Gershom Bulkeley, “Saltbox Science,” and the Colonial New England Laboratory

Abstract

This article investigates the prolific colonial New England alchemist and physician Gershom Bulkeley (1635/36–1713) and his late seventeenth-century household laboratory. First, I provide an updated bibliography and biography of Bulkeley and then engage an assemblage of surviving commonplace and account books, inventories, a vade mecum, and several books discovered to have been previously owned by Bulkeley. In order to understand Bulkeley’s laboratory, I coin the term “saltbox science,” arguing that his work combined European textual knowledge and temporal and material adaptations within the colonial household and town. I describe first his creative flexibility in regard to the construction of laboratory furnaces that were based on designs initially gained from Europeans. Thereafter, I demonstrate how his laboratory practice was embedded within his household and his town’s temporal rhythms and material networks. Bulkeley’s “saltbox science” is meant to serve as a template for understanding a certain domestic class of seventeenth-century colonial New England alchemists who, in general, leave behind little archival evidence of their laboratory activities.

Acknowledgements

I thank Tara Nummedal for her steadfast guidance as my advisor at Brown University and Donna Bilak for first encouraging me to prioritise the Bulkeley manuscripts. I also wish to thank the many archivists in Hartford and elsewhere, most especially Jenny Miglus at the University of Connecticut and Eric Johnson-DeBaufre at Trinity College. Lastly, I would like to express gratitude to Bruce Moran for his understanding and patience throughout the editorial process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The most important texts for articulating alchemical and medical networks are by Patricia Watson and Walter Woodward. See Patricia A. Watson, The Angelic Conjunction: The Preacher-Physician of Colonial New England (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1991); Walter W. Woodward, Prospero’s America: John Winthrop, Jr., Alchemy, and the Creation of New England Culture, 1606–1676 (Williamsburg, VA: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010). Other works that have also at least tangentially addressed seventeenth-century New England experimentation largely fall within the history of alchemy. See, for instance, William R. Newman, Gehennical Fire: The Lives of George Starkey, an American Alchemist in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Donna Bilak, “Alchemy and the End Times: Revelations from the Laboratory and Library of John Allin, Puritan Alchemist,” Ambix 60, no. 4 (2013): 390–414.

2 Bulkeley receives some analysis as part of Theodore Delwiche’s study. See Theodore R. Delwiche, “Fuit Ille Non Empiricus Mercenarius: Apprehensions to Alchemy in Colonial New England,” Ambix 67, no. 4 (2020): 346–65.

3 Several major historians from this early period have written on Bulkeley, casting him as both a skilled minister and physician. See, for example, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, Universities and Their Sons: History, Influence and Characteristics of American Universities, with Biographical Sketches and Portraits of Alumni and Recipients of Honorary Degrees (Boston: Herndon Company, 1898),or Walter R. Steiner, “The Reverend Gershom Bulkeley of Connecticut, an Eminent Clerical Physician,” Medical Library and Historical Journal 2, no. 2 (1904).

4 Thomas Jodziewicz, A Stranger in the Land: Gershom Bulkeley of Connecticut (Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical Society, 1988).

5 Woodward, Prospero’s America.

6 Donna Bilak, “Gershom Bulkeley (1635–1713): A Sensory Chymist in Colonial Connecticut,” The Recipes Project (blog), 19 April 2018, https://recipes.hypotheses.org/tag/donna-bilak.

7 Delwiche, “Fuit Ille Non Empiricus Mercenarius.”

8 Unless otherwise noted, details in this biography are summarised from Jodziewicz, A Stranger in the Land.

9 Other scholars have noted how the Bulkeleys generationally maintained positions of power in New England. See, for instance, James M. Poteet, “A Homecoming: The Bulkeley Family in New England,” The New England Quarterly 47, no. 1 (1974): 30–50. The Bulkeleys also had prominence in later centuries with one descendent, Morgan Bulkeley, serving as the governor of the state of Connecticut from 1889–1893.

