Myth # 85: Prostitutes were so common around Gen. Joseph Hooker’s army that they became known as “hookers.”

General Joseph Hooker

According to this myth, there were so many prostitutes working around Union General Joseph Hooker’s army that they became known as “Hooker’s Division” or “Hooker’s Brigade” or simply “hookers.” The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang calls this story “popular fiction.”

The fly in the ointment is that the term was in use before the Civil War. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, this word had its origins as early as 1567 when it meant petty thief or pickpocket. (Other definitions include a person who fastened his clothing with hooks, like the Amish, a two-masted Dutch finishing vessel, and a rugby player, but we’ll ignore those.)

In America this synonym for prostitute dates back at least as far as 1845. It probably evolved from the conventional sense of hook, to lure and take or rob, qualities associated with prostitutes. John Bartlett’s Dictionary of Americanisms of 1859 defines a hooker as a strumpet and says it comes from the New York  neighborhood known as Corlear’s Hook, where there were lots of prostitutes. That’s probably another myth. 

Since “hooker” already meant prostitute by the time of the Civil War, it was an obvious joke to refer to the prostitutes around General Hooker’s army as Hooker’s Brigade.   

(An interesting aside: in French, the man who solicits patrons to come to a whorehouse is known as an accrocheur, or hooker, from the verb accrocher, to hook.) 

Myth # 79: Wine was an expensive luxury, so most people drank cider or beer.

Sara Rivers Cofield heard this recently during a historic house tour and wondered if it was a myth.

Not a myth–this one’s true. Wine was expensive, lots more expensive than beer or cider, because it was imported. Beer, “small beer” (with lower alcoholic content), and cider were everyday beverages for men, women, and children, drunk morning, noon, and night, and often made at home by the woman of the house. Small beer was served at every meal to boys at the College of William and Mary–in fact, the school had it’s own brewery. But wine had to be imported, usually from France, Portugal, the Canary Islands, or Spain.

The price differential shows up best in the colonial regulation of taverns and ordinaries. Many jurisdictions set “The Rates and Prices that every Ordinary keeper in this County may ask, demand, receive, or take for drink, Diet, Lodging, Fodder, Provender or Pasturage.” While these prices differ throughout time and place, there is a clear price gap between beer and cider and the more expensive wines.

For example, in 1743/1744, Lancaster County, Virginia, regulated beverages by the quart. Wines included Canary or French brandy at 5 shillings, Portugal or French wine at 4 shillings, Madeira wine at 2 shillings 3 pence, and Western Island wine (not sure which islands those were) at 2 shillings. Meanwhile, a quart of strong beer from Virginia or Pennsylvania cost 6 pence and cider was 3 and 3/4 pence. At 12 pence to a shilling, that made wine eight to ten times as costly as strong beer and twelve to fifteen times as much as cider. Wine was for the gentry; cider and beer for everyone. 

Myth # 78: People built one-and-a-half story houses to avoid the tax on the second story.

There are so many myths that involve taxes–can you stand one more?

Taxes are a complicated subject–what’s new there? In early America, most of the government’s money came from import/export duties on liquor and slaves and from port charges. Colonists paid several sorts of taxes but no income tax and only occasional taxes on real estate and personal property. The usual tax assessments due from individuals were the parish tax, which paid for churches, clergy salaries, and aid to the poor; county taxes, which paid for courthouses, bridges, and ferries; colony taxes, which paid for public officials and the Capitol Building; and in some colonies, the old feudal quitrent to the king, who legally owned all the land. (Property owners were technically only renting.) These taxes didn’t necessarily occur every year and they varied over time. Most taxes were based on the number of “tithables” in the household (white males over 16 and all slaves over 16), meaning those with the most slaves and the largest families paid the most tax.

I could find no mention of taxes on a second story in the colonies of  Virginia, Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Georgia, after having searched online databases of those colonies’ laws. (If you are not aware of this resource, see http://libguides.bgsu.edu/content.php?pid=65781&sid=486039 to find links to the laws of the 13 colonies.) I plan to check the remaining colonies–a tedious task–as the week progresses, but I do not expect to find any mention of a tax on the second story.

