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Lithograph by Currier & Ives, c. 1876. Currier & Ives Collection (Courtesy photo/Library of Congress)
It’s New Year’s Eve and here in the Historic Triangle, that means it’s time to party like a Colonial American.
Not judging, but the colonists drank — and not just during the holidays.
George Washington had a distillery at Mount Vernon, according to “Drinking in Colonial America,” a 2007 article in the Colonial Williamsburg Journal. Thomas Jefferson imported alcoholic beverages from France. Benjamin Franklin gathered more than 200 synonyms for inebriated, including “addled,” “cracked,” and “halfway to Concord.”
But colonists didn’t drink alcohol to the exclusion of everything else, according to Frank Clark, master of Historic Foodways at Colonial Williamsburg. For one thing, people had to hydrate to survive the summer. And even if some wells or other public water sources came with a risk of contamination, Williamsburg had 10 to 12 clean springs for colonists to choose from.