Category Archives: librarians

Native American Herbal remedies used by the Shakers

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The Shakers’s herbal business was in full swing by the early 1800’s and most of the communities participated. Sabbathday Lak, the still existent Maine community, still produces herbs and teas which can be purchased in the shops of the Shaker Museum/Villages.

The Shakers used many herbs that had been imported to North American, either by accident or design. The common plant, now considered a weed, dock, is one such example. Lavender, boneset, barberry are just a few of the imports which the Shakers grew in their herb gardens. They also imported medical plants, such as opium, which they did not produce themselves.

They also studied various Native American remedies and added them to their medicines.

I found it surprising how many plants I recognized, although I know them simply as trees or ornamentals rather than herbs. Some are much in favor still today as medicines or for alternative healing.

Both prickly ash and white ash were used for digestive troubles. The Prickly Ash is called the Toothache tree or toothache bush.

Several bee balm species, which I plant for scent for attraction for butterflies,  have a long history of use as a medicinal plants by many Native Americans. The Blackfoot Indians recognized the strong antiseptic action of these plants and used them in poultices. A tea made from the plant was also used to treat mouth and throat infections.  Bee balm is the natural source of the antiseptic thymol, the primary active ingredient in modern commercial mouthwashes.

Bee balm was also used by Native Americans as a seasoning.

Boxberry – wintergreen and checkerberry The fruits are edible, with a minty flavor and were used as a diuretic.

Bloodroot  -Sanguinaria carnadensis), was used for typhoid pneumonia as well as ringworm, scarlatina and jaundice. One of its common names is Indian Paint. In fact, several of the herbs used by the Shakers, betrayed their origin as Native American remedies by using Indian: Indian cup, Indian Hemp, Indian Physic and Indian turnip. All of these were part of the Shaker herb stock.Cup weed or Indian cup weed,  Silphium perfoliatum is native to North America. It resembles Rudabeckia (black eyed Susans) but the center is yellow instead of brown. It was used primarily for chest complaints but is now used as an ornamental.

Lest we disparage the herbal knowledge of the Native Americans and the Shakers, here are a few examples of plants they used which we use as well.

Black Cohosh. (Actaea racemosa) Other common names: black bugbane, black snakeroot, fairy candle . Black cohosh was used for epilepsy and, like today, for ‘female complaints’.

Witch hazel.tract of the plant is used in the astringent Witch hazell Varieties of this shrub are also native to China and Japan. It was used, as it is today, as an antiseptic, particularly for skin complaints. Soaking a toothbrush in witch hazel on a regular basis also helps with the bacteria in the mouth. Hamamelis virginiana produces a specific kind of tannins called hamamelitannis . One of those substances displays a specific cytotoxic activity against colon cancer.

 

Poisonous herbs

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Natural remedies from plants, herbs and otherwise, are not necessarily safe. Some of the herbs used by the Shakers had to be used with care and, in fact, were outright dangerous. I mentioned foxglove in a previous post. Anyone read Agatha Christie mysteries? Foxglove played a starring role as a poison in at least one. Mandrake is another. A mild narcotic and a powerful cathartic, it is also called May apple or wild lemon. Belladonna is another example. It is a member of the deadly nightshade family and is a narcotic. Although it has been used for centuries (the name itself is Italian for beautiful woman. It dilates the pupils and women used it to make their eyes look large and mysterious). It is very dangerous to use as an amateur. Rhubarb, yes, the same plant in which the stalks are eaten, has poisonous leaves. They are full of oxalic acid. Poke berry is another plant with which care must be taken. Although the young leaves were eaten in a ‘sallet’, the leaves become poisonous as the summer wears on. Hellebore is a powerful poison. It was used for epilepsy, dropsy, and apoplexy. In areas where deer are a problem, hellebore can be planted for spots of color. The deer are too smart to eat them. Daffodils, used as an emetic and cathartic, is also poisonous. Another good choice for a flower if deer are a problem. Liquorice has been used for centuries as an aid to digestion. But it is also an abortifacient and should not be eaten by women in the first three months of pregnancy. No discussion of herbs would be complete without mention of opium. The opium poppy has been known in the Middle and Far East for millennia. The Crusaders brought it back to Europe. During the late 1700s, it was imported into the United States, primarily from Turkey and India. Because it was considered a medicine, it was not taxed. It was sold over the counter in apothecary shops with no control whatsoever. During that time, opium was used in a solution of alcohol (laudanum) or as a tea. The opium pipe had not been invented yet so, unless it was mixed with tobacco, it was not smoked. When we think of the opiates, we usually think of their pain killing properties. And in an age where there were few other choices, that is important. However, another important use was to control diarrhea in infants in children. Diarrhea killed many many children so they were dosed with opium. Babies and children were also dosed with opium to make them sleep or to control their hunger so I suspect there were more than a few accidental addicts.

