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My Great-Uncle Albert: No Wonder I Like Apples

My great-uncle Albert Henry Sawyer (1855-1944) was born on 16 September 1855 in New Hampton, Belknap County, New Hampshire. He was the brother of my great-grandmother Francis Lila Sawyer (1863-1958). Their family was a small tribe of 13 children.

He married Emma F. Marden (1862-1941) on 15 September 1884 in Woodstock, Grafton County, New Hampshire. I know from census records and my own research that he worked on the family farm, but I didn’t know much about Albert beyond that – so I decided to research him in GenealogyBank’s Historical Newspaper Archives to see what else I could learn.

I began by searching for “Albert Sawyer” in the old New Hampshire newspapers.

Source: GenealogyBank

One of the first articles I found was this.

Source: GenealogyBank, New Hampshire Patriot and State Gazette (Concord, New Hampshire), 13 December 1888, page 5

It reports:

“Albert Sawyer of Woodstock has made about 9000 gallons of cider this fall with his portable mill, going from house to house.”

Wow – that’s a lot of cider!

So, Albert was an entrepreneur as well as a farmer.

I did a quick internet search to see what else I could learn about early New England apple cider. The Old Sturbridge Village museum gave me a few interesting details about the region’s cider production in the 1800s:

“Cider mills operated throughout New England in September and October, converting most of the region’s apple crops into cider using horse-powered crushers and hand-operated screw presses… Most early New Englanders drank cider, with the average farm family making over 300 gallons of it a year.”

If the average family farm produced 300 gallons of cider each fall, Albert’s production of 9,000 gallons of cider using a small, portable mill is certainly remarkable.

A Wikipedia image search provided an interesting take on what Albert’s portable cider mill may have looked like in 1894 – the time period when Albert did his work.

Photo: Apple Press Monument (a relic of the Mid-Winter Fair, 1894, still in the same spot), Music Concourse, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, California. Credit: Joe Mabel; Wikimedia Commons.

Thank you GenealogyBank for giving me the rest of the story of the lives of my relatives. I’ll think of Great-Uncle Albert the next time I eat an apple.