Thomas Minor's world: agrarian life in seventeenth-century New England

For over thirty years (1653-1685), Thomas Minor kept a diary recording his activities as a farmer in Stonington, Connecticut. This article uses Minor's diary, the only extant document of its kind for the seventeenth century, to reconstruct key features of the colonial New England agrarian experience. Arguing that work played as significant a role as religion in shaping early New Englanders' lives, the article examines not only how farming contributed to the Minors' economic prosperity and independence, but also how its physical demands and seasonal rhythms shaped Thomas Minor's worldview more generally. Agriculture provided an important context for Minor's relations with his wife and sons, with nature, and even with a sense of his own mortality. Minor emerges as someone less interested in calculating profit and loss on his farm than in accomplishing a hard day's work as a steward of the land that he hoped would support his family for generations to come.