| T O P I C R E V I E W |
| Debs |
Posted - Dec 28 2005 : 1:54:11 PM
I am fascinated by how people lived before the Industrial Revolution and wanted to share with you all some things I've seen recently.
There was a TV series here called "Tales from the Green Valley" where a group of history/archeology experts gave up their theory for a practical experience of how rural people lived in around 1620 (in England, that is). More about the show here -
http://www.petersommer.com/writing_tales.html
Also, in the latest (January) issue of Country Living UK, there is an article about a woman who decided to spend 1 year living as a schoolmasters wife from 1793. She completely stepped back in time, from wearing 18th century clothes to using a goose quill dipped in an ink mixture made with elderberry juice and soot!
So you don't have to wait til you get your hands on the Country Living mag, here is a bit about her time travel from a Scottish news website:
http://www.borderstoday.co.uk/ViewArticle2.aspx?SectionID=968&ArticleID=1274692
Hope you enjoy these fascinating glimpses into the past!
Debby |
| 14 L A T E S T R E P L I E S (Newest First) |
| westfork woman |
Posted - Jan 04 2006 : 09:23:22 AM
Our lives are so easy compared to the old timers. Life has changed just in my lifetime, although I realize most people didn't live like we did in the 50's and 60's. Even in our little valley, not everyone had a cow or raised a garden or had chickens. Now, almost no one does. We still raise and put up a good part of what we eat, and we are able to kill and dress out and take care of meat, but with hot water at the tap, and a freezer to put all that food in, we are so lucky. We still heat our house only with wood, but we have a chain saw to cut it up with, and an airtight stove to burn it in. Way different. When I was a kid we heated with a woodstove in the living room, an oil stove in the dining room, and a cookstove in the kitchen. The oil stove could just barely keep the pipes from freezing, and sometimes they still froze. The house wasn't insulated, but it was tight enough the snow didn't come in, but it was cold. We lived in the winter with blankets over the doors and windows, and on the stairway. By spring we were so ready to take those blankets down. It was like living in a tent. We took quart bottles of hot water sewn into fabric covers to bed with us, and had so many quilts on top of us we couldn't turn over. In the morning, us kids stayed in bed until there was a fire going, then we ran downstairs to behind the woodstove in the living room to get dressed. I don't miss those days at all.
Greetings from the morning side of the hill. |
| cajungal |
Posted - Jan 03 2006 : 4:10:14 PM
Good article, Debs.
Gosh, I sometimes think I could do it and then I turn on the hot water and realize I really like hot water! We are camping people and we "wilderness" it quite a bit but I don't think we even have the skills they had back then.
For example, how many of our parents or grandparents really taught us how to slaughter and dress an animal? Another one is hunting....now hunting is big in Texas, but most people around here don't teach their children how to handle handguns or shotguns. Sometimes I think about the movie "The Patriot" and ask myself if we could form a community militia like they did. Probably not....no one uses those skills on a daily basis. Plus, the things we do today like baking bread, crocheting, spinning, etc.... are done because we want to or because it's a hobby, not because it's a must for providing for our families.
I guess I'd like to think I could do it. I certainly try to duplicate a lot of that way of living. But, if the goat eats my garden, I can still run to the grocery store!
Blessings you old fashioned farm gals!!!
Catherine
One of the best compliments from one of my daughters: "Moma, you smell good...like dirt." |
| Susie Q |
Posted - Jan 03 2006 : 3:06:33 PM
There is going to be a new PBS series Texas Ranch House that will air in May of this year and deals with life on a Working Texas Ranch. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/ranchhouse/ |
| westfork woman |
Posted - Jan 02 2006 : 3:15:53 PM
I mixed up the show about the pig. I forgot that Canada TV had one of these shows. I think it was 1880 House or something like that. These people went thru the winter on their homesteads. And it wasn't an easy winter. I love all these shows, but not the reality shows like Survivor. There was a joke going around that the newest Survivor show would be in Burns, Oregon, in the winter, calving out 250 heifers. I would like see that one.
Greetings from the morning side of the hill. |
| westfork woman |
Posted - Dec 31 2005 : 12:15:27 PM
The Green Valley show sounds really neat, maybe it will be on tv here. I saw a BBC series that was on our PBS station about a group of people recreating a village in pre-Roman Britain. I was amazed at some of the things they did. They never seemed to understand just how important cooking is. They tried to take it in turns with terrible results. They served chicken that wasn't cooked enough and one of the children got food poisoning, they wasted food, and all were hungry. More than likely the old ones probably ate mostly soup. Nothing would have been wasted and there would have been something for everyone to eat, even if there were lean times. They didn't figure out how to pack water and get wood, or any of the other things that must be done. Instead of the leader, a woman they had elected, just assigning jobs according to a persons strenghts, they just let everyone decide what they wanted to do and when. It didn't go well.
While I loved Frontier House, they did a lot of things really different than the pioneers would have done them. Especially the California father and teenage girls running around in their underwear. Those girls and that father, would have been shunned by their community for the way they acted and dressed. My mother, who really lived a pioneer life, was horrified when the barn burned, the pig got burned, and they killed it and buried it. She said, the pig would have been butchered. That family could not have afforded to lose that meat. They might have starved to death with the loss of that pig. When we were in Nevada City, Mt last spring we got to see recreations of the Frontier House cabins. All the stuff the families used is in the the museum there.
