I got high for the first time in my life in April of 1991 at the age of 25. Immediately after that I started reading High Times magazine and learned a startling story. They were often running articles about Jack Herer and his book, The Emperor Wears No Clothes. They talked about how hemp had such a long history in this country and around the world, how we used to make clothing and rope and canvass and many other products out of hemp. I read those stories for a few years and I became fascinated by them. In 1993 I was arrested, set up to sell a half ounce to a friend. That sparked a nine month battle that ended with me declared not guilty because of entrapment. Then I got arrested again when they came into my cousins apartment without a warrant and got me for having about enough weed to stuff a bowl with. I won that court case too because of the fact they didnt have a warrant. I spent a night in jail for a crime that they would later drop the charges on. So I was feeling beat down and in that broken state I found out the truth about this plant and our long history with hemp. In April of 94 I met Jack Herer in person and I bought his book the same day. I was blown away. Jack laid it all out, tracing hemp back through its ancient beginnings, its spread throughout Europe, Asia, America and the world, showing its historical uses and great potential for the future. I became a Jack Herer disciple, basically. One thing that particularly interested me is that in the beginning of his book he said that wherever there were major hemp growing regions in America there were towns named after hemp. He mentioned Hempfield Township in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. (Now divided into East and West Hempfield townships.) I am from Ephrata, Pennsylvania, just about 20 miles away from the Hempfield. We used to wrestle them when I was in high school. I had never even stopped to consider What is a hemp field? I dont remember ever hearing of hemp in my life before until 1991 or so. I figured it was probably true but I wasnt sure. Here was a story that seemed to blow the lid off of history as we knew it. I thought, if this is true then why havent I heard of it? Why is this information not generally known? I thought that if it WAS true then there must be evidence to back this up. I resolved that one day I was going to get to the bottom of this. After I got arrested in 93 (with the trial in 94) and arrested in 94 (with the trial in 95) I was flung into poverty. It cost me over $5,000 to win and back in those days I only brought home about $180 take home. They took my license from me for 6 months because even though I was found not guilty of delivery I could not say that I didnt at least possess it so they found me guilty of possession. From 1995 to 1997 I lived in poverty and depression without even a car to get around in. Finally in early March of 1997 I had gotten on my feet enough to buy a cheap car and immediately, on that first night, I drove into the Lancaster Historical Society to begin my research. Earlier in the day I had gone to the Landis Valley Museum in Manheim Twp. and learned that they had several hemp millstones in their collection and they said that in 1810 there were twenty hemp mills in Lancaster County. I was blown away by that fact. I went into the historical society and determined to read everything that had ever been written on the local historical hemp industry. I wanted to know everything about those mills - who owned them, the years they were in operation, how they worked and everything related to the entire industry. I found three items that provided some information but I quickly found that almost nothing had ever been written about the local hemp industry or Pennsylvania hemp in general. There was no one place that I could look to find where those hemp mills were. After a couple months I had a pile of information already but most were just quotes of a few sentences or a couple of paragraphs that indicated that hemp was once widely grown here but not a lot of specifics. Until I started my research almost no one knew anything at all about the historical Pennsylvania hemp industry. It had simply been forgotten and all but erased from our collective memory. Carter Litchfield had written a small book called Early Pennsylvania Hemp Mills. He focused in on what he was able to find out about a few hemp mills. He told of an articled from a 1928 edition of the Lancaster County newspaper called Hemp and the Early Hemp Mills of Lancaster County, which up to that time had been the most extensive piece dealing with the history of the hemp industry here. He also helped author a book called The Bethlehem Oil Mill, which also gave good information about the hemp and oil mill there owned by the Moravians who kept extensive records. But what of those 20 hemp mills in Lancaster County? Where were THOSE, thats what I wanted to know. I read everything ever written about the old mills of Lancaster by at least a half dozen serious scholars who had researched all of our old mills. They had focused on grist mills and saw mills though and for some reason or another barely mentioned the hemp mills. Arthur Lord for example in his book Water-Powered Grist Mills of Lancaster County gives history of like over 250 mills. Out of all of them he mentions 13 hemp mills throughout the history of the county. Other mill researchers also mentioned a few hemp mills but I still could only come up with around 13 or so hemp mills, which was pretty cool in itself. Finally I spent weeks in a row of 8 hour days at the historical society looking through rolls of microfiche at old tax assessment records from around the 1750s until around 1840. There were often gaps of 5-8 years in the tax assessment records of each township. The years that existed often times gave scant data and were only the partial returns of the townships because the records had been damaged and were missing. They were all handwritten in old colonial script. So what I was looking at were the incomplete, fragmentary remains of only snapshots of our history but some of those years they gave great information. They told how many acres of land a person owned, how many horses, chickens and cows they had, what buildings were on the land, if they owned a mill and if so, what type of mill it was. Since nobody else would tell me where those hemp mills were I would find them myself on the tax records. As I delved into the tax assessment records, township by township, person by person, year by year a starling picture started to emerge - that this industry was larger than anybody had ever imagined it to be! By the time it was over I had the names of 112 men who owned hemp mills in Lancaster County! 