New England Vampire Panic

Starting in the late 1700s and running for a century, small rural communities in New England were sometimes stricken with a panicked fear that the dead were somehow feeding off the living, and many graves were exhumed in the hopes of ending the attacks.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History class from house
Stuffworks dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. And
I'm Tracy and we are officially into a little bit
of Halloween programming. We're getting there. I mean I start

(00:21):
in July in my personal life, but I held out
till now for the just tenter hooks. Barely expect some
scary things, scary people coming up over the next month
or so. I just think you're fascinating. Uh, It's Halloween
is my favorite holiday. Um. So today we're going to
talk about an American phenomenon that happened for about a

(00:47):
hundred years. It was going on in New England where
there were these bizarre vampire panics. And while we live
in an Asian vampires are insanely popular as entertainment, uh,
and they often become romantic interests, for better or for worse.
There have certainly been times in human history when fear
of real and for true, actual vampiresm caused these outright

(01:10):
panics and for people to really enact some very bizarre
rituals to try to quell this menace that they perceived
around them. Every time we every time there's a news
story that floats by about somebody discovering a quote, vampire
grave in some place. We get all these requests from
people talk about that. Yeah, and there have been a
lot and we'll talk a little bit about one researcher

(01:31):
who does a lot of work specifically in that field. Uh.
The word vampire, of course, originated in Slavic Europe in
the tenth century, and there have been a number of
vampire panics in Europe as well throughout history, from you know,
the tenth century right up until roughly the end of
the eighteenth century. But at that point it kind of

(01:52):
started to fizzle out, like these instances where people became
convinced on mass that there was a vampire in their
midst But US Europeans were moving to North America, a
lot of their superstitions came along for the ride. And
it's in New England that we're focusing this lens today. Uh.
And it's actually later in the historical record than people

(02:13):
might anticipate because it does sound, you know, superstition on
this level sounds a little wacky, in a little old fashioned,
but it's a lot more modern than you might think.
This was happening way more recently than I think most
people would suspect UH. And so first we're going to
cover a couple of specific instances of vampire panic that
happened in New England, and then we'll discuss some of

(02:36):
the causes and circumstances around this phenomenon that kept repeating.
And we're first going to start in Jewett City, Connecticut.
So in the late eighteen forties through the mid eighteen fifties,
in Jewitt City, there's a vampire panic. So the Ray
family of Jewitt City experienced the series of tragedies when

(02:57):
which healthy members of the family, previously healthy members of
the family just wasted away. And most of the panic
really was in the eighteen fifties, as this family had
begun to lose more and more members. So it wasn't
like a panic that lasted ten years UM, but the
events leading up to it really lasted that long. So
first the Ray family's son Lemuel died, and then Henry,

(03:20):
who was the father of the family, passed away a
couple of years after that, so this was late eighteen
forties into early eighteen fifties. And then Elisha was next uh.
And then the eldest son of the family, Henry Nelson,
and Will refer to him by both names to keep
him separate from the father. Henry also fell sick, so
there was a lot of speculation going on about what

(03:42):
was causing all of these deaths for this one family,
and believing that the dead were somehow beating on the living.
Two of the Ray sons were exhumed on June four.
Their bodies were burned in this desperate attempt to try
to end the families bring and we don't really know

(04:03):
why the Ray family attributed the later deaths to the
buried relatives, but it appears that they thought that Lemuel
and alive Show were somehow coming back, possibly as spirits,
which was part of the vampire lord at the time,
rather than the modern vampiric concept of the dead actually
rising from the grave and biting people on the neck uh,
and that they were draining Henry Nelson, the eldest son.

(04:26):
It's unclear also why their father, Henry was not a
suspect in all of this. There was never any indication
that his grave had been intended to be disturbed, just
the two sons. We also don't know when Henry Nelson died,
but it appears that the tuberculosis outbreak which was really

(04:47):
the culprit ended there. So tuberculosis is an infectious disease,
as we know now, was not known app time, and
it's spread through bacteria, So the burn ing of their
bodies might actually have helped contain the outbreak. Uh So
this sort of solidified this incorrect notion that what they

