Forefathers' Day Dinners and Martha Washington Teas

Abstract

As early as a half-century before the 1876 national centennial, the point at which many scholars have marked the beginning of the colonial revival movement, historicized foodways appeared at centennial celebrations and homecoming gatherings across Northeast America. Commemorative consumption, the communal participation in anachronistic foodways, provided a vehicle for inscription into heritage-based groups, thus catalyzing the coalescence of collective self-consciousness during a time of cultural upheaval and social dislocation. Early discrete examples of commemorative consumption provided a seedbed for more widespread, popular expressions of the same. Through clambakes, centennial picnics, and Forefathers' Day dinners, New Englanders appropriated Native American foodways and re-enacted European settlement, symbolically laying claim to a region and a nation. Later, through Martha Washington teas, middle and upper-class Anglo-American women in the Northeast and beyond asserted their prerogative as a social and political force, metanymically celebrating the nation and imaging the national community in their own image.