Certain Connecticut merchants were said to have exported wooden nutmegs, basswood hams, and horn gun-flints.
1826. The land of “wooden nutmegs” and horn gun-flints.—Mass. Spy, Sept. 6: from the Schoharie Republican.
1826. The common reply of the boat-men to those who ask them what is their lading, is, “Pit-coal indigo, wooden nutmegs, straw baskets, and Yankee notions.”—T. Flint, ‘Recollections,’ p. 33.
1830. Toast by Col. Brown of S. Carolina:—“Yankee boasters—may they be charged with cow-foot gun-flints, wadded with insurrection pamphlets, primed with wooden nutmegs, and levelled against the eastern manufactories.”—Mass. Spy, July 28.
1833. That land of wooden hams, wooden nutmegs, and wooden-headed pedagogues, known, emphatically, as Down East.—S. A. Hammett (‘Philip Paxton’), ‘A Stray Yankee in Texas,’ p. 347.
1838. A Western paper says, a certain dweller in the land of notions—“long sarce and short sarce”—wooden nutmegs, horn gun flints, and cast iron axes, has lately taken to making sausages of brown paper.—Balt. Comml. Transcript, Jan. 20, p. 2/1.
1840. [The motion] resembled the wooden nutmeg of the Yankee trader.—John Q. Adams, House of Repr., Jan. 22: Cong. Globe, p. 134.
1842. The cargo [of a flat-boat] consists of almost everything you would comprise in the extensive term of “Yankee notions,” with perhaps the exception of wooden nutmegs and hams.—Mr. Gwin of Mississippi, the same, July 8: id., p. 636, App.
1843. This was the mystery connected with his visit to the land of johnnycake and wooden nutmegs.—‘Lowell Offering,’ iv. 26.
1850. See BASSWOOD.
1853. The Connecticut people are religious. It is a land of liberty and religion and steady habits. (A voice. And wooden nutmegs). Yes, and they make wooden nutmegs better than anybody else.—Mr. Stanly of North Carolina, House of Repr., Feb. 1: Cong. Globe, p. 463.
1863. While Yankee ingenuity exhausted itself in the invention of cotton-gins, power-looms, telegraphs, and the like, we gave it praise; when it cropped out in such little vagaries as wooden nutmegs, brown paper shoes, and cast-iron gimlets, the result was comparatively harmless;… but when this mental activity exhibited itself in such moral heresies as witch-burning, Quaker-hanging, Fourierism, free love, and modern abolitionism, it naturally induced grave fears as to the consequences.—Mr. T. L. Price of Missouri, the same, Feb. 28: id., 137/2, App.
1864. Would you expect the untutored African to run the New England engines, turn their spindles, or indulge in the ingenious pastime of making pins, combs, buttons, horn gun-flints, and wooden nutmegs?—Mr. C. A. White of Ohio, House of Repr., Feb. 19: id., p. 765/3.
