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
Before machinery, every ear of corn on an American farm was handled individually by a person.
A husker walked between the standing rows with a metal peg strapped…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
A store used to come to the farm, and the important thing about it is that it bought as much as it sold.
The huckster ran a fixed…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Every American town on a railroad had a depot, and essentially everything that entered or left the town went through it - people, freight, mail, parcels, newspapers, telegrams,…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
For a long stretch of American history, eighth grade was not a step on the way to anything. It was where school ended.
And it ended with an…