Things made, invented, or “raised” in New England; a comprehensive phrase.

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1819.  

        Ye fair Creoles, and pretty quatroon misses,
I greet ye all,—I come here to retail
My Yankee notions,—cheese, wit, verse, codfishes,
Cider, et cetera.
Mass. Spy, Sept. 8: from the New Orleans Chronicle.    

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1825.  We found him stowed away among the tallow, corn, cotton, hams, hides, and so forths, which we had got, in exchange for a load of Yankee notions; half suffocated; half starved.—John Neal, ‘Brother Jonathan,’ ii. 298.

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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.

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1828.  People abroad have no idea of what is meant here by Yankee notions, and are liable therefore to mistake our wooden ware for intellectual ware.—The Yankee, Jan. 1 (Portland, Me.).

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1838.  A moveable house on wheels, constructed by Mr. Fessenden of Dorchester, Mass., to take his family to Illinois, is called “A Yankee Notion” in The Jeffersonian, Albany, Sept. 15, p. 244.

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1842.  See WOODEN NUTMEGS.

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1843.  Occasionally, perchance, you will see some honest country Jonathan, with his wagon full of ‘Yankee notions,’ which he had brought in to ‘peddle.’—Yale Lit. Mag., ix. 44 (Nov.).

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1853.  They have gotten up in Boston the greatest “Yankee notion” of a steamer that we ever heard of.—Daily Morning Herald, St. Louis, Feb. 4.

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1889.  The camps were full of pedlers of “Yankee notions,” which soldiers were supposed to stand in need of…. If there was a new pair of boots among the contents [of a box from home], the feet were filled with little notions of convenience.—J. D. Billings, ‘Hardtack and Coffee,’ pp. 213, 221 (Boston).

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