How Many Bottles of Beer on the Wall?

     The Easton Journal and its related papers are doing a supplement on local agriculture. I was contacted to supply some historical background for the articles. Chaffin's History of Easton includes a list of the most common farm products in 1875. In that year Easton produced over two tons of dried hops, the bitter ingredient in beer. Easton, it turns out, was probably the last town in Massachusetts to produce hops commercially.

     Lots of farmers in Middlesex County grew hops in the 18th century because somebody had to help out that ne'er do well Sam Adams and other local brewers. When farmers moved west into the fertile fields of New York and Ohio, hop growing moved with them. Hops grew well on those fertile soils and then the Erie Canal opened and made it cheap to get their crops to market. The demand for local hops declined. Here's what happened, from my Easton's Neighborhoods:

Cyrus Howard married Joseph Hayward’s daughter Elizabeth and moved to Hamilton, New York in 1799. Coincidentally, around 1825 farmers in Howard’s part of upstate New York began to grow hops and after a decade their competition severely hurt the business in Middlesex County. One of Cyrus Howard’s sons, Eliphalet Smith Howard, returned to Easton and settled on the east side of Howard Street directly south of the school house. He soon began to grow hops on his farm and built a hop kiln for drying this popular beer flavoring ingredient. The Hayward family quickly adopted the crop in their neighborhood, and other hop kilns sprang up in other neighborhoods as well. Thus, while hops production in the rest of Massachusetts was declining, Easton farmers were able to keep it as a cash crop until many years after the Civil War.

Hop growing, became the chief "industry" on the Hayward farm about the time of the Civil War. The increase in German immigrants and the new emphasis on temperance which hurt hard liquor consumption led to a spurt in beer production for which hops were a necessity. For the first few years, Hayward took the hops to the drying kiln in the Howard Neighborhood, but in September 1868 Captain Washington and his son E. R. Hayward built their own kiln west of Captain Washington’s house. The hop fields themselves were on the current land of the Southeastern Regional School.

According to the account of Edward B. Hayward, Captain Washington's grandson:

The hops were set out and allowed to grow one year. Thereafter the hops came up each spring, and a hop pole was set in each hill. As soon as the vines began to grow they were trained around the poles and fastened with a string twisted so as the vine grew the string would untwist and not cut the vine. This hop tying was one of my boyhood jobs, but I always had plenty of help so that the task never became arduous.

In late September or October the hops were harvested. Great boxes were taken to the fields and each box divided into four compartments and four boys and girls picked into each box. The poles were pulled up and laid on a support across the box and the hops were stripped from the poles into the boxes. Boys and girls came from the country round to earn their spending money for the year.

As fast as the boxes were filled they were emptied into huge burlap bags and taken to the hop kiln. A fast picker would pick two boxes a day, but by far the most were out for a good time more than for spending money, so the average was much less than one box. Pickers were brought from North Easton in express wagons making an early start so as to get back by seven o'clock as was the usual custom.

The hops were spread out over a screen floor in the hop kiln and hot fires were kept going under them all night until they were dry. Then they were pushed through a chute into another room ready to be pressed into bales for shipping.

All was not quite as idyllic in the hop fields as the previous account might indicate. Historian Frank Mennino has recovered an article from the Easton Journal  of September 5, 1884 which could be a headline story today:

An 80-year-old man. Edwin Fisher of the Centre, was attacked by a gang of youths who were returning from E. R. Hayward’s hop fields. When the old man offered some apples to the hot, tired youths, the ungrateful thugs beat him with pails and dinner plates. Hayward has about 50 boys working in the fields and they often help themselves to fruit from the orchards lining the route to work. They are not industrious workers while they are at work, and we wish they were not so industrious afterward. They often make for merry workers and poor examples for our children.

 

I mentioned this to Frank Mennino yesterday and he told me that the Trustees of Reservations has a historical researcher developing a 100-200 page report on the history of the Governor Ames Estate to help in the management of the property. Apparently, the Trustees actually use research to manage their properties while other conservation groups in Easton simply put such studies on the shelf. Anyway, Frank noted that the researcher was fascinated by a sketch of a hop kiln we have on the wall at the Historical Society. She told him that in her years of researching across Massachusetts it's the only sketch of a local hop kiln she has ever seen.

That's the history, but I wanted to know how many gallons of beer 4300 pounds of hops could flavor, and that leads us to the science of hopping. More on that tomorrow.