“Next to loving, I suppose that eating is the most fascinating as well as the most deadly form of indoor sport practiced in America, or anywhere. Perhaps I should have placed eating first, for many folks have dyspepsia so badly that they have forgotten how to love and are so disagreeable that no one loves them either.”
— The Barter Lady: A Woman Farmer Sees It Through
According to Evelyn Harris herself, she had a reputation among the seasonal farm workers of Kent County: “Miss Eveline sure feeds you well.” Harris had learned some of her recipes from her mother-in-law, Margaret Harris (nee Grier) who, like her, was originally from Baltimore but moved to the Eastern Shore to become a “farmer’s wife.”
Evelyn was born Mary Evelyn Bockmiller in 1884 to Charles Howard and Jessie H. Bockmiller. Her family lived at 1500 E Lafayette in Baltimore City. At age 10, Evelyn later said, she had “helped to build the Methodist Church at North avenue and Caroline street by selling homemade candy.” In later years, she would describe childhood summers spent selling snowballs with syrups made from flavorings and cornstarch. Her product, she recalled in 1918, had been “about as good as ice cream.”
She graduated from Eastern Female High School in 1903. The Baltimore Sun regularly mentioned her name in relation to musical performances. Her 1906 wedding engagement announcement said she had been a music teacher for “a number of years.” Evelyn had been attending the Peabody Conservatory, but halted her musical education to marry a Kent County farmer named Arthur Livingston Harris. After moving to the Eastern Shore, Evelyn played organ at Betterton Methodist Church, which shared pastors with nearby Still Pond Methodist Church. Still Pond Methodist produced the cookbook that this recipe came from, and that church cemetery is where Evelyn and her husband are buried. Arthur came from a prominent farming family. His own father, whose parents had moved to Maryland from Delaware in 1838, was “one of the pillars of the Methodist Church in the village of Still Pond,” according to a 1914 obituary in the Kent News of Chestertown.
Evelyn was an outspoken woman who used her position as a farmer’s wife to engage local papers with many letters and, eventually, impassioned columns. In 1914 she wrote an article in the Country Gentleman magazine touting the benefits of a Home Economics course she’d taken at a state college. There, she’s learned about new devices like a vacuum cleaner. She’d learned about bacteria in the kitchen, and thermometer readings for safety. She’d also learned about how store-bought preserves contained artificial ingredients, and about the science of bread-rising. Her friends, she said, were astonished that she would enroll in a home economics course. “You [know] how to cook as well as anyone around here!,” they told her, and she happily conceded that she did in fact know how to cook well, but that “perhaps [she] could learn how to do it more easily.”
A 1918 article in the Country Gentleman went into great detail about the canning business that Evelyn operated out of Howell’s Point, the farm she ran with her husband. In that article, Evelyn gave her interviewer, Maude Radford Warren, more information than she probably asked for, and emphasized that her husband was “her business partner.” A 1915 ad in the Sun mentioned jams, jellies, and eggs for sale, delivered from Howells Point. Later ads mention Christmas trees, and fruit – especially pears. Around 1928, Howells Point was one of the largest pear tree orchards in the eastern United States.
Evelyn’s many letters and columns attempted to educate readers on the plight of farmers. She complained of being asked to reduce production while producers of “synthetic butter, imitation preserves, imported powdered milk, or imported powdered eggs” were not. She described the lack of access to resources and education, compared to when she’d lived in the big city. In one famous controversial column, she advocated for “plural wives” for farmers, ‘one for every 40 acres’, to spread the burden of hard work. The idea was probably meant to draw attention to the hard-working life of farm women… and almost certainly to stir the pot.
In 1923, Governor Ritchie appointed Evelyn Harris to his agricultural committee, so that her concerns could have more direct impact on policy. But not everyone was a fan of Evelyn’s ideas, or at least of her writing voice. In 1923, a Baltimore Sun reader wrote in response to one of Evelyn Harris’ columns:
“No doubt that many readers who have never had the pleasure of becoming acquainted with Mrs. Harris think she is most wonderful and eagerly await her articles as they are published from time to time, but to we poor folk dont here on the Sho’ that do happen to know her — well, it’s a joke. We think it about time for some one to put a silencer on her stuff.” The letter was signed simply and ominously, “One Who Knows.”
The 2015 book “Legendary Locals of Kent County,” by Patricia Joan O. Horsey described Mrs. Harris as “controversial and colorful.”
