3 Migration

The conclusion of the American Revolution with the Treaty of Paris in 1783 brought a rapid increase of Euro-American settlers into western New York. Indigenous peoples who had sided with Britain in the war lost their territories, and speculators took most of the eastern land forfeited by Loyalists. In 1790, when the United States government took its first national census, more than half of the Americans counted were under the age of sixteen. Rural families like the Ranneys had an average of six children. As this agrarian population came of age, sons of Yankee farmers seeking to begin their own farms found fewer parcels available close to home, containing less attractive land at higher prices. In 1783, after decades during which would-be settlers had been frustrated by the British Proclamation Line and been afraid of strong native nations to their west, only one-fourteenth of white Americans lived beyond the relative safety of the old colonial settlements. By 1800, the frontier population west of the Appalachian Mountains had expanded to 921,000, more than one-fifth of the country’s white population.^[1]

But even on the new frontier, speculators and land companies controlled vast swaths of unimproved western lands. Historian Allan Kulikoff recounts, “Starved for funds, New York sold 22,000 square miles, almost half of the state’s land, to developers. Two land companies—Phelps and Gorham and the Holland Land Company—held 6.2 million acres, much of the western half of the state.”^[2] Histories of western migration describe Oliver Phelps and Nathaniel Gorham as “two Massachusetts speculators” who “for $100,000 . . . bought preemptive rights to a vast tract in the western part” of New York and began the “Genesee Fever.”^[3] Older histories of the early frontier also recall that the fever rose quickly after British and Indian incursions from Canada, Oswego, and Niagara, called the Border Wars, ended around 1779.^[4]

At the conclusion of revolutionary hostilities, western New York was a land occupied by trappers, Indian traders, and small pockets of settlement such as the “one or two white families [who] had settled at Catharine’s Town, at the head of Seneca Lake.”^[5] This pattern of sparse frontier settlement extended all the way to the French village and British garrison at Fort Detroit, which may help explain why migrants to western New York like the Ranneys so quickly looked farther west and bought parcels in Michigan even as they began making new farms in Phelps.^[6]

Acquisition of western lands highlighted the competing agendas of rural settlers and urban speculators. Oliver Phelps and Nathaniel Gorham had acquired the six million acres that became known as the Phelps and Gorham Purchase in an elaborate series of negotiations with the native Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy). Phelps and Gorham paid the Indians five thousand dollars and promised a perpetual annuity of five hundred dollars. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts relinquished its western claims for a fee of a hundred thousand dollars that the speculators tried to pay in devalued Massachusetts scrip. When the federal government assumed the war debts of the states and rehabilitated Massachusetts currency, the speculators were nearly ruined.^[7] The purchase was concluded by 1789, and the establishment of townships quickly followed.

The town of Phelps, located near a large stream called the Canandaigua Outlet, was one of the first settlements formed after the conclusion of the purchase. Two employees of the land company, John Decker Robinson and Nathaniel Sanborn, drove a herd of cattle into the area and distributed them to the Indians in exchange for signing land-sale documents. They operated a land office in a log cabin in return for grants of land. Robinson brought his family to the new town in 1789 and opened a tavern in 1793. By then, settlers from western Massachusetts had begun flooding into the new township.^[8]

Many of Phelps’s original settlers were from Conway, Massachusetts, Ashfield’s neighbor to the east on the road to Deerfield that passed by the Ranney farms. Jonathan Oaks arrived in 1790 and settled at a crossroads on an old Indian trail that became known as Oaks Corners. The settlers told their families and friends in Massachusetts about their new farms, and a steady stream of migration began from Conway, including the families of Benjamin Wheat, Captain Lemuel Bannister, Osee Crittenden, and Augustus Dickinson, whose daughter Fanny married Thaddeus Oaks. Their daughter, Lucretia Oaks, would later marry Phelps’s peppermint king, Leman Hotchkiss.^[9]

Solomon Gates arrived in 1790 from Conway with Jonathan Oaks. Gates’s sister, Esther, was married to the Ashfield merchant Selah Belding. Wells Whitmore of Conway also arrived with Oaks and became the town’s first constable in 1793. Solomon Goodale, Phelps’s first town clerk, was also from Conway. Since entire families from Conway often migrated together, the town’s contribution to Phelps’s early population growth was substantial. Jesse Warner left Conway with his five adult sons in 1796 to settle in Phelps.^[10]

Historian Hal S. Barron attributed the generally declensionist view of migration’s effects on rural New England to the “pervasive influence of Frederick Jackson Turner . . . [and] the agrarian myth.” Turner had believed that migration involved a cutting of ties with home that was extreme enough to cause a cultural break, resulting in civilization recapitulating itself on the frontier and creating a new American culture. In contrast with this traditional story of western settlement, in which young people left for the frontier and then had only sporadic contact with their families back home, traffic from Conway to Phelps was two-way.^[11] In spite of the difficulty of traveling 250 miles over challenging terrain, many settlers regularly went back and forth between Conway and Phelps. John Salisbury first visited Phelps with Jonathan Oaks in 1790. He went home to Conway for a while and then returned to Phelps in 1796, when a local history records he “came alone and walked all the way.” Salisbury visited Conway again, married Elizabeth Banister, and returned to Phelps with her and his brother Stephen’s family (presumably not on foot). When Elizabeth died in 1806, Salisbury returned to Conway once again and married Polly Wilder.^[12]

Just up the road from Conway, near the South Ashfield plain where the Ranney brothers had their farms, lived the Burnett family (sometimes spelled Burnet). The first Burnetts to visit Phelps were the brothers named John and Patrick. They arrived in 1794, and Patrick moved on, but John remained. John’s son William Burnett was a town magistrate and became a brigadier general of the militia after fighting on the Niagara frontier during the War of 1812.^[13]

Joseph and Lodowick Vandermark (sometimes spelled Vandemark) also arrived in 1794, from Pennsylvania. Lodowick was a millwright who operated a successful sawmill on Flint Creek in Phelps. His children were Frederick (1785–1862), a farmer who later sold some farmland to Roswell Ranney, Experience (known as “Spiddy,” 1793–1851), who married Archibald Burnett, and William, who also married a Burnett sibling and named his son Archibald, after the man who brought peppermint to Phelps.^[14] Archibald Burnett was the son of Archibald and Eunice Burnett,[1] who had settled in Ashfield just after the Revolutionary War. Of their nine children, the three youngest, Andrew, Nahum, and Archibald, moved to Phelps after 1813. They are the source of the first peppermint planted in Western New York.^[15]

In the early 1810s, Archibald Burnett was a peddler working out of Ashfield, who like many others carried a trunk of wares and a basket of essences to the newly settled farms and villages of western New York. Archibald liked the area and decided to stay, finding employment and lodging on the four-hundred-acre farm of Lodowick Vandermark. Archibald married Vandermark’s daughter, Spiddy, and bought a farm in the neighboring township of Junius on the nearby Canandaigua Outlet. At about this time, Archibald received an urgent letter from his brother Nahum, who was still living at the family home in Ashfield on the road to Conway, near the Ranneys. Nahum wrote that he had important news that was too sensitive to relate in a letter and urged his brother to come home quickly. Archibald rushed back to his childhood home and discovered the news was peppermint, which Samuel Ranney had recently brought to Ashfield. Archibald walked back home to Phelps, carrying a bundle of peppermint roots in his backpack. He planted them in mucky soil by the Canandaigua Outlet, and the plants thrived. Within a few years, peppermint fields could be seen on western New York farms throughout Ontario and Wayne Counties.

