Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine, states
diverse in their peoples but similar in topography, occupations, customs, and traditions.
As a primary region of European contact, New England, like its folklore, can be
characterized as multicultural since settlement. The cooperation of indigenous peoples in
passing on essential knowledge of the land and its resources eased settlement. The
English settlers processed maple sap, added pumpkin, cranberries, and corn meal gruel to
their diets, and, along with the French trappers farther north, adopted Native American
woods lore and folk cures. Of numerous traditions handed down since contact, some, like
the clambake, entrenched themselves regionally. A few, most notably Thanksgiving Day
with its attendant foodways, became the custom of the land.
Expansion of setdement led the English along waterways to superior mill sites
discovered by hunters, trappers, Indian captives, and early surveyors, and gradually
forced the native populations to more remote reservations in northern New Hampshire,
Maine, Canada, and interior Connecticut and Vermont, marginalizing for generations
those who continued living among White settlers. In the wake of the 1960s civil rights
movement, significant numbers of native peoples who had nurtured their heritage through
an active network of traditional populations, both on and offtribal lands, shed their
anonymity and today preserve and promote many aspects of native tradition both publicly
and privately. Wampanoag, for example, tell of Mashaup, the creator giant, who arose
one dawn from Cape Cod, his preferred resting place (he could stretch full length, his feet
at Providence, hips on Chatham, and head near Sandwich). Mashaups sodden, sand-filled
slip pers so angered him that he flung them out to sea where they formed the islands of
Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. New England’s tribes, including the Passamaquoddy,
Abenaki, Wampanoag, Narragansett, Micmac, and Pequod, are rich in such timeless lore.
In the popular imagination, however, New England is die home of the Yankee, an
image based on the official history of the founding of our nation. Obscure in origin, the
word “Yankee” applies, in New England, to those English who trace their roots to the
Great Migration of the 1630s. Widespread identification of New England as Yankee
country arises from the popularity of the Yankee character, that comical schemer and
country bumpkin of mid-19th-century theatricals. Quick on the uptake, in storytelling
tradition the classic Yankee avoids straight answers; he is a trickster given to wryly
innocent verbal putdowns showcasing Yankee shrewdness and the outsider’s (or cityslicker’s) naiveté. A tourist asks: “Have you lived here your whole life?” The Yankee
drawls, “Nawht yet!” “Yankee” also implies trickery, the Yankee trader wily enough to
sell wooden nutmegs to unsuspecting housewives; or frugality, as in the proverbial
expressions, “Tight as the bark of a tree” and “String too short to be saved.” It would not
be far fetched to place L.L.Bean’s ascent from supplier of sturdy gear and duds for the
hunter-trapper to Madison Avenue darling into the Yankee-trader tradition.
The rocky farmlands and seacoasts of New England became a region of villages,
towns, and farms, settlements defined by the occupations of their citizens—Cape Cod cranberry growing, New Hampshire and Vermont maple sugaring, Maine lobstering,
Rhode Island deep-sea fishing, and Connecticut tobacco farming.
Maritime tradition is tenacious—fishing, lobstering, and boatbuilding being vital to
seacoast economy. The whaling tradition of 19th-century Nantucket and New Bedford,
Massachusetts, has an extensive folklore. Whaler’s scrimshaw, the intricate whalebone
carvings of lovers’ tokens or whales’ teeth incised with marine motifs, are valuable
collector’s items. Contemporary scrimshanders engrave and ink common animal-bone or
polymer substitutes. The high drama of disaster at sea, an all too common feature of
maritime history, and the rigors of the sailor’s life are well documented in folksong and
story and in such mocking ditties as: “Boston, Boston/What do you have to boast
on?/Tall steeples, foolish people/And a coast that ships get lost on.”
The most prominent aspect of New England government is the town meeting,
traditionally occurring the flrst Tuesday in March. At these open, democratic meetings,
townsfolk debate and then vote upon important issues on the town warrant such as taxes,
roads, and law enforcement. In the past, a poduck supper and dance followed. In the
1990s, most towns with this form of government conduct general business one evening
and school business on another.
Another important political tradition is Election Day, a significant holiday for the
Puritan, but even more so for New England’s African Americans. In the colonial era,
Blacks could assemble freely to elect a Black governor who would serve as the authority
for the community that elected him. First in Massachusetts, and eventually throughout New England, their celebrations included
colorful processions, the forerunner to the patriotic parades now a fixture of American
holidays nationwide.
Seventeenth- and 18th-century New England is noteworthy for distinctive traditions of
gravestone carving reflecting religious beliefs of the early settlers. The unique winged
death’s head and, following the Great Awakening’s lyrical evangelical piety, the cherub
soul image, symbolize the transport of the deceased to eternal glory in heaven. Period
epitaphs, straightforward messages scattered among New England’s graveyards, deliver
their comforting words or stark warnings to the living who gaze thereon. Classic is:
“Death, the debt to nature due/Which I have paid as so must you.” More recently, John
Benson, representing the sixth generation of the Benson family, Newport, Rhode Island,
stonecutters, designed and fashioned President John F.Kennedy’s New England—slate
graveside in Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, DC.
