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The Garden State
New Jersey was the breadbasket of the fledgling United States
Before the towering buildings, buzzing highways, and churning factories, New Jersey was a rural land of fertile soil and family farms. Benjamin Franklin called New Jersey "a barrel tapped at both ends," perhaps because of the cornucopia of locally-grown grains, fruits, and vegetables that spilled from the bountiful Inner Coastal Plain into neighboring New York and Philadelphia. In 1803, two New Jerseyans patented the first American reaper for harvesting crops. By the mid-nineteenth century, farms covered more than two thirds of the state's total acreage of land.
Recovered from a New Jersey farm, this fanning mill is a fitting symbol of the state's agricultural past. Also known as winnowing machines, fanning mills used a system of fans and screens to generate enough air to remove the chaff from grains of wheat – a necessary step after reaping and threshing the crop. Farmers also used winnowing machines to clean seeds prior to planting. The sifting mechanism separated the heaviest, more-robust seeds from smaller, cracked, and damaged ones, hopefully ensuring a fruitful harvest the next year. |