A one-and-a-half story house is just a one-story house with a finished attic for extra living or storage space. As the director of research at Colonial Williamsburg wrote so succinctly when this myth surfaced back in 1968: “One-and-a-half stories are simply cheaper to build than two.” 

Myth # 75: Builders of early American houses built few windows to avoid paying the window tax.

Yawn . . . another bogus tax. Let’s all say it together: There were no taxes on — uh, hang on a minute . . . 

There actually was a tax on windows! Toward the end of the Revolutionary War, Virginia passed an emergency tax on homeowners based on the number of windows in their houses. (Hening’s Statutes, vol. 10, p. 280.) It was to last three years and it only counted windows with glass, which eliminated the lowest economic cohort that would likely have had only shutters because they couldn’t afford glass. However, this was a war measure, not a regular tax, so most historians discount it, insisting that there were no taxes on windows. I was unable to discover whether this war-time tax was ever collected, since the war ended shortly thereafter and it was, presumably, no longer needed. Also, this law pertained only to Virginia. Here’s the law:

“A tax or rate of one shilling for every glass window shall be paid by the proprietor of each inhabited house within the commonwealth in the month of September 1781, and so on in each of the three next succeeding years.” The law goes on to list other taxes, calling them “urgent necessities of this commonwealth” due to the war. 

This could be the basis for the persistent window tax myth. An online search of other colonies’ compiled statutes through google books yielded no other examples. Not all records of colonial laws are available online, but the ones I could access–Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and South Carolina–did not mention windows. I think it’s pretty safe to say there were no taxes on windows, except for that one little, temporary, exception in Virginia.  

Myth # 63: It cost a worker a year’s wages just to buy a suit of clothes.

 

In an effort to show how expensive clothing was in colonial America, it is occasionally said that a journeyman (a man who worked for wages, from the French for day: journée) had to spend an entire year’s wages to buy one suit of clothes. Well, maybe if he had an audience with the king . . .   Clothing was expensive and even the well-to-do owned only a few outfits. Gentry women often re-made their dresses by sending them out to be dyed and then attaching different trimmings. The “middling sort” may have had only one of two changes of clothing; the poor may have had only what was on their backs. But clothing was available, new and used, at a very wide range of prices. William Carlin, a tailor in Alexandria who made clothes for field hands as well as the planter elite, charged £3-5 for an ordinary wool suit and £15 for a silk brocade suit. Meanwhile, a journeyman’s wages around the time of the Revolution averaged £30-35, about half of which went toward housing. 

MYTH # 54: Many houses and roads in America were built with bricks and stones carried here as ballast in the holds of ships.

(Thanks to Eric P. Olsen of Morristown National Historical Park for suggesting this one.)

The nature of the North American tobacco trade meant that many incoming ships had to carry ballast to America. There was more cargo going east across the Atlantic from tobacco-producing colonies than coming west. Tobacco was a huge export that filled many ships to England; incoming ships were sometimes only partially loaded with imports. Ballast, carried near the keel, was necessary to keep the ship upright. 

Because of very sensible laws against dumping ballast in a river or port, ship captains knew to take ballast that they could unload and sell, even for a small amount of money. Records show that bricks were sometimes used, as was slate, coal, and flagstones, even though such things were available in the colonies.  

However, the quantities imported were relatively small (for instance, 1757 records mention “ten thousand bricks” or “100 feet of flagstone”) making it unlikely any house or building was built entirely from ballast. Here’s what I was able to turn up talking/writing to historians in the following cities and states.

