Agricultural History of the Northshire: Part

2 The Sheep Industry

by Jon Matthewson, MFFC Advisory Board member and Director of the Dorset Historical Society.

The Northshire has a long and varied agricultural history. There have been periods of relative stability punctuated by periods of tumultuous change. This is the second of a three part series covering, briefly, the history of those changes. Prepared by the Dorset Historical Society it is a free insert for Merck Forest & Farmland Center’s 2020 local food program, Northshire Grown: Direct, which is a community scaled cooperative CSA program that sells products from more than 40 local farms and food businesses to a customer base of 400-plus community households.

In 1811, William Jarvis, United States consul in Portugal, successfully smuggled a large flock of merino sheep from Spain to his farm in Wethersfield, Vermont. Merinos were a high-wool-producing breed, and soon other Vermont farmers became interested. But it wasn’t until after the wheat blight of 1827 that farmers really took to raising sheep. For the next three decades, merino sheep created a boom for Vermont farmers. Because sheep needed quite a bit of grazing land, wealthy sheep farmers bought out smaller farmers, who used their profits to relocate in recently opened farmlands in western New York and the upper Midwest.

The Vermont sheep farmers, in turn, began to buy large tracts of flatland on the West Coast in the 1850s, and moved their flocks there. In Dorset, the height of the sheep boom was in 1850, when there were 4,752 sheep in town, but by 1860, there were only 2,649. (In those years, Dorset’s human population in those years was 1,700 and 2,090, respectively.) The largest flock in Dorset consisted of 860 sheep, owned by Lyman Sykes, whose farm was on the Dorset West Road, near Bond Lane. Traditionally, there were four steps in processing wool: shearing, fulling, carding, and spinning. All four could be performed on the farm, but most small towns had other businesses for fulling and carding wool – mills, which (amid other small shops) would be near water sources. Ironically, most local fulling and carding mills had closed before the merino-sheep boom hit. Subsequently wool was shipped to larger factories that handled the last three wool-processing steps.

Industrialization affected local farmers in many other ways, too. The 19th century saw many innovations in the mechanization of agricultural processes, in order to simplify some of the more strenuous or time-consuming chores. One major change to thousands of years of agricultural activity was the fanning mill.

Wheat grows tall, but only a small part is used. The utilized part consists of wheat and chaff, which must be separated. Traditionally this was done by smashing the head with a flail, and then letting wind blow away the lighter part (the chaff), leaving the wheat in a winnowing basket.

By the mid-19th century, farmers produced wind in devices called fanning mills. The farmer would turn the blades (the fan) to blow on the wheat and chaff, which were then separated by several screens inside the machine. For about 80 years, fanning mills were ubiquitous on local farms, but by the 1940s, they were relics of agricultural history. Next time: Holstein cows and the Dorset Cheese Factory’s prize-winning sage cheese!