Ornamental plants as herbal remedies

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The Shakers for many years did not plant flowers simply for beauty. Everything had a purpose. That did not mean, however, that plants we now think of as purely ornamental did not have places in the Shaker garden. A by no means exhaustive list of plants that were used as remedies follows.

Boxwood – now used as a hedge. The Shakers used the bark as a tonic and astringent and sometimes as a substitute for quinine. (Who knew?)

Foxglove – A showy plant prized for its flowers. The Shakers used it for the heart (the active ingredient is still used for heart medicine) and asthma.

Gentian, blue fringed – A powerful tonic that improves the appetite and aids digestion.

Hollyhock – Used to treat coughs, female weakness (yes, really) , and inflammation of the bladder.

Hydrangea – A mild diurertic

Iris- Used for fragrance. It’s root was used as a powerful cathartic.

Lavender, English – Stimulant and tonic. Used in flatulence and fainting and to arrest vomiting.

Lobelia – Also called Wild or Indian Tobacco. Antispasmodic and emetic. The milky sap is poisonous.

Marigold – A tincture is used for cuts, bruises, sprains, and wounds, especially to prevent gangrene.

Peony – Both root and flowers were used as antispasmodics. particularly for epilepsy and spasms, and also for whooping cough.

Privet – Another common hedge plant. The leaves are astringent and used for mouthwash.

Rose – The petals were used as astringents. Rose hips also make a tea that is very high in vitamin C.

Sunflower – The seeds were used as expectorants and were used for coughs and pulmonary infections.

Violet – Used in colds, coughs and sore throats.

Were these herbs effective? We know some were because the active ingredients have since been isolated and put into modern medicines. Most of these at least did not harm.  However, there are many herbs that were used in small doses that were, like the lobelia above, poisonous and had to be used with great care.

Medicinal Herbs used by the Shakers

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For millennia, people have depended upon herbs to treat sickness. Before the advent of modern antibiotics and so on, herbs were the only way of treatment. In fact, more than a few of our current medicines : quinine, penicillin, and aspirin to name just a few, were used in their natural states. People didn’t know why they worked but years of observation had told them some of these plants did work.

The Shakers were no different from the previous immigrants to the United States; they brought their herbal lore with them and collected plants from the woods and fields around them. Since they found new and unfamiliar herbs in this new land, they studied the plant knowledge of the Native Americans around them. An epidemic, especially when the numbers of the Shakers were so small, would be disastrous.

Although they at first gathered herbs, they later planted physic gardens and grew certain varieties. If they produced more than required by their Families, they sold the remainder and purchased other medicines they could not produce themselves.  Although their religious beliefs and practices were suspect, (celibacy? Gender Equality? What were they thinking?)  their herbs, as with all their other products, were not only respectable, but reliable.

These medicinal herbs became a source of enormous profits for the Shakers.

What were some of the herbs used by the Shakers?

Many of the herbs are known to us today. Chamomile, which was used as a tonic, and chicory, for example. Black, blue, red and white cohosh were all used. Black Cohosh was used for ‘female complaints’, and has regained favor again for that purpose.

Other herbs, such as boneset, were known and used during the Middle Ages. As the name suggests, it was believed that this herb aided in the healing of broken bones. The Shakers used it for colds, fevers, jaundice and as a general tonic.

Burdock is now commonly considered a weed. Used as a salve or poultice, it treated gout and other rashy diseases, including leprosy and the rash associated with syphilis. I wonder how well they worked.

Another weed used as a medicine was the common dandelion. The young leaves can be eaten in a salad. However, the young plant does possess some slight narcotic properties. It was used as a tonic and a diuretic and used in constipation, dropsy and uterine obstructions.

Flax, which was used to make linen and flaxseed, as well as yellow dye from the flowers, was also given internally for coughs.

One of the ‘herbal’ uses that surprised me was common garden lettuce – used as a narcotic where opium was objectionable.

Pepper

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As I research my next book, I am continually drawn into new channels. Everything is interconnected.

