"The process of natural selection was set aside . . . The animals have been repeatedly inbred to produce more and more milk."

Gems in the Pasture
Pamela H. Sacks

Part I | II | III | IV

Small farm, bay view

The large museums have the advantage of deep pockets, which allow them to replicate their time periods in grand fashion, not only through their breeding programs, but also through their buildings, furnishings, equipment, and interpretive staff. Yet small museums, too, are raising heritage breeds, and in some ways may come closer to capturing the ambiance of life on an eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century farm. Tiny Coggeshall Farm in Bristol, R.I., raises Milking Red Devons, Wiltshires, and a handful of Dominique chickens, along with several "dunghill fowl," as poultry of mixed breed were known. A short history of the museum explains, "The Coggeshall family began renting the farm in the 1830s, when Wilbur and Eliza came there to live. They were both descendants of John Coggeshall, a contemporary of Roger Williams and the first president of the Rhode Island colony. They had twelve children, some of whom lived on the farm into the twentieth century." The farm actually represents the years predating the Coggeshalls' arrival. Set next to Colt State Park, the forty-acre spread seems isolated, although it is not far from the main road leading into town. As I approached, I had a sense of what rural life in the Revolutionary era might have looked like. The farm is bounded on three sides by stone walls and woodland. It sits on a rise and offers a glorious view of Mill Gut, with the white-capped waters of Narragansett Bay beyond it. The day was blustery, and Luis Mendes, his red wool cap pulled down over his ears, could be seen in the distance herding five Red Devons. The sun reflected off the lustrous coats of these majestic animals as they came across a pasture enclosed by hand-split post-and-rail fencing.

Fig. 5. Illustration from Louis Daubenton's book Advice to Shepherds and Owners of Flocks on the Care and Management of Sheep (Boston, 1811). This Merino ram was considered "one of the finest examples of his breed to come out of Spain." Courtesy American Antiquarian Society.

Mendes has been Coggeshall's historical interpreter for eight years, explaining to school groups and other occasional visitors that the animals provided food, fiber, and labor and were essential to a family's existence. He and Walter Katkevich, the museum's director, maintain the farm and carry on the breeding program. Mendes knows how to artificially inseminate the cows. "The semen comes on the Greyhound," he remarked. The day I was at Coggeshall, thirteen sheep were in residence, mostly proud-looking Wiltshires. Several reposed beside a pen, while others peered out from between the slats. Mendes said that he and Katkevich were planning to part with either their bull calf or a steer and four or five of the sheep. I asked if the animals would be slaughtered. "I'm a vegetarian, so it makes it a little tricky," he replied. Living history museums often find homes for the animals they cull from their herds, or they send them to petting zoos. But some are not appropriate for those situations. Ever wonder where your favorite gourmet restaurant got that delicious bit of chicken, beef, or lamb? It just might have been from a Dominique, Shorthorn, or Wiltshire.

Coggeshall also has two Guinea hogs, huge creatures with pointed ears and bristly hair. Once considered excellent for lard, they later fell out of favor, and the breed is now endangered. As his charges alternately snoozed and snorted in their specially built shed, Katkevich made note of their docile nature, but said he doubted that the farm had Guinea hogs two hundred years ago. They were brought over on slave ships and sent to the South. Bristol was a leading port for the slave trade, and Katkevich figured the hogs would show the town's connection to that enterprise. Along with the original small red house, the farm now has two barns, a sheep pen, and several sheds. "We're not trying to re-create an eighteenth-century farm. We represent a farm," Katkevich said, noting that in the old days, there would have been one barn, if that, and a lean-to for the pigs. The sheep would have shared a pen with the cattle. Of course, all museums, large and small, would incur the wrath of the public--and perhaps feel the long arm of the law--if they attempted to keep animals in the exact conditions in which they existed two hundred or more years ago. Katkevich pointed out that back then, people lived with pain and early death, and livestock served a practical purpose. They were treated in ways that could not--and should not--be replicated for the sake of historical accuracy. "The oxen would die of overwork," Katkevich said. "To be sentimental about your cattle was not realistic."