In 1924, Arthur Harris died. Evelyn’s voice changed from that of the “farmer’s wife,” to a widow running and managing the farm herself, scraping to get by. Evelyn supported her family by making trades – corn cobs for haircuts and chickens for a book club subscription. She became known as “The Barter Lady.”
Her collected columns from this era eventually were published in 1934 as a book, “The Barter Lady: A Woman Farmer Sees It Through.”
In May 1929 the Sun ran a full-page spread interview with Evelyn. This was before the Bay Bridge was built, and Evelyn had “now adopted the airplane as a means of advancing her farming interests.” The idea was ahead of its time, and the article exclaimed: “Just to think of having a ripe luscious Bartlett or Madame D’Anjou plopped down upon your breakfast tables right out of an orchard across the bay!” Evelyn’s son piloted the plane, which enabled them to fly directly to Baltimore to call out buyers who tried to cheat them by claiming the pears had gone bad. By 1930, Evelyn’s columns mentioned her desire to get her own pilot’s license.
The columns are full of local details, such as her family’s Chesapeake Bay water dog, “given to [her] as a puppy in trade for a bite which [the dog’s] mother took from [Evelyn’s] leg.” She reminisced about bringing the “first portable moving-picture machine” to Kent County “before the talkies had started.” She complained of the scourge of wealthy men from the city buying up farms and operating them as vanity projects.
On food she mentioned wild goose and duck, and that “most of us like to eat the little fat ‘muskrats’ as they are called in this locality, and when properly handled they are really good to eat.”
She favored homemade foods for political reasons and as a matter of taste. “Bakers’ bread has caused more divorces than have hot biscuits or hot waffles or hot rolls,” she wrote, anecdotally describing an incident in which a burglar was scared away by a can of biscuits randomly exploding.
In a typical attention-getting column, Evelyn bragged that her chicken house was made from the scaffold used to hang four of the suspects in the “famous Hill Murder,” an 1892 incident in which nine Black men and boys were accused of murdering a white doctor.
Taking wood from what amounted to a lynching wasn’t the only way that Evelyn Harris benefitted off of the suffering of Black people. Harris may have been outspoken but she was not enlightened. Her book espouses condescending, racist views on her Black neighbors, claiming they had “no idea how to stretch a dollar,” while admitting that she sometimes traded them food for chores instead of paying them money.
Although Evelyn’s writing career seemed to exemplify “rural versus urban” tensions that fomented in the early 20th century, she eventually returned to Baltimore. In 1944 she was living at 4437 Clifton Road, had just taken up study at the Peabody again, and was profiled in the Sun decrying most singer’s abilities to sing the national anthem. “High G is Low Barrier,” the headline read.
Yet another newspaper profile in 1952 called Mrs. Harris an “advocate of musical therapy,” and said that she was back at Betterton for the summer, selling sticky buns, gingerbread, coffee cake, and potato rolls.
That would be her last major newspaper profile, although, in the years leading up to her 1967 death, she continued to write to the Sun to advocate for musical therapy, complain about postal rates, and to decry the fact that a prospective hotel claimed the need of a liquor license to turn a profit. The license applicants, the Charles House Company, she wrote, had “never eaten any real honest-to-goodness Maryland crab cakes, fried chicken or hot potato rolls.” The owners of the would-be hotel “can’t imagine chicken salad with homemade salad dressing.” “Of course,” she lamented “most of their customers-to-be will not have had this pleasure either.”
I’ve only scratched the surface of Evelyns many, many strong opinions and adventures. “The Barter Lady” offers a lot of interesting insight into Eastern Shore culture at the start of the Great Depression, and a timeless slice human nature.
Recipe:
- 1 rockfish
- water
- salt
- 6 hard-boiled eggs
- 2 Tablespoons butter
- .5 Teaspoons salt
- .25 Teaspoons black pepper
- .5 Teaspoons mustard powder
- .5 Pint milk, hot
“Wrap rock in large cloth, drop in boiling salted water for about 30 minutes. Take immediately out of water, place on dish and surround with sauce made as follows : Boil hard six eggs, remove and mash fine the yolks. Add two tablespoonfuls of butter, one-half teaspoonful of salt, one-quarter teaspoonful pepper, one-half teaspoonful mustard. Have a pint of hot milk, cut whites of eggs fine and when milk begins to boil, add the other mixture, and the whites, stirring all the time to prevent lumping. When thick pour over the fish.”
Recipe from “The Eastern Shore Cook Book, of Maryland Recipes“
