Historic Hallowell

Before thinking about farming or earning a living the first settlers had to put a roof over their heads and cut enough firewood to heat their homes and cook their food. During the colonial period the average homestead consumed 20-30 cords of wood per year. If they had energy left they could attempt to clear and till five acres of land in three years, one of the conditions of sale imposed by the Kennebec Proprietors. Once the timber was cut and the house and barn built, was there anything of value left?

The economy of early non-native settlers was built on the barter system. Hard currency was scarce. There was, however, one commodity available to the settlers, that required only hard work, fire that trees that had ten times the value of wheat: wood ashes.

In short order a huge market for wood ashes was created and the American colonies, awash in wood ash, were ready to meet it. A settler could either collect and sell the plain wood ash, or they could blanch it in a large vat, and boil it down to produce pot-ash (potash). If that residue was baked in an oven, the carbon in the residue would cook off, leaving a product called pearl-ash. Both pot-ash and pearl-ash were worth more than any other product a farmer could produce, and large quantities were shipped from Hallowell until the middle of the 19th century.

Huge quantities of raw wool were being produced in England in the mid to late 1700s just as Hallowell was being settled. The wool needed to be cleaned before it could be used. The cleaning process is known as “fulling” and the cleaning agent is Fuller’s Soap. The soap making recipe uses fat or oils and an essential ingredient scarce in nearly treeless Europe - wood ashes.

An early Hallowell newspaper, the American Advocate, featured an advertisement placed by a local businessman searching for the raw material of the the much needed soap. The product was still being shipped from Hallowell’s docks into the 1850s.