Movement and Liminality at the Margins: The Wandering Poor in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts

Abstract

This chapter explores the social and historical processes that allowed the small piece of land at a place called “the Parting Ways” in Plymouth, Massachusetts, to become a haven for several transient families and later several free African-American families. Using the theoretical concept of liminality to guide my analysis, I examine both the practice of “warning out” poor individuals and families and the communal landholding practices of colonial Massachusetts. “Warning out” created a class of economically disadvantaged people who never fit into the rigid cultural, social, and legal boundaries of eighteenth-century Massachusetts society. And the landholding practices allowed for shifting ways to use, own, and live on land within the law. I argue here that the ability of the Parting Ways site to function as a refuge for members of society’s unfortunate was directly related to the liminal status of the property and its eventual inhabitants. The “betwixt and between” status of people and place afforded social, political, and legal flexibility and mobility that enabled the transient families to settle at Parting Ways while they remained unwanted elsewhere.