05/16/2026
Today is our 3rd Living History Saturday with 10 more to follow, and today's topic is the kitchen garden! Many people in the 19th century chose to keep small kitchen gardens often for the same reasons that we do today: to supplement their diet with homegrown herbs and vegetables, to be eaten fresh or preserved for later through canning or drying. However, how much people relied on homegrown produce varied from region and from person. Certain staples foods that comprised the daily mid-19th century diet such as coffee, sugar, salt, flour, etc. could not be produced at home and would have been store-bought.
The Aycocks farmed as a source of income and would have been producing a lot of food on their land, however it isn't likely they they would have eaten much of their own produce. Among the 25 families that appeared next to them on the census, the Aycocks were the second largest farm in terms of acreage, value, and number of enslaved laborers. Like many wealthy farmers, they likely purchased their own food from outside sources in nearby towns like Nahunta or Goldsboro. However it is not uncommon for enslaved people to have been forced to rely primarily or even entirely upon subsistence gardening for their diet when not supplemented by rations provided by slaveholders. The second source of an enslaved persons diet is through rations, typically corn based, occasionally diversified with salted fish or pork.
Enhanced by technological advancements such as steam printing as well a growing body of work by American naturalists, the 19th century saw an abundance of literature on gardening and other how-to guides in the form of almanacs, seed catalogues, monthly publications, and botanical prints. In our garden, we have planted the three categories often found in a kitchen garden of this era: herbs, vegetables, and flowers. Today we planted herbs that appear commonly in 19th century receipts (that is 'recipes') or were known for their medicinal qualities, such as parsley, chamomile, basil, rosemary, sage, lavender and lamb's ear. Thank you so much to everyone who joined us today!
We hope you will join us next month on June 6th from 10 to 2 for Period Laundry, where we will explore how people washed their clothes, practiced personal hygiene, and how we treat our clothes based off of their construction/care needs.
