Place of Origin

United States ➔ Pennsylvania

Date of Composition

1830

Description

Naomi McClenachan Morris (1811-1893) inherited Harriton, a vast estate outside Philadelphia, at the age of six weeks, upon the death of her father. She married Levi Morris in 1830. The couple had six children, three of whom lived to adulthood. They lived in Philadelphia until 1840 and then moved to Harriton. After her husband's death in 1868, Naomi ran the estate's farms and mills with the help of her sons-in-law and brothers-in-law.

Harriton stood on 700-acre property first settled by a Rowland Ellis, a Welsh Quaker, in 1696, who named it Bryn Mawr. Ellis's original mansion house, built in 1704, still stands and is now a museum. The estate was bought by Richard Harrison, a Maryland tobacco farmer, in 1719, who renamed it Harriton and operated it as one of the largest slave plantations in the North. Slavery had long since been abolished at Harriton by the time Naomi and her husband occupied the property, but, as a Quaker lady, she remained sensitive to its slaveholding past to the end of her life.

Apparently, like many brides, the nineteen-year-old Naomi McClenachan Morris found herself in need of recipes, for her cookbook is dated 1830, the same year as her marriage.