DYNAMIC REFLECTIONS OF CAPITALISM AND CLASS IDENTITY AT THE PENNS NECK COMMUNITY: AN ANALYSIS OF THE PERSISTENCE OF DUTCH-AMERICAN TRADITIONS ON FAMILY-OPERATED FARMS AT PENNS NECK, MERCER COUNTY, NEW JERSEY

Recent archaeological investigations conducted at Penns Neck, a community originally established by the descendants of Dutch immigrants in northern Mercer County, New Jersey, revealed evidence of prosperous late-colonial and post-revolutionary family networks extending from the mid eighteenth to the twentieth century. The presence of domestic residences and family-owned farming operations at Penns Neck, including those at the Schenk-Jewell farmhouse and the Covenhoven-Silvers-Logan house, provide the opportunity to examine the development of late eighteenth and nineteenth century rural communities, particularly with Dutch-heritage backgrounds, and to help explore the nuanced link between traditions utilized by farming households and larger institutional and socio-economic systems that operated within these farming communities. The research question addressed by this thesis is: what were the traditional elements of cultural identity embraced by Dutch communities, especially at Penns Neck, and how were traditions changed and adapted to the pursuit of capitalistic enterprises and ideologies. Using a Marxist approach coupled with ideas from world systems theory, analysis of consumption patterns, landscape design, and class relations can peer into the economic and social realities transpiring at these sites exposing ties to larger governing, and invisible, networks of power expressed within the community. Patterns of consumption, wealth distribution, and labor relations at Penns Neck show an intermeshing of traditional values and ideas that both resist and sway to general socio-economic pressures and circumstances emerging across the region. Spatial and temporal analysis of artifacts, architectural forms, and landscape development show clear attempts by the capitalist farmers to naturalize/solidify their place within the social-economic order, in which symbols supporting capitalistic ideologies were ingrained in the landscape. This contrasts with earlier community members that used social institutions outside the farm to raise social and political capital, rather than solely economic capital, in the community to climb and hold positions of the social hierarchy. Despite the profound changes occurring on the landscape during the occupation of the site by the Schenck and Jewell families, some traditions remain, including the use of value systems and institutions, material culture by type, and symbols that reflect the family’s Dutch ethnic heritage. At large, the study follows Wurst and Mrozowski (2016) that capitalism in not a fixed entity, but a dynamic and multi-faceted totality that both shapes and conforms to the society that embraces it, even at the community level; the cultural expression of agrarian families on the Penns Neck landscape help depict and provide an example of the dynamic nature of capitalism from the eighteenth to the twentieth century and the nuanced experience that emerging capitalistic institutions and pursuits had on the day-to-day lives of the community members. The archaeological data collected for the analysis was largely acquired during the Phase II site evaluation of the Schenk-Jewell Farm Site (28ME408), Covenhoven-Silvers-Logan House Site (28ME410), and Lower Harrison Street Domestic Site (28ME413) by the Ottery Group during the summer and winter of 2021, which yielded an artifact assemblage dating as early as the mid-eighteenth century extending across multiple family generations up to the twentieth century. The archaeological investigation revealed evidence of the original location of the main houses and multiple structural features associated with the former outbuildings in the adjacent work yards. Historical documentation, including state land records, census and tax records, deeds and wills, maps and aerials, and historic photos, were analyzed, to contextualize the archaeological data and the family histories in a way that addresses the themes of this thesis. Archaeological sites, located in both Old World and New World contexts, that were identified during the literature review were compared in an attempt to identify Dutch-American cultural patterns present across the sites. While the analysis was successful in tracing certain elements of Dutch cultural continuity, that is in the occurrence of ceramic types and architectural forms, of the early families settling at Penns Neck, these traditions were challenged and refitted to accommodate the needs of emerging farming operations, which attempted to capitalize on the connection of Penns Neck into a wider regional economy during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.