As far as paving roads, no evidence for that exists in colonial Virginia. In Annapolis, Maryland, photographs of the city shows streets there were still unpaved in the 1860s, and bordered with curbs and sidewalks (but no paving) in the 1880s. Clearly, the tale that these streets were paved with ballast is untrue. In Charleston, S.C., streets were similarly unpaved: in 1791 Washington noted “streets of sand.” In Nantucket, this myth is “island lore” without any concrete evidence. In a 1961 study, historians were “able to turn up no evidence that any whaling ship ever sailed into Nantucket harbor without a cargo so that ballast was necessary to keep the vessel low in the water.”  Some evidence exists that Nantucket purchased paving stones in 1837, probably from Gloucester, MA. In Savannah, this claim is made for the streets that go to the river; but paved streets didn’t appear until 1883, a date after which little ballast entered the port. Ballast stones were, however, used as foundations of buildings of riverfront warehouses and some retaining walls (Factors Walk Retaining Wall) built in the mid-1800s. After 1882, the use of ballast declined to the point that the city was obliged to purchase stones. If anyone knows about other colonies, please chime in! 

Kathy Nichols, Executive Director of the Heritage Society of New Braunfels in Texas writes about a related myth. “My docents are saying that English ironstone was made for ship’s ballast.  Yep, they are telling people that’s why ironstone was made.  It is even printed in the book offered by my site…so you can understand that they are loathe to put their trust in a new director about such a catchy myth.  I’ve actually heard this story at a number of other sites but am not able to uncover articles similar to yours about this topic yet.  If you know of anything, please send me in that direction.”

Ironstone, or stoneware dishes, was legitimate cargo, much desired in the American colonies. Josiah Wedgwood and other manufacturers made such pottery by the boatload and shipped it all over the world. It was heavy, yes, but not ballast. Keep telling them, Kathy.

Myth #45: The Dutch bought Manhattan for $24 worth of beads.

Only one period document mentions anything about the purchase of Manhattan. This letter states that the island was purchased from the Indians for 60 guilders worth of trade goods, which would consist of things like axes, iron kettles, and wool clothing. No reason beads couldn’t have been included, but nothing tells us exactly what the mix was. Indians were notoriously shrewd traders and would not have been fooled by worthless trinkets.

The original letter is in the archives of the Netherlands. It was written by a merchant, Pieter Schagen, to the directors of the West India Company (owners of New Netherlands) and is dated 5 November 1626. He mentions that the settlers “have bought the island of Manhattes from the savages for a value of 60 guilders.” That’s it. It doesn’t say who purchased the island or from whom they purchased it, although it was probably the local Lenape tribe.

A little more is known of the purchase of Staten Island. That sale was also made for 60 guilders worth of goods, and for this, the Indians took fabric, axes, hoes, awls, kettles, Jews’ harps, and beads.

Historians often point out that North American Indians had a concept of land ownership different from that of the Europeans. The Indians regarded land, like air and water, as something you could use but not own or sell. It has been suggested that the Indians may have thought they were sharing, not selling.

Here is the letter, followed by a transcript in English:

Recep.7 November 1626
 High and Mighty Lords, 
Yesterday the ship the Arms of Amsterdam
 arrived here. It sailed from New Netherland out
 of the River Mauritius on the 23d of September.
They report that our people are in good spirit
 and live in peace. The women also have borne
 some children there. They have purchased the 
Island Manhattes from the savages for the value
 of 60 guilders. It is 11.000 morgens in size
 [about 22.000 acres]. They had all their grain 
sowed by the middle of May, and reaped by the
 middle of August They sent samples of these
 summer grains: wheat, rye, barleey, oats, 
buckwheat, canary seed, beans and flax. The 
cargo of the aforesaid ship is:
7264 Beaver skins
 178 ½ Otter skins 
675 Otter skins 
48 Mink skins 
36 Lynx skins 
33 Minks 
34 Weasel skins
 
Many oak timbers and nut wood. Herewith,
 High and Mighty Lords, be commended to the
 mercy of the Almighty,
 
Your High and Mightinesses’ obedient
 
P. Schagen

Myth #30: Mirrors were usually made of two or more pieces to avoid the tax levied on large pieces.

 

The dreaded mirror tax, like the closet tax, the second story tax, and other mythological excise taxes never existed. The reason large mirrors were made in several pieces was because it was extremely difficult to manufacture large, flat pieces of glass, not to mention harder to transport them without breaking, and therefore they were much more expensive.

