Diary of a Colonial Housewife

The hardships of a Long Island mother compel her to write, `Dear Lord, deliver me'

By George DeWan | Staff Writer

A page from Mary Cooper's diary (Oyster Bay Historical Society / )

On a midsummer day in 1769, soon after her 55th birthday, Mary Cooper sat down wearily at a table in her Oyster Bay farmhouse, opened her diary, and with quill pen in hand began pouring out her anguish:

July the 13, 1769. Thirsday.
This day is forty years sinc I left my father's house and come here, and here have I seene littel els but harde labour and sorrow, crosses of every kind. I think in every respect the state of my affairs is more then forty times worse then when I came here first, except that I am near the desierered haven. A fine clear cool day. I am un well.

In one of the few diaries written by a woman in the American colonies, Mary Cooper opened a window on 18th-Century colonial Long Island life. Another diary, written about the same time by Ebenezer Miller of Miller Place, adds to the picture we get of how people lived in the middle of the 18th Century.

Although Cooper and her husband, Joseph, were better off than the average farmers of the day - the family owned most of Cove Neck, and at times kept four slaves - the picture she presents of the constant hard work, family tragedies, church on the Sabbath and occasional entertainment was repeated on farms large and small across the Island.

Cooper married at 14, became a mother at 20 and had six children, all of whom caused her sorrow. Two died in infancy, two in childhood and the remaining two died before their parents.

On her dead children's birthdays, and those of her dead father and sister, she remembers and grieves:

Tuesday, September 8, 1772.
This day is 18 years since my dear son Caleb was born. O alas, how is my expectation cut off.

Much of what was used on the farm was produced on the farm, and from sunup to sundown and after, there was work to be done. Cooper writes of cleaning house, cooking meals, drying apples, making sweetmeats and sausage, salting beef, washing and ironing clothes, baking mince pies, taking care of honeybees, making wine, drying cherries, processing flax, making soap, sewing, picking blackberries, making candles, and boiling souse, or pickled meat.

Cooper is constantly writing of her exhaustion and weariness:

Friday, July 7, 1769.
Hot as yesterday. I am dirty and distressed, almost weared to death. Dear Lord, deliver me.

Despite the signs that the Coopers were fairly well off for their times, Cooper often writes of having creditors bothering her. Added to that were the constant demands being put on her to feed and house relatives:

Wednesday, August 23, 1769.
A fine clear morning with a cold north wind. My hearte is burnt with anger and discontent, want of every nessesary thing in life and in constant feare of gapeing credtors consums my strenth and wasts my days. The horror of these things with the continuel cross of my family, like to so many horse leeches, prays upon my vitals, and if the Lord does not prevent will bring me to the house appointed for all liveing.

But there were amusements and social life as well. She and her friends had sewing and quilting bees, where the women would all work and gossip together. She records a barbecued-turtle feast, dancing, and, occasionally, seeing horse racing, which had been inaugurated a century earlier on the Hempstead Plains. On Aug. 29, 1769, she, with others, sailed across Long Island Sound to Connecticut in two hours - ``very greatly against my will,'' she writes. ``The tumulting waves look frightful.''

Cooper was a member of the New Light Baptist Church, and may have occasionally gone to hear preaching by Jupiter Hammon, the black slave from nearby Lloyd Harbor who was America's first black poet. ``I went to the New Light meetin to here a Black man preach,'' she writes on Aug. 27, 1769, and she has three references to hearing ``Hammon'' preach, although it cannot be confirmed that this is the same person.

Religion is Mary Cooper's solace:

1773. June the 29. Tuesday.