When one thinks of the spice trade, we think of the more exotic spice like cinnamon or cardamon. Not lowly pepper. But pepper was extremely valuable. When the Salem merchantmen began sailing east, before they traded in cloth they traded in pepper. Carnes, the first Captain who sailed to Sumatra for pepper, brought home a cargo that made a 700% profit.

The enormous profits continued to the early 1800s, but fell victim to the pirates in the east.

Since pepper was easily portable, the sailors could carry trade something (butter was a big favorite) for a stash of pepper of their own. This could be traded at home for a little profit. In the 1980s, when the ship, The Mary Rose, was raised from the ocean floor, almost every sailor’s corpse carried a supply of pepper. This ship sank in 1545.

Cloth and Piracy

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What? How could these two disparate topics be connected? Well, in the early 1700s, there was a pirate called ‘Calico Jack” Rackam. A lesser known and not very successful pirate, Calico Jack and his crew plied their trade in the Caribbean. In 1719, during one of the many wars between France and England, they accepted a pardon from Britain. Privateering was really piracy under another name, but on the right side of the law. However, this war ended in February of 1720. Rackam and his crew, which now numbered two women among them, went back to their old ways. With the ship ‘William’, they started capturing ships again and were soon declared ‘Pirates”.

The two women, by the way, were Anne Bonney and Mary Read. Anne Bonney left her husband to sail with Calico Jack. Mary Read, also on board, had disguised herself as a man to join the crew.

They were captured and in November tried and convicted. Anne Bonney and Mary Read were spared from hanging due to pregnancy. Mary Read and her unborn child died in prison but Anne Bonney and her child (probably fathered by Calico Jack) were released and disappeared.

Now, where did Jack get his unusual nickname? Well, in 1700 the import of calico into England and the Colonies was forbidden. (See previous post). One of the theories is that Jack got his name from smuggling the popular cloth.

Who would have guessed that cloth could be so interesting and have such a checkered (ha, ha) history.

Imported India Fabrics – circa 1796

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We forget I think, in these days of synthetics, that to the affluent in the US coastal cities, there were many fabric choices. Of course all were natural fabrics. And I say coastal cities since in the farming communities and certainly on the frontier families were dependent upon homespun for their clothing. Homespun that was usually home dyed as well. In Williamsburg these dyes would have been imported: the fustics, indigo (homegrown as well as imported from the Phillippines), and cochineal. But further from the coast, the thrifty housewife would have used many dyes collected from the garden and forest around her, as per previous posts.

Many of the imported fabrics are unfamiliar to us now. A search for definitions does not always turn up anything. Here are some of the fabrics imported into the new USA in the 1790s.

Nankeen – A yellow fabric made from a yellowish cotton. Later on, the cotton was the ordinary white and the fabric was dyed to achieve the yellow color.

Shalloon – A lightweight twill of wool or worsted usually used for the lining of coats e.g. The coats of the British Army.

Ticklenburg – a coarse mixed linen fabric (mixed with tow once assumes), to be sold in the West Indies. I suspect this cloth was destined for slave clothing.

Calimancoes – A variety of worsted.

Sprigged Mecklenburgs – a variety of cotton that looks like dotted swiss.

Calico, of course. Even the name is a corruption of Calicut, the town where this particular type of fabric was purchased. In India, the process for making printed cloth with wooden blocks and dye was developed in the 11th century. By changing the mordants, one dye would produce two colors0, usually red and black. By the 12th century, these printed fabrics were already exports to the Middle East.

In 1783, a process was developed in England for using copper printing. More on that in the next post.

Ahoy me maties, sailor talk in ordinary speech

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Idioms are colorful parts of speech and English is full of them. They make little sense to a non-native speaker and contribute to the difficulty of learning this language.

And speaking of learning, let’s talk about learning the ropes, an expression that dates from the era of the sailing ships over 200 years ago. Ropes controlled the sails and a new sailor had to know which rope to choose from 10 or more, in the dark, and during a crisis. He had to ‘learn the ropes’.

He also had to cross the line; i.e. the Equator.

What about ‘at loggerheads’? Loggerheads were hollow spheres of iron at each end of a shaft. Once heated, they were used to melt tar in buckets. The loggerheads could never come together, hence the expression.

‘Chew the fat’? The heavy mastication required to eat the beef that had been brined for months on end.