Archibald and Nahum Burnett’s names began appearing on Ontario County Tax Assessments and Indentures (land sales) in 1820 and 1822, respectively. This may be due to the lack of complete records available for the 1810s. Or, rather than first planting peppermint on his own property, Archibald may have carried the roots he brought from Ashfield to Lodowick Vandermark’s farm while he boarded there. The Vandermarks were also early adopters of peppermint in Phelps and remained prominent peppermint farmers for generations. Archibald’s brother-in-law, Frederick, was the recipient of the check for two to three thousand dollars recorded in the newspaper notice mentioned earlier, in payment for an 1824 shipment of peppermint oil to Massachusetts. Peppermint was already becoming an important cash crop in western New York during the period when Ashfield was the center of the peddler trade. The Vandermarks later became major suppliers of peppermint oil to the Hotchkiss brothers, whose careers I follow next.

In contrast with a historical tradition that often depicts westward migration as a cutting of family ties and a financial and cultural declension for the region from which people migrated, the connection between the Ashfield area and western New York was so well established and fluid that people, information, and products traveled easily in both directions. As peppermint became economically important in Ashfield, it was almost simultaneously planted and distilled around Phelps. As the hub of the lucrative essence peddling business, however, Ashfield remained the center of demand for peppermint oil and a principal destination for New York oil shipments for another thirty years. The town retained its preeminent position in the peppermint oil market until Western New Yorkers devised a new way to sell oil. The rise of wholesale and branded peppermint oil and the Hotchkiss brothers is the second phase of the peppermint oil story.

Although the New York peppermint oil business was later dominated by the Hotchkiss brothers (who both declared themselves peppermint kings), the Ranneys remained active in the business until the 1870s. And the Ranneys were responsible for introducing peppermint roots to southwestern Michigan, which became the third major growing region and the site of the final peppermint kingdom, of Albert May Todd. So before turning to the Hotchkisses and Todd, let us return for a while to the story of the Ranney migration.

On June 25, 1831, the Genesee Farmer reprinted a feature article from the New York Sentinel that discussed “the powerful influence, physical and moral, on our country” exerted by “locomotive engines [that] can be propelled at the amazing speed of from 30 to 50 miles an hour.” This prophetic article appeared only a few months after the legendary demonstration of America’s first locomotive, Peter Cooper’s Tom Thumb, in August 1830. Cooper’s engine had lost to a horse-drawn train due to a mechanical failure, but the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad’s managers saw the future clearly. The newspaper article went on to predict that remote towns and villages would come to seem as if they were right next door and that this conquest of distance would have a profound effect on American society.^[16] To put this in perspective, imagine traveling from New York City to Buffalo. On foot, on horseback, or in a coach, a traveler would be lucky to cover forty miles a day. The 440-mile distance between the two cities would require eleven grueling days of travel for those hardy enough to make the trip at all. After 1825 a trip on the Erie Canal was much less physically demanding but not much faster. A decade later, in contrast, a traveler could step onto a train in New York City and after a single day spent in the comfort of “the cars” could step off in Buffalo.

Steamship service began on Lake Erie in 1818, before the Erie Canal was even completed. From Buffalo, the lake opened a route to Michigan. Western New Yorkers like the Ranneys took advantage of the opportunity and went west to work or invest on the frontier. After moving to Phelps, George Ranney and some of his sons spent at least one winter logging in Michigan. In July 1833, the New York speculators Charles Butler and Arthur Bronson left Detroit to explore the new lands available in southwestern Michigan. After passing through the new townships of Coldwater and Sturgis, they stopped on the large prairie surrounding the village of White Pigeon. Butler wrote in his diary, “White Pigeon is a pleasant little village . . . situated in the center of an extensive and beautiful prairie 6 or 7000 acres. What is a prairie? It looks like the great ocean, for there is nothing to obstruct or intercept the view except here & there a house; a perfectly level plain without a tree or bush or stone; encircled in the background with the dense & noble forest which looks like the frame of the picture.”^[17]

Some of the first New Yorkers who visited land offices on the Michigan frontier were speculators, but their numbers were decreased by President Andrew Jackson’s Specie Circular, the 1836 executive order that required land-office purchases to be made in hard currency rather than on credit or using banknotes of questionable value. During the winter of 1836–37, George Ranney worked in western Michigan with two of his sons and his son-in-law, cutting timber on the Grand River.^[18] George had been the first member of the family to move to western New York, and within a few years of his arrival he had expanded his interest to the new territory, which became a state in January 1837. On April 15, 1837, as previously mentioned, Samuel Ranney and his son William bought two parcels at the Detroit Land Office. Two weeks later, on May 1, Leman and Hiram Hotchkiss of Phelps bought 1,327 acres of western Michigan land, and their uncle Calvin Hotchkiss bought 1,325 acres. A year and a half later, after Samuel Ranney’s death, his son William returned to the frontier to visit the newly opened Bronson (Kalamazoo) Land Office and purchase another 560 acres in September 1838. Henry Ranney’s brothers and cousins were on the move to Michigan.^[19]

The Ranney family correspondence preserved in the file cabinets of the Ashfield Historical Society tells the story of a tightly knit extended family that worked very hard to maintain connections across time and distance. Henry Ranney saved the letters he received over six decades from relatives in Boston, New York, Michigan, Arkansas, the Indian Territory (Oklahoma), and California. Family members shared information and provided both emotional and financial support to each other throughout the nineteenth century. Ranneys who went west to New York, Michigan, or even the distant goldfields of Pikes Peak and California remained securely attached to their family. They visited each other regularly, over the years, and between visits they wrote.

In May 1839, Henry Ranney received the first letter in a correspondence that spanned six decades. George Lewis Ranney wrote from Phelps to his brother Henry in Ashfield. The twenty-four-year-old, who went by his middle name, Lewis, opened his letter with the most important news: “Our folks are well as usual.” Lewis continued with news of his business ventures: “I am working at home this season. . . . We have planted this season about 6 acres of mint, 9 acres of corn, 6 acres spring wheat, potatoes and oats sufficient, &c. Our people are going into the poultry line considerable this season, with near 50 chickens already.” Lewis then passed along news of their cousins, Samuel Ranney’s sons. “Dexter is yet in Michigan I suppose, William is a-building a new house in the West Village, Frederick is about here as usual.” Frederick, who had been a minor when his father Samuel died in 1837, had just turned twenty. Lewis concluded, “Mother says she calculates to send to you three pairs of socks. Father wishes you to send them $50 or $100 if you can, as he has had none from Michigan. Money is very scarce here now, probably will be until after harvest.”^[20]

Lewis’s letter sets the template for the Ranney brothers’ correspondence. News of the family came first, then business and occasionally politics and neighborhood gossip. Although they would ultimately be spread across the nation, the brothers not only kept in touch but also regularly did business together. Henry Ranney and Jasper Bement’s peddler operation in Ashfield was the market for Lewis’s peppermint oil. And the call of their father, George, for money from Ashfield, since he could expect none from Dexter in Michigan (presumably the return of a loan to his nephew), was not unusual. Information, money, and people all flowed freely between Massachusetts, New York, and Michigan. Later, celebrating the close family connection enabled by improved transportation, the brothers’ aging mother, Achsah Sears Ranney, began splitting her time between the three regions after the death of her husband, George, in 1842.

