and Edible Memory: The Lure of Heirloom Tomatoes and other Forgotten Foods. She lives in Milwaukee, where she and her husband grow hops in their backyard.
Jordan applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, Beer Ghosts: In Search of Lost Hops and the Women Who Grew Them, and shared the following:
From page 99:Learn more about Beer Ghosts at the University of Chicago Press website.Profits on the family’s hops more than doubled from 1866 to 1867, when the household harvested an impressive 13,249 pounds and netted a rollicking $4,613, even after shelling out hundreds of dollars to pay, feed, and transport thirty-two women for hop picking. I know they were women because Silas lists the entry for the cost of feeding them as boarding “pickers + men,” the men being those who were hired to pull hop poles and tend the boxes.I did not expect the Page 99 Test to work so well, but it worked perfectly. Page 99 places women’s work front and center, and we see Ella Seymour, the young hop picker whose diary is a through line of the book, in her own words. The page also reveals one of the book’s major findings, something I did not go looking for but that became unmistakable in the archival record: The work of women, as hop pickers and as the hostesses of those hop pickers, made the hop boom possible, and provided the great breweries of the day with the hops they needed to meet the ever-growing demand for beer.
Pickers were essential to the profitability of the hop-growing enterprise, and wives like Mary Ann were essential to the success of the picking because of the quantity of work required to host all those people—they provided the “room and good board” necessary to attract the right quantity and quality of pickers. The Seymours hosted hop pickers over a decade or more, but the thirty-two pickers of 1867 might have been their biggest year. Mary Ann would have been in charge of the work of hosting them. Daughters Ella and Ida would have been around fourteen and twelve years old, respectively, grown enough to be helpful. Ella accomplished all these chores, and picking and tying hops, with more physical challenges than her sister because of having been born with kyphosis, a strong curvature of her spine…
At some point in the 1860s, Silas even added an extra kitchen onto his house to make space for the cooking required for the annual hop harvest…
Throughout this book I try to convey this history both at the ground level, essentially from inside a single farmhouse, and from a birds-eye view. Ella’s diary allows me that glimpse into the farmhouse, and one family’s experience of hop-growing. I pair that unique account with other sources like historical newspapers, and a database I created from the handwritten agricultural census records that includes 4,000 Wisconsin hop farmers. As I write elsewhere in the book, “the small gets us to the big. These figures in the census or the hop reports in newspapers translated into millions of hop cones, each picked by hand from the lengthy bines, and thousands of straw ticks, pillowcases, and dinner plates. Far-off beer drinkers shaped the rhythms of these families and the land around them.” The story of Ella, and of her mother and sister, is also the story of the rise of 19th century beer and its much more famous brewers.
-Marshal Zeringue
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