In the colonies of the seventeenth century, domesticated animals mostly fended for themselves. They roamed free, and crops were fenced off. Calves and sheep were often picked off by wolves, though hogs were good runners, able to survive encounters with bears and rattlesnakes. As Percy Bidwell and John Falconer pointed out in their History of Agriculture in the Northern United States 1620-1860, "With such care the New England cattle early acquired through a vigorous process of natural selection a reputation for tough vitality." Despite the harsh conditions, the numbers of livestock steadily increased, and the settlers devised a system whereby the animals grazed on common fields in the winter and early spring. When crops were in the ground, they were pastured outside of the village and tended by herders, while the working oxen, horses, and milk cows were kept nearby. Howard S. Russell, who traced three centuries of New England farming in his book A Long, Deep Furrow, noted that by the mid-1630s the town of Cambridge had set each Thursday as market day, when produce and animals were for sale. "For several years after 1635 farmers did very well, and when Stephen Daye set up his Cambridge printing press, the first booklet printed (1639) was that useful agricultural item, an almanac," Russell wrote. Still, the farmers did little to improve conditions through the late seventeenth century and into the eighteenth. Fences were put up, but shelter and feed were lacking; during the harsh winters, snow would pile high on the animals' backs. Oxen were used for plowing and hauling, but as they got older and slowed down, they were fattened and slaughtered for meat. During this time, farmers began to raise more sheep, in part because of government incentives seeking to reduce dependence on costly imported wool. Russell noted that in an effort to protect flocks, bounties were placed on wolves, and a dog that killed a sheep was treated as a murderer and hanged.

Even as colonists moved to protect their animals and develop markets, American Indians were finding their lives drastically altered by the introduction of cattle, pigs, and sheep into their environment. Indians subsisted according to the dictates of the season, hunting deer, moose, and beaver in the fall and winter. An Indian claimed to own an animal only at the moment it was killed. Colonists, on the other hand, took ownership of their animals and exerted total control over their lives. William Cronon, in his book Changes in the Land, wrote that the keeping of animals, combined with the raising of crops, drastically changed the New England landscape, and thus how Indians were able to live. The miles of fencing that farmers used to keep livestock from eating crops became the symbol for property ownership--and the English rationale for taking Indian lands. Moreover, the use of oxen to plow fields allowed colonists to convert acre upon acre to farmland. A system of roads cut through the countryside to bring produce to market.

It was not only the land that livestock affected. The ravenous appetites and ravages of swine, which reproduce rapidly and in great numbers, soon constituted a nuisance--and a danger--to the colonists, who exiled them to distant locations, often coastal areas and offshore islands. The animals wreaked havoc on oyster banks and other Indian shellfish gathering sites. They are said to have watched for the low water, as Indian women did, and competed directly with them for food. "Pigs thus became both the agents and the emblems for a European colonialism that was systematically reorganizing Indian ecological relationships," Cronon wrote.

As colonists' settlements grew, putting pressure on the ecosystem, Indians were forced to adjust to a different way of life. The white-tailed deer they had used for food and clothing largely disappeared, threatened by changes in habitat and competition from domestic animals. Cronon wrote that Indians were thus forced to live in "fixed locations on a more permanent basis. Earlier subsistence practices, which had depended on seasonal dispersal, were gradually being abandoned, with important ecological effects." Living more closely together for longer periods of time put even greater pressure on their hunting and planting areas and encouraged the spread of infectious diseases, which were to soon take a devastating toll on their population. Alfred W. Crosby, in his 1986 book, Ecological Imperialism, summed up the situation this way: "If the Europeans had arrived in the new world . . . with twentieth-century technology in hand, but no animals, they would not have made as great a change as they did by arriving with horses, cattle, pigs, goats, sheep, asses, chickens, cats, and so forth. Because these animals are self-replicators, the efficiency and speed with which they can alter environments, even continental environments, are superior to those for any machine we have thus far devised."

Fig. 6. Luis Mendes, left, and Walter Katkevich talk about their work with heritage animals. Photograph courtesy of James P. Sacks.

Along with their capacity for rapid reproduction, the animals arriving from Europe carried with them a variety of diseases and pests. A distemper of some sort killed hogs, and Russell told the story of a farmer named Clough who, in May 1635, found a dead one and examined its throat. Within three weeks he, too, was dead, along with three children from the area. Hog cholera was recorded in the middle of the seventeenth century, and an infectious sheep disease called "scab" later set off alarms among farmers. Bot flies killed horses, and rabies appeared for the first time in 1760, bringing death to dogs and hogs.