The Ranneys and their close friends prospered in Phelps even as they looked westward. Alonzo Franklin Ranney, Henry’s oldest brother, considered moving to Michigan several times but ultimately spent his life in Phelps. Cousin William stayed in Phelps for a few years before moving to Michigan. Relative-by-marriage Russell Bement lived on a 281-acre farm in Phelps and owned a brick store downtown. Russell’s son John moved to Philadelphia, where he worked for a glassmaker, sold essence vials to Henry in Ashfield, and later represented Hiram Hotchkiss’s brand of peppermint oil.^[21] As these relatives and former neighbors fanned out across the growing nation, they retained the bonds of familiarity and trust formed in Ashfield.

By 1837, Henry had completed his commercial apprenticeship with Jasper Bement and had opened his own store. In the spring of 1840, Henry’s cousin Luther Ranney peddled essences, carrying sixty-three dozen vials in March and returning for another fifty-three dozen three weeks later. In July, Ashfielder Horatio Flower bought eighty-four dozen vials of essence for a peddling trip to the west that resulted in Flower’s relocation to Phelps.^[22] The R. G. Dun credit company’s correspondent reported in 1842 that Ranney was a “clever young man.” A few years later, Henry and his partner, Richard Cook, were “reputed safe and doing good business.” On the tenth anniversary of their partnership, the R. G. Dun investigator described Cook and Ranney as “good character business men, credit and business fair. Worth 2 to 3,000. Considered good for [credit] engagements.”^[23] By this time Ashfield was no longer producing its own peppermint oil, and the change had been noticed by newspapers like the Boston Daily Courier, which ran a feature article entitled “How Ashfield has gone out of peppermint business.”^[24] But Henry Ranney remained the center of a wide web of peppermint oil distribution.

In April 1842, John Bement wrote from Philadelphia to Richard Cook’s brother Moses in New York City, “I have shipped this week 200 gross of vials of 1 3/4 oz, the very kind that is used in Ashfield.” In a postscript, Bement added: “I wish Ranney would come here and see me.”^[25] It is unclear whether Henry visited his friend in Philadelphia, but soon he would have an opportunity to see Michigan. In May 1842, twenty-three-year-old Lucius wrote to his older brother of his arrival in Allen, Michigan, after a ten-day journey from Phelps. To cover the 475 miles between Phelps and Allen in ten days, Lucius almost certainly took a steamer between Buffalo and Toledo, some three hundred miles away on the other edge of Lake Erie. “I have a warranty deed for 160 acres of as good land as there is in Michigan,” Lucius wrote. “For said land I paid $148.” The property is well situated, he continued, only “6 miles from Hillsdale Center which the railroad will be completed to from Adrian this season.”^[26] Lucius’s prediction was accurate: a line of the Michigan Southern Railroad reached Hillsdale in September 1843.^[27]

Lucius wrote his brother again from Allen in April 1843. “I traded one of my lots of land the other day for a lot with 35 acres improved, house and barn.” Lucius said he would delay a planned visit to Phelps because he had gone into the potash business. “We have made three times and we find it profitable,” he reported; “therefore we intend to follow the business.” Potash, made from the ashes of trees burned to clear farm fields, was often the first product western settlers shipped east to raise cash. “This part of the country is settling fast,” Lucius wrote. “Just where there was forest one year ago, the same surface is now waving with wheat. The cars will run to Hillsdale Center this summer, 6 miles east from where this child is, and then you can come out here in a hurry if you please.” Regarding the extended family, Lucius wrote: “As for Lewis, I saw him a few weeks ago. He was well and is doing well I guess. He and his partner will have about 50 acres of mint to still this fall. You had better come out this fall and buy their oil. What is it worth now?”^[28]

Lewis Ranney had migrated from Phelps to Michigan with peppermint roots in 1835. He was probably the first farmer in western Michigan to grow peppermint. He settled on the prairie near White Pigeon and got right to work growing and distilling peppermint for Henry’s peddler business. But Lewis soon discovered that Ashfield was not the only market for his peppermint oil. He wrote to Henry from Phelps in November 1843: “I ought to have written a long time since but through the fall I occupy 20 hours in the 24 a-stilling therefore I wanted the rest for sleep.” Peppermint oil was distilled from “hay” cut and dried on the fields in the fall. Lewis reported that he had left Florence, Michigan, with a load of newly processed oil in mid-October. “We brought down 594 pounds of oil we sold to Wells of Lyons at two dollars in advance and the rise [for] eight months. I have been here about three weeks. I shall tarry until good sleighing, and then go back.” Philip C. Wells was a peppermint oil broker working in western New York and, later, Michigan. Wells and Hiram Hotchkiss often worked together, and both offered terms that included an advance payment at the current market price and a guarantee to pay whatever the price might rise to in the months between contract and delivery. In this instance Lewis seems to have negotiated an even better deal, being guaranteed a share of the price rise for eight months after he delivered his oil to the broker, Wells.

“Smith and myself intend planting 30 acres in the spring of mint,” Lewis concluded. “It is rather hard business, but I think it better than wheat.”^[29] Lewis’s yield of a little over ten pounds of oil per acre was fair for a newly planted field. Growing peppermint involved planting root cuttings called stolons in plowed fields and cultivating them throughout the season to keep out weeds that could ruin the distilled oil’s flavor. Peppermint was more labor intensive than wheat but also much more profitable. Lewis wrote again from Michigan in February 1844. He had waited for snow in Phelps, but when it did not come he set out in a wagon. “We found very good wheeling most of the way,” he wrote. “We got two dollars per pound for our oil we sold to Wells of Lyons. He shipt it to New York, ours was to be sold with his. His agent sold sooner than Wells expected they were going to and when Wells was informed of the sale oil was worth $4.00 per lb in NY. Probably some Gum Game about it.” Although Wells had promised Lewis a share of the price rise when he sold it on to a final customer, Wells had apparently been swindled. In spite of this disappointment, Lewis reiterated, “Smith and I intend putting in thirty acres this Spring to mint and that in addition to what we have already in I hope will give us some oil next fall for Pocket Change.”^[30]