(05:10):
had done had actually stopped the vampires. Yes, so we
know now that what was going on was that the
family had what was called at the time consumption. And
even so, and we'll talk about it, it comes up
a little bit later that sometimes these cases of consumption
were actually identified, they were diagnosed, but there was an
underlying fear about what was causing the illness, right, and

(05:32):
so because uh, tuberculosis wasn't identified until several decades later,
even though consumption was identified, it was not known that
it was bacterial, I mean, it was contagious, didn't quite
have the germ theory of disease yet, that was not
quite there yet barely getting started. And if that, like
the germ theory didn't really spread like it was just

(05:54):
in its infancy at this point. It wasn't until the
nine twenties that that really had the idea in their
heads that germs cause disease. And even so in more
remote areas, it was entirely possible that that that word
would not have reached people yet absolutely Uh. And so
that's the Jewitt City vampire case. And you'll sometimes hear

(06:15):
them referred to. There's their tours through town, etcetera. And
you'll hear in um circles of people that like to
talk about these types of things, Uh, the Jewitt City vampires,
even though they were not actually vampires. Uh. And the
next time we're going to talk about so remember that
one was in the eighteen fifties when that all happened.
This one is a bit later, and it's quite famous.

(06:38):
It's the Mercy Brown case. Uh. And so Mercy Lena Brown,
and she went by Lena was a resident of Exeter,
Rhode Island, and she died there in eighteen ninety two,
so much later in the historical record. When she died,
the town was really struggling. The Civil War had claimed
a lot of his popular its population, and that was

(06:59):
really the case everywhere, like the Civil War could just
eliminate huge numbers of people from a town's population. The
railroad had also made it really easy for people to
leave the area to try to find better farmland. Yeah,
as a brief side note, Exeter was a farm community,
but it's widely recognized that the soil there is not

(07:20):
great for farming. That's the case in many parts. It's
very rocky. So yeah, we kind of talked about a
similar thing in our Brook Farm episode, that these people
set up a farm in a place that doesn't have
a good soil. Right, So, yeah, Exeter was it was
a farming community that got barely got by before all
of these deaths and and people wanting to leave started
to happen, and then it really got rough well, and

(07:41):
once the railroad made it much easier to move a
farther distance away, there wasn't a huge draw for people
to stay there, continuing to struggle to just with another nature. Right.
From eighteen twenty until the time of Lena's death, the
population had gone from people to nine d sixty one.

(08:02):
So yeah, over of course of about seventy years, they
lost well over half of their population. Now, Lena's mother
had died ten years earlier in two and Lena's twenty
year old sister had died the year after their mother,
so about a decade before Lena became sick. Two other

(08:22):
women in her family had died, and Lena's brother had
become sick as well, but he left Exeter. He moved
to Colorado Springs in the hopes that a climate change
would cure him. While Lena was dying, her brother Edwin
came back. He had had some health improvements for a
little while while he was gone, but eventually he got

(08:45):
sick again. So the story goes that the neighbors, thinking
that some sort of evil supernatural happening had reversed Edwin's
remission when he came home. Uh they approached Lena's father,
whose named George Brown, and they suggested that an exhamation
of the family members who had already died and at
this point Lena had passed, might lead to his son's recovery.

(09:09):
So they thought we might be able to save Edwin
if we dig up the dead ladies. So their goal
was to check the hearts of the deceased to see
if there was fresh blood in them, and that would
be an indicator that the corpse was feeding on the
living people, and George reluctantly agreed to do this. So
on March seventeenth, his wife and his two daughters were unearthed,

(09:32):
and I feel like I should mention. George did not
believe in this nonsense, and he refused to be present
at the exhamation. He was really most records indicate he
was just trying to placate his neighbors because they were
relentless um and Lena, of course, had only been dead
for about two months at this time. She died in January,
and because it was winter, she had not decomposed all

(09:54):
that much, while her mother and sister, again having died
almost a decade prior, were just skeletal at that point,
they were just bones. Uh. There was actually a correspondent
for the Providence Journal on hand for this disinterment, and
he reported that quote, the body was in a fairly
well preserved state. He's referring to Lena. At this point,
the heart and liver were removed, and in cutting open

(10:16):
the heart, clotted and decomposed blood was found. The town
doctor was also in attendance for this, as sometimes did
happen during the exhumations, and he really was also trying
to be the voice of reason, and he was like, no,
she's got tuberculosis. She has a long disease. She died
of this. She's this is not a vampire um. But

(10:37):
of course that kind of fell on deaf ears, right.
Mercy Lena Brown's liver and heart were burned there on
a site, and the ashes were fed to her brother
and attempt to cure him of tuberculosis, but that of
course did not work. No, he died like two months later.

