Forgotten Destitute Laborers Of Early America

hello welcome today we've got a very special guest Carol jarbo who has been on the channel several times over the years thank you so much for joining us you're welcome thank you for inviting yeah absolutely and one of the things we want to cover today is the research that's newer to you that you've been covering for about the last four years or so right right um I've already talked a little bit about that on an earlier video when I've been studying the poor and the poor houses and what exactly did it mean to be poor and destitute in the colonies and so from that research of the poor houses and how they dealt with the poor we went into what happened to the people who were hanging on the edge before that happened right so we're talking about folks that are on the fringes of society absolutely what we call the destitute you know not the poor because usually when you talk about the poor you have the Working Poor but this is the bottom the belly uh the the ones that are scraping with with their fingernails just trying to get by from day to day so when I very first met you you were doing Maggie Delaney her story right and that was I remember very vividly the first time I saw you perform that it was before we ever did a video about it right but is that where this idea started it actually started all the way back about 17 years ago okay right at the very beginning when we first walked into this time period in the way of a reenactment and I was searching for my place in the middle of all these wonderful people who had all of this research and were doing all these different types of people of the communities that would have been alive through this period of time and I couldn't find my place I didn't fit in the nice people I just I didn't feel like there was anything to talk about because it was already being done so terribly well and um uh being that I'm I'm a teacher or I just retired from teaching I wanted to bring something out that people maybe had never seen before and so the logical place to go was down and that's when I first began to look into the indentured servants and the immigrants who came over here and what they did to survive once they first got over here and from the indentured servants which of course were down on that bottom belly I just kind of slid over into what happened to them when they got free and when they got free over half of them disappeared because they could never make it so where did they go and what did they do and that's how I slid into the poor this destitute area of people who just skidded out by their fingernails until they fell off the edge okay then it's a super compelling story an idea to think about on the channel regularly we focus on the everyday person right we don't we don't focus on famous people very often or famous battles or dates that you learned in history growing up right because we try to focus on what you didn't learn in history growing up and so when we met you it just made sense and you were going further into the almost underbelly of society or what people don't want you to look at right right the ones that you don't learn about in school and the ones that you don't see out in the public so since I've known you we you were doing Maggie Delaney her story and you helped us with the uh first person reenactor Series right and then you moved on to resurrectionists right and now you're doing survival jobs right what is is it continually changing because you're always researching and wanting to try and new things or understand you think why is it always changing for you is it do you get bored doing the same thing I do I get bored once I feel like I've covered an area fairly well and I can bring it out in confidence then as I continue to research I'll find a rabbit Trail like I did with the resurrectionist I was like oh that's interesting I wonder if that went on here and then as I fall into it I think this is something that the public needs to know this is something that people would find interesting I think because I like the out of the ordinary stuff I'm just that kind of person and then once I got the resurrectionist it was real easy to slide into what would drive a person to do that type of thing and we've actually I've actually slid into the criminal area a little bit and talked to gotten into that I mean of course England's transported so many of their criminals over here it's not uncommon to find that they're all over the place and what they did and from that you find these desperate people on the bottom who are looking for some something else to do so that's when I went into the poor houses because I wanted to know what they did with the people when they fell off the edge and if you're going to look at poor houses one of the things I found out was how what the means were the limits that they went to to keep from going there and I was like okay what things could you do you know in between the I have a job and I don't have a job I'm in the poor house there was there's a big gray area there so that's how I slid into these undesirable what I call survival jobs so I did forget in between there's the Scoundrels right right and you have a YouTube channel that focuses on Scoundrels we do we do can you tell us the names so folks out here know yes we have Scoundrels alley is what it's called and there are four of us in the Scoundrels group right at the moment Eric and Susan Seitz who are with Fairwinds and of course Parson John and Maggie we take different um looks at the people on the bottom uh Susan and Eric really talk a lot about the criminals that were here he's very very well versed in who was here and what they were doing and what what their names were the criminal language called the canting tongue they had their own language that they could sit around in a Tavern and talk about who they were going to hit next and nobody would know what they were saying even though it was English and a person or Badger is my partner in this Badger and Maggie we tend to do the the jobs or the things that are right on the edge of between legal and not so legal to talk about where those kind of people went so we we cover a real Broadband there of the underbelly between all four of us and we do have a website and you're welcome to go there we have a YouTube channel the scandals alley you can go and see we put up videos every now and then when we find out new things or when we just feel like making some fun stuff to let you know what we're working on next so one of the things that I've found super interesting as I've watched you research and make changes and kind of go after different interests is that the character of Maggie