Jennifer L. Green is Director of Education for the Colonial Pennsylvania Plantation, an eighteenth- century living history farm in Media, Pennsylvania. She has previously worked at The Mill at Anselma, a colonial-era grist mill in Chester County, where her study of early American agricultural and industrial history began. In addition to the Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, she has written multiple articles for ExplorePAHistory.
When American patriots declared independence from Great Britain in 1776, the single largest boon to their cause was the nation’s ability to feed itself—as well as much of the Atlantic world. Beginning in the mid-1700s, crop failures across Europe and an expanding slave population in the West Indies created a huge demand for food from the colonies. Plantations and farms in the Mid-Atlantic ...
At the time the first European colonists settled in the Delaware Valley, few places in the world were as well-suited to the cultivation of grains. By 1750 the Delaware Valley produced such a surplus that its wheat and flour not only supplied the American market but also were exported to Europe, Africa, and the ...
Connecting the Past with the Present, Building Community, Creating a Legacy