Scope of collection
Eunice P. Wyman of Concord, Massachusetts kept accounts 1820-40 of transactions related to her farm and homestead. She gained income not only from selling products (butter, soap, syrup for a sick man, pigs), but also through selling the services of her sons John and Franklin (picking apples, driving cows, digging potatoes, butchering, digging wells, shoveling gravel) and renting half her house to a man who paid, in part, by performing tasks (putting rockers on an arm chair, white washing two rooms, making a flower box).
Her goods and her sons' services were paid for in cash or by exchange of goods or services (cider and vinegar, wool, driving her cattle home from Stoddard's pasture, shoemaking, plowing the garden, "himself and oxen to go into town to get 23 rails and 11 posts," use of wagons, horses, carts, and oxen). Through use of the index to the Massachusetts Census for 1820, 1830, and 1840, customers were identified as being from Concord, Carlisle, Acton, and Westford.
The back of the volume includes 5 pages of 1814 accounts for dry goods and groceries with Porter Kimball, who appears in the Massachusetts 1820 Census living in Sterling, Worcester County. His customers appear to be from various central and eastern Massachusetts locales, including Charlestown, Roxbury, Fitchburg, and Templeton.
In addition, the final pages carry recipes for Cup Cake, Election Cake, and Sponge Cake.
