Last week my great grand-daughter, Abby, now 11 years old, emailed me saying she was assigned a project at school to write about someone living in the 1930's and wondered if I would write a little article about it and send it to her. This is what I wrote:
I lived on a farm in the 1930's. The country was in a depression when many people were out of work & were very poor. Living on a farm was better as we always had plenty to eat--my mother had a big garden so we always had fresh vegetables. She canned a lot in the summer so we had lots to eat in the winter also. We had cows, horses, pigs, & chickens. We would go to town in a wagon drawn by two horses & my parents would take eggs & cream & trade them for cheese, flour, coffee, sugar & other staples that we couldn't grow. We kids always got a nickel to buy an ice cream cone.
My mother churned her own butter. It was a glass churn with wooden paddles that turned. It took about an hour to get butter. We did not get fruit like bananas & oranges, but we had apples & plums from our own trees. At Christmas we would always get an orange in our stocking--what a treat that was! My mother made candy for us on special days. She baked cookies, cake, pies & bread so we had plenty of sweets.
I went to school in a one room schoolhouse with one teacher for all grades. There were about 15 pupils in 8 different grades. I walked to school -about 2 miles - & carried my lunch in a tin bucket. Lunch was usually a peanut butter sandwich & cookies.
