Text size:

Sun to Sun, All Work Little Fun

Long Island's colonial children keep busy just to help the family survive

By Katti Gray | Staff Writer

In colonial Long Island, it was expected that all but the wealthiest and most feeble bodies would perform the tasks required for daily living.

Children -- whether enslaved or free -- were no exception to that. Like adults, they rose and retired with the sun, filling the daylight with chores: Harvesting clams. Digging clay to be fired into bricks. Retrieving well-water. Guarding corn fields from ravenous wildlife. Stoking hearths that burned around the clock, every day of the year -- because fires were needed for cooking, cleaning and warmth and were difficult to ignite in the first place.

Often, children transformed work into play, telling stories or swimming off the coast at a time when toys were limited to wooden dolls or, for the well-to-do, tin boxes with exercise wheels for pet squirrels.

In what was a largely agrarian age, many lived on farms that at their smallest could average about 80 acres. It was a lot of territory to cover.

Other than general tidbits about the roles children played in commerce or household maintenance, historians say little else is known about the lives of young people.

``Couples married as much for economics as anything else back then. A woman alone could not run a homestead. A man alone could not. Together, and with children added to that mix, they could survive,'' said Barbara Kelly, curator of special collections at Hofstra University's Long Island Studies Institute.

Given this narrow understanding of colonial children, it is difficult to determine how adults measured a child's human worth back then, said Bonnie Thompson Dixon, executive director of the Long Island Children's Museum.

``What exactly was the value of a child? Was it another mouth to feed? An accident? Or were they brought into the world to help humans move to the next level, so to speak? That's a big question,'' she said.

What does seem clear, though, is that children were made to know their place as adults defined it.

``Whether you were a rich child or some other child, children really would never have spoken to an adult unless the adult spoke first,'' said Kathleen Kane, director of education for the Society for the Preservation of Long Island Antiquities. ``Parents ate and the children waited for them to finish . . . Often, children ate separately and afterwards. Children weren't the main event of the family as they are today. They were expected to act like little grown-ups.''

Because of the status of children, no one wrote much of their lives. Much of the limited information available on colonial children has been gleaned piecemeal from such material as paintings from that period, letters -- mainly adult observations -- and other archives.

History that was passed down orally through generations of Indian families, and finally penned on paper, also provides glimpses of children who resided in the region long before English and Dutch immigrants arrived, said historian John Strong, an expert on Long Island's Indians.

As small children, Indians spent much of their time under the wings of women. As they became older, the boys would participate in rites of manhood during which they were deprived, for a time, of food or water but eventually were welcomed back into the fold as full-grown men.

Smaller children, along with their mothers, harvested the fields and set up wigwams during round-the-clock gatherings of crops.

``They played a very important role in the economics of these communities.

``We do know their lives centered around family, gathering, hunting,'' Strong said. ``But it was not structured in the way we have come to know work. The whole day was a mixture of socializing with your family. The notion of play and social activity was often not separate. You taught your children as they picked acorns. Your kids may be throwing acorns back and forth. The young boys, while they were hunting, were doing all the male-bonding that we talk so much about these days.''

In addition, Indian children were known to have played with miniature bows and arrows, precursors to adult-sized tools they eventually would use.

So, manual labor was the norm for all children, who first served as apprentices of sorts in their own homes and often for actual employers later on.

What they learned at home, in shops, in the fields and on the waters often took the place of formal schooling, which was erratic in those early years. Believing ignorance was sinful, Purtians established some of the first schools. But this was long before public education became a legal right -- and, even then, it was against the law for slaves to be educated even informally.

And with so much of the focus on a family's sheer survival, parents frequently considered churning butter, spinning textiles, tanning animal hides and so on as the life skills to teach their offspring.