(10:58):
And because this particular vampire panic happened in the late
eighteen hundreds and there was a reporter on hands to
witness it, the story really spread. It actually ended up
being picked up by the American Anthropologist Journal UH when
a gentleman that wrote for them went to study it
after he had read that initial account, and it ended

(11:18):
up being talked about far and wide. And some historians
actually believe that it was the Mercy Brown story that
inspired bram Stoker's Dracula, which published in although there is
some debate over it um. Some will say that the
news that had spread out that led to specifics that
seemed to parallel bram stoker story, not all of those

(11:40):
specifics had really become public knowledge by the time he
would have been working on it, So it's a it's
an unknown although there are some interesting parallels between the two. Uh.
And the general reception of this story in the press
and in public opinion was that really this was all
just because of ignorance of small communities. Uh. And it

(12:00):
was even characterized by some as a hoax. By the
time the man who wrote for the American Anthropologist Journal
showed up, they thought that people were kind of pulling
his legs. Uh. And the Boston Globe actually even suggested
that um inbreeding and intermarrying an exeter had resulted in
this community that was not so intellectual and that they
were kind of prone to buy into these crazy superstitions. Uh.

(12:24):
So the world at large thought a lot of this
was crazy even earlier than this story. But uh, you know,
these small communities would get the grip of the panic.
As a side note, there's an episode of The Memory
Palace that's about this specific vampire panic you all would
like to listen, and it's called Mary Mary and Mercy.

(12:45):
Mercy Brown's story is really quite famous in the Vampire
lawre and New England law on its own outside of
um you know, sort of paranormal enthusiasm because it is
such so late in the game that it is a
little startled. I think for people in To move on
to another story, a group of children in Griswold, Connecticut

(13:07):
stumbled onto a previously unknown burial ground and there had
actually been a serial killer in the area just prior
to this, and because of that, a police investigation was
started and the site that the children had found was
excavated because initially they had just found like some bones,
and they weren't police and the authorities were not sure

(13:28):
if they had found a burial site that this serial
killer had been using. But it turned out that what
they had actually unearthed was an interesting part of this
area's history and New England, for anyone who does not know,
is actually filled with unmarked burial plots left over from
the colonial area era, mostly when families would establish these

(13:48):
burial spaces, but they didn't always keep records of the
interments and they had eventually grown over with age, you know,
as as small townships had fallen away and died off
and been replaced by bigger cities and people moved away.
These burial plots weren't always uh maintained visibly right, so
not quite as far back in history as the many, many,

(14:11):
many bodies that are now under car parks that were
constantly hearing about from the UK, but kind of similar
in how people buried their loved ones and then moved
on for whatever reason announced something else got there. Eventually,
authorities uncovered twenty nine graves, and most of these were
just austere graves where people had been buried in very

(14:32):
simple wooden boxes. There were fifteen children, six adult males,
and eight adult females, but there were also two stoned
crips that the state's archaeology team, which was led by
Nick Valentoni, were particularly interested in, and one of these crips,
which was labeled Burial number four, when they were doing

(14:53):
the excavation, revealed a much different in tumbment than those
that the team had uncovered up to that point, and
instead of finding a body laid out simply in a
wooden box with the arms either crossed over the chester
or at the side, this had a coffin which was
painted red and it had the initials J B and
the number fifty five laid out on the lid in

(15:15):
brass tacks. And while the feet of the deceased were
exactly where you would expect to find them in the coffin,
the rest of the body had been completely rearranged into
a layout that was similar to a Jolly Roger, but
with the skull turned face down into the rib cage
and then the leg and arm bones forming the cross
underneath that. So analysis indicated that the beheading and the

(15:38):
fracturing of the ribs and the dismemberment of the body
had all happened several years after this JB had died.
Paleopathological evidence also revealed that JB had probably died of consumption,
and two other sets of remains near JB, which were
labeled IB the number forty six and n B with

