Amelia Stewart Knight knew the cross-country journey west would be a rough one; it was not for the weak or timid. The trip to Oregon…
An intrepid, independent soul, Mollie Dorsey was a homesteader in her teens, a gold rusher in her twenties, worked as a seamstress and a cook. She…
“Learn to do common things uncommonly well; we must always keep in mind that anything that helps fill the dinner pail is valuable.” – George…
Clearly, it was not the best day in Daniel Freeman's life. He'd been on the trail for over three weeks, and the weather had been…
Life is full of surprises, and few people would have known that better than the Americans who participated in the land rushes and homestead movements…
“I had gone to bed one night, but could not sleep. My father was constantly in my mind. I seemed to feel that he was…
"There was nothing but land; not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made… I had the feeling that the…
Sometimes the best plans go awry, and for intrepid female Matilda Glover Koontz Jackson, first aspirations of pioneering could easily have ended somewhere along the…
No one knows, or will ever fully understand, why Caroline Henderson, nee Boa, daughter of a prosperous Iowa farmer, graduate of Mount Holyoke College in…
"Two days after Thanksgiving, hospitable Anna Eleanor Roosevelt…motored in a White House car from Washington to visit the Tygart Valley homestead project near Elkins, W.…
In Medical Folkways in America – Part One: Maggots, Hairballs, and Eels, we looked at how things used to be, way back, when people lived on…
Have you ever wondered why, when so much of the homesteading lifestyle deals with the practices and philosophies of the past, no comprehensive history of…