18-year-old Helena Muffly wrote exactly 100 years ago today:
Monday, September 22, 1913: Walked the coats I borrowed yesterday back this morning.
Source: Ladies Home Journal (December, 1912)
Her middle-aged granddaughter’s comments 100 years later:
The previous day it rained while Grandma and her sister Ruth were at Sunday School at the Baptist Church in McEwensville. They were particularly upset because Ruth “had on her bestest dress.”
Someone who lived near the church must have lent them coats. I wonder if Ruth managed to keep her dress dry.
18-year-old Helena Muffly wrote exactly 100 years ago today:
Sunday, September 21, 1913: Went to Sunday School all afternoon. It rained nearly all afternoon. Ruth and I were in quite a pickle about getting home. She had on her bestest dress. The questions were solved when a nice boy brought us home in his buggy.
A recent stormy day in McEwensville
Her middle-aged granddaughter’s comments 100 years later:
Grandma and her sister Ruth usually walked the mile or so home from Sunday School. It would have been a miserable walk if they’d had to tramp home in the rain.
But all’s well that ends well. . . hmm. . . Who was the nice boy who brought them home?
18-year-old Helena Muffly wrote exactly 100 years ago today:
Saturday, September 20, 1913: I picked and picked at the potatoes today till there weren’t any more to pick and then I stopped. My hands presented quite a spectacle by the time I was through from being so badly stained. I don’t care though, Pa gave me a dollar.
Did Grandma rub her hands with tomatoes or tomato juice to try to remove the stains? (Picture Source: Simply Recipes)
Her middle-aged granddaughter’s comments 100 years later:
Work and more backbreaking work. . . at least the potatoes were all harvested (and Grandma was a dollar richer).
Here’s some advice in a hundred-year-old book about how to remove stains from hands.
To remove stains, dip the hands into a dish of strong tea, rub well with a nailbrush, and rinse in tepid waters. Ripe tomatoes, also the juice of a lemon, will remove stains from the hands.
Housekeeper’s Handy Book (1913) by Lucia Millet Baxter
18-year-old Helena Muffly wrote exactly 100 years ago today:
Friday, September 19, 1913:
September 16 – 17 – 18 – 19: Nothing much of importance happened during these days. I have to help Pa some and get put at rolling for one thing. Of course I had my mishaps even to going off of the roller. That work is all done by this time.
Photo Caption: An American Reaper in a Russian Wheat Field.Source:The Book of Wheat (1908)
Her middle-aged granddaughter’s comments 100 years later:
This was the fourth of four days where Grandma wrote a single diary entry. Three days ago I described how Grandma rolled the fields in preparation for planting fall wheat. And, two days ago and yesterday, I shared pictures of large and small wheat farms from a hundred-year-old book.
The 1908 book, The Book of Wheat by Peter Tracy Dondlinger, had lots of interesting information. One part I really enjoyed was the description of wheat production in several other countries.
I’m going to share what the book said about Russia. Within the larger historical context it is fascinating to read something about Russia that was written in the years prior to the Russian Revolution and the formation of the Soviet Union.
Russian Wheat Production
Viewed solely from the point of view of its natural resources and economic aspects, Russia is the United States of Europe. It has immense undeveloped areas that would form ideal wheat lands, lands very similar to those which constitute the wheat belt of the United States.
The similarity between Russia and the United States in the natural resources of the wheat growing regions is quite equaled by the dissimilarity of political practice, social theory and economic condition. The Russian peasantry had had neither means nor opportunity to attain a higher plane of life.
The poor system of land ownership and the antiquated methods of agriculture made Russian wheat a dear wheat in spite of cheap labor and a low standard of living. The future possibilities of Russian wheat production depend upon the social, economic and educational progress of Russia.
There are symptoms of improvement in this direction. The extension of peasant land ownership is improving economic conditions. It seems that political and social conditions are at last changing and popular education is growing. In agriculture, better machinery is being introduced, and the crops are being rotated.
18-year-old Helena Muffly wrote exactly 100 years ago today:
Thursday, September 19, 1913:
September 16 – 17 – 18 – 19: Nothing much of importance happened during these days. I have to help Pa some and get put at rolling for one thing. Of course I had my mishaps even to going off of the roller. That work is all done by this time.