Shaping the architecture and landscape of New England, the I-type house is ubiquitous
across the Northeast, due in part to the late-20th-century vigorous historic-preservation
movement. The extended farmhouse, its outbuildings attractively appended, epitomizes
the old regional children’s saying, “Big house, litde house, back house, barn.” White or
red clapboard houses, sheds, and barns dot the New England countryside, organize its
countless village commons, and crowd its towns and urban neighborhoods. There exists a
body of folklore around house, barn, and meeting house raisings, all communitywide
events. An example is this partially parodic stanza sung at a 19th-century Connecticut
barn raising to the tune of a familiar hymn: “If God to build the house deny,/ The builders
work in vain./Unless the Lord doth shingle it/ It will blow down again.”
With the Industrial Revolution came waves of Quebecois, Irish, Italian, Cape Verdean,
Russian, Polish, Greek, and Scandinavian immigrants who provided cheap labor to the
burgeoning mill manufactories, somewhat mitigating Yankee influence. With these
workers came their values and traditions, along with ethnic social clubs, churches,
networks, and neighborhood enclaves. Large communities of Hispanic and Asian
immigrants, recently resettled in its metropolitan centers, further diversify New
England’s population. The starding appearance of die railroad inaugurated numerous
items of folklore, including this spirited Massachusetts train riddle from the turn of the
20th century: “Corn stalks twist your hair/Mortar and pestle pound you/Fiery dragons
carry you off/Great cart wheels surround you.”
The regionwide popularity of dancing, once the culmination of virtually all social
gatherings of any size, has dwindled. Neighborhoods and communities held contra
dances, generally hiring Yankee and Francophone musicians whose repertoire of English,
French Canadian, Irish, and Scottish dance tunes included “St. Anne’s Reel” from
Quebecois tradition, “Portland Fancy” derived from an Irish reel, and “Soldier’s Joy”
from the Yankee repertoire. A post-World War II revival of country music and dance
traditions, primarily among college-educated newcomers and stabilized by the
participation of some old-timers who grew up in the tradition, continues as a popular
pastime. In remote rural New England, the barn dance, a meeting ground for young and
old of varied ethnicities, thrived until the 1960s, and a few linger even in the 1990s. The music, dance, and foodways of Cape Breton, Scandinavia, Ireland, Asia, and Latin
America, among other places, enjoy currency in the active ethnic clubs of New England’s
cities.
Among popular traditions from the region’s immigrants is the annual Blessing of the
Fleet in Catholic fishing communities like New Bedford and Marblehead, Massachusetts.
An activity once enjoyed by insiders and their local neighbors has become such a popular
tourist attraction that it has spawned updated copycat practices like the blessing of a
motorcycle fleet in northern New Hampshire. Numerous public processions honor a host
of revered Catholic saints on their respective feast days and, among Southeast Asians at
their late-winter New Year’s celebrations, a fierce, yet benevolent, dragon god dances
through the streets of New England’s Chinatowns in brilliant red and gold to the raucous
accompaniment of Chinese drummers.
A number of social customs continue according to an agricultural calendar:
sheepshearings in the spring, agricultural fairs with horse and oxen pulls and timber
rolling in the summer, apple and cranberry picking in the fall. All over New England, but
especially in New Hampshire and Vermont, late winter’s “sugaring off” commences with
the tapping of the maples: The sap boils down into various grades of syrup, maple cream,
sugar, and candy Accompanying “sugar-on-snow,” a taffy-like treat of thickened maple
syrup poured on clean, dry snow and rolled on a fork, are pickles “to cut the sweet” and
donuts “to cut the sour.”
Two traditional New England meals are the boiled dinner and the bean supper. For the
first, pot roast (often corned beef), carrots, potatoes, cabbage, and turnips stew at a
simmer for hours. The bean supper, its Saturday night niche promising the cook the
relative ease of a Sunday cold lunch, includes frankfurters, steamed molasses brown
bread, and beans baked slowly in a pottery crock, the squat bean pot itself a regional icon.
Among French Americans, pork pie heads the list of holiday dishes, and, as for baked
beans and brown bread, ancestral recipes are family treasures.
Summertime “chowdah” contests attract great crowds who sample myriad variations
of the milk-based broth with onions, potatoes, salt pork, and clams. Labor-intensive
annual family or community clambakes feature clams, lobsters, and corn on the cob
layered with rock weed harvested firom local shorelines and steamed in pits atop heated
stones. These and other traditional gatherings provide appropriate settings for
performances of local music, songs, stories, recitations, and dancing.
The 1888 founding of the American Folklore Society in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
marked the formal beginning of the academic study of folklore in the United States. A
regional organization for folklore studies, Folklorists in New England (FINE), was
founded in Boston in 1980.
Linda Morley
Eleanor Wachs
References
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Videorecording.
Huntington, Gale. 1964. Songs the Whalemen Sang. Barre, MA: Barre Publishing Society.
Ives, Edward D. 1978. Joe Scott: The Woodsman Songmaker. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
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