“Good by old 1910 tomorrow…you will have gone never to return to us again in this world.” So Mary Brainard, a Wilton New York farm wife, wrote in her diary on New Year’s Eve. The world was changing for Mary and her extended family. Using Mary’s 1910 diary as a principal source for his research, Hamilton Craig, a native of Shushan, Washington County and a doctoral student at CUNY will present an intimate picture of farm life in Wilton in a presentation at the Saratoga County History Center at Brookside Museum in Ballston Spa on Thursday, August 15 at 7 pm.
“Looking back on this document today, that line reads as an evocation of a past world in decline and change” said Hamilton, who is researching farmers movements in the United States. “Mary Brainard’s diary presents a powerful story of people who sought to encounter this changing world on their own terms.”
Caught between the agrarian subsistence economy of early America and the capitalist economy of the late 19th and early 20th centuries farm families tried to hold on to what they knew, leveraging kinship and bartering arrangements within the community to shape their interactions with the market. “Wilton was by and large a farming town providing goods and services to nearby Saratoga Springs during this time” says former Wilton Town Historian Karen Strack-James. “Mary Brainard and her family are representative of that community.”
