How did people in Ridgefield celebrate Thanksgiving in the “old days”?
Pretty much the same as today, except there was more of a religious side to the holiday back then for many families.
For instance, in her diary, Anna Ressiguie, daughter of the owners and operators of the Keeler Tavern inn, writes repeatedly in the 1850s through the 1860s of attending church services on Thanksgiving. The Ressiguies would then have Thanksgiving dinner, usually just the three of them, and afterward either receive guests or perhaps go visiting others in town.
What did Anna eat at the dinner? She didn’t often say, but in 1851, she reported, “We dine alone on turkey, pig, chicken and many good things beside.” That’s three people eating! “It does seem really selfish, I declare,” wrote Anna. However, they were running an inn and often had diners show up in the evening so perhaps they had to be prepared.
In 1862, when her mother was seriously ill, Anna reported on Nov. 27: “A sad Thanksgiving within, though a pleasant one without. Father & I sit down alone to our turkey and Indian pudding while poor mother looks on and refuses to eat.” Her mother died three weeks later, two days before Christmas.
Indian pudding, incidentally, is a sweet desert in which cooked cornmeal is flavored with such ingredients as molasses, butter, cinnamon, ginger, eggs, and even raisins or nuts.
Jared Nash, another diarist of the same era, reported in 1865, on the day before the Dec. 7 Thanksgiving, that he “dressed some chickens for Thanksgiving.” (President Andrew Johnson had declared Dec. 7, 1865, “National Thanksgiving” to celebrate the Union victory in the Civil War. Thanksgiving, which had been celebrated as early as 1777, was at first in December, and then late November. In 1863, President Lincoln declared the last Thursday in November as Thanksgiving. Deviations from the November date occurred in 1865 and 1869.)
The next year, Jared reports the day before the Nov. 29 Thanksgiving, “I pick turky & some chickens.” No doubt, that was their dinner the next day.
Turkeys were a more expensive main dish for years; chickens were more common and easy to obtain.
Back in the early 1800s, Samuel G. Goodrich, who became our famous “Peter Parley,” was a minister’s son growing up on West Lane and High Ridge. He reported in his autobiography that standard dinner fare through the year back then was “mutton and poultry,” but that “on Thanksgiving-day, some of the magnates gave the parson (his dad) a turkey.
“This, let me observe, in those good old times, was a bird of mark; no timid, crouching biped, with downcast head and pallid countenance, but stalking like a lord, and having wattles red as a ‘banner bathed in slaughter.’ His beard, or in modern parlance, his goat, without the aid of gum and black-ball, was so long, shining and wiry, that it might have provoked the envy of his modern human rival in foppery.”
One wonders how tender these tough toms were. —J.S.
The post Old Thanksgivings appeared first on The Ridgefield Press.