Change for livestock finally arrived at the start of the nineteenth century, when progressive farmers began approaching agriculture as a practical science and took an interest in Bakewell's methods of selective breeding. In 1807, Elkanah Watson organized an agricultural fair with an exhibit of sheep under an old elm tree in Pittsfield, Mass. He believed their fleece would produce wool equal to the finest in Europe. Watson was delighted when he staged an event three years later that drew more than five hundred cattle and sheep. Between 1820 and 1840, representatives of all of the important English breeds of cattle, including improved Durhams and Shorthorns, were brought to the United States. These animals were well cared for and exhibited at livestock shows, which had quickly become annual events.

But the influences did not reach everywhere, and life remained wretched for many animals. Agricultural journals advised their readers on better methods and provided a vehicle for farmers to trade helpful hints. In the July 31, 1839, edition of the New England Farmer, and Horticultural Register, a Genesee farmer wrote that "there are many who have not yet learned the difference there is in the richness and flavor of eggs produced by fat and well fed hens, and those from birds that have been half starved through our winters." He went on to suggest the right feed, including "an abundance of fine gravel that they may be able to grind and prepare for digestion the food they receive." Another farmer asked the journal to reprint a cure for wounds on horses and cattle, "which alone has been worth more to me than ten years subscription." A third offered a commentary on the "free martin," a heifer calf born as a twin to a bull calf. The free martin had an anatomical abnormality and was never able to reproduce, but "works well in a yoke," the farmer wrote. "Why the female of the ox family, when produced as a twin, should alone of all other animals, be incapable of reproduction, is one of those physiological anomalies left for future observers to explain," he concluded.

Like the breeding practices that slowly gained currency, the approaches to disease that have carried into the present--the very strategies that were deployed in Great Britain just months ago and that caused such worries at the living history museums--hesitantly took shape. The policy of aggressively fighting infectious disease among livestock was first introduced in Massachusetts in 1859, when deadly pleuropneumonia was discovered in a cow in Worcester County that was traced back to a herd of imported Holsteins outside of Boston. The disease spread, and the Massachusetts legislature set up a cattle control board with broad powers to quarantine and destroy. Thousands of animals were slaughtered, and the disease was wiped out by 1867. Russell offered the view that those actions were to set the pattern nationally for control of foot-and-mouth disease, which appeared in Massachusetts in 1870, and for subsequent battles against bovine tuberculosis and other animal infections.

Roughly seventy percent of the American population lived on farms in the 1830s, but economic forces were pulling more and more young men and women away to mills, cities, and nonagricultural pursuits. That trend would continue throughout the nineteenth century, even as a steady stream of families pulled up stakes and headed west to more fertile soil and new lives, sending farming in the East into a gradual, inexorable decline. Fast-forwarding to the end of World War II reveals an America in which specialized production methods and increases in technology have made large, mechanized farms more advantageous. It also sets the stage for the opportunities and dangers that helped to create the burgeoning scientific and conservation movements that relate to heritage animals.

In the postwar era, farmers began to focus on a few breeds that proved to be highly productive--and sometimes highly profitable--under controlled circumstances. The dairy industry chose the Holstein. The process of natural selection was set aside, and artificial reproduction techniques were introduced using semen from a select group of superior bulls. The animals have been repeatedly inbred to produce more and more milk. "You breed for feet, legs, bone structure, udder suspension," said Steve Prouty, who ran a dairy farm in Hardwick, Mass., for fifteen years and then turned to produce. "Today, you can fill out a list of qualities and the computer can do the selection. They are able to tweak the traits more and more with each generation." Characteristics such as a strong immune system have largely been ignored, however; instead, the animals are vaccinated against disease and loaded up with antibiotics. "We pickle them," Prouty remarked. Saperstein, the Tufts livestock veterinarian, described today's Holstein as a delicate machine. "It has always worried me that we are breeding animals that are less resistant to disease because we haven't had to worry about it," he said. This approach has produced an abundance of food at low cost, but it has come with a price: the decline, and in many cases extinction, of breeds well adapted to particular environments. "In my career I've seen the minor breeds disappear," Saperstein reflected. "It's sad. The Guernsey and Jersey cow were different. We domesticated these animals for our use. It's our history, and we're throwing it away."