10 Jodziewicz, A Stranger in the Land: Gershom Bulkeley of Connecticut, 14.

11 The confusion with Glastonbury stems also from Bulkeley’s complex relationship with his daughter Dorothy Treat. Increasingly in the years leading up to his death in 1713, Bulkeley, a widower from 1699 onward, visited his daughter Treat at her home in Glastonbury. Scattered evidence from his account books and elsewhere suggest that his visits after 1700 grew more extended, likely due to a combination of his age and illness. As he resided more and more in Glastonbury under his daughter’s care, his place of residence became muddled in the handful of surviving documents from this decade. The home that he purchased in 1683 was, however, not given to his son Edward until April of 1712, just one year before Bulkeley died. He was buried at the top of a prominent hill in the Wethersfield burial grounds, where his tabletop grave can still be located today, not in Glastonbury alongside his daughter Treat and her husband. His reputation by that time, grown from his laboratory and the thousands he had treated, assured the public’s remembrance of him as a “Brave Chymist.” See On the Death of the Very Learned, Pious and Excelling Gershom Bulkley, Esq. M.D. Who Had His Mortality Swallowed up of Life, December the Second. Aetatis Suae, 78 (New London, CT: Printed by T. Green, 1714): https://www.loc.gov/item/rbpe.00300200/ (accessed 1 July 2019).

12 Gershom Bulkeley Probate Records (Microfilm, 1713), Hartford Probate District, Connecticut State Library, fig. 613.

13 The property’s history can be traced through various owner’s hands in Sherman W. Adams, The History of Ancient Wethersfield, Connecticut, ed. Henry R. Stiles, vol. 1 (New York, NY: Grafton Press, 1904), 294, 83, 50, 313.

14 Peter Bulkeley and Gershom Bulkeley, Account Book 1680–1697, Call no. 02077, Connecticut Historical Society, 131 Right.

15 Adams, The History of Ancient Wethersfield, Connecticut, vol 1, 192.

16 Gershom Bulkeley Probate Records, fig. 611.

17 For more on the Starkey and his textual double, see Newman, Gehennical Fire: The Lives of George Starkey, An American Alchemist in the Scientific Revolution.

18 Bruce D. White and Walter W. Woodward, “‘A Most Exquisite Fellow’ – William White and an Atlantic World Perspective on the Seventeenth Century Chymical Furnace,” Ambix 54, no. 3 (2007): 287.

19 White and Woodward, “A Most Exquisite Fellow,” 287.

20 Woodward, Prospero’s America, 42.

21 Quoted in White and Woodward, “‘A Most Exquisite Fellow’,” 291.

22 White and Woodward, “‘A Most Exquisite Fellow’,” 291–92.

23 In contrast, most of the ten Glauber books listed within Bulkeley’s posthumous inventory do not include a title. For a full listing, see Jodziewicz, A Stranger in the Land, 73–94.

24 Despite this Bulkeley reference, Glauber’s work is not present amongst the currently recovered Bulkeley texts at Trinity College, Hartford, CT. For the reference, see Gershom Bulkeley, MS #7, Gershom Bulkeley Collection, Hartford Medical Society Library Collection, Watkinson Library, Trinity College, 159.

25 Gershom Bulkeley, MS #1, Gershom Bulkeley Collection, Hartford Medical Society Library Collection, Watkinson Library, Trinity College, 411.

26 Gershom Bulkeley, Vade Mecum (1705), Gershom Bulkeley Collection, Box 1, Watkinson Library, Trinity College, 97.

27 Bulkeley, MS #1, 414, 421.

28 Gershom Bulkeley Probate Records, fig. 610.

29 Gershom Bulkeley, MS #18, Gershom Bulkeley Collection, Hartford Medical Society Library Collection, Watkinson Library, Trinity College, 221.

30 Bulkeley, MS #18, 239.

31 Bulkeley, MS #18, 244.

32 Gershom Bulkeley, Folio, Gershom Bulkeley Collection, Box 1, Watkinson Library, Trinity College, 10.

33 Bulkeley, MS #18, 239–40.

34 J. Frederick Kelly, The Early Domestic Architecture of Connecticut (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1924), 65.

35 Peter Bulkeley and Gershom Bulkeley, Account Book 1680–1697, call no. 02077, Connecticut Historical Society, 54 Right. In these references, left and right are used in place of the traditional use of credit and debt as these are highly misleading in the Bulkeley account books: Bulkeley crowds credit and debt entries onto each page with frequent breaks in organisation.

36 Bulkeley and Bulkeley, 54 Right.

37 Gershom Bulkeley Probate Records, fig. 610.

38 Gershom Bulkeley Probate Records, fig. 610.

39 Gershom Bulkeley Probate Records, fig. 611. On early modern paper use, see Elaine Leong, “Papering the Household: Paper, Recipes, and Everyday Technologies in Early Modern England,” in Working with Paper: Gendered Practices in the History of Knowledge, ed. Carla Bittel, Elaine Leong, and Christine von Oertzen (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), 32–45.

