16-year-old Helena Muffly wrote exactly 100 years ago today:
Friday, May 26, 1911: I’m through watching cows for the present time—at least. That was my duty for one wk.
Her middle-aged granddaughter’s comments 100 years later:
Why is the duty of watching cows over? What did it involve? Weren’t there fences around the fields? (Somehow this entry brings back vague memories of Johanna Spyri’s book about Heidi watching cows in the Alps.) Was the task rotated between the siblings in the family?
According to Wikipedia barbed wire was widely used by the last quarter of the 19th century. I would have thought that the Muffly family would have had sturdy barbed wire fences around their fields—but maybe they didn’t.
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[...] the summer of 1911 Grandma wrote about cows getting into the corn (July 10 and July 25), and on May 26 she wrote “I’m through watching cows for the present time—at least. That was my duty for one [...]
[...] May 26, 1911 diary entry [...]