The Book of Wheat (1908) by Peter Tracy Dondlinger
Her middle-aged granddaughter’s comments 100 years later:
This was the third of four days where Grandma wrote a single diary entry. Two days ago I described how Grandma rolled the fields in preparation for planting fall wheat. And, yesterday I shared pictures that showed the huge “modern” equipment used to harvest wheat on immense farms in the Midwest a hundred years ago.
The machinery used to plant and harvest wheat was very different on small farms in Pennsylvania like the one Grandma lived on. Today I’m sharing several additional pictures from the same book—but this group of pictures shows how wheat was raised on small farms a hundred years ago.
18-year-old Helena Muffly wrote exactly 100 years ago today:
Wednesday, September 17, 1913:
September 16 – 17 – 18 – 19: Nothing much of importance happened during these days. I have to help Pa some and get put at rolling for one thing. Of course I had my mishaps even to going off of the roller. That work is all done by this time.
The Book of Wheat (1908) by Peter Tracy Dondlinger
Her middle-aged granddaughter’s comments 100 years later:
This was the second of four days where Grandma wrote a single diary entry. Yesterday I described how Grandma rolled the fields in preparation for planting winter wheat. Since Grandma didn’t write anything specific for this date, I’m going to share something I learned when I was doing research for this series of posts that surprised me.
Did you know that there were some huge, highly-mechanized, wheat farms in the United States in the late 1800s and early 1900s?
There were 91 large “Bonanza Farms” ranging in size from 3,000 to more than 30,000 acres in North Dakota and Minnesota.
In 1864 the US government gave a group of investors millions of acres of land to finance the building of the Northern Pacific Railroad from Minnesota to the west coast. During the Panic of 1873, the investors got into financial difficulty and needed to raise funds to complete building the railroad so they let stockholders buy large tracts of land in the Red River Valley at low rates.
The farms had professional managers and migrant labor did much of the work. (During the winter months many of the farm laborers worked in logging camps in Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.)
By the early 1900s wheat prices were low, labor costs were rising, and the Bonanza Farms weren’t very profitable.
There also was a lot of concern that the Bonanza Farms weren’t good stewards of the land. For example, the opening paragraph in a bulletin published by the US Government in 1908 said:
Experience has shown that when excessively large companies farm great tracts of land the tendency is to exploit the land for the greatest immediate profit at the expense of the permanent value of the soil. Proper soil-cultural methods are not observed: rotations for the preservation of soil fertility are neglected; the main crop, wheat, is grown continuously, and the seed is allowed to degenerate through careless methods. Undoubtedly there are exceptions to this rule. It is not the writer’s wish to intimate that rational dry farming is impossible when carried on by large companies, but the general rule has been as stated here. It is evident that the homesteader, having in mind the value of his home and the welfare of his posterity, is more likely to perpetuate and increase the value of his land.
Dry-land Grains (U.S. Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Plant Industry, Circular No. 12, 1908)
These concerns led, in part, to changes in tax codes that discriminated against Bonanza Farms which made them even less profitable.
At the same time more people wanted to farm in the upper Midwest and the land was becoming more valuable, so many of the Bonanza Farms were divided into smaller plots and sold to family farmers.
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Here’s links to several sites that have additional information about Bonanza Farms:
18-year-old Helena Muffly wrote exactly 100 years ago today:
Tuesday, September 16, 1913:
September 16 – 17 – 18 – 19: Nothing much of importance happened during these days. I have to help Pa some and get put at rolling for one thing. Of course I had my mishaps even to going off of the roller. That work is all done by this time.
Her middle-aged granddaughter’s comments 100 years later:
Whew, I bet that Grandma was exhausted. It’s rare that she didn’t write a diary entry every day—but I can understand why she was too tired to write anything a hundred years ago today.
Grandma was using a roller in a plowed field to level the ground and break up clumps of soil in preparation for planting wheat seeds. In Pennsylvania wheat is planted in the fall and harvested the following summer.
Horses were hitched to the roller, and Grandma would have needed to tighten one rein or the other to make the horses go in a straight line. Unlike the roller in the picture, the diary entry makes it sound like the roller that she used may have had a seat. The mishap sounds embarrassing (and perhaps painful).