The legend may have its origin in the Townshend Revenue Acts of 1767, which mandated duties on certain imported items coming from England to the American colonies, including glass. “For every hundred weight avoirdupois of crown, plate, flint, and white glass, four shillings and eight pence,” it reads. The term “plate glass” refers to a thin, polished glass containing few impurities that was used for both mirrors and large windows.

But after vigorous protest, Parliament repealed the Townshend duties in 1770 (all except the one on tea), so any duties on glass were short-lived and never collected. There was no excise tax in the thirteen colonies on mirrors.

 

Myth #19: Iron nails were so valuable that people burned down wooden buildings just to collect the nails.

Here’s a good illustration on how a myth gets started. Ken Schwarz, Colonial Williamsburg’s blacksmith since 1982 and the master blacksmith since 2003, says he hears this one every time they make handwrought nails at the Anderson Forge. It’s not true, yet there is a nugget of fact if you dig deep enough . . .

. . . back to a single Virginia law in the 1640s that forbade the burning of buildings for the nails.  However, Ken explains that during the earliest years of the colonial period—the first few decades of the 1600s—buildings were constructed in a very slipshod manner, with wood touching the ground. They were meant to be temporary, because the earliest settlers hadn’t planned to “settle” at all–they were here in the New World to make a quick fortune and go home. So they built shoddy buildings that quickly rotted. Therefore, it was an occasional thrifty practice to get rid of these shacks by burning them, but then, why not sift through the ashes for the nails? Ken says the nails weren’t all that valuable, but why waste them?

The law aimed to stop Englishmen from deserting their plantations and from burning the buildings as they left (and taking the nails with them) by giving them the estimated number of nails. Here, read it yourself.

And it is further enacted by the authoritie aforesaid, That it shall not be lawfull for any person so deserting his plantation as afore said to burne any necessary houseing that are scituated therevpon, but shall receive so many nailes as may be computed by 2 indifferent men were expended bout the building thereof for full satisfaction, reservinge to the King all such rent as did accrew by  vertue of the former grants or planting of the same from the expiration of the first seaven years.

Perfectly clear, right?

Okay, the translation: in essence, it says, if you’re going to desert your plantation (which you are leasing from the king, you don’t own the land), don’t burn the worthless buildings for the nails before you leave; we’ll give you as many nails as two men estimate are in the building, but you won’t get any of your rent back from the king.

Ken Schwarz says that this practice didn’t last long. Slipshod building techniques soon gave way to sounder architecture. No one would ever have burned a decent building for its nails.

Myth #13: The mortgage button in the newel post signifies that the mortgage had been paid. The document was rolled up and placed in the hollow post.

Actually the knob is just a decorative way to cover up the joinery.

The mortgage button is one of history’s more enduring myths. You will hear it told in many historic houses, and believe it or not, there are actually companies that sell “mortgage buttons” so you can install one on your newel post to show all your friends that there is no lien on your property. Buy one if you like—there’s no law against silliness—but I know of no instance where mortgage documents, or anything else, have been discovered rolled up inside the newel post of an old house.

Usually the myth claims that this is a long-standing New England tradition (or old British tradition) dating from the 17^th century. Some say it originated in Nantucket. Supposedly, when the house’s mortgage was fully paid, the homeowner drilled a hole in the newel post of the main staircase, rolled up the mortgage document, put it inside, and capped the hole with a decorative plug. Or they burned the document and stashed the ashes.

Trouble is, mortgages didn’t exist in the 17^th century. Or the 18^th.  Heck, banks didn’t exist in the 17^th or 18^th centuries! Real property has been used as collateral for debt for centuries, but that isn’t a mortgage. In the nineteenth century, mortgages (and banks) did exist. Homes were typically financed by a three-to-five-year balloon loan where homeowners made interest only payments for the duration, then could roll them over into a new loan when they came due. Mortgages as we know them didn’t exist until the creation of the FHA in 1934. As Time magazine says in its 9/6/10 issue, “The thirty-year mortgage was a revolution, a stark contrast to the short-term loans that had been the norm until then.”

I can’t imagine how this story got started. Let me know if you have any theories!