40 Bulkeley, Vade Mecum, 96.

41 Bulkeley, Vade Mecum, 86.

42 The work of William Newman and Lawrence Principe on George Starkey is most directly relevant. See Alchemy Tried in the Fire: Starkey, Boyle, and the Fate of Helmontian Chymistry (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

43 For more on Starkey’s brief period as an experimentalist in Massachusetts Bay, see William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe, eds., George Starkey: Alchemical Laboratory Notebooks and Correspondence (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

44 Gershom Bulkeley, MS #5 (1703–1706), Gershom Bulkeley Collection, Hartford Medical Society Library Collection, Watkinson Library, Trinity College.

45 Frances Phipps, Colonial Kitchens, Their Furnishings, and Their Gardens (New York, NY: Hawthorn Books, 1972), 99.

46 Bulkeley, Vade Mecum, 29.

47 Bulkeley, Vade Mecum, 64.

48 Bulkeley, Vade Mecum, 69.

49 Bulkeley, Vade Mecum, 86.

50 Bulkeley, Vade Mecum, 87.

51 Bulkeley, Vade Mecum, 96.

52 Gershom Bulkeley, “Letter from Gershom Bulkeley to Michael Saltonstall,” February 25, 1701, Winthrop Papers, Reel 16, January 1702–August 1704, Massachusetts Historical Society.

53 Bulkeley, MS #5, 1.

54 Bulkeley, MS #5, 1.

55 Bulkeley, MS #5, 1.

56 Bulkeley, Vade Mecum, 84.

57 Bulkeley, Vade Mecum, 70.

58 Bulkeley, Vade Mecum, 43.

59 Bulkeley, Vade Mecum, 26–27.

60 Bulkeley, Vade Mecum, 100–101.

61 Bulkeley, Vade Mecum, 211.

62 Bulkeley, Vade Mecum, 32, 40.

63 Bulkeley, Vade Mecum, 121.

64 Bilak, “Gershom Bulkeley (1635–1713): A Sensory Chymist in Colonial Connecticut.”

65 Rampling ties this term to the philosophers’ stone. However, here the phenomenon is used in a broader sense for alchemical efforts writ large. See Jennifer M. Rampling, The Experimental Fire: Inventing English Alchemy, 1300–1700 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 7. For further discussion on this complex process of reading and laboratory practice, see Tara Nummedal, “Words and Works in the History of Alchemy,” Isis 102, no. 2 (2011): 330–37.

66 Johann Zwelfer, Pharmacopoeia Regia (Nuremberg: Michael & Johann Fredrich Endter, 1668) in Watkinson Library, Trinity College, call no. Cage Quarto 615.1 Z97p.

67 William Salmon, Doron Medicum (London: T. Dawks, T. Bassett, J. Wright, and R. Chiswell., 1683) in Watkinson Library, Trinity College, call no. Watk. Cage 615 S17, 455.

68 Johann Rudolf Glauber, Pharmacopoea Spagyrica (Amsterdam: Jan Jansson, 1654) in Watkinson Library, Trinity College, call no. Watk. Cage 540.1 G55 v.5, blank leaf.

69 N[ota] sed Q[uaestio] de sala p[ro]prio. Werner Rolfinch, Chimia in Artis Formam Redacta, Sex Libris Comprehensa (Geneva: Samuel Krebs, 1662) in Watkinson Library, Trinity College, call no. Watk. Cage 540 R74, 160.

70 Johann Seger Weidenfeld, Four Books of Johannes Segerus Weidenfeld, Concerning the Secrets of the Adepts (London: Will Bonny, for Tho. Howkins, 1685) in Watkinson Library, Trinity College, call no. Watk. Cage 540.1 W41, 100.

71 Bulkeley, Vade Mecum, 204.

72 Although Bulkeley dates the vade mecum to suggest its completion, several dozen later pages on further recipes and life events follow as addenda. Bulkeley, 289.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by short-term fellowships provided by the Science History Institute and Linda Hall Library.

Notes on contributors

George D. Elliott

George D. Elliott is a history lecturer at Purdue University Northwest, Hammond, United States. He has been a fellow at the Science History Institute, Linda Hall Library, and Brown University’s Centre for Digital Scholarship. He received his PhD in history from Brown University in 2022, and his dissertation and current work focuses on understanding the social history of colonial New England science, alchemy, and medicine. Email: [email protected]; [email protected]