Source: Wikimedia Commons
There is a wooden box with a crank on top and a little drawer at the bottom in antique shops all over the country, usually priced as decoration.…
Maya Linton
Source: Wikimedia Commons
It is bolted to a bench in a shed somewhere, or sitting in a flea market with a price tag on the hopper: a cast iron frame with…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Go through census pages for American farm country before the middle of the twentieth century and you keep meeting her. A young woman, late teens or early twenties,…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Look at a wood-burning kitchen range in a museum or an antique shop and there is a compartment at one end that most visitors cannot account for. A…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Sorghum syrup was the only sweetener an American farm could produce without buying a single thing.
Sweet sorghum is a tall annual grass that grows where sugar cane…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
A great many older American houses have a hole under them that nobody uses. A brick or concrete chamber, sometimes plastered smooth inside, sometimes arched over, with a…