About

Most of what we know about colonial American life comes from the people who wrote things down: governors, ministers, merchants, men with reasons to leave a record. The American Colonial Home is interested in a different archive.

Probate inventories. Household accounts. Diaries kept by women who were tracking the butter, the linen, the state of the salt pork. Letters that mention, in passing, what was on the fire. The material record of ordinary domestic life from 1620 to 1820, read carefully.

This site grew out of years of working with primary sources and a persistent sense that the most revealing documents in early American history are the ones nobody assigns in a survey course. A 1743 kitchen inventory from Middlesex County tells you things about how people actually lived that no political history can. The goal here is to read those documents closely and share what they contain.

Every week, one finding. A household object and what it meant. A preservation practice and who did the work. A primary source that opens a window into a world that was, in most ways, nothing like ours, and in a few surprising ways, not so different.

The archive covers the colonial kitchen and hearth, food and preservation practices, domestic labor and household economy, regional life across New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and the Southern colonies, material culture and household objects, and the primary sources themselves: the diaries, inventories, and letters that are the closest thing we have to being there.

The Colonial Hearth Letter is the weekly newsletter. It goes out every Monday with one new discovery from the archive. Subscribers also receive the free Colonial Home Field Guide, a room-by-room reference to colonial household objects and domestic life from 1650 to 1800.

The archive is free to read. The newsletter is free to subscribe.

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