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Show Page 9 the case with Jared Pratt as he attempted to "earn the scanty means of 12 subsistence" by hard labor for others. Jared's father had apprenticed him to a weaver, inasmuch as serious attempts at flax production were being 13 made throughout the region. But with the advent of the mechanized textile 14 industry in the 1790s, "hand looms were mostly dispensed with...Weavers, 15 therefore, were thrown out of employment." It was under this disadvantage that the Pratts took up wheat farming in the Hudson River Valley during the War. No doubt attracted by tales of Hudson Valley prosperity, Obadiah Pratt and his sons nevertheless watched the markets continue to sag. But Canaan remained their home. In the upper stretches of the township the Shakers had established a grist mill at the foot of Mount Lebanon, and the cultivation of wheat remained barely ' profitable. Just as Jared Pratt married, early in the 1790s, conditions began to worsen for the small farmer, and weaving became bumpy indeed. Jared's first wife, "Polly" Carpenter, was a native of the township, reared in New Lebanon. There she died, too, for she gave birth to a daughter, Mary, in February of 1793 and then gave up. The young unemployed weaver fared forth with his infant daughter to try the plow. The year 1799 found Jared courting Charity Dickinson of Bolton's Landing, a small Lake George settlement - on July 7, he married her. With Charity came another infusion of notable New England into the line of Orson Pratt. Samuel and Huldah Dickinson, her parents, descended from the Mayflower immigrants John Howland and Elizabeth Tilley, and, through grandmother Mary Cole, from Anne Marbury Hutchinson, the brilliant rebel exile of Boston. In 1637, not long after William Pratt's departure from Massachusetts Bay, Anne Hutchinson had squabbled with the same John Cotton who had exasperated the Hooker colony. Banished from Boston, she, her husband, and twelve of her thirteen children were massacred by Indians |