is always there and I was wondering if that's because you're so connected to that character that you've created or if you're actually saying this is what her life possibly would have looked like as she progressed right actually it's the second thing I had so many people asking me at the end of the Maggie story what happens to Maggie when she gets free does she ever get free what is she going to do and to the and I put it off for a while but after a little bit I thought you know I really need to discover where I could have gone and what I could have done so that's when the resurrectionists came in where she gets free a little bit earlier than what she thinks she's going to and she moves into this this uh that's where she meets up with a little Badger and that's where she begins her not so legal side of her of her life because that was what happened a lot of times is you came out of your indentorship and you were just thrown out there depending on whether or not you got freedom dues that could help you there were a lot that slid back into crime so I thought that's going to be something that would be true plus it brought out something new that nobody knows anything about or very few people know anything about and then as I have aged because Maggie's been around for a little while I thought okay So eventually Maggie's not going to be able to do that Badger's going to get too old to be a resurrectionist um where would they go next and that's when I started studying the poor houses because that was what I just assumed is we would always go to the poor house but as I delved into that a little bit further I found out that that was not always the case although that was always the threat you know that was the threat was that that's where you were going to end up either that or a ditch on the side of the road dying somewhere so that's how I morphed into that and so I am moving Maggie forward into her life and this is going to be the last chapter is going to be as she approaches the end of her life in her age what and where she could be I think that that's so it sounds difficult to me we do a lot of research for the channel and as I do research I'm never thinking about this continuous character moving into these different situations is does that make it more difficult or is that just happen automatically for you uh in some ways it's more difficult because it needs to I've got a three-part story now that's got to fit and I have to keep going back to where she came from where she came from where she came from if I was just doing research I could go into any direction I want to but for Maggie hers is going to be a constant moving downward not necessarily moving upwards so that limits me on where I can go and what I can do with her but on the other hand that storyline is laid out for me and I have a foundation so that makes it easier to be able to say okay here she is at this point in her life what would her options be at that point and I I think that helps a little bit but there actually has been two or three other things I've done research-wise that Maggie doesn't fit into so I've had to actually develop new characters to bring those things out okay that you haven't met yet okay well I look forward to it so before we we need to talk about the museum and the survival jobs but before we get there let's lay a little bit of foundation the whole reason that this Museum and these jobs exists to stay out of the Poor House right so why is the Poor House such like such a bad environment that people are doing anything they can to stay out of there from the research that I've done and what I've seen written and the interesting thing about it is that a lot of the research on the poor houses was hidden up until the 1960s in fact a lot of the um a lot of what they did with the poor or what happened to the poor that was all kind of hush hush because we were a new nation trying to grow and the last thing we wanted to do was to tell our immigrants oh when you get over here you could be as poor as you are where you come from so if you're coming over here to get out of poverty it may not work that way and so they said they hit it and it wasn't until the social revolution of the 1960s that people went back and dug that out and found exactly what was going on the interesting thing to me is that you have a per a time period in the 1700s where the poor kind of changed hands or the care of the poor changes hands it starts out being the responsibility of the church in the Church of England so you have parishes and you've heard of Parish Health in the parish box and you gave pennies or you put money in the parish box uh and and that money was used to help the poor but by the time we get to the middle part of the 1700s and especially after the revolution where the church of England is no more the towns themselves the government takes over the poor and as that change happens the poor go from being you poor pitiful thing we need to help you because that's what God wants us to do to now you're living on my tax money and you're a criminal and you should be out working in the whole thing changes the whole attitude toward the poor goes 180. and when that happens the poor houses become set up to house the poor but not only to house them but to reform them and that is to make them come in and make them miserable by treating them badly by humbling them by humiliating them and by forcing them to be miserable enough that we hope you'll leave and go out and get a job even to the point where we divide the people in the poor houses as whether they are worthy or unworthy the worthies of course being invalids mentally handicapped uh very very elderly something where they just physically or mentally cannot work okay as opposed to people who they feel could work um and so the ones who could work were considered unworthy and they were the ones that they were pushing trying to get out as fast as they could and they would work them from five o'clock in the morning till eight o'clock at night doing menial manual jobs that were just mind-numbing boring not allowed to talk to one another not allowed to socialize at all but just to sit side by side and do these these very meaningless jobs because they felt like they needed to help support themselves to help offset the taxes they were having to charge people to get them to do that and so going into the poor house was somewhat almost like being in a prison because they they would hold you there and if you wanted to get away from the poor house a lot of them you literally had to climb the walls and Escape wow in order to get away so this was not a pleasant place where people were going oh I'm so sorry that