This is a page of data about the Hager (sometimes spelled Hagar) family who lived in Wendell, Massachusetts in the early decades of the 19th century. The status of this page is IN PROGRESS.
Ancestry overview page from Breidenbach family tree
- Martin b. in Marlborough in 1778 (father was William, mother ??)
- m. Hannah Fairbank in Sudbury in 1807
- d. in Deerfield @ 76 in 1855
six children:
- Martin Hagar (1808 – 1880)
- Charles Hager (1809 – 1890)
- Otis Hagar (1811 – 1833)
- Elizabeth Hagar (1814 – 1895)
- Hannah Morse Hagar (1815 – 1849)
- Lydia Caroline Hagar (1817-??)
Charles Hager overview from Ancestry
- b. 1809 in Wendell
- m. Myra Holden Felton in 1838
- living in Deerfield by 1880
- d. 1890 in Deerfield, @ 80
1810 US Census:
- living in Wendell (Hampshire County at that point?), 7 people in household
1820 US Census:
- living in Wendell, 8 people in household, 1 engaged in agriculture
1840 US Census:
- living in Wendell, 6 people in household, 1 engaged in agriculture
1850 US Census, non-population schedule, shows Charles on the following farm in Wendell:
- 45 improved acres, 20 unimproved, total value $1500 w/ $100 worth of equipment (acreage is on the low side for Wendell that year, value is closer to average, so he was presumably farming quite productively)
- 1 horse, 4 dairy cows, 2 oxen, 2 other cattle, 1 pig, for a value of $320
- grew 50 bushels of Indian corn, 5 bushels of oats, 2 bushels of peas/beans, 100 lbs. of potatoes, 23 bushels of barley, 100 lbs of butter, 20 tons of hay
- sold $40 worth of “home-made manufactures” (was this things like palm-leaf hats?) and $52 worth of meat
1855 Mass. Census:
- Martin Hager 77
- Charles Hager 45
- Myra Hager 44
- Dexter Hager 16
- Fanny Hager 13
- Liddia Hager 10
- Otis Hager 6
- Martin Hager 4 (looks as though he may have come back to the hill towns – there’s a Martin C. Hager farming in New Salem in the 1880 census, although it doesn’t look as though he was actually growing very much)
- Electa Hager 40
“tobacco sash”
on tobacco cultivation in the area:
tobacco had been raised for private use in Hadley since 1800, but was cultivated much more intensively after the Civil War when farmers “fell victim to competition and their own speculation” (p273) and shifted to larger-scale commercial crops (like tobacco) rather than their previously diversified farming (Hardin, “Poles and Puritans,” in Miller, ed., Cultivating a Past: Essays on the History of Hadley, Massachusetts, 2009)
a number of unsuccessful early (colonial) attempts were made to grow tobacco in Mass. and Conn., as well as NY and Penn. – “As late as 1801 the entire New England crop was estimated at only twenty thousand pounds, or the amount which Virginia exported in 1620.” (p281) – Mass. colonial records for 1629 note that tobacco “doth hardly produce the freight and customs duty” (qtd p282) – there was also a Puritan prejudice against tobacco as a stimulant, but the climate and soils were the greater factor – dev’t of cigar wrapper industry in NE began about 1825, “subsequent to the introduction of cigars and cigar leaf” (p282) but even this has to be heavily fertilized in NE (Jacobstein, The Tobacco Industry in the United States, 1907)
