Essex County, Farmers And Fishermen, By Daniel Welsh

In the book Farmers and Fishermen: Two Centuries of Work In Essex County, Massachusetts, 1630–1850, Daniel Vickers explores the lives of both farmers and fisherman, both very popular professions in New England during the early colonial period. By telling two separate stories of the farmers and fisherman of the region, specifically telling the story of Essex County, Massachusetts, Vickers is able to bridge the gap of knowledge through primary source material left behind by settlers in the region as well as government documents, like the Massachusetts Tax Valuation List of 1771 and what later historians inferred. The conclusions that he comes to, that in the early period of colonization the fishing and farming communities are tightly linked together
One issue that came from this was the desperate lack of labor, because there were so few settlers and each seemed to want land for himself and his family. On land, the farming way of life that New England settlers left behind in Europe saw the most basic place of production was the individual household. This, combined with the labor shortage in Essex County during the first decades of settlement there, meant that the people who ended up helping to clear forests, building barns and other farm buildings, as well as tending to the fields were the sons of farm owners, if they had any. The “productive relations” between fathers and sons in New England families, Vickers argues, has never received extended study, and his depiction of how boys, teenagers, and young men fulfilled their roles at home convincingly illustrates that “the two were interdependent on each