Christmas is going to be different this year for Samantha and her family. Uncle Gard is bringing his girlfriend, Cornelia, to spend the holidays with them. Christmas had started out so hopeful for Samantha, with an invitation to a friend’s Christmas party, elaborate plans for building a gingerbread house, and the secret presents that Samantha has been making for everyone. Cornelia’s visit changes Samantha’s plans.
For Samantha, Cornelia’s visit makes Christmas more difficult. At first, she says that she will help make Cornelia feel welcome and thinks to herself that she will have to get a present for Cornelia that is as elegant as she is. However, when Samantha tries to put up the usual homemade decorations that she made herself, the maid angrily takes them down, calling them “dustcatchers.” The house must be perfect for Cornelia’s visit, and Samantha is insulted that people see her decorations as an eyesore or inconvenience. The cook, who was going to help Samantha with her gingerbread house, says that there probably won’t be time for it now because her grandmother has asked her to make extra, special foods for Cornelia’s visit. Grandmary even tells Samantha that it would be better for Samantha to “stay out of the way” of their Christmas preparations.
With Cornelia coming, no one seems to notice or care about Samantha. Samantha finds out that she won’t be able to attend her friend’s party because it is the night that Cornelia is arriving. It doesn’t seem likely that her grandmother will care about her secret Christmas wish for the beautiful Nutcracker doll in the toy store window. Samantha has been without a doll since she gave her own beloved doll, Lydia, to Nellie, who had never owned a doll before. Cornelia is an extra person Samantha needs to supply a present for, but she can’t summon up any enthusiasm for giving a present for someone who is making things so difficult for her.
Throughout the book, Samantha considers different presents that she could give to Cornelia, beginning with the most basic, convenient token gifts that she could give and then forget about, unlike her homemade, heart-felt gifts for everyone else. However, Samantha’s attitudes toward Cornelia change as she gets to know her better during the holidays and comes to see her as a source of fun and support.
When Cornelia actually arrives and begins participating in the usual Christmas activities, Samantha sees that she is far less fussy than the people who were preparing for her arrival. Unlike most other grown-ups, Cornelia is not too dignified to have fun while sledding or get messy while making gingerbread houses. Cornelia even suggests sledding, to Grandmary’s surprise. Cornelia always mentions how nice it would be to decorate a gingerbread house, like she did when she was a girl, Samantha says that she would like that too, but the cook is too busy to help this year. Cornelia says that is no problem because she and Samantha can make the gingerbread house themselves. Cornelia even makes sure that some of the decorations that Samantha made are prominently displayed on the Christmas tree.
By the end of the book, Samantha changes her mind about Cornelia completely. While everyone else seemed to be ignoring Samantha and going out of their way to make Cornelia feel welcome, Cornelia was paying more attention to Samantha and really thinking about what would make Samantha happy at Christmas. Cornelia is the one who correctly guesses what Samantha would really like for Christmas, and in return, Samantha decides to give her best present to Cornelia.
The story ends with Uncle Gard officially engaged to Cornelia.
In the back of the book, there is a section with historical information about how people would celebrate Christmas during the early 1900s.
The book is currently available to borrow for free online through Internet Archive.
Samantha is turning ten years old! She is having a birthday party with some other girls, and Aunt Cornelia’s younger sisters, the twins Agnes and Agatha, are coming to visit. Samantha’s grandmother is very strict, with very precise ideas about the way that things should be done. The twins are accustomed to being raised more permissively. When Samantha complains that her grandmother makes her wear long underwear for most of the year, even when it’s really too hot to wear it. Her grandmother thinks that it will help ward off illness. The twins encourage Samantha to think for herself. Few people wear long underwear anymore or believe that they will get sick by not wearing it, the twins say, and if Samantha doesn’t want to wear it, she should be allowed to make up her own mind about it. Samantha agrees that ten years old should be old enough to decide about simple things, like what kind of underwear to wear.
The twins have a lot of interesting ideas about how to do things differently, and they encourage Samantha to be a little more daring and try new things. When the cook talks about Samantha’s birthday cake and how it will have ten candles on it, the twins suggest that she could make ten smaller cakes, called petite fours, and put one candle on each of them. Samantha thinks that sounds so elegant that she wants to try it, although the cook thinks that it sounds a little strange for birthday cakes. They’re also going to have ice cream at the party, homemade. Samantha and the twins help to make it, although they are annoyed by Eddie, the nosy and bossy boy from next door, who shows up and tries to tell them what to do, hoping for a taste of ice cream himself.