Henry continued bottling peppermint essence for peddlers, and, like Jasper Bement, he expanded into other essences. In May 1844, his peddler Charles Sanderson wrote Henry from Leominster. He sent the letter with his brother, Henry’s politically minded friend William, and asked: “If it is convenient you may pay him that last bill, one half in essence as follows, one half gross peppermint, one half gross wintergreen, one quarter each cinnamon, hemlock, lemon, aniseed and Sassafras, one quarter gross sassafras in large bottles if you have it. One half gross oil spruce, the balance proportioned as above.”^[31] A few months later, in August 1844, twenty-one-year-old Augustus Graves of Ashfield wrote to Henry from Franklin, Massachusetts, during a peddling trip. Instead of to Ashfield, however, Graves’s envelope was addressed to 76 Union St., Boston. Henry had moved briefly to the city to begin a business partnership with George C. Goodwin, the brother of his new bride, Maria. The Goodwins were Ashfield natives whose father manufactured surgical splints. “I shall be in Boston in a week or 10 days at the most and I shall want an assortment of essences,” Graves wrote. “I should like you to put up some essence of an extra quality, twice as strong as any I have yet had of you, without the alcohol being reduced. . . . I think I shall want about two gross of 4 ounce essence in peppermint, lemon, Wintergreen, hot drops etc. (and four or five gross 2 ounce ditto) I shall be in sometime next week and shall want considerable stuff if you have the right sort.”^[32] Although he became a Boston wholesaler, Henry Ranney continued supplying the peddler trade and soon returned to his home in western Massachusetts.

Although they were no longer technically partners, Jasper Bement and Henry Ranney remained close business associates and close friends. The two men also shared a political orientation favoring the abolition of slavery, as mentioned earlier. But their activism was much more substantial than simply preferring an end to slavery. Like William Sanderson, who had carried abolitionist tracts while peddling, Ranney and Bement continued in the Ashfield tradition of expressing their ideals on a national stage. In August 1844, Jasper Bement wrote to Henry Ranney from Syracuse, New York, where he had stopped on his way to Detroit. Bement touched briefly on business and then offered detailed descriptions of several conversations he had enjoyed with Liberty men and the reactions of strangers to whom he had offered abolitionist tracts at a political gathering. Bement gave Ranney some intelligence he had gathered on flour prices in Troy but then returned to politics and suggested a strategy for an upcoming Liberty Party convention. Bement confidentially advised Ranney against supporting Hooker Leavitt for the state Senate, because the voting public might become aware of his “disability” and reject him for public office. Leavitt was aiding runaway slaves on the Underground Railroad, which the men supported but were aware would disqualify him from election in 1844 in Massachusetts.^[33]

A few days later Jasper Bement wrote to “Friend Ranney” from Buffalo, New York. Bement was unhappy his travels were taking so long and complained that the whole trip was likely to last six weeks. Although canal boats, railroads, and steamships on the Great Lakes had greatly reduced travel times between Massachusetts and Detroit, Bement was making several stops along the way to do business and talk politics. He mentioned he had lectured on abolition at a Liberty rally. Bement told Ranney he used Ranney’s “notice,” so apparently Henry had printed a handbill announcing talks about abolition. In addition to Liberty men, Bement found Whigs and Loco Focos (an equal rights faction of the Democratic Party) busily holding mass meetings. “Some of the Whigs,” he said, “are most ready to vote for Liberty, but they think they must vote Clay in this time to keep Texas out.” His prediction proved correct: the Whigs voted for Henry Clay in the next presidential election to prevent Democrat James K. Polk from being elected and annexing Texas. They failed to elect Clay, and Polk led the United States into the Mexican-American War.^[34] Bement also described a visit to Niagara Falls, which he called a sublime spectacle. He mentioned seeing the monument at Queenston Heights, site of the first major battle of the War of 1812, and the battlefield of Lundy Lane. Bement closed by urging Ranney to write him care of Detroit. He addressed the letter to “Mr. Henry S. Ranney, Postmaster”: the twenty-seven-year-old Ranney had returned from Boston and was becoming a substantial citizen of Ashfield.

When the R. G. Dun credit reporter visited Ashfield again in May 1847, he found Henry doing business on his own. The reporter wrote that Henry “manufacture[d] oil of peppermint at Ashfield” and had acceptable credit.^[35] Augustus Graves wrote to Henry again from Middleborough, Massachusetts, on another peddling trip, to order twenty-nine dozen two-ounce essences, including six dozen peppermint; twelve dozen four-ounce essences, including six dozen peppermint; and six dozen half pints of peppermint in flat bottles, probably supplied by John Bement from Philadelphia. Graves also ordered cinnamon, wintergreen, hemlock, wormwood, spearmint, sassafras, anise, lemon, pennyroyal, goldenrod, Hot Drops, Balsam of Life, Balsam Honey, and Lee & B.’s Prestons Salts, “if you have them—no other.”^[36]

Henry Ranney positioned himself at the center of a commercial web that spread from the peppermint fields of western New York and Michigan to the wholesale market of Boston and the far-flung retail markets served by Ashfield’s peddlers. Peppermint oil grown by his family and by trusted friends passed through his hands on its way to warehouses in the city or essence baskets carried by peddlers into the remotest corners of the nation. Throughout his career, Henry preferred to do business with people he knew and trusted. He continued this style of business well into the second half of the nineteenth century, in spite of the economic panics and credit crises many historians suggest began a shift toward a more impersonal style of commerce.^[37]

In August 1847, as mentioned previously, Henry’s cousin Frederick Ranney wrote from Centerville, Michigan, seeking payment for peppermint oil he had sent Henry the previous fall. In October Augustus Graves wrote again from Franklin, Massachusetts, to order fifty-four dozen two-ounce essences, including six dozen peppermint, as well as six dozen four-ounce peppermints and other patent medicines, including Carter’s oil and opodeldoc.^[38] The patent formula for the liniment Graves ordered was well known to suppliers like Ranney. Opodeldoc, attributed to the German alchemist Paracelsus, consisted of soap, alcohol, camphor, and wormwood.

In the spring of 1848, Jasper Bement wrote again to Henry. As he had done years earlier, Bement quickly left business behind and turned his attention to abolitionist politics. “So Cass is to be the slave holders tool,” Bement wrote, “to do their infamous work and Northern Locos will fall down and worship. Already the Greenfield Democrat has him out with a long article and lauds him to the skies, puts on a thick coat of soft soap. Oh the full blaze of the 19th century!”^[39] General Lewis Cass, who had been the territorial governor of Michigan, was running for president on a platform of popular sovereignty that advocated letting new territories decide whether to permit slavery. Cass’s presidential campaign in 1848 drove many antislavery Northern Democrats into the arms of the Free-Soil Party. In addition to running a widespread peddler business with a far-reaching supply chain, Ranney and Bement continued to share a keen interest in national politics. And Henry’s antislavery stance seems to have been shared by his brothers. In the spring of 1850 a younger brother, Lyman, wrote from Van Buren, Arkansas, where he was working as a store clerk. Lyman thanked Henry for sending him eastern newspapers but warned against forwarding any openly abolitionist Free-Soil papers. He reported, “Slavery exists here in almost all forms.” Some slaves seemed to live under decent conditions, while others had it hard. The most alarming element of slavery, for the young man, seemed to be that “some slaves are black others are white. There is one boy around in town who is whiter than half the so called white children. He has very light colored hair, roman nose, and his features do not resemble a negro in the least. Yet this boy is a slave.” Lyman said the boy was sold since his arrival for $150, less than half what he would have been worth if he had been visibly black. “If I had plenty of money,” Lyman concluded, “when I go north I would purchase him and take with me and let them see what some of the subjects are that are held in bondage.”^[40] Lyman did not purchase the boy and he did not go back north. He took another job at a mercantile store in the “Indian Nation” at Tahlequah, where he mysteriously died in 1854.

