pre grid 1930's living

I had shirts made out of the flowered feed sacks and most of Grandma's aprons were made out of them. But those were the sacks the flour came in, Grandma bought her flour (and I think sugar as well) in 50# sacks and after October or November we never knew when we could get back in to town.

We didn't buy livestock feed at all, raised some wheat, barley and oats ... the chickens got wheat, pigs got barley and the work horses got the oats.

Wormlady; what you described is much how my husband grew up on the family dairy farm except there was no generators. He was born in 1945. Wood stoves for cooking, heat and water.Electric arrived in 1942 when his Mom had her first baby. One light bulb and one plug in the kitchen, a light bulb in the barn and milking machine! No more milking 40 cows by hand twice a day! Just had to attach the milkers to the cows teats and turn on the compressor.It was the late 1950's before more electric was installed in the house.They also had an icehouse with sawdust and an old icebox which I still have and outhouse.

I lived in Ohio a two room cement block house with an attic for Daddy to sleep in. It was converted from a garage. Grandma, my two sisters and I slept in the bedroom. The other room was the kitchen. It had a two burner kerosene stove for cooking and a very small oil stove for heating. Grandma turned off the oil stove at night to save oil even when it went -20 below 0 F. We wore warm clothes and snuggled to keep warm. We had one light in the house suspended from the kitchen ceiling and one electric outlet.Bathroom was an outhouse and baths were in a round wash tub set next to the stove. Blankets were draped for privacy. I was the youngest and went first in the cleanest water!

How did all of us who grew up this way ever survive without all the modern gadetry of today? At least we still know how to survive and live without electricity , gasoline and boughten food. We taught all five kids so they know what to do when the power goes off too.It is good to teach children how to live without modern conveniences if they should have to or want to.

I enjoyed it, the best memories of my life are the years I spent at the ranch growing up.

And I went back to that to a great extent, voluntarily. The two years before I relocated to KY (12 years ago) I lived on a ranch in MT on the Crow reservation, electricity, but no running water, no indoor plumbing, no phone. I could go to town once a month with no problem and I did buy most of my food (no garden) but I certainly did not have any difficulty at all with the lack of 'modern conveniences'.

In the mountains of Colorado during that period, my maternal grandparents had a similar setup, but my paternal grandparents had a unique advantage. They had an ice cave. They didn’t need to store much ice. The summers were short and cool at the high elevation anyway.

It was a natural ice cave that contained ice all summer long most years. The remote and sparsely populated ranch community shared the ice and either harvested their ice as it was needed individually or in small groups. The “cave” was actually a fissure in the ground on the side of a hill that was deep enough and large enough to keep ice frozen during all but the hottest summers.

The cave was accessible by foot or horseback, and I don’t think they were able to take wagons or trucks to it. Once at the cave opening, you crawled down into the vertical “cave”, rather than going horizontal into the cave. Melting snow refilled the cave each spring thaw. I was in the cave in July 1984 and broke off a chunk of ice to take home and put in the freezer to show family and friends.

Rural electrification didn’t arrive to the area until around 1950. However, years later, community potluck summer picnics usually still involved some guys making a run to the ice cave for ice to use in the crank-operated ice cream makers.

CD in Oklahoma

The winds are howling outside and the snow is piling up. We are expecting 8-12 inches.

I just spent a very pleasant hour or so carefully re-reading this thread, because a storm like this always brings with it the possibility of a power outage.

My dad, who I interviewed for the opening post is now 84. He called me the other day because his 87 year old sister had come to visit him (350 mile drive alone).She had just gotten an iPad and could not figure out how to get online.

I talked her through the process and she was able to connect to the interwebs.

These two octogenarians, who grew up in the depression and in poverty, both have and use cell phones, GPS, laptops/tablets; they regularly TEXT or email each other (both are hard of hearing so that is a great way for them to communicate...and hard headed, but that is another story... ). They are also both on Facebook.

They both have been through a lot and have seen a lot of changes. They have not only survived, but thrived and I am so blessed to be related to them.

Thought I would bump this thread up so we could all be inspired by the stories shared here. And be reminded that survival not only includes knowing how to do things the old fashioned way, but also includes adaptability to what is best in the present age.

I would be glad to hear other stories from the past.

My dad was also born in 1900 & my name is Georgia. What a coincidence!

I've worked in alotof nursing homes and learned so much from our residents. Two sisters were most inspiring. They actually homesteaded here in MO. With their families carved homesteads out of solid woodland. Talked about keeping sheep and washing the wool in the river. Spinning,weaving and making the cloth for their families clothes...now that is an job! Shocking corn and having a snake fall out and bite their Pa who nearly died. Everything done with horses. In their 90's when I met them but still quilting "on their fingers" as they called hand quilting. They always said electricity on the farm was the best thing ever.

Many of our neighbors here in the Ozarks still use cisterns and haul water. Also several springs around us that people use regularly for their drinking water.

It's strange to me to read that some here have no experience or no stories from their parents and grandparents about life before power and running water, because I grew up that way and have the experience first hand. I'm blessed to still have my mother alive and still able to tell stories from her past.

Settlers didn't arrive in Alberta until around 1900, with the majority coming after, so modern conveniences were decades in the making.
My parents were both born by 1925, and were married in 1942 and proceeded to have a large family of 9 children born alive. (Not counting stillborn and miscarriages).

