SOUTH BERWICK, Maine – Farmer and mariner Benjamin Gerrish, whose 1791 diary gives a vivid picture of survival on a South Berwick farm over two centuries ago, is the subject of a talk by museum curator Nina Maurer on Thursday evening, October 28, starting at 7:30 pm. 

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Sponsored by the Old Berwick Historical Society, the program will be held at Berwick Academy's Jeppesen Science Center on Academy Street, and the public is invited.  Refreshments will be served by volunteers.          

The diary, the only one from 18^th century South Berwick known to exist, is on view this month at the CountingHouseMuseum, where it was loaned by the Maine Historical Society.  The museum is open weekend  afternoons from 1:00 to 4:00.          

Maurer created the exhibit, titled “Village Voices,” and has been a consulting curator at the Counting House since 2007.  She was director of Piscataqua region properties for Historic New England and a curator at the Connecticut RiverMuseum and the MercerMuseum. 

Her interest in collections began with a curiosity about what lay behind the attic door of her grandparents’ summer house in Wisconsin.  She pursued material culture studies through graduate work in aesthetics at TempleUniversity and a McNeil Fellowship in early American decorative arts at the WinterthurMuseum.          

In 2010 Maurer completed a survey of farm history in YorkCounty for the Maine Archives. This work prompted her investigation of the Gerrish diary.             

Gerrish lived in a farmhouse that is still standing on Brattle Street.  Death, hardships and scarcity confronted him and his small family, who produced much of their own food and clothing on 40 acres of land along the GreatWorksRiver. Crops included apples, potatoes, barley, corn, flax, and hay. 

But like other local farmers, Gerrish was also a mariner who supplemented his income by shipping out of Portsmouth on trading voyages to southern ports and the Leeward Islands of the Caribbean. 

Gerrish’s diary, which ended in October, 1791, just before he went to sea, documents a life deeply rooted in a widespread network of exchange in goods, services, and labor, and Maurer calls it “a rare survival.”          

“This is not at all the self-sufficient farm family we have come to expect as the model of early American rural life,” said Maurer, “but a household dependent on exchange with neighbors and a wider marketplace beyond the Piscataqua region. The document is a timeless and intimate account of life on the margins of the young Republic, and chronicles the capacity to adapt and the power to endure.”  

The upcoming program is part of the Old Berwick Historical Society's 2010 series of talks, walks and historical events. The series, supported by member donations, includes seven monthly evening presentations as well as other local history events around South Berwick.  

More information on the Counting House Museum and all the Old Berwick Historical Society's programs is available online or by calling (207) 384-0000.