In June 1850, George Goodwin wrote from Boston to “Brother Henry”: “I received J. Bement’s order and forwarded the goods in a day or two. Nothing particularly new. We would all be happy to see you Maria and children, can you come?”^[41] In contrast with the findings of some historians of this period and region that kinship networks were losing their importance as the foundations of business relationships, we see that family bonds and close personal friendships were still central elements of widespread commercial networks such as those run by Ranney and his associates from Ashfield. Historian Paul E. Johnson, for example, seems to accept the idea popularized by Alexis de Tocqueville that very early in American history most kinship networks were disrupted, and “restraints of every kind were swept away by the market, by migration and personal ambition, and by the universal acceptance of democratic ideas.” This does not seem to reflect the style of business Henry Ranney continued throughout his life.^[42]

In addition to growing staples for the family and peppermint for the market, the Ranney brothers in Michigan were always on the lookout for business opportunities, and they and Henry continued to provide financial backing to each other across the miles. In February 1851, Lucius wrote to announce: “I and one of my neighbors bought a thrashing machine last fall. We paid $250 for it, we hired a man to work with us which we worked at thrashing about two months and thrashed about 10,000 bushels of wheat which come to $360.” Lucius estimated that labor and wear and tear on the machinery would cost him only about $90 per season going forward, which would make the operation respectably profitable. “We can thrash and clean fit for marketing 80 bushels in 60 minutes,” Lucius concluded, and “the town of Allen raised about 30,000 bushels of wheat this year.”^[43] Lucius also mentioned that he had been ill for a while, that he had rented out his farm for three years, and that he had had “a little daughter” in September–“healthy and of course a smart and good girl.” Returning to business, Lucius wrote: “Lewis and [younger brother] Harrison intend to mint it some next season. They are doing tolerably well.” Lucius concluded by requesting an extension on Henry’s loan: “The money I am owing you if you wanted I will try and borrow it if I can. Sickness and building will bring me rather short until next fall. If you can wait until next fall it would favor me some. I rather think that Lewis cannot pay you until then.” In addition to the business deals they were doing together, the brothers maintained a strong network of emotional and financial support across the miles.

In 1851, Henry Ranney bought an old (1792) tavern in Ashfield, which he remodeled as a home with several apartments, which he rented out.^[44] Although he closed his general store, he remained active in the peppermint oil business. In October, 1851, Lucius wrote again with news: “Lewis is very sick with a swollen leg, the doctors call it a species of irrasiplas.” Erysipelas was a bacterial skin infection that was common and potentially deadly in an age before antibiotics. “Unless it is checked it will work up into his bowels and kill him,” Lucius continued. Remembering his debt to Henry, he said: “The demands you have against me I am afraid that I shall not be able to send you this fall. But I think and hope that I shall be able to go down next fall myself and pay you. Times are uncommon hard in the state this fall. . . . As for oil peppermint, in consequence of Lewis’s health they did not raise any.”^[45]

Lewis survived his infection, and he wrote to Henry in September 1853 to say, “My health in the main is quite good, able to do good fair days work. But not the nerve I carried in former years. I do not work very hard nor do not intend to.” Lewis had reduced his farm to forty acres, which he thought he could work with the help of a local boy and his wife, who he reported “is quite a rugged woman and very ambitious and helps me a great deal from choice.” Lewis informed Henry that their mother, Achsah, who had been staying in Allen with Lucius, planned to spend the winter in Phelps or Ashfield. The Ranney matriarch continued taking advantage of rail travel to move regularly between her sons’ homes for the rest of her life. Lewis concluded by asking, “What is peppermint oil worth, I planted 5 acres last spring? It has been too dry for it. Shall probably still about 30 or 35 pounds. I see it quoted at about 4.25 in New York papers.”^[46]

Lucius wrote a month later, saying: “The season has been so very dry that peppermint is very small indeed. There is some New York buyers about, they offer about $3.50 per pound. Lewis will have about 25 pounds. He has contracted a few pounds to the druggists in Hillsdale, Jonesville and Coldwater for five dollars per pound.”^[47] Although by this time New Yorkers like Wells and the Hotchkiss brothers were regularly visiting and sending agents to buy Michigan peppermint oil, family ties enabled Henry to maintain a foothold in an increasingly competitive market.

In June 1854, Lucius wrote to Henry and to their mother, Achsah, who was staying in Ashfield to nurse Henry’s wife, Maria, in her final illness. Lewis had sold his farm and was looking for a small property near Lucius. Lucius added, “The Bements have sold to John Baggerly and he has moved out here so that we have got them for neighbors once more. Mr. Bement’s folks have bought 3 miles South of Hillsdale. He sold for $2000 and bought for the same 80 acres.”^[48] Henry’s wife, Maria Jane Goodwin, died in the spring of 1855, leaving behind a ten-year-old son, Ralph, and an eight-year-old daughter, Ella. Several of his brothers visited Henry that summer in Ashfield. In August 1855, Harrison Ranney wrote from South Allen, Michigan, to Anson Ranney, who had just arrived in Ashfield with their brother Lemuel. In addition to asking, “Why cannot Henry come out here this fall?” Harrison inquired about peppermint oil: “I wish you would ask Henry to find out if I could dispose of any Oil Peppermint, and how much and at what price, for if I could sell two three or four hundred pounds of Oil down there somewhere I would go down sometime this fall.” Harrison said oil was worth three dollars per pound in Florence and wondered whether he could get four in Ashfield or Boston. “You be certain to find out about the Oil Peppermint,” Harrison reminded Anson in closing. “I want to make one thousand dollars this fall. I may go to St. Louis with one lot of Oil. It is worth four dollars there.”^[49] Although the prices of commodities were beginning to become more uniform as information about distant markets was distributed over the new telegraph network, detailed knowledge of particular commodities and their markets continued to offer well-connected sellers like the Ranneys a competitive advantage.

