Volume 6 Issue 4 Winter 1999-2000
David Phelps Jr.’s Profitable Sidelines
If a newcomer to Simsbury in 1775 had asked David Phelps Jr. what he did for a living in addition to farming, he would have told the man about the many enterprises that brought him extra income. “Oh, I do a lot of fetching and carting,” he might have begun. His account book, inherited from his father David Phelps Sr. in 1760, records an active transport business. Townspeople relied on Phelps to haul all manner of things for them and they also rented his team of oxen, sometimes with a cart or sled, to do their own hauling.
