'Labor Is the Great Thing in Farming': The Farm Laborers of the Ward Family of Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, 1787-1860.

The Ward Family Papers provide data on the lives of 363 men and boys who worked on the Ward farm between 1787 and 1860. These were years in which farm labor changed very little and mechanization arrived slowly. The great problem remained the retention of good laborers, who were essential to participation in the profitable commercial trade with Boston consumers. The author traces the course of generational change and its relationship to changes in the agricultural economy of central Massachusetts. Little data exists, however, for the years after 1832.