you're poor we will help it wasn't like that at all so especially if you were are an unworthy person right in an attempt to stay out of the Poor House people were willing to do jobs that you just probably couldn't even imagine people doing at least where we live now and you guys have taken some time to make a museum to educate folks that come to reenactments about this can you tell me a little bit about what survival jobs in the colonies look like and what how I guess how you went through the process of building this Museum oh sure once I found out how bad poor houses were and how badly people tried not to go there I had to start looking at that gray area that I was talking about a few minutes ago that was between the poor the Working Poor where you have a hired job and you you can or you do something and having to go destitute into a poor house and I knew that there were jobs that were just on the very bottom rung the kind of jobs that did not pay enough to to get you any further than one day at a time so I actually went to England first and went and looked at all their jobs that I could find because they actually had done more research during this period of time than we have over here and then I transferred it over here and I began to track ours backwards to see if they had come to this time period And as I as I went through I actually uncovered a lot of jobs that we did um that we're not necessarily over there and it was it was amazing to me what people were willing to do that they were making they weren't even I mean they were making enough money just barely to survive I like to say that this is enough money to get you to something to eat tonight maybe if you're lucky a place to lay your head down and then tomorrow you're going to have to get up and you'll be homeless and back out on the road again to do it and one of the things I found interesting is that a lot of them were entrepreneurial jobs they were jobs that people found a niche they found a lot of them are recycling what we would call recycling jobs where they would go and and find this material and found someone to sell it to and bring it in um so it was it was hard because I I wanted to go to the street people first and see what kind of Street jobs there were but in doing the research I found you had to have money to start that job if you're going to sell something you've got to have money to buy something unless it's something you can get for free okay you know that nobody else wants to get and that's how it opened the door into these other jobs so what are some of the examples of uh things that people would collect or jobs that people could do just to get them to the next day well like one of the things is grease collecting you have a lot of old women who go door to door to the more wealthy houses and they collect the grease and the awful you know the the parts of the animals from the meals used grease and used leftovers that type of thing and those women those old women and it talks about how greasy they were that their clothes were constantly covered with grease and that they were they were they're in rags because it didn't pay hardly anything but they were able then to take that product and sell it to the soap makers and the candle makers so there was a raw material that could be moved along you have the people who scavenged we have no garbage collection at this beginning of time and so people are just dumping their waste out on the streets and they were talking about in Philadelphia how it was in big piles on the corners which bothered Benjamin Franklin to know in he's the one who who actually organized the first what he called scavengers were people that went by and and picked up the garbage but the Scavengers the original scavengers were people who would spend their days digging through this garbage fighting off the stray dogs and and the pigs that ran loose who were eating the the foodstuffs and them going through and picking out things that they could take the various different areas and sell for a pittance but if you worked all day long and you got a pittance at every place you went to you might have enough to put together to buy enough to eat tonight so you've got those scavengers doing that you've got Ash collectors who went and collected ashes we were still burning wood here because we had a plethora of of wooden places to burn England and Europe especially England was already running into coal because they cut down a lot of their wood so there was a big cry out for potash for fertilizer over there so there were men who went from door to door with buckets and picked up ashes from fires you know you have to do something with the Ash and he they would take it to the potash Factory and sell it we've even got ads where the potash factories are begging for 10 000 bushels of Ashes you know if somebody could bring that that they needed that badly so so you've got that kind of thing you've got leech collectors women who walked out in the water and especially country women and who would allow the leeches to suck onto their legs and they would take them and sell them to the medical the doctors to use in their their doctor work you've got rag Pickers who went door door and picked up old rags old thread socks when you weave you always have those extra pieces at the end when you cut it off all of that together they would sell to the paper makers to make paper and especially during certain parts of our history they were desperate to have that those rags and they were running ads again in the gazettes begging for women to bring those in so you've got all kinds of just things you wouldn't think about you know night soil people whose job it was to go and dig out the outhouses and cesspools at night because you can't just dig a new hole whenever you need to so they would hire these groups and both men and women to come in and get down and dig that out and they would sell it to the fertilizer plant for fertilizer so was there any kind of correlation between the riskier more dangerous the job was the higher it paid or are all of these just getting you through they were all just getting you through what I found is especially in the men the men that ended up in the poor house that were injured on the job I mean we have no OSHA at this period of time we have nobody to protect you there's nothing nobody's taking um those extra steps to make sure that you as an employee don't get crushed by this you know they're they really don't care yeah there's no social safety nets there's no safety net on the job and you you see so many men end up in the poor house because they've had their arms crushed or their legs crashed or their backs crashed or their