When Lucius returned home to Michigan after his own visit to Ashfield, he wrote to Henry: “[Harrison] will start for Florence next Wednesday. He has not been out there yet but saw a young man from there a few days ago and he says they hold oil at four dollars a pound there. But Harrison thinks he can get it for $3.50 or $3 and rise, and will let you know the result as soon as he returns.”^[50] Henry brokered a deal for his brother, selling Harrison’s peppermint oil to his late wife’s brother George Goodwin in Boston. In November 1855, Harrison wrote to Henry: “I recd your letter containing the draft two or three days since and am glad Goodwin is satisfied with the oil, for I took some extra care to get that which was good and pure.” Harrison reported that he and their brother Lemuel were visiting Lewis to help shuck his corn crop. Harrison concluded the letter with an apology: “Please excuse bad writing for I have been husking corn so long that my fingers are like sticks.”^[51]

Henry visited Phelps, New York, and Allen, Michigan, in 1856 with his children and his new wife, the Ashfield resident Julia A. Bassett. In July 1857, Lucius wrote to Henry: “There is not a day passes but what I think of you and also think of what a fine visit we had together last fall.” As always, the letter begins with news of the family. “I suppose that you have heard that Harrison has a boy about three months old,” Lucius wrote. “Anson’s boy walks all over the house. . . . I moved the house from across the road over near where you and I staked out, and I find it much better or handier rather, it also looks better.” Lucius continued, “Mother did not go out to Coldwater to see Mrs. Hathaway last fall, it did not seem to be convenient for her to go until she was afraid that Mrs. Hathaway was gone” Mrs. Hathaway was their cousin Lucretia, Samuel Ranney’s daughter. Lucius added a postscript, to his twelve-year-old nephew and ten-year-old niece. “Ralph can’t you take a basket of essences and take a trip out into Michigan and make a dime or two & see your kin, they would like to see you very much. Ella how can you manage to come out, try and study out some way can’t you. If you cannot don’t forget to write.”^[52] Although the Ranney letters were often filled with the details of the brothers’ business dealings, they were always primarily concerned with maintaining the close bonds of the family across the distances that separated them.

Lucius made another trip to Ashfield in late 1857. Returning home to Allen, he wrote to Henry that he had stopped in Phelps on the way back. “I found Franklins folks well and Frank was making arrangements to move to Michigan in the spring.”^[53] With a national recession just beginning following the Panic of 1857, however, Franklin changed his mind and ultimately spent the rest of his days in Phelps. The next letter Henry received was from his brother Lemuel, who wrote at the request of their brother Lucius and his wife “to inform you of their affliction. They have lost their little girl. Little Cally is dead. We buried her last Wednesday. She had the scarlet fever in its most malignant form. . . . She suffered very much throughout her illness. It is a severe stroke on Lucius and Clarissa I assure you.” In addition to the family tragedy, Lemuel filled his brother in on the local business climate. “The price of land has fallen 20 per cent since you were here last fall,” he wrote. “How are the times down your way this winter? I hope not as tight as it is here.”^[54] The Panic of 1857 began a recession that lasted for two years and has been characterized as the first global recession. Many historians consider the widespread business failures in this period as the culmination of a trend that had begun two decades earlier, in the Panic of 1837. They describe a shift to a more impersonal style of business as “incremental movements in a long process of disentangling the claims of commerce from the claims of personal obligation.”^[55] As we see from the activities of the Ranneys here and from the business of the Hotchkiss brothers below, however, the abandonment of a “moral economy” of kinship networks in favor of an impersonal “market ethic” was by no means immediate and universal.^[56]

As his brothers in Michigan began to decrease their involvement with peppermint oil in the late 1850s, Henry cultivated other sources, again preferring to deal with relatives and close friends whenever possible. In October 1858, he received a letter from Harrison Hawley Lawrence responding to an inquiry about the peppermint oil market in Michigan. Lawrence was connected to the Ranneys through his wife, Mary, who was either a relative or a close friend of the family.^[57] Lawrence wrote, “You say you would like to buy one or two hundred pounds of pure oil at a low figure. I have not got any oil on hand as I have just sold my crop of oil at two dollars per pound, but I know of good oil that can be had for 14/- per pound for the money. If you want old oil two years old I can get it for 13/- that I know is pure & free from weeds, for cash.” Lawrence said most of the oil had already been sold but if Henry wished he would “get [him] a good article & fit it for transportation.”^[58]

The Ranney correspondence of the mid-nineteenth century and the Hotchkiss correspondence from the same period covered below frequently quote prices for peppermint oil in shillings rather than dollars and cents. Except during the inflationary Civil War years, the British pound sterling was worth between $4.80 and $4.90 throughout the nineteenth century. One British shilling (1/-) was one-twentieth of a pound, or, when exchanged for American currency, about twenty-four cents. This was not, however, the way the Ranneys and Hotchkisses understood shillings. When early American merchants who were not involved in foreign exchange used shillings, they were referring to a tradition in which a shilling was worth 12.5 cents, or one-eighth (one “bit”) of a Spanish real. In this tradition, fourteen shillings equals $1.75. Oddly, in this alternate accounting, twenty shillings equals only $2.50, or about half the actual value of a British pound sterling.^[59]

Henry relayed Lawrence’s information to his brother-in-law and former Boston partner, George Goodwin, adding a markup to cover his services as broker. Goodwin replied, “I have bought a lower figure than you mention. I sell considerable quantities of oil of peppermint to retail apothecaries in the country, but as I said I have been supplied at a lesser price, genuine and pure, and can purchase now at the same price.”^[60] Lawrence wrote again, a few days later, and reiterated, “If you should want, or your brother-in-law, 200 pounds of oil you had better send soon as there is but little here. I know of 300 pounds of good new oil that can be had for 14/- [$1.75] per pound for the money.”^[61] On October 29, Henry wrote to Goodwin offering “100 lbs or more of pure, new, Oil Peppt, at $2.00 per pound.” Henry offered his brother-in-law ninety-day credit terms to sweeten the deal and concluded, “I am not urgent about making any sales, for I have not ordered any oil yet.”^[62] George accepted the offer on those terms, and in late November Henry received another letter from Lawrence, stating: “I send by todays Express to G. C. Goodwin & Co. according to your order 100 lbs oil peppt of the first quality of new mint of this years raising. I have taken great pains in fitting it up for transportation.” Lawrence passed along news of some other peppermint oil deals Henry had inquired about and concluded by mentioning, “I believe we intend paying your brothers in Hillsdale a visit in a short time.”^[63]

In the following weeks, Goodwin in Boston wrote “Brother Henry” to say, “The oil of peppermint has been received and I think it is a first-rate article.”^[64] And Harrison Ranney wrote to update his brother on the family. “Mother is making 7 lbs butter per week from her cow this winter,” Harrison wrote. Achsah Sears Ranney had just turned seventy. And “Lem is not doing anything this winter but thinks or talks of going to Pikes Peak in the spring. There is quite an excitement here about the Gold in Kansas.”^[65] Until statehood in 1861, the Kansas Territory extended to the Rocky Mountains and included the Pikes Peak region that attracted more than a hundred thousand Fifty-Niner prospectors. In March 1859, Lemuel and Anson Ranney set off for the goldfields with three other local men. Anson rented out his farm and sent his wife and baby to stay with her parents.^[66]

In the fall of 1859, Henry once again contacted H. H. Lawrence, to ask for four hundred pounds of peppermint delivered at $1.50 per pound. Lawrence responded: “Wells of Lyons is here at present. He is buying some and paying 12/- [$1.50]. So you can see I cannot make enough at the offer you make to pay me for buying and fitting it for transportation.”^[67] Lawrence asked for a handling charge of $2 per hundredweight, so he could make a small profit on the transaction. Henry agreed and sold two hundred pounds of Lawrence’s peppermint oil to Goodwin for $1.75, making $46 profit on the deal, compared to $4 for Lawrence.^[68] The Ashfielder was clearly in the driver’s seat in these transactions, demonstrating the strength of the interstate network of friends and relations he controlled. But Henry’s interest in the peppermint oil business was decreasing. Although the deals Henry occasionally brokered yielded him good profits for very little effort, Phillip Wells and his associates the Hotchkiss brothers (discussed below) were already buying most of the peppermint oil produced in Michigan. And unlike Wells and Hotchkiss, who were able to communicate between Michigan and New York by telegraph when necessary, Henry was limited to postal letters because the telegraph did not reach Ashfield until the 1890s.