And my personal favorite: ‘piping hot’. If you sat down to eat to as soon as the proper pipe sounded, the food was still hot.

In the 1700s, particularly the late 1700s, New England sailors were opening up trade with the East and bringing back pepper from Sumatra, spices from the Spice Islands, tea and silk from China, and cloth (madras, chintz, calico and other cottons such as seersucker and nankeen) from India. Whalers set off from Nantucket, Salem and Bedford and was a strong industry although it reached it’s peak later in the early nineteenth century.

Hard to believe but this country was already part of a global economy.

The Question of Black Dye

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I don’t care for black and never use it when I am dyeing. It is a color that requires care in use. It simply takes over. Overdyeing usually results in a mottled black so using black dye means strictly controlling it.

But of course black was used, in fact it was required. Black was already the color of mourning by Colonial times, even if the rules decreeing social behavior weren’t as strict as they became later on in the Victorian era.

Depending upon the mordants, some of the natural dyes produce charcoal. Staghorn Sumac, for example, which dyes fiber a soft brown, (and does not need to be mordanted since it is full of tannin) will dye charcoal if the fiber is mordanted with iron water.

Black walnut and black walnut do not dye black either, despite the names. Black willow bark (which will not dye cotton – in fact, many natural dyes do not do well on cotton) produces a light brown to a rose tan upon wool when mordanted with alum. Black walnut, which is full of tannin and does not require additional mordanting, produces a rich brown.

So where does one find black? The dye of choice came from logwood, a tree that is native to Mexico and Central America. The British successfully propagated the species to Jamaica and the West Indies as well. Logwood was sold by apothacaries and in general stores, usually as logs since customers feared adulteration. However, a Pennsylvania newspaper advertised in 1798 that chipped logwood ( produced by Philadelphia prison inmantes ) could be had at reasonable rates.

Only the reddish heartwood was used. The chipped wood was dampened and then gathered in a sack and immersed in the dye kettle. After boiling for twenty minutes, the sack was removed and the fabric was submerged into the dyebath. Logwood could be used on silk, wool and yes, cotton, with the hues varying ( as usual) depending upon the mordant. Logwood could be used to dye textiles navy blue and was a much cheaper alternative to indigo, although not as colorfast.

Black was a compund color and other dyes such as fustic were used to produce black. It too was not wonderfully colorfast. However, anyone who has ever worn black jeans and watched them fade can attest to the poor colorfastness of current black synthetic dyes as well.

Logwood was important for dyeing right up to the beginning of World War II.

Red Cabbage and Pokeberries

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Both red cabbage and pokeberries produce beautiful red shades. The problem is, as it is so often, colorfastness. Items dyed with pokeberries quickly fade in light. I read in a contemporary book, Harvesting Color, however, that mordanting pokeberries with vinegar makes the dye colorfast. A modern dyer experimented with pokeberries until she found a method that works. I have yet to try this but plan to this fall.

The recipe included in this book is:

Ratio of 25:1 for pokeberries to fabric. Presoak fabric in vinegar. Mash berries until they have all been crushed. Fill pot with enough water to cover the berries and still alow yarn to move freely. Add 1/2 C vinegar for every 1 gal water. The PH has to be 3.5; pretty acid. Heat the dye pot on medium but do not boil, and let steep for about an hour. Strain. Prewet yarn, preferably in an acid bath (1/4 C vinegar in the water bath). Add the prewetted yarns to te dye pot and let them soak about 2 hours or overnight. Hang the yarn without rinsing for at least 20 minutes and up to half a day and then rinse excess color.

Red cabbage is cut up.  If you prefer a more blue color, add salt. Otherwise the color will be pink. Fibers must first be soaked in a tannin bath (acorns!) and then mordanted with alum.

Soak the fiber you will be dyeing in water for an hour or overnight. Fill the dye pot with enough water to cover the fabric and brint the water to a simmer. Put the cut up cabbage into the pot, bring the heat up to a simmer, and simmer for at least 20 minutes or until the cabbage leaves lose their color and become a light pale pink. Strain out the cabbage. Bring the dye back to a simmer and add the presoaked fiber. Simmer for about 1/2 an hour.

The dye is now a purple lavender. If you prefer pink, stir in the vinegar or lemon juice now. Salt will change the dye to dark blue. Soak the fiber until it reaches the desired shade.Rinse and hang to dry.

Natural dye colors tend to be more muted than the synthetics but many are also much less toxic and make use of easily obtainable materials.