We had no power, no running water and just wood and coal for heat. A wood stove in the kitchen and a heater in the living room, and the bedrooms were cold. Even with storm windows we always had a layer of ice on all the windows in winter.

The only things gas powered were the tractor, the car and the washing machine. My dad and brothers would bring in the batteries to keep them from freezing, and when the tractor or car needed starting they would build a little fire underneath the oil pan to warm it up, and then attach the battery. This was done from November until April.

We kept our milk and cream cold by keeping it in the creek behind the house in summer. We'd separate the milk and if we wanted butter we had to pour the cream into a jar and shake it. We had to drink powdered milk in winter when the cows dried up and buy margerine. The garden was a couple of acres, and it was us kids' jobs to weed it. We ate fresh all summer, but never had lettuce in winter - the only vegetables eaten in winter were the potatos, carrots, beets, parsnips and turnips which were kept in the dirt cellar under the kitchen floor and of course the huge 75 gallon wooden barrel filled with sourkraut and leaves. A lot of the fruits and vegetables were canned or else dried.
We picked wild mushrooms, nuts and berries and usually took blueberry or saskatoon jam sandwiches on homemade bread for our school lunches.

Pigs were butchered in November when it got cold enough for the meat to keep, and the 100 or 200 chicks were eaten once they grew and there was never any extra to butcher in the fall. Once in a while some were kept for laying and the old hens were canned in jars, as was some of the pork and that was eaten in the spring before the chickens were big enough to eat. We didn't eat beef but did have deer meat and fish. We would snare fish in our creek.
The chicken coop had it's own wood/coal heater and someone had to get up in the middle of the night to add to it to keep the chicks alive. If it got too cold in the coop the chicks would pile up in a corner and smother.

Our house water came from the creek and later on an adjoining quarter of land we had a hand dug well with a pump. This well was closer to the barn so we had a couple hundred yards to carry water to the house - many times a day!

We had a washstand with a hole in the top for an enamel basin to fit on, and the water could be dumped through the hole into a 5 gal. "slop" pail underneath and carried out for the pigs. Beside the basin was a pail of water with a dipper for drinking out of that we all used, even visitors. Many times in winter the water would be frozen in the pail in the morning.

Bath time in winter was once a week with the water heated on the wood stove and the youngest and girls went first into the round galvinized tub. Big oval boilers were used to heat the water and the stove also had a resevoir for heating water. We had an outhouse and the "toilet paper" was most often old magazines and catalogues.

Everyday cooking was done on the kitchen stove which was fired up all year round, and most women had big 4' by 8' clay ovens outside to bake bread usually 2 or 3 times a week, and then cooking the meals too because the oven stayed hot for about 8 hours.....old tyme slow cooker!

All the wood was hand cut and hand split, and the woodbox needed to be filled all the time.

The washing machine was brought inside the house in winter and boy was it noisy! The clothes were hung out on the line and then brought in and hung in the kitchen to dry. In summer the machine was moved outside. Needless to say, we had our school clothes which were hung up and worn again, and our home clothes that we wore for many days before they were washed. Ironing was done using the sad irons heated on the stove.

Lights at night were the coal oil lamps with the mantles that had to be pumped up, and the lamps with the wicks. Our only entertainment was the battery operated radio, and we couldn't listen long in order to preserve the battery life, and a wind up gramaphone. We used the thorns off of a tree when we didn't have needles for it.

We never seemed to have money, but we never went hungry.

A lot of the field work was done with a team of horses, and the one tractor. The grain was cut and bundled with a binder, stooked using 6 sheaves and every fall the threshing crew would make it to our place to thresh the grain. In the mid 60s we got a pull behind combine.

I never had the luxury of power, running water and flush toilets or phone until the fall of 1966. Even though I don't want to be without my luxuries now, I'm prepared for a long lasting grid failure after the generators run out of gas!

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http://www.pinterest.com/sanza1/

A wise person speaks when they have something to say but a fool speaks just to say something

Same here.

Since butchering I have been rendering lard most every day, I think I have finally gotten through all of it. Yesterday I went through to check and I found two 5-gallon buckets of ground pork, still frozen, that my wife had forgotten about [it needs to be mixed with spices for sausage].

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http://www.mofga.org/

http://www.mofga.org/Programs/FarmAp...2/Default.aspx

I've really enjoyed reading this. Thank you so much for sharing your stories. I'm 36 years old and all of my grandparents are gone. It's been nice reading everyone's family memories.

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www.SAHMville.blogspot.com

I've enjoyed re-reading this as well. Gives me lots of great ideas. And hope. Reminding ourselves that we can live with a lot less than we have and survive is a good lesson. It may not have been easy to live the way my dad did, or the way many of you describe (thanks for your contribution Sanza), but it is do-able. I'm definitely bookmarking this page and hoping others chime in as well!

I too am enjoying reading this thread. Both my parents, who are gone for many years, were raised during the Great Depression. We always had extra food stored away growing up because of the lack of food in my father's life early on. My mother fared better because her mother & step-father operated a grocery store. After the economy improved, they bought a farm in Michigan and grew much of their food, preserving it and transporting it back to Illinois in the fall. My grandparents came to this country in the early 1900's from Poland.

My parents always had a garden and some fruit trees. My uncles had farms and we often split a cow with one of them in the Fall. We would spend as day berry picking at a farm then spend the next day preserving them.

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Philipians 4:13 I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.

I learned to bake from a friends gramma in a tin oven on a 3 burner kerosene stove