112 men, who the evidence clearly shows as owning hemp mills even though only fragmentary snapshots of incomplete information is available! Plus, I found other hemp mills that were documented even though no records exist for them. All in all, I documented 108 hemp mills in the county. (There are less mills than names because they often passed through multiple hands.) Often the other mill researchers mentioned so and sos mill and said that he owned a grist mill and saw mill at this particular location. When I looked at the tax records, yep, theres the grist mill and the saw mill and there, clear as day and written just as plainly and boldly is the hemp mill. Why did they leave the hemp mills out in almost all cases? Was it intentional? Were they embarrassed? Was it too scary to talk about hemp? What was the deal here? It turns out that not only was E. and W. Hempfield named for the Vast quantities of hemp raised there but they grew it just as much in every corner of the county, or wherever there were people, basically. The hemp mills were in and around Columbia, Mt. Joy, Elizabethtown, Marietta, Manheim, Lititz, Rothsville, Akron, Ephrata, Denver, Bowmansville, New Holland, Strasburg, Paradise, Bird-In-Hand, Intercourse, Lancaster, Quarryville, Clay, Millersville, Churchtown, Leola, Ronks - you name it - they were everywhere all over the county! And nobody even knew they existed! After my search in Lancaster I went to the York County Historical Society and did the same thing, investigating the tax records and found three dozen hemp mills in that county. Then I went to Berks County Historical Society and looked through their records, which were even more scant and written in German until the 1780s making all that previous knowledge inaccessible to me. Still, I was able to document 16 hemp mills there and rope factories too which were also in York and Lancaster and Lebanon and all over the place. I immersed myself in this research for 5 years of intensive investigation, ending that phase of my search in 2002. By that time I had collected a massive amount of data and stories to put together a pretty in depth look at the historical hemp industry in Pennsylvania. Since then however I keep uncovering more and more. I have found over 200 hemp mills in all parts of the state and if time and resources permitted me to go do thoroughly exhaustive work in each county I am sure that I would find 100 more and I am sure that there were many that we will never know of and history has forgotten. As I was uncovering this information I was also trying to get the word out. I started giving speeches in 1998, first at the New Holland Kiwanis Club and then the New Holland Rotary Club. Then I was in the newspapers when we helped to organize the Lancaster Hemp Fest in the summer of 98 at Pequea Silver Mine Park and ever since then Ive been doing everything I can to get the word out. Now, it seems like a lot of people generally know that Pennsylvania grew a lot of hemp but still nobody knows the whole story because I only released about 10% of my information in by book, Hempstone Heritage, which is still a hundred times more than anyone ever knew before. I want so badly to release all the information that Ive got. I want everyone to know what I know because the story is deep and it is profound. It will shake up everything people ever thought they knew about history. For anyone who paid attention to everything Ive written over the last two years they probably think I told a lot. I only have told people a fraction of what I know about the Pennsylvania hemp industry. There is way more to it. I still am blown away by it and it is partly what fuels this passionate quest I have for truth and justice to prevail. Now, a lot of people wonder why I became so passionate about hemp and point out that no one could ever get high off the hemp that was grown by our ancestors. They say the THC was so low that no once could ever smoke the female hemp buds and get high from them. Those people are full of shit, blinded and misled by the modern arguments about the differences between industrial hemp and marijuana. Truth is, those modern industrial hemp strains didnt exist back in those days. If you would have smoked the buds from the female plants in the crop you grew for seed I guarantee youd be higher than Ben Franklins kite. The hemp buds might not have been all that great and people might not want to accept this but that is what they smoked back in the old days before they had access to the really good stuff, the stuff that was bread specifically for the THC. As a historian I have not firmly committed to saying that you definitely could or could not get high from that hemp. There is a LOT of evidence to indicate it was psychoactive and there is some evidence that indicates it was not. So it comes down to which does the evidence balance more strongly in favor of, anecdotal stories and gut feelings. My gut feelings and the evidence say that they DID smoke it and everybody absolutely knew about hemp and to think they didnt makes no sense whatsoever. Everyone knew the secrets of the hemp, I can pretty much guarantee that. I am mainly concerned about the history so much though only because it helps so much to understand the present and through that knowledge and understanding we can chart of more purposeful path for the future.
Posted on: Fri, 28 Nov 2014 22:13:05 +0000
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