16-year-old Helena Muffly wrote exactly 100 years ago today:
Thursday, December 14, 1911: Oh dear! I do wish it would snow. I’m getting tired of tramping through the mud all the time. Get provoked at a problem in Arith. It looked so easy, but I couldn’t get it. I’ll try tomorrow again and perhaps I’ll succeed.
Men probably wore boots like this when tramping around the farm through the mud. Grandma probably had galoshes that she pulled over her shoes. (Source: Kimball’s Dairy Farmer Magazine, September 15, 1911)
FARM COMFORT
Sloshing around in wet and mud is no fun, but a pair of good, stout rubber boots, which you always depend on, makes it a lot easier.
Get the easy, comfortable, long-wearing kind—the
Woonsocket
ELEPHANT HEAD
Rubber Boots
We have been making rubber boots for 45 years, often as many as 10,000 pairs a day—in the only exclusive rubber boot mill in the U.S.
We make boots for men, women, and children: hip boots, knee boots, short boots—all kinds. One man who bought a pair 28 years ago wrote us that they were still good.
All Dealers.
WOONSOCKET RUBBER Co.
Woonsocket, R.I.
[An aside–I can’t even imagine a company today advertising that a pair of boots might last 28 years. I guess that some things were just made better a hundred years ago!]
Her middle-aged granddaughter’s comments 100 years later:
Yuck—the mud sounds awful. This is the third time that Grandma’s mentioned mud in her December diary entries . . . and the eleventh time that she’s mentioned it since she began the diary in January 1911.
(If you would like to read her previous entries on this topic—type the word mud into the search box near the top of this page.)
Mud was a huge problem a hundred years ago. There would have muddy areas between the house and barn on the farm. And, the roads, both in McEwensville and the surrounding rural areas, were not yet paved in 1911.
A Hundred Years Ago 
Lordy, how I hated galoshes! As much rain and mud inside as outside!