ son, Charles II, cancelled all the patents, and recognized a royalist supporter as the true leasee of the land which he, the king, ultimately owned. [35]  He only had been on the throne a short time when he acted, and needed to avoid reigniting the civil war that had raged in England for eighteen years.  To prevent rebellion, he confirmed the land titles of settlers. [36]

And so, just before settlers in Barbados begin promoting a scheme for Carolina, they had assurances that land ownership no longer was something that could be revoked by the whim of a monarch or revoked to punish unfaithful followers.  Not all the ideas introduced by William I were extinguished, but an important one had been replaced by the concept of private land.

End Notes
1.  Charles J. Reid Jr.  “The Seventeenth-Century Revolution in the English Land Law.”  Cleveland State Law Review 43:221–302:1955.  234.  The exact number, 180, is from “Enclosure.”  Wikipedia website.

2.  Reid.  235–236.

3.  For more on the effects of the Bubonic plague and the introduction of the woolen industry, see the post for 19 May 2019.

4.  Harriett Bradley.  The Enclosures in England: An Economic Reconstruction.  New York: Columbia University Press, 1918; reprinted by Batoche Books of Kitchner, Ontario, in 2001.  30.

5.  Bradley.  38–39.

6.  Michael John Hebbert.  “London.”  Encyclopædia Britannica website, uploaded 20 July 1998; last updated 4 August 2021.

7.  Fernand Braudel.  Le Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéan à Epoque de Phillippe II.  Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1966 revised edition.  Translated as The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II by Siân Reynolds.  New York: Harper and Row, 1972.  1:476.

8.  Braudel.  1:478–479.
9.  Braudel.  1:490.
10.  Hebbert.
11.  Braudel.  1:476.

12.  David Hackett Fischer.  The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History.  New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.  74.

13.  Fischer.  91.
14.  Fischer.  72–73.

15.  Fischer.  93. The effects of the mini-ice age on Jamestown are mentioned in the post for 31 October 221.

16.  Fischer.  95.
17.  Fischer.  96.
18.  Braudel.  1:490.
19.  Braudel.  1:527.
20.  Reid.  238.

21.  James Stevens Curl.  “The City of London and the Plantation of Ulster.”  British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) website, 2001.

22.  “The Middle Level of the Fens and Its Reclamation.”  249–290 in The Victoria History of the County of Huntingdon, volume 3 edited by William Page.  London: Saint Catherine Press, 1936.

23.  Anthony N. B. Garvan.  Architecture and Town Planning in Colonial Connecticut.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951.  59.

24.  “Virginia Company.”  Wikipedia website.

25.  Jeff Wallenfeld.  Answer to query “What are the names of the men who funded the Virginia Company of London?” posted to Beyond Britannica website by anneypeters on 23 November 2020.  He responded on 24 November 2020.

26.  Emily Salmon and John Salmon.  “Tobacco in Colonial Virginia.”  Encyclopedia Virginia website, 5 February 2021.

27.  Bernard Bailyn.  Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America.  New York: Vintage Books, 2013.  78.  The company was the Somers Isles Company; the islands now are known as Bermuda.  Rolfe was among those who first explored Bermuda. [37]

28.  Bailyn.  78.

29.  Bailyn.  79.  This use of land to attract settlers became known as the head-right system.

30.  Bailyn.  80.

31.  C. H. F.  “Rich, Robert (1587-1658).”  48:1885-1900 in Dictionary of National Biography, edited by Sidney Lee.  London: Smith, Elder and Company, 1896.  Rich is the Earl of Warwick.  He was one of the investors in the Somers Isles Company, and eventually joined the fray in Barbados on behalf of Courteen’s heir.

32.  “Statute of Monopolies.”  Wikipedia website.

33.  Hilary Beckles.  A History of Barbados.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.  8.  Hay was the Earl of Carlisle, and had been associated with James I. [38]

34.  Larry Gragg.  Englishmen Transplanted: The English Colonization of Barbados, 1627-1660.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.  Chapter 3, “Establishing a Colony, 1625–1660.”

35.  Robert M. Bliss.  Revolution and Empire.  Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017.  142.

36.  Richard S. Dunn.  Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972.  80.

37.  “Somers Isles Company.”  Wikipedia website.
38.  “James Hay, 1st Earl of Carlisle.”  Wikipedia website.