As far as the Pilgrim show, they didn't seem to have any concept of the religious base the community had, but it would be hard to act a religious befief system you did not believe in. When the Indians came to trade, they didn't understand it at all. The Pilgrims could never have survived without trade with the Indians. The hardships the tv people all went thru, really brought out their true selves. I am sure they all learned a lot, and were changed forever, just like the real pioneer people were changed by their experiences.
Greetings from the morning side of the hill. |
| Debs |
Posted - Dec 31 2005 : 11:41:50 AM
I never saw Frontier House, but I did see Pioneer House, quite interesting to learn about how the pilgrims built their new lives. It wasn't much different when the first pioneers travelled to New Zealand in the 1830's onwards, many of them were escaping the poverty brought about by industrialisation and the jobs they had lost. From the 1860's onwards however, they went to NZ in search of GOLD - my great-great grandfather was one of them!
Julia - that book sounds interesting, I would be interested in the Native American recipes also. And I have been meaning to visit Inverness for nearly a year, and places like Avebury and Stonehenge are really ancient!
Debby
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| Snowden Cottage |
Posted - Dec 31 2005 : 05:38:19 AM
Loved "Frontier House"..someone taped it for me when it was on TV a couple years ago..I, too, am quite drawn to all things done in the old way..love Tasha Tudor lifestyle and Maryjane's ideals, of course! We are planning to return to a simpler lifestyle here real soon..and I will again get my chance to live out the "dream"...(but I gotta admit..I would be really hard pressed to give up my makeup  ) I think we have the best of both worlds..we can try to slow down and choose simplicity and how it works best for us! Mumsie
Live simply... Love deeply...Hope forever! |
| Horseyrider |
Posted - Dec 31 2005 : 04:45:53 AM
I, too, loved Frontier House. It was really interesting to think about what it would be like in day to day life.
We might can our own food, we might gather wild plants, have milk animals, etc. But nothing brings out how much we're tied to our times like when the electricity goes out. I can't pump water or bake my bread, the furnace blower stops, and I can't get online!
We have a generator for emergencies that will do things like run the heat and keep the stock tanks from freezing, but geez, it's such an imposition.
When you don't have electricity, and you have to think about gathering wood and building a fire to heat some water to take a bath, you can see why people sometimes preferred to stink.  |
| Fabulous Farm Femmes |
Posted - Dec 31 2005 : 12:02:16 AM
You can buy all three of those video's at PBS.com...the Frontier House was my favorite one too. I could do without almost everything except for Tampax and Ibuprofen...I draw the line there! |
| Celticheart |
Posted - Dec 30 2005 : 8:54:16 PM
We watched Frontier House, too. It was very interesting. The people we thought would do well in the beginning were not the ones who adjusted the best. We also thought the people they chose to participate were 'interesting' choices. The wealthy family, for example, although I thought their children were the ones who took the most away from the entire experience.
Marcia
"I suppose the pleasure of country life lies really in the eternally renewed evidence of the determination to live." Vita Sackville-West
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| Aunt Jenny |
Posted - Dec 30 2005 : 8:25:50 PM
Frontier house.!! I loved that one!! And I saw parts of colonial house..never did see the Victorian one. The Frontier house was the most interesting to me..I watched it several times. We recorded it and then loaned the tape out and it was never returned..it was a good one!
Jenny in Utah
It's astonishing how short a time it takes for very wonderful things to happen...Frances Burnette
http://www.auntjennysworld.blogspot.com/ |
| asnedecor |
Posted - Dec 30 2005 : 8:21:40 PM
Have you ever seen those specials on PBS? The 1900 house, where the family was in London in a Victorian house and had to live like they did back in 1900? Or the Colonial one, where a group of people lived in a Colonial village, circa 1700's for a summer. There was also the one with the 3 families that did the homesteading in Montana. I love those, especially to see how some one from the 21st Century adapts to earlier times.
Anne
"Second star to the right, straight on till morning" Peter Pan
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| Aunt Jenny |
Posted - Dec 30 2005 : 6:54:31 PM
Wow...that was such an interesting article. Amazing that she did that for a year. I would totally love to do something like that..husband would never go along with it though..haha.
I am very interested in The old way of doing things, Amish, native americans and all..I feel sometimes like we just have too much technology..things got done in a simpler way for lots of years. Of course we wouldn't be having this discussion here a hundred years ago either..
Thanks for posting this Debby!
Jenny in Utah
It's astonishing how short a time it takes for very wonderful things to happen...Frances Burnette
http://www.auntjennysworld.blogspot.com/ |
| julia hayes |
Posted - Dec 30 2005 : 6:23:33 PM
Debby, I too am fascinated by how people survived without all the modern "conveniences" of today. I just bought a book today: "A thousand years over a hot stove".. it is a historical record of how women cooked, prepared food etc, in early America. there are some amazing recipes and wonderful pictures, particularly of early Native Americans, which is of special interest to me these days too. I'll have to check out these websites..thank you for sharing them. I'm fascinated by Scottish life as well..with particular respect to early, early pagans.. I visited Inverness a few years ago and was amazed by the Cairnes (spelling?, circular rock dwellings, I saw...When I was in England I visited a town called Avebury, which also blew my mind! There's nothing like stepping back in time by visiting ancient places to stir the imagination and sense of wonder..
Happy New Year to you!! Julia Hayes
being simple to simply be |
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