(15:58):
the number thirteen, which we believed to be age indicators,
had also died of tuberculosis. IB was a woman and
n B was a child. Uh And now we're going
to get into kind of the backstory and what happened
as a result of that find um so to return
to our backstory for this this family. Michael bell, a

(16:20):
Rhode Island folklorist and researcher and author of the book
Food for the Dead on the Trail of New England's Vampires,
has studied this New England vampire phenomenon for more than
thirty years, and in that time he's documented six dozen
incidents of exhumations, and he believes really strongly that there
were many, many others that just haven't been discovered yet. Yes,

(16:41):
so when Tracy mentioned earlier that you sometimes read about
uncovering a random grave, that he thinks that they're probably
way more cemeteries that we haven't even stumbled upon yet.
The earliest exhamation that he's recorded is from the late
seventeen hundreds, and the furthest away from New England that
he's recorded is happened in Minnesota. For a context, the

(17:02):
Salem witch Hunts were primarily slotted in the sixteen nineties,
so this was sometime after that. Yes, so even the
earliest incident of this vampire panic was roughly a hundred
years later than the witch hunts had kind of happened
and and died off. So, you know, I don't know,
socially it filled a gap of a need for superstitious
paranormal situation. But scare that Bell has studied actually involved

(17:29):
a letter from a councilman which was printed in the
Connecticut Koran and Weekly Intelligencer. And this letter actually warned
the editor and readers of the paper about a quack
doctor who was suggesting exhimation and burning of the dead
to stop consumption, which was believed to be done by
these dead bodies, like the consumption had been initiated by them.

(17:50):
Most of the research into this practice of exhuming bodies
during the vampire scare is based on handwritten records, and
many grave sites are similar to the ones in the
grizz Will Discovery that we just talked about, and they're
unmarked and sort of lost in time. And the genesis
of the vampire fear that was happening in New England
in this period really has yet to be pinpointed, but

(18:11):
as with any folkloric myth, it's likely that there's no
single starting point. Rather, a small seed of a legend
fed the lurking and present fear of the unexplained because
even though they could diagnose consumption, they didn't know what
caused it, uh And in turn that would all add
to the mythology and you know, build the legend, and
that would feed more fear and so on the way

(18:32):
these things happen, and certainly a doctor suggesting the idea
like that we should burn these bodies because they're feeding
off the living, would allow that superstition to gain a
little bit of ground. So that incident, you know, probably
added a significant ground swell to what was already likely
being talked about in communities. Right, and on top of that,

(18:54):
you're not actually familiar with medicine or anatomy or the
way bodies decomposed. It's easy to misinterpret normal decomposition through
this lens of cognitive bias and a lack of medical knowledge.
It's easy to misinterpret that as some kind of supernatural
thing going on. So bloated corpses were often described as

(19:16):
looking like they had just eaten, for example, or blood
coming from the mouth was held up as proof that
this dead body had been feeding on a living Yeah.
When there are accounts of these exhamations and people have
kept journals are written about them, they do they reference.
It was clear this must have been happening, because the
body was bloated, it had just eaten, and the hair

(19:38):
had continued to grow. They didn't know that that happened
yet as part of decomposition. And well, it's the it's
that your skin received It looks like your hair and
your nails are growing, but that's not what's happening. Yeah,
so they were attributing this to this dead body somehow
getting you know, nutrition from from uh. These people that

(19:58):
were dying of consumption and the Jewitt City panic and
similar incidents had all really taken place in rural, fairly
isolated areas. They were often small farming communities. There are
records such as journal juries and even newspaper write ups
from cities and more metropolitan areas that really suggests that
when outsiders like would travel through these small towns or

(20:20):
small settlements, they really kind of chalk this up as
like crazy superstition and that these were just really overzealous,
uneducated farm folk who didn't know any better than to
blame common things on the supernatural. Yeah. And what's interesting
is that in many instances, the consumption that was actually
killing people had really been diagnosed by a doctor, but

(20:44):
because people didn't really know what was causing consumption, it
was still believed that it was somehow the dead that
we're doing it. Yeah. I think a lot of people
tend to assume uh, And it's often not clear when
you're reading some of these articles uh and accounts of
what happened. They think that people didn't know that people
were dying of a disease. They just sort of thought

