Servants

[mary]

Some of us have found that the challenges of dressing in the morning or completing many of the day's tasks-- and in the order they should be completed-- requires many more hands than I possess. Certainly my children pitch in, and in ways suggested by the historical record. But what if that was simply not enough? I began to wonder about the use of paid servants in the frontier... particularly Illinois and the Lead Region.

Many of us have read Christiana Holmes Tillson's excellent narrative and the stories of her various household servants. Well... I suppose she being of Eastern stock was used to such assistance, and therefore required a servant when she moved to Illinois.

My husband tells me of the situation of George Wallace Jones... the southerner from Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, who in 1831 came to Sinsinawa Mound with his wife Josephine Gregoire Jones, seven servants, and a number of French laborers. In 1832, with the advent of the war, Jones sent Josephine, accompanied by a servant named Charlotte, to her father's home in Ste. Genevieve for protection. Seven servants... that must have been quite a household!

Eastern upper-crust? Southern "aristocracy?" We might expect to see household servants in these situations.

Now, we read about a cabin-born Illinois gent from Crawford County who remembered the following:

In this house and lean to kitchen was housed my parents, eight children and two maids, then called hired girls; and I never knew that we were cramped for room. I suppose my mother and the girls recognized that fact. The girls received one and one-half dollars a week for wages, the hired man thirteen dollars a month and board, and they saved money.

Source: Edward Wilson, from his recollections of early life in Crawford County, Illinois.

Could it be that the use of paid household servants-- even on the "frontier"-- might be more widespread than we first thought?

[mary]

Juliette Kenzie, in Chapter 9 of her excellent book Wau Bun, wrote:

I had made many fruitless attempts, both in Detroit and Green Bay, to procure a servant-woman to accompany me to my new home. Sometimes one would present herself; but, before we could come to a final agreement, the thoughts of the distance, of the savages, the hardships of the journey, or, perhaps, the objections of friends, would interfere to break off the negotiation; so that I had at length been obliged to rest satisfied with the simple hope held out by my husband, that one or the other of his French employés, with his wife, would be contented to take up their abode with us.

In this state of things, all difficulties seemed to be obviated by the proposal of Major Twiggs, that we should take into our service a young colored girl, whom he had brought from Buffalo, in the spring, to wait on Mrs. T. until her own servants should arrive from the South.

Louisa was accordingly sent for, an uncommonly handsome young negress, with an intelligent but very demure countenance, who called herself fifteen years of age, but who, from the progress in vice and iniquity I afterwards discovered her to have made, must have been at least several years older. Be that as it may, she now seemed to have no fault but carelessness and inexperience, of both of which I had great hopes she would improve, under careful training.

Would it be correct to presume that Louisa was a paid servant?