The Dupui ledger supports the contention that Indian
corn was a staple food product in the area, being
sold some 23 times, in pecks, skippels and bushels,
to area residents over the course of 41 years.
Pricing of the commodity appears to have remained
rather consistent at 3 shillings per bushel for
multiple decades, until the price suddenly jumped
after the Revolutionary War to a rate of 5 and half
shillings per bushel.
The second of the three sisters, beans, makes only a
rare appearance -- 2 bushels, sold twice (ten years
apart), at a rate of a shilling and and half per
bushel, and the third sister, squash, only makes its
appearance by way of a single entry related to "the
hauling of your Pumpkins."
As these three types of food items, typically
associated with colonial gardens, in the aggregate
have a rather spotty record of sales at Dupui's
store, one can hazard the guess that perhaps they
were being sold elsewhere in the area, perhaps at
local summer faires. That, of course, would
imply that throngs of folk gathered at some other
locale on certain days, leaving Dupui's store
without a sufficiency of customers on those
occasions.
This is an implication that can quantitatively be
assessed. We begin with the assumption that a
local
re-occurring "faire" likely had set
calendar dates that probably would have coincided
with the last day of each month during the harvest
season, namely July, August, September and October.
We then examine the Dupui ledger for activity on a
sampling of those dates:
|
Total
Entries in the Dupui Ledger per date:
|
Year
|
31
July
|
31
August
|
30
September
|
31
October
|
1744
|
NO
ENTRIES
|
NO
ENTRIES
|
NO
ENTRIES
|
NO
ENTRIES
|
1745
|
NO
ENTRIES
|
NO
ENTRIES
|
NO
ENTRIES
|
NO
ENTRIES
|
1746
|
NO
ENTRIES
|
NO
ENTRIES
|
NO
ENTRIES
|
NO
ENTRIES
|
1753
|
NO
ENTRIES
|
NO
ENTRIES
|
NO
ENTRIES
|
NO
ENTRIES
|
1754
|
NO
ENTRIES
|
NO
ENTRIES
|
NO
ENTRIES
|
NO
ENTRIES
|
1755
|
NO
ENTRIES
|
1
customer
|
NO
ENTRIES
|
NO
ENTRIES
|
1781
|
NO
ENTRIES
|
NO
ENTRIES
|
NO
ENTRIES
|
NO
ENTRIES
|
1782
|
NO
ENTRIES
|
1
customer
|
NO
ENTRIES
|
NO
ENTRIES
|
1783
|
NO
ENTRIES
|
1
customer
|
NO
ENTRIES
|
NO
ENTRIES
|
By way of these ledger entries, one can
tentatively conclude that area market fairs (in
which produce such as corn, beans and pumpkins were
sold), perhaps became an end-of-month local summer
harvest tradition.