Lydia Dyar: NOT an Enemy to Her Country

Boston Gazette and Country Journal, 28 March 1774 via America's Historical Newspapers

Lydia Dyar, whose flamboyantly patriotic gravestone in Billerica is the subject of the essay I am working on at the moment, was a small-scale merchant. Nearly every spring between 1760 and 1774, she advertised in the Boston newspapers, touting her new stock of imported garden seeds. At her shop in the North End of Boston, customers could find a variety of vegetable seeds — cabbage, spinach, carrot, turnip, lettuce, cucumber, squash, cauliflower, pea — along with beans, herbs, and flowers.

Even during the height of the nonimportation crisis, the Widow Dyar continued to buy seeds from London and Messrs. Edes and Gill of the Gazette, strong Whigs both, continued to run her ads. Unlike the unfortunate Cummings sisters, whose business activities attracted the ire of a tar-and-feather-wielding mob in October of 1769, Lydia Dyar and the other seed sellers of Boston went unmolested. The March 6, 1769 issue of the Boston Gazette carried five seed sellers (Lydia Dyar, Abigail Davidson, Elizabeth Greenleaf, Bethiah Oliver, and Susanna Renken), all of whom advertised their wares as imports. A year later, when tempers were running high over the Boston Massacre, Dyar omitted the word "imported" from her ad, though two other sellers (Davidson and Renkin) still advertised their seeds as "Imported in the last ship from London" (Boston Gazette, 9 April 1770).

Name of the Day: Sweeten Reed

Mr. Sweeten Reed lost £200 in real estate during the Boston fire of 1760:

He (or a son with the same name) went on to marry a woman named Anna and had at least one child.