ACH - The American Colonial Home

Regional Life

Where the Fire Was Kept: The Virginia Kitchen and the People Who Worked It

In 1724, Hugh Jones, a mathematics professor at the College of William and Mary, made a quiet observation about the Virginia landscape. Common planters, he noted, kept "the Kitchen apart from the Dwelling House, because of the Smell of hot Victuals, offensive in hot Weather." It describes an

A woman spinning at a wheel beside a colonial hearth, with a child seated on the floor nearby and a kettle suspended over an open fire.

Domestic Labor

The Housewife's Week: What a 1740s New England Woman Actually Did

In 1805, Elizabeth Porter Phelps wrote a letter to her daughter from Forty Acres, the family estate in Hadley, Massachusetts. She had risen before four in the morning to work butter in the cool air before the summer heat made it unmanageable. By mid-morning she was still at it. "

Food and Preservation

What Colonists Drank: Cider, Small Beer, and the Household That Brewed Its Own

John Adams drank a tankard of hard cider every morning for most of his adult life. He credited it for his health and saw nothing unusual about the habit. In the colonial household, he was right on both counts. For most of colonial America, fermented beverages were not a luxury

Primary Source Finds

Sarah Knight Eats Her Way Through Connecticut: What Her 1704 Journal Reveals About Colonial Food on the Road

In October 1704, a Boston businesswoman named Sarah Kemble Knight climbed onto a horse and rode south toward New Haven and New York, alone except for hired guides, on a legal errand involving a dead man's estate. Along the way she kept a journal. It wasn’t published