By the 1970s, around the time the nation was celebrating its bicentennial, such views had spread, and the early signs of today's effort to save heritage animals were visible. The response from many connected with animal husbandry was dismissive. "For the first ten years, we were completely pooh-poohed," recalled Dr. Donald E. Bixby, a veterinarian and executive director of the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy, which was formed in 1977. "The attitude was, 'Why should we keep these old breeds? They're obviously inefficient.'" As time passed, however, the livestock industry continued reducing the gene pool, and concern mounted. Gradually, with the support of the conservancy, backyard efforts initiated by people with a passion for a particular breed began to appear. By the mid-1980s, the living history museums had gotten involved and the movement had gained considerable momentum.

In 1995, Robyn Shotwell Metcalfe, whose husband, Robert, founded 3Com Corp., formed the Kelmscott Rare Breeds Foundation and Farm in Lincolnville, Maine. She had first become interested in historic breeds during a stay in England in the early 1990s. When the Metcalfes returned to California, she bought several Cotswold sheep and raised them in her yard. Later, the couple moved east and Ms. Metcalfe established Kelmscott, which raises Gloucestershire Old Spots pigs, Cotswold sheep, and Kerry cattle, among other breeds. The staff carefully documents bloodlines and preserves genetic material; as success is gained with one breed, the farm imports another. Kelmscott's fundamental philosophy is that historic breeds have to be more than a hobby or the entire endeavor is doomed. The farm is no petting zoo, as a talk with Executive Director Craig Olson makes clear. It markets its meat to tony Manhattan restaurants and gets top dollar. "We harvest the wool, send the animals to slaughter," Olson said. "That's the only way to show that they can have economic viability."

Two years after Kelmscott opened its doors, a group of livestock breeders that shared its viewpoint founded the New England Heritage Breeds Conservancy. Its aim? To foster the raising of historic breeds on sustainable farms, so known because the livestock are treated as part of a natural cycle and the methods employed have a minimal impact on the environment. Last year, armed with a half-million-dollar grant, the group formed a collaboration with Hancock Shaker Village, a living history museum in Pittsfield. The Shakers, who were known for efficiency and innovation, operated highly successful farms well into the twentieth century. Together, the two groups are assisting farmers raising heritage livestock and seeking out niche markets for their meat.

Fig. 7. Guinea hogs arrived in America on slave ships. Most were sent to the American South. Photograph courtesy of James P. Sacks.

In recent years, attitudes about conserving historic breeds have begun to harden--another sign, perhaps, that the movement is coming into its own. Not long ago, Pavlick, the Old Sturbridge Village agricultural coordinator, was shopping around for a Milking Red Devon. The prospective seller balked, fearing the line would be diluted by crossbreeding. The museum went on to make the purchase, but only with the promise that the pure bloodline would be maintained. "It has to do with relations with the rest of the world," Pavlick explained. "With the dwindling genetic pool, it's becoming more in our interest to maintain these rare lines. We'll gain back some goodwill."

Meanwhile, those in the heritage movement's historical, cultural, and educational vanguard are finding more allies among those who specialize in science and public policy, and who see it as vital to save the beautiful and hardy heritage breeds in the tank as well as on the hoof; that way, material will be available in the event of a genetic mutation, in the aftermath of a devastating epidemic, or simply to breed a trait back into a commercial line. In the age of tainted mail and Osama bin Laden, the logic runs, it does not make sense to reject the idea of planning for the worst. The Office International des Epizooties, which keeps track of transmissible livestock diseases worldwide, places fifteen in the "most serious" category for economic and public health consequences, with foot-and-mouth at the top of the list. There are several dozen others, anthrax among them, classified as significant. No matter how quickly officials in developed countries move to wipe out potential epidemics, authorities warn, the threat of bioterrorism will remain real. "It will happen," Saperstein predicted. "They could do it for fifty cents." As a hedge, scientists have been urging the federal government to set up a national livestock "genebank" in which the frozen semen and embryos of rare breeds, and even cells for cloning, would be kept; the government has recently taken steps to follow through. The federal plans are expected to be complemented by other developments, possibly including Tufts' genetic repository.