An Annapolis silversmith and gardener

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 2003 by Alfred Mayor

William Faris, born in London in 1728, was a prosperous silversmith, clock-and watchmaker, and tavern keeper in Annapolis, Maryland, from 1756 or 1757 until his death in 1804. He was also a single-minded gardener, and it is in that in carnation that he wrote a daily diary from 1792 until a few days before he died. The diary has now been published by the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore with extensive notes identifying people and events.

Like Goethe, Faris records the weather every day and chronicles births, deaths, marriages, and illnesses in his family and in the town. But chiefly he fulfills a statistician's dream with his minute record of Brussels sprouts, cabbages, and tulips planted, harvested, and planted again.

Faris and his wife, Priscilla, had nine children, of who Faris appears to have preferred the girls to the boys, since some of the boys periodically left home in a huff. The diarist does mention these instances, though not at length, for the entries on most subjects except the garden are brief to the point of terseness. George Washington's death and the election of Thomas Jefferson to the presidency are each dismissed in one line, and Faris's own birthday (and no one else's) also merits a line a year. He is more self-indulgent about his agues, fevers, constipation, and other ills, and goes into detail about the remedies for same--among them, paregoric, laudanum, chamomile, and an otherwise unidentified bark tea.

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One of the more eloquent entries reveals Faris as a rather feisty fellow, so perhaps his sons had reason to absent themselves from time to time. On March 20, 1792, he was planting parsnips and working on asparagus beds when two girls climbed up on his fence. He told them to get down, but "the Biggest reply'd shee would not she would sett thare as long as she pleas, I told her she should get down. she replyd she would not get down for me. I told her she was an impudant slut [and] ... as I lifte my hand to put her hand off the fence she said you Impedant scoundrel tuch me if you Dare. I pushd her hand off the fence, she stept down and call'd me and Old Dog Old Dog. I told her she was a strumpit ... and I told she was an Impudant Bitch ... and she and the girl call me several approbious names."

A careful reading of the diary implies a man of eclectic interests who was handy with his hands. When he died in 1804 one of his possessions was a physiognotrace with which to make silhouettes--an ingenious device that had been developed in Philadelphia two years earlier by John Isaac Hawkins. On June 25, 1792, Faris was in the final stages of building a frame for the static electricity generator with which he zapped various ailing body parts. On July 13, 1800, for example, he was feverish, and having electrified himself, "I obtained 5 or 6 Loos stools." A more ambitious cabinetmaking project in noted in the entry for July 21, 1795, where he writes: "a very Hott day. I this day mad abegining or rather an attempt to make a forty Piano."

Faris kept bees, the gift of a local baker, which pollinated his flowers and provided honey, and he apparently kept a number of birds, for his inventory listed eleven cages. The autumn of 1793 was apparently not salubrious for his birds, since he notes the death of his "poor Mocking Bird" in the entry for October 21, and four days later "the 2 yallow Birds" died.

He smoked his own hams in his smokehouse and fed his pigs some of the peaches from his trees to make them more succulent. The balance of the peach crop became peach brandy, which he also made. He cast interesting fruits in wax, and he pressed many leaves, each carefully identified. Among them were mulberry leaves, which he also fed to the silkworms that were given to him on May 25, 1795. He put the worms and leaves on a piece of white paper in a drawer, a habitat they apparently liked, for on June 18 Faris writes: "this morning began to make a silk reel from the Dictionary of Arts & Sciences, a fine warm day." Such a reel is listed in his inventory.

The diary is preceded by informative essays on Annapolis in Faris's time, on Faris himself as a diarist, clockmaker, silversmith, and gardener, and on his many children and grandchildren. At the end of the diary there is a section of the shop drawings used by Faris, the silversmith. The editors claim that "these drawings are the only working eighteenth-century American silver shop drawings known today," although who actually drew them is not clear. One appendix contains an alphabetical discussion of the plants Faris grew in his garden, and another contains the inventory of his estate.

The Diary of William Faris: The Daily Life of an Annapolis Silversmith, ed. Jean B. Russo and Mark Letzer (Maryland Historical Society, 717-267-0867),$55.00 (hardcovers).