Sandwiches in the United States are mentioned first by Frances Trollope in Domestic Manners of the Americans. Their contents are unknown, and they were brought along for a hellish “pic-nic” party in the woods in the environs of Cincinnati circa 1829.
Though the heat was “furnace-like,” Trollope and companions (unnamed) had packed “books, albums, pencils, and sandwiches” and set out with the usual picnic expectations. But they soon got lost in the forest’s woody steep hillsides and suffered madly from swarms of insects. When they stooped for lunch there, there was no view, and instead of grass, they sat on “a mass of rotten rubbish that had formed part of the pith and marrow of the eternal forest.” It got worse when they got lost on the way home, all the while promising “each other faithfully never to propose any more parities of pleasure in the grim stove-like forest of Ohio.”
Trollope’s testy humor and honesty, notwithstanding so many negative anecdotes in Domestic Manners, America seems somehow at fault with her picnic disaster. Another “pic nic” anecdote is snobbish: “I once mentioned to a young lady,” Trollope relates, “that I thought a pic-nic party would be very agreeable and that I would propose it to some of our friends. She agreed that it would be delightful, but she added, “I fear you will not succeed; we are not used to such sort of things here, and I know it is considered very indelicate for ladies and gentlemen to sit down together on the grass.'”
One hundred and fifty-six miles west of Cincinnati, and thirty-two years later, David Broderick Walcott’s Hocking Valley Picnic (1854) makes picnicking ordinary. The scene is probably a commemorative view of a local summer picnic, but of who is unknown (at least by me). The group is genteel and is perhaps linked to the substantial local coal mining businesses in Athens. Twenty years of picnic progress made a considerable difference in style and substance.
David Broderick Walcutt. Hocking Valley Picnic (1854), oil on canvas. Ohio Historical Society, Columbus, Ohio
It’s a well-organized social gathering in an open clearing beside a lake. A white cloth is being set up, and what’s served is probably the usual assortment of picnic foods and drinks.
See Frances Trollope. Domestic Manners of the Americans, Edited by Donald Smalley. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1832. Reprint, 1949; http://www.cincinnatilibrary.org/tallstacks/voices/trollope05.html; Pamela Neville-Sington. Fanny Trollope: The Life and Adventures of a Clever Woman. New York: Viking, 1998