When Plimoth launched its search for breed documentation in 1986, researchers found little to work with; early settlers had left few specifics behind about the livestock that accompanied them from England and the Netherlands. What did exist were sketches in documents concerning the “division of cattle” in May of 1627, which ended the colony’s holding of livestock in common. The animals were described as “two black cows, a red cow, a white backt cow and four black heifers.” The Kerry cow, an ancient English dairy breed, and the Milking Red Devon were tapped to represent their black and red forebears. The plantation’s staff found that the Kerry was a near match for a black cow described by seventeenth-century British livestock authority Gervase Markham, who wrote that it had “hair like velvet, large white horns with black tips,” and added, “They are of stately shape, bigge, round, and well buckled together in every member, short joynted, and most comely to the eyes.” Sheep and hogs presented an even bigger challenge. The Wiltshire Horn sheep of colonial days was smaller and hardier than the modern type, which has been developed as a hefty meat producer with little or no fleece. Getting the right look, or phenotype, meant using more than one breed. The farming staff crossed the Wiltshire with the Dorset Horn, a small breed with a heavy wool coat. On the swine front, the Tamworth hog, a reddish-colored lean and hardy forager, was crossed with a European boar to produce the Iron-Age pig, which is covered in coarse hair and is one-third the size of its normal domestic counterpart. While farm records of the period contain little information about goats, they were a primary source of milk and meat for early settlers. To represent this tough little animal, Plimoth has imported and bred the Arapawa Island goat of New Zealand, an endangered breed that most closely resembles the now extinct Old English Milch goat.
But Plimoth wanted its breeding program to be more than fleece deep. “In our quest for the most accurate recreation of a seventeenth-century type,” the farm staff wrote in 1993, “we must not lose sight of the importance of maintaining the genetic material found in these older breeds.” There is little question that the Kerry and Milking Red Devon were–and still are–in dire need of saving. The American Livestock Breeds Conservancy, a nonprofit group that strives to protect historic lines from extinction, rates each as “critical,” with fewer than two thousand animals alive. The sheep are better off–but not by much. The Wiltshire is termed “rare,” with fewer than five thousand in existence, and the Dorset, with twice as many alive, is in the “watch” category. As a result, the farm staff has devised a program in which the two breeds are crossed for looks and also are maintained independently in order to preserve their genotype. The same is true of the “rare” Tamworth pig and the European boar.