In October 1860, Lawrence replied to Henry’s annual query, explaining that “the crop was not large on account of the drought, it has been very dry the latter part of the summer here. I raised 140 pounds of oil, which I sold a short time since for two dollars per pound.” Lawrence warned that “Messrs. Wells and Hotchkiss of Lyons New York has bought all the oil in the state. I do not know of a pound for sale. They paid two dollars per pound.”^[69] Henry used this information to close a transaction with his brother-in-law that had been left unresolved from the previous season. “A short time since I had advices from Michigan that Hotchkiss and Wells of Phelps and Lyons New York had purchased the whole of the oil of Michigan,” Henry wrote to George Goodwin, “paying from $2-$2.50 for it, it is supposed, for the purpose of controlling the price. . . . In relation to the oil sold by you,” Henry concluded, “I leave it for you to make the proper account of sales, or if not convenient to do it in detail, then the net result.”^[70] Goodwin replied apologetically, explaining that Henry’s bill had been mislaid, and then sent Henry “our check for $172.51 in payment for 93 pounds of peppermint at $1.75 per pound and one years interest on the same at 6%. If this is entirely satisfactory to you we will call the account settled in full to date, if not we will try to make it so.”^[71] The close personal relationship maintained by Henry and Goodwin certainly facilitated the resolution of the outstanding issue. As we will soon see, business dealings between people lacking such trust—even when related—were often much less amicable.

Although Henry expended much less energy in his peppermint business than his rivals in western New York, his strong personal network allowed him to remain competitive. In 1861 he tried to get ahead of his competitors and contacted Lawrence a month early, in late August. Lawrence replied, “I have 10 acres of new mint that looks the best of any I have seen. I think there will not be half the oil this fall there was last fall. Mr. Wells and Hotchkiss of Lyons New York is coming out soon with the intention of buying the whole crop.^[72] Lawrence included a wholesale price list clipped from the August 21, 1861, Western Chronicle in Three Rivers, Michigan, that quoted “Peppermint Oil, 2.25 a 2.50.” A few weeks later, Lawrence wrote again, saying that he had distilled 218 pounds of peppermint oil from his ten acres of new plants, which he would let go for eighteen shillings [$2.25]. “It is rather early yet to sell oil,” he wrote, “as most farmers are not stilling yet. But as you have dealt with me for some time past in the oil matter, I will offer as low as I dare.”^[73]

Henry relayed Lawrence’s information to Goodwin, adding: “I think my information is reliable, and as I know Hotchkiss and something of his circumstances and management, I think it likely that he and his partner may buy up pretty near the whole crop.”^[74] Goodwin replied that he would buy one hundred pounds at $2.50 or the full 218 at $2.25. He mentioned the current price quoted in Boston was seventeen shillings [$2.125] per pound.^[75] The day he received Goodwin’s offer, Henry wrote to Lawrence with an offer. “My brother Frank at Phelps NY writes me that Hotchkiss is buying oil Pep there for $1.75 per lb and is to allow the advance or rise in price, if any, ’till the first of January.” Henry told Lawrence that as they had been doing business with each other for several years, he preferred to continue dealing with friends and hoped they could settle a deal to their mutual advantage. Lawrence challened Henry’s information from Phelps. He wrote, “You stated that Hotchkiss was buying oil pepp at 14/- [$1.75] per lb. Oil cannot be had here for that price. Oil is held here at $2.00 per lb now.”^[76] But Lawrence accepted Henry’s offer and shipped his peppermint oil for fifteen shillings [$1.875] per pound, after receiving a “package of money” totaling $410 in New England banknotes.^[77]

While he was negotiating this transaction, Henry received a letter from his brother Lucius, who had been ill. “I was obliged to stop work entirely,” Lucius wrote. “Of course I had to commence doctoring and the more I doctored the worse I grew, and I tried a second doctor and the third and so on until I got so debilitated from the top of my head to the soul of my feet that I could not eat sleep nor rest in no shape.” In spite of his illness, Lucius reported that he had “just finished husking and digging potatoes. I had about 150 bushels of potatoes and about 1000 bushels ears corn. I had about 200 bushels wheat.”^[78] One of the most remarkable features of the Ranney brothers’ letters is the apparent obligation the brothers felt to stay in touch, even decades after they had all gone their separate ways. In spite of his illness, Lucius began this letter to Henry with an apology for not writing sooner that was typical of the brothers’ correspondence. “It is been so long since I have written to you that I am at a loss to know what to write first,” Lucius wrote. “It is been some two years since I have written to you, and on the other hand you cannot boast much of writing to me that time and for my part I feel ashamed that such a state of things should have occurred, but so it is.” There is no reason to believe the Ranneys were unique in this feeling; western archives are full of evidence of correspondence and visiting between extended families, friends, and even old neighbors from back east. Nineteenth-century Americans, at least in the Yankee West, were much more connected than history sometimes gives them credit for being. Perhaps we discount the connectedness of rural Americans in this period because, as historian Susan E. Gray has observed, the historiography of the Yankee migrations is complicated by the story Yankees created for themselves “coeval” with settlement, and by “an interpretation that reigned from the 1890s to about 1950, to which the works of Frederick Jackson Turner are central.”^[79]

The next peppermint harvest was affected by drought and also by the Civil War. Lawrence wrote to Henry in September 1862: “Of 14 acres I got but about 142 lbs oil and 4 acres of that was new mint. We are holding our oil at 22/- [$2.75] per lb.” Three men from New York were in the fields, Lawrence wrote, and “they offer[ed] 20/- [$2.50] and the rise for oil,” but the farmers were holding out for a better offer. “The war is causing some excitement here,” Lawrence added. “Every young man has enlisted that is able to carry a musket. Drafting is soon expected here.”^[80] Henry offered Lawrence’s oil to Goodwin at twenty-five shillings, or $3.125, a pound. “The practice of those Yorkers (Hotchkiss &c.),” he explained, “is usually to offer or make a stipulated price, and grant the seller the advantage of the rise for a few months. They make such offers this year.”^[81] Goodwin dragged his feet, possibly hoping for a lower price. By the time he gave Henry his order a month later, Lawrence had sold his peppermint oil and reported there was none left for sale in the region.^[82]