(21:04):
suddenly people were dying and they didn't know what caused it.
And and while they didn't know the cause of consumption
and that it was bacterial, there were doctors saying, this
person has consumption, they are going to die. Uh, So
there is still this Uh. You know, there was a
certain amount of knowledge, but it wasn't enough. And you know,

(21:25):
it's worth considering the fact that in the face of
a disease that was incurable at the time, it's understandable
that there was likely a strong desire to do something
anything to try to remedy the situation, even if it
was the bizarre digging up bodies and burning of corpses
or parts of corpses and sometimes consuming them, and it all,

(21:48):
it all is kind of wacky and bizarre and seems extreme.
But if you just have you can't do anything, but
you feel a need to do something that seemed like
their avenue. And because there were people who, you know,
by some combination of luck in their their constitution, their
immune system did not die, there was a lot of

(22:09):
trying to figure out, Okay, why did that person? Right
with that that clearly there must be something we can
do because that person survive. And this is something that
you know, human beings continue to do today. People will
try all kinds of stuff when you know, told that
they have something that's not treatable by conventional you know,

(22:29):
western medicine. Yeah. Well, and it's worth noting that Mercy
Brown's father who gave into this request to exume his
family's remains, though he was not there and did think
it was huie, he never got consumption even though three
members of his family, four members of his family died
of it. Uh. And some people said it was because

(22:50):
he didn't believe that he somehow had you know, magically
created this talisman for himself of not acknowledging the spirits
and so they couldn't get him. And in some ways,
even though scientifically you would say this, you know, supports
the idea that this wasn't really a functioning, working approach
to dealing with this disease, some people were able to
spend his good health as a way to somehow prove

(23:14):
that in fact, no, no, the spiritual angle is correct.
As somehow want to do an episode on the history
of magical thinking, Yeah, but I think it would require
all of my research for all time forever, and then
the episode would be like nine minute, million hours long. Well,
it's and it's hard to find your way into, like
where you latch in to start something like that, because

(23:35):
it is that's a long and storied traditions. So while
they were uh, many many uniting factors in most communities
that had one of these vampire exhumations take place, they're
all rural, they're all battling disease outbreaks, the manner in
which the ritual work was done was not consistent among

(23:57):
all of these events. Yeah, some in and says a
vampire exhamation involved a great deal of ritual. One practice
documented in some cases in Vermont, Connecticut and Rhode Island
involved burning the dead person's heart, often mixed with herbs,
and inhaling the smoke as a cure for a disease.
There's also the eating the ashes ritual that was used

(24:20):
in the Mercy Brown exhumation. But there were other communities
that took a really simple approach. They would uh merely
open the grave, flip the body face down, and then
rebury it. Yeah, the thinking being, now when this tries
to get out, it will just be going deeper into
their correct like it won't it won't understand its orientation.
People think ghosts are dog smart enough to feed off

(24:44):
the living, not smart enough to roll over. So Vermont's
exhumations and burning rituals were much more of a public
spectacle than anywhere else, and often they took place in
the town square. This is probably because a lot of
township in the area at the time had their cemeteries
close to the center of town rather than weigh out

(25:04):
on the outskirts as was customary and other places. So
this minute would be tricky to carry out the whole
business of addressing this vampire problem in any sort of secret,
low key way, so instead it just became this extremely
public practice. Yeah, and most other communities you read about,
it's kind of like a group of strong willed men
kind of get together in the dead of night and
they're going to go do this gruesome thing to protect

(25:25):
a town or protect a family, and they kind of
kept it on the d l really, but in Vermont
they were kind of like party of the town square.
We're gonna burn some vampires, is you know. They can't
really hide it when it's right there. Yeah, hard to
dig up a grave and plain site and still keep
it quiet. And of course there is um the Griswold

(25:48):
case where the body was exhumed and the bones were
rearranged in an effort to keep the dead from rising
up to claim the victims. And so this is a
little different than most of them more common approaches um uh.
Two researchers, including Nicholas Belentoni and paul As sled Zick,
which I hope I pronounced correctly, wrote an article on

(26:08):
the American Journal of Physical Anthropology in about it, and
they suggested the idea that since this JB character was
exhumed approximately five years after his death, decomposition would have
been so advanced that he probably wasn't any more than
bones to work with, and since they could not find
a blood engorged heart or other flesh to burn, the

