Pandemic Lessons From an 18th-Century Reenactor

In all ways, Jon Townsend lives an old-fashioned life. Except, maybe, when he uploads portions of it to his endearing—and instructive—YouTube channel.
A man standing in the woods
What makes Jon Townsend’s YouTube channel so enthralling is the sheer specificity of it—a very specific time in a very specific place in the history of the world.Photograph: Ryan Kerr

Some dads golf, others take up the culinary arts, and more than a few obsess over the household’s thermostat. Jon Townsend’s father had a more esoteric hobby: muzzleloader rifles—the kind from the Revolutionary War or Civil War, where you cram the gunpowder and ammunition down the barrel. During Townsend’s formative years in Indiana in the late ’60s and early ’70s, his father would host other muzzleloader lovers from miles around—not just to shoot these antique firearms but also to camp. It was around America’s 200th birthday, the Bicentennial, and folks were jazzed about the early days of our country. Being a business-minded person, Townsend’s dad began supplying goods to these enthusiasts.

“And so I grew up in it,” Townsend says. “I grew up doing this thing.”

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This thing is reenactments of the 18th-century lifestyle. All of the 18th-century lifestyle, researched in meticulous detail and presented with infectious enthusiasm on his YouTube channel, Townsends. He finds 18th-century recipes and cooks them in an 18th-century replica kitchen. (Open fire—very smoky.) He’s built a log cabin by hand, in accordance with period construction practices. He once hand-carved a canoe out of a tree. He does videos about how people gambled and wrote to each other and did laundry (itself a weirdly captivating multipart series). He of course dresses the part and runs the Jas. Townsend & Son business, where you can buy all the tools you need to live the 18th-century life, as well as different outfits if you want to cosplay a sailor or hunter or regular old civilian.

I was supposed to visit Townsend in rural Indiana to profile him and live the lifestyle myself—but coronavirus. Then Townsend started uploading videos about what it was like to quarantine in the 18th century, and about the nature of this uncertainty we’re living in, and of course cooking videos about how you can make do with bare essentials, like soup made of cheese and bread. So I called Townsend, and we talked about how, in certain ways, these past few months have given us all a taste of the 18th century along with him.

What makes Townsend’s YouTube channel (1.3 million subscribers, at the time of this writing) so enthralling is the sheer specificity of it—a very specific time in a very specific place in the history of the world. Sure, the intellectual starter yeast was his father’s muzzleloader hobby, but Townsend lives this stuff. He pores through period letters and books—cookbooks and diaries and manuals—and collaborates with other experts on 18th-century hunting and music and woodworking. Curious what kinds of tattoos people had at the time? He’s got you covered.

Why the 18th century, and not the 17th or 19th? “If you want to know about anything, you look at what it's like in its infancy,” Townsend says. “And that's the 18th century for the United States.” It was a time of relentless flux, politically and culturally and economically, as the Western world transformed under the Industrial Revolution. “We've got a lot of parallels about what's going on with the world we have today,” he adds.

The most glaring of which is disease. Smallpox was a serious problem in 18th-century America, and early efforts to vaccinate against it brought unhinged opposition. Cotton Mathers was an early proponent, which drew the ire of vaccine opponents, who went so far as to hurl an explosive through the window of his house—though it failed to detonate. Strapped to it was a note that read, “Cotton Mather, you dog, dam you: I’ll inoculate you with this; with a Pox to you.’’ (Curious logic there, attaching any sort of writing to something that’s about to explode.)

Disease brought the same kind of frustration for 18th-century Americans that you may be feeling now. As the coronavirus pandemic has unfolded, scientists have worked frantically to learn more about how it spreads and who’s the most vulnerable and how we might treat the afflicted. New knowledge replaces old knowledge, and it can be hard to keep up. In our panic, we crave answers.

They were dealing with that, their medical industry,” Townsend says. “Yellow fever was really bad in Philadelphia in the late 18th century, in the 1790s. And there was a great desire at the time to throw a lot of medical research at this to figure out what it was. Was it infectious between people?” (Yellow fever, like malaria, is spread by mosquitoes, not people.)

Americans in the 18th century were accustomed to death—a lot of it. Back then the stomach flu could easily kill children, if it wasn’t smallpox or yellow fever. “But today, we don't really see that, so we're not used to it,” Townsend says. “We're not used to these things attacking us out of left field and laying waste to great portions of the population.”

It’s hard for us to fathom scenes from a New York hospital that became so overwhelmed by Covid patients that they had to store bodies in a refrigerated semi-trailer. Perfectly healthy young people are perishing. The best disease experts in the world are telling us to prepare for an even worse second wave in autumn if we don’t take social distancing seriously.

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That distancing means, inevitably, unemployment and isolation. “Many, many people in the 18th century were in that situation. Wintertime, that was time for unemployment,” Townsend says. “Lots and lots of people were agriculturally based, and they had to survive on whatever they put away in the fall. They were used to just not having a job. For four to six months, there is no income and there's nothing you can do about it.”

The coronavirus has brought with it a crushing sense of uncertainty, not just in the immediate moment but also for our very futures. We don’t know what the world will look like a month from now, or a week, or even a day. It’s this uncertainty that feeds into a sense of the surreal, that we’ve lost so much of the routine that keeps us grounded as humans, that this can’t possibly be happening.

If you’ve got kids, you’re worried about their future like you’ve never worried before. “It's generational uncertainty,” Townsend says. “For the past maybe hundred years, we've lived in this kind of, Oh there's this bright shiny future out there.

“But there's a whole different mindset going on in most especially common people in the 18th century,” Townsend adds. “I think we would find their thought processes pretty alien, in some ways.” Heading across the Atlantic to America, immigrants thought they had at least a better shot. But they knew they would suffer. Not only that, they expected subsequent generations to suffer before the family got a good footing.

The colonial cuisine reflected this hardship. Among the doozies that Townsend has cooked up on YouTube: pancakes pinkified with beets; coffee mixed with eggs; fried deer heart because you aren’t about to let a perfectly good organ go to waste. If you thought the shortage of beans at your grocery store was aggravating, take it from Jon Townsend: 18th-century Americans were working with far less and combining what little they had into fearsome culinary chimeras.

If you think your pandemic existence is unbearably surreal, keep in mind that you’re not at the same time reenacting a technologically bereft 18th-century life and uploading it to YouTube. The disconnect is not lost on Townsend. “It's like, I need to go out and fix the log cabin, and what's the new solid-state hard drive that I'm going to use in the new systems I'm building?” he says. “And how do those things relate and how do they also smash into one another and make it difficult to do one thing? I don't know.”

“Yeah,” Townsend adds, “it is the weirdest life in the world.” Ain’t that America.

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