The Farmer’s Almanac has always been a staple book in my grandmother’s rural North Carolina household. Before deciding when she should plant her garden or what seeds she should put in the ground, she consults the almanac. She and her friends plan the community hog-killing by the moon phases in the almanac, believing that the wrong phase of the moon could make that year’s supply of sausage and ham spoil early. Recently, I learned that even some of her family home remedies came from the almanac. If a child becomes feverish, she might tell you to put raw, sliced potatoes into their socks overnight. For a black eye, she’d suggest applying lard to heal it quickly. This made me wonder – just how deep did the influence of the almanac run?
The almanac has been popular across many communities for centuries, but its affordability made it particularly appealing to rural and lower-class populations. It appealed to both men and women through a large variety of articles. Further, it was translated into many different languages, making its readership wide-ranging and diverse. The Farmer’s Almanack garnered around 20,000 readers during the late 1790s and early 1800s; Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac attracted around 10,000 annual readers. Although there was variation by publisher, almanacs generally followed the same format: a calendar of important dates, moon phases, and weather patterns based on astrology; a set of short anecdotes or parables; and “miscellaneous” advice, remedies, maxims, and recipes. Every part of the almanac was important to its readers, but the remedies have had the most lasting influence on communities across America.
Almanacs recommended cures for a wide variety of ailments, from the relatively harmless, such as coughs and colds, to the more serious, like rheumatism and snake bites. Liquor, turpentine, tree bark, and dairy were particularly popular ingredients in home remedies. Since eighteenth- and nineteenth-century almanacs varied widely across regions and publishers, however, they very rarely suggested the same cure for an ailment.
Take, for example, two suggested remedies for burns. In 1807, the New England Almanack suggested applying brandy or rum to burns to prevent blistering and pain. Brother Jonathan’s Almanac in 1847 suggested that readers “scrape the inside of a potatoe [sic]; mix sweet-oil and turpentine, one spoonful of each. . .apply it to the burn immediately, and it will extract the heat.” From our modern day perspective, both of these so-called cures seem unlikely to have had any effect. This is certainly true in the case of using liquor for burns, but there have actually been studies on the healing properties of potatoes on burns. One 1990 study suggested that potato peels performed better than plain gauze dressings in healing burns, proving that there was some legitimacy to using a potato poultice in the nineteenth century.