(26:29):
exhumers likely improvised this rearrangement into the skull and crossbones style.
Because there have not been a lot of those found,
that might be the only one in fact, so uh,
we have all of this knowledge of these things happening,
but we don't have a lot of evidence outside from
personal accounts and written word. And there have been instances

(26:52):
where there are suspected graves where people think if we
uh could dig up this old plot we found, we
might find some more evidence. But some communities are like,
please don't do that. Um, they're they're not always into
the idea of just digging up bodies in the interest
of finding vampire lower. Not everyone is as excited about
exhumations many steph, you missed the miss classless. We are

(27:16):
so so far. The Griswold, Connecticut JB is the only
instance where we actually have a visual confirmation of this
practice of exuming the dead to deal with a vampire threat. Yeah,
we have lots of historical accounts and journals and articles
and things, but not so many in the United States
actual graves. Yeah, well of messed up bones and bodies. Yeah.

(27:37):
And so you know, the Mercy Brown incident was kind
of considered the book end by many to this bizarre
panic and outbreak because after that, as we said, it
got publicized, it got talked about, I mean, news of
it traveled to London and to Europe, and uh, it
seems like people suddenly kind of turned the mirror on
this practice and went, oh yeah, Plus, they were moving

(28:00):
out of these smaller communities to bigger places to find
their fortunes and that sort of group think superstition that
can sometimes happen. This seemed to dissipate around then. So yeah, well,
in the state of medical knowledge was just so much
different at the time. And this is something that you
and I talked about before we recorded our recent episode
on Phineas Gage that it was really hilarious in a

(28:23):
way to me to read these accounts from people who
were writing as though they totally knew what they were
talking about, but actually had no idea that pathogen's cause
disease like it's you will read medical documents from you know,
before the late eight late nineteen, early twentieth century where

(28:45):
people just seemed to completely know what they're talking about,
but what they are talking about is not based on
the reality of medicine as we know it today. Yeah. Well,
and some of it's just that they didn't have all
the the data to interpret the data they did have, right,
so it was easy to kind of, you know, extrampolate
things down the wrong path. They weren't necessarily using the

(29:07):
scientific method to approach questions of medicine. If this if
these stories interest you a lot, there's an awesome podcast
called saw Bones Maximum fun Um. It is by Sydney
and Justin Nicklroy, and Sydney is a medical doctor and
she talks to her husband about just the crazy, ridiculous

(29:28):
things that used to happen and sometimes still do happen
in the world of medicine. And they have done lots
and lots of awesome episodes, including one on John Harvey
Killogg that actually has some information in it that is
not an hour one. So even if you the nice
interlocking yeah, even if you think you know all the
things about John Harvey Killogg, just give that a listen anyway.

(29:49):
So that's the scoop on the Vampire. Do you have
some listener mail to cap this episode off? I do.
I actually have two pieces. The first one is from
h Sarah Kate and it's short. She says, hello, gals,
Holly like you, I so daily. In fact, I first
heard about the podcast during a mending session. I was
teaching about darning, and she says, Now I listen to
the podcast when I sew. She says, I appreciated the

(30:12):
episode about the invention of the sewing machine and the
resulting patent disputes. I'd like to hear a podcast about
mercerized cotton fred or viscos, which I understand to be
made of, among other things. Would pulp that's correct, heck,
nylon spandex elastic Now that was a great invention. It
was even used in corsets before they faded away. And
why does elastic lose its stretch as rubber bands do?

(30:33):
Do they become unstretchable? In time? Yours and the Needle
Arts Sarah Kate and I. She sent us a link
to her blog which covers her projects which are very cool.
She does a lot more of sort of heirloom style sewing,
which is really really lovely. And I wanted to read
this because, um, while we don't have an immediate plan
to talk about those things here, uh as most of

(30:56):
you may know and stuff if you listen to stuff
to blow your mind. Robert is traveling and so while
he is in China, which I know he has told
their listeners he's doing, I'm gonna sub in on one
of their episodes. And Julie and I've talked about that.
We want to talk about textiles because nice, that's my jam. Yeah,
and so we are going to talk about some of
those things. One of the awesome things about working at