Henry contacted Lawrence early in the 1863 season, and by the end of August Goodwin had agreed “to engage about 200 lbs oil peppt.” This time, Goodwin wrote, “I am willing to pay the market price, but wish to secure it so that it should not this time slip through my fingers.”^[83] The following year, wartime inflation and drought combined to drive prices to levels that had not been seen since the early days of peppermint growing. “There is no established price,” Lawrence wrote in September 1864. “Those having any amount are holding at from $8.00 to $10 per lb. The crop is not ¼ of a yield to what we have formerly raised. . . . I had but 120 lbs from 20 acres of land. . . . I say to you if you want what I have, 120 lbs at $6.00 per lb, you may have it.”^[84] Lawrence also wrote that he planned to hold his five-hundred-bushel wheat harvest “until next Spring. If gold should advance much more, wheat will, which the prospects looks favorable for gold to advance still more yet.”^[85] Peppermint farmers were well aware of the risks and opportunities presented by inflation in the Civil War’s greenback economy, as we will see in greater detail soon.

After the wartime price spike, Henry’s interest in the peppermint oil business waned. In 1867, Lawrence reported that oil was scarce because the crop had been winter-killed, and Henry bought just twenty pounds for Goodwin.^[86] The following September, Henry bought two hundred pounds for three dollars a pound.^[87] He also heard from his son Ralph, who had survived his Civil War service in the 34th Massachusetts Regiment and had taken up peddling.^[88] Ralph wrote from Northfield, Vermont, while peddling in the Connecticut River Valley. “I can’t think of anything that will impress one of the greatness of our country,” Ralph said, “[more] than to travel mile after mile by rail in a state like this and then look at the United States map and compare distances.”^[89] A few weeks later, Ralph wrote again: “A man was run over by the cars near the Depot at the crossing last night and his leg and arm cut off and otherwise badly mangled. He is yet alive. He was intoxicated at the time. Is now sober!”^[90]

Henry effectively retired from the peppermint oil business when he was elected for a second time in 1868 to represent Ashfield in the Boston legislature.^[91] Goodwin approached Henry for more peppermint oil late in the 1868 season, and Lawrence responded to Henry’s inquiry, “I am out of the business at present. . . . I find I can get you two cans of oil 40 lbs at $4.75.”^[92] Although also nearly out of the business, Henry brokered a final deal, selling Lawrence’s oil to Goodwin for $5.50 per pound.^[93]

In August 1869, Lemuel Ranney wrote to Henry: “We buried our mother a week ago today. She died on Saturday night August 7 at 11 o’clock, entirely conscious and able to talk up to the last moment. . . . I suppose you know mother’s age. It was 80 years three months and 27 days.”^[94] Born in 1789, Achsah Sears Ranney saw remarkable changes in her lifetime. A pioneer settler of western New York, in later life she took advantage of the transportation revolution to travel regularly by rail between her children’s homes in Massachusetts, New York, and Michigan. After her death, as the Ranney brothers aged, their letters became less frequent and more filled with news of the deaths of family and friends. In 1877, Alonzo Franklin Ranney wrote to Henry from Phelps: “I think sometimes of selling my farm in order to get rid of so many tears and hard work. But just now it would be hard disposing of it except at a sacrifice.” Alonzo invited his brother to visit: “It will be 20 years this fall since you are out here.”^[95]

An element of the Ranney letters that should not escape notice is that throughout the decades of their correspondence the brothers never addressed religion or wrote to each other about faith. Even events like their mother’s death and the jarring loss of Henry’s wife and Lucius’s young daughter never elicited an expression of religious sentiments. The Ranneys all seem to have shared their uncle Samuel’s secularism; if not in the affirmative sense of Samuel’s materialism, at least in their apparent lack of interest in religion. They lived in the “burned-over” district of western New York while the fires of the Second Great Awakening were raging but were apparently untouched by the flames. Perhaps historical accounts of the overwhelming influence of religion on rural American society are overstated.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the Ranney brothers began to die. In early 1881, Anson Ranney wrote to Henry, “I have sometimes thought that we would hardly know how many there were left of us, if we did not write each other and find out how many were living in how many dead.” Anson related the details of the recent death of their brother Lewis. “Sarah [his widow] still lives on the place and Everett our boy is going to work it this summer.”^[96]

Anson closed his letter to Henry with an invitation to “[you] and your wife to come out here to Mich on a visit. I would so much like to have you come and make us all a long visit. We ought to write each other oftener than we do.” Harrison Ranney wrote in 1885 from Clearwater, Minnesota, with news of cousins and old neighbors.^[97] In early 1886, Lemuel Ranney wrote, “I come to you with sad news. Brother Anson died last Wednesday after a short illness of one week. . . . He says I intended to write to Henry today but I don’t feel able to and probably never shall again. I went up again on Tuesday morning and stayed with him until he died Wednesday about 11 o’clock.” Lemuel also passed along information on the health of the surviving brothers and the death of Frederick, the son of their cousin Samuel Ranney. “I saw his son Frederick in Detroit about two months ago,” Lemuel wrote. “I also saw Charlie Hathaway [Lucretia’s husband] who is city inspector of buildings in Detroit.”

In 1893, Henry wrote a long letter to the editor of the Phelps Citizen, in answer to an inquiry regarding the Massachusetts peppermint oil business. He narrated the introduction of peppermint to Ashfield by Samuel Ranney, its transportation to Phelps by Archibald Burnett, and the migrations of the Ranneys to Phelps. After more than a thousand words, Henry remarked: “I find I have written more than I intended, but have been led on by personal interest with regard to the mint business, for in my youthful days I assisted my father in its cultivation and distillation, and later, during the 25 years that I was in the mercantile business. I manufactured and sold thousands of gallons of essences—mostly at wholesale rates in supplying peddlers.^[98]

Henry Ranney died on January 23, 1899, at eighty-one years of age. Although he had been a Free-Soil abolitionist and a key figure in the essence-peddling and peppermint oil businesses, the obituary in the local newspaper remembered him primarily for the unprecedented fifty years he had served as Ashfield’s town clerk.^[99] His two wives and five children all predeceased Henry, but four grandchildren and his brothers Alonzo Franklin in New York, Lemuel in Michigan, and Harrison in Minnesota survived him and carried the Ranney family legacy into the twentieth century.

The history of the Ranney family’s involvement in the western expansion of the peppermint business illustrates the important role played by family networks in rural commerce. Although nineteenth-century economic changes tended to decrease the importance of personal loyalty and kinship networks, especially in cities, the close ties maintained by the rural Ranneys and their associates gave them a competitive advantage against rivals lacking these secure networks. Next, we turn our attention to the Hotchkiss brothers, Hiram and Leman, who were the first Americans to declare themselves peppermint kings. Although their activities overlapped with those of the Ranneys, the Hotchkisses struggled throughout their careers with the limits of trust, both with strangers and with close family members.