broke their neck or crushed their head getting hurt at work so a lot of these bottom jobs these survival jobs were jobs that people like that could do they just but and they paid nothing next to nothing at all going back to your work with the resurrectionists that sort of a job where you're well can we call it grave robbing for oh no no that's a bad word no no let me make this clear it was not called grave robbing up until gray Robin you take the stuff clothes jewelry glasses wig whatever happened to me yes those are bad people that's a criminal that's a criminal you would get hung for taking property however the law said the body was not property so a body snatcher would be the more correct term as long as you put all the stuff back in the coffin and you took just the body the law said you really hadn't done anything wrong so is that a job that's would fall in this category or does that actually pay more money oh that paid way more money that's what I thought anytime you work with the medical profession you're going to make more money but that's also one of those jobs that's on the line between on the line legal and illegal exactly it just depends on who you're who you are and who you're taking out and what you're doing with it when you get them out so your museum is covering folks that want to make an honest day's wage that's exactly right that's why we call it an honest day's work that's the name of it because these are all legal jobs there's 17 legal jobs in there that people could just do in fact out of all 17 only three of them are actually hired jobs the others are all entrepreneurial jobs that you could just go out and start on your own which is better however I do need to say that I do have a wall at the very end that has the not so legal jobs that I give people that option once you've gone through and see what you would have to do to be able to survive you might want the not so legal jobs that pay a lot more money and you didn't have to work nearly as hard I do like to give people options so I I don't think that you see very many traveling museums can you give us the lay of the land for this Museum real quick and folks can see it at reenactments all over this side of the country right right so can you talk about bit about that the way it lays out is of course it's our large tent our 20 by 24 and in the middle we've put up a wall to the center from the front to the center and then one from side to side where the two posts come down that hold the ridge so that when you come in one side you come in like almost like a little room and then you make a curve and go around through the back and then you come back out the front again another little room on the other side and we did that because of covet we really were not planning on bringing this out I had all this research I didn't know what to do with it but covid when we first began to come back out again they were really not wanting people to Cluster together in one place and so the great experiment was if I took all my research and put it on two by three banners with the display in front of them and I staggered it through this type of a you know type of a museum type of thing wood people really be interested enough to walk through and read it so we we really chewed our fingernails for the first two or three times that we took it out not knowing if it was going to be something that would be accepted not knowing that the if the events would even let us do it and whether or not the public would be able to do it so like I said you're going to come in come in the front and there's a couple of things on the outside to read one of the things I really like people to understand before they come in is I have a sign out front that I make everybody read and it starts off with the words what if and then I list I bullet list things that you need to think about before you see these jobs what if your main Breadwinner becomes ill or hurt or dies or becomes a drug herd which was a bad problem in the colonies we had a lot of problems with drinking what happens if they can't do their work anymore whoever they are what happens if suddenly now you have no income coming most people rent rooms they don't have houses that's very odd especially in the cities so they're gonna you can't pay the rent you're going to get kicked out to the streets and it's going to be really fast it's not going to be like Weeks Later so what if you have no money coming in you have no place to live now you can't sell on the streets unless you have money to get started what if you have no sellable trade skills you don't have something that you can do or if you were a Cooper and your arm got crushed well there goes your job and then I said at the bottom of it it says what would you do to survive so I like people to read that first so that when they come in they have the right frame of mind to begin to look at these jobs and say would I be willing to do this to eat supper tonight I also put up something about the poor house I put up just one Banner about that that they could just read Because I want them to see here's your options it doesn't look compelling here is door number one you know uh so far I've only had one person in the last two years choose the poor house and I don't think they read real well and then I send them through to read these 17 jobs and it's amazing to me how many people choose crime how many people come out choosing the crime once they look at all of these things that you could do but what you have to do in order to make enough money to eat tonight they that cry wall looks really really popular it's it's much more enticing which is I want people to understand why so many people did term to Crime right right so I have known about this Museum we talked about it a while back and we've talked about it in stages when you were creating it after it was created but I've only had the opportunity to see it about a week ago yeah yeah and it's great it's wonderful it was fun to see families come through and have conversations about it and parents reading these jobs to their kids and their kids the wheels are just really turning right and I think that I think it's really powerful and you've done a great job with it thank you very much I hope so my my goal is that people come out of there with a lot greater gratefulness and respect of the people that brought us where we are today

Channel: Townsends

Views: 49,425

Keywords: 18th century, 19th century, Carol Jarboe, Laborers, Ryan Kerr, Working Poor, history, jas townsend and son, poor house, reenacting, townsends, workhouse

Id: XGL0TO78OFY

Length: 28min 20sec (1700 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 07 2022