(31:18):
a place that has so many cool podcasts, is that
when we do have someone who's on leave for some reason,
well there's all kinds of cool substitutions that people get
to play with. Yeah, some of our other editors have
recorded with Julie already, and I'm gonna talk about Velcrow
a lot because I'm really fascinated by it from a
scientific point of view. And our other one is from

(31:39):
our listener Catherine, and I'm not reading her whole email
because it's lengthy, but it just talks about food, so
you know, I want to talk about it. She says,
Dear Holly and Tracy, I've been listening to your podcast
for a few months now, usually wall fulfilling the less
brainy aspects of my job as an archivist at the
Montana Historical Society. Uh. She has lots of reboxing of

(31:59):
documents and sorting in microfiche. I have worked in archives before.
I know there are times when your brain is not
getting stimulated. You know, it seems like you would have
to be, but not always. I was on a hike though,
when I finally got around to listening to your podcast
on ice cream over Labor Day weekend, which may have
been a poor decision considering the heat of the day
and the dirts of ice cream atop Mount Helena. Anyway,

(32:19):
though it's not my area in particular, the history of
cooking and other quote women's work is something of a
specialization of a few of our research center and museum staff,
so I've been exposed to some interesting tidbits about it
over the past year and a half. Ice cream came
to Montana before the days of refrigerators. In the summertime,
homesteaders would sometimes take advantage of hail storms to provide

(32:40):
the needed ice Okay, that's so cool, that's really say.
And there's at least one documented case of people going
up into the mountains to fetch snow to make ice
cream for a Fourth of July picnic. One of my
favorite things about working at MHS has been testing historic recipes.
We had hand cranked ice cream one afternoon in June,
as well as a pancake breakfast earlier this spring. Uh

(33:00):
and more than a dozen of us for Pie Day
made pies from historic recipes found in the Historical Society's
extensive cookbook collection. Mine was an odd example of a
non creamy banana pie. From a book printed in and
of course everyone got to sample the pies once the
judges had finished their taste tests, and then it talks
about some other interesting topics that may become a podcast

(33:22):
for us. But first that just sounds awesome. I would
love to work in a place with the Brazilian historical cookbooks.
As a side note that I know from my time
in libraries, cookbooks are one of the few books that
pretty consistently gain and appreciating value because so if you
have an old one that's in good condition, because that's
part of the problem is that they get used and

(33:42):
they get food stains on them and butter on the pages.
They're covered in flour, in grease and everything. Uh yeah,
when um my mother passed away was quite a while ago,
I was working in the library, and she collected cookbooks,
and the first thing our library had said was, when
you are ready, I would like to talk to you
at your mother's cookbook collection. And so a lot of
those ended up in the library because no one was

(34:04):
going to use them in the family, not because they
weren't cool, but I mean, if you're trying to tackle
three recipes a day for the rest of your life,
you wouldn't get through them, ye uh. And that way
it kind of felt like other people could really benefit
from it so well. And suddenly I spent this past
weekend in Nashville, North Carolina, where there is a used
in mirror bookshop called the Captain's Bookshelf. Now I wish

(34:26):
I had spent a lot more time looking. There was
a cookbook section and I kind of looked at it
potentially and said, you already have a joy of cooking, right, yes, okay,
And then that that was the end of my thought process.
And I'm like, man, I wish I had plundered through
that a lot. Yeah. Yeah. And it's not like every
um cookbook is going to appreciate in value, particularly now

(34:47):
that we have multiple printings of popular television personality. Like
it's unlikely that your Rachel Ray book is going to
be really valuable in ten years. Not that there's not
good stuff in it, it's just not the same uh
sort of uh supply and demand issues that some of
the older cookbooks that were printed, like in the early
nineteen hundreds have really appreciated in value. If there's a
good copies to learn out, So just interesting cookbook nursery

(35:11):
If you would like to write to us about historical
things you have cooked, or anything you've cooked, or your
pets or anything we've talked about, uh, you can do
so at History Podcasts at Discovery dot com. You can
also connect with us on Twitter at missed in History
and at Facebook dot com slash history class stuff. You
can visit us on Tumblr at missed in history dot
tumbler dot com, and we are on Pinterest pinning away.

(35:34):
If you would like to learn a little bit more
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You can a lot of vampire happening. Yeah. You can
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(36:00):
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