At first, girls the party act a bit self-conscious, trying to be polite and grown-up in their party clothes. After Samantha opens her presents, her Uncle Gard and Aunt Cornelia show up with a special surprise: a puppy named Jip. Jip is a little wild and doesn’t know how to obey commands. He runs off with Samantha’s new teddy bear (a recent invention in Samantha’s time), and the girls have to chase him and get him to drop the toy. Samantha distracts the dog by offering him her shoe, and Eddie, who was watching, picks up the bear. At first, he says that he’ll give it back if they give him some ice cream and let him play with the dog, but Samantha refuses because he was not invited to the party, and she doesn’t like him nosing in. Agatha wrestles the teddy bear away from Eddie before Samantha’s grandmother arrives and tells them that young ladies shouldn’t fight or make spectacles of themselves. Most of the rest of the party is elegant, and the girls are a little more relaxed, now that they look a little less elegant from chasing the dog. However, Eddie gets revenge on the girls by adding salt to the ice cream they made. Even though everything else is fine, including the petite fours, Samantha is still angry at Eddie for ruining the ice cream.
Since Samantha didn’t get to eat the ice cream at her birthday party, the twins and Aunt Cornelia suggest that Samantha return to New York City with them for a visit, and they can all go to a fancy ice cream parlor there. Grandmary agrees and says that she would like to go to New York City herself. On the way to Uncle Gard and Aunt Cornelia’s new house, Grandmary says to Samantha that she hopes that she thinks that the twins get too carried away with some of their ideas. She thinks that they’re too impulsive and don’t think before they act, and while they’ve been raised to be very modern children, she still thinks that some of the old ways are best.
When Grandmary and Samantha see a protest held by women’s suffragists, Grandmary is annoyed at the women, making public spectacles of themselves and inconveniencing passing traffic. She thinks that it’s just another “newfangled notion” that’s a lot of fuss and bother over nothing. She’s never had to vote in her entire life, and she doesn’t see why any other woman would need to. Samantha can tell that this opinion bothers Aunt Cornelia and the twins when Grandmary says it in front of them, but they don’t seem to want to discuss it further.
The twins and Samantha ask to take Jip to the park, and Aunt Cornelia says that’s fine. She has a meeting to attend, but she wants them back home in time to go to the ice cream parlor after her meeting. However, Jip gets away from the girls when they try to put him in Samantha’s doll carriage, and they chase him to the place where the suffragists are meeting. Although Samantha knows that her grandmother doesn’t approve of the suffragists, they have to go after the dog. There, the twins tell Samantha that Cornelia is also a suffragist, and she is speaking at the meeting.
Jip charges right up to the stage where Cornelia is giving her speech, and Cornelia lectures the girls about not thinking about the consequences of their actions and not following her instructions for taking proper care of Jip. Sometimes, they are too impulsive and don’t think ahead. Cornelia explains to the girls about the need to follow agreed-upon rules for safety and how that is different from the changes that her group is advocating. While Grandmary has been saying that the suffragists are also too radical and impulsive and making a fuss about nothing, Cornelia says that much thought, planning, and hard work has gone into their movement to ensure that the changes they’re advocating will be for the better. Grandmary doesn’t appreciate how much thought and preparation the group has done and how long it has taken them to get this far because she hasn’t really thought about the issues at all herself and she has not been to any of previous meetings, where the planning has taken place.
Note:The women’s suffrage movement was already decades old by 1904, when this story takes place, so it’s not really as “newfangled” as Grandmary describes it. It had been building for a long time. However, Grandmary may not have been aware of that because she never needed to be aware. Consider what her life has been like. Remember that Grandmary is a wealthy lady and that marriage and social connections have been the basis of her life. Her husband was wealthy, and she was likely born into a wealthy family. Her life has always been comfortable without her needing to have a job or vote or do anything other than be a wife and mother. Growing up, becoming a well-behaved young lady, and getting married set her for life, and up to this point, she hasn’t had any major problems with money or her lifestyle and hasn’t really needed to think much further than that. She’s used to letting the men in her life handle business and politics and provide her with money, and she now lives on the money that her husband left to her, which is more than ample. Mostly, what Grandmary has needed to manage in her life are the social graces necessary for entertaining her husband’s business associates and their wives and for helping to facilitate her children’s marriages and careers. Grandmary’s daughter was also married to a well-off man before their early deaths. Her son is also a wealthy man, who can provide for his wife, and Cornelia is also from a wealthy family in New York City, a natural extension of their social circle. Grandmary assumes that Samantha, raised in this wealthy social atmosphere, will also naturally meet and marry a wealthy man through the connections of her friends and family, one who will support her and their children in a comfortable fashion. She thinks that, besides caring for her future children, Samantha will likely occupy her time with good works for the less fortunate and that she will give elegant parties for the fashionably-dressed ladies of their social level to solidify their social connections. The elegant affair that her tenth birthday was supposed to be was also practice for her future, as Grandmary envisions it. Grandmary thinks that life will continue to follow this same general course in their family and that there will never be a need for anything different because her own life has been fairly smooth, comfortable, and predictable, largely unshaken, even by the deaths of her husband and Samantha’s parents. But, she’s about to change her mind.
The girls are a little disheveled when they go to meet Grandmary at the ice cream parlor because there is no time to go home and change. As they explain to Grandmary about why the girls look a little disheveled, she tells them that she already knows because she was there, watching the speech. When she saw that Cornelia was the one speaking, she decided to stop and listen, and she was impressed by what she heard. She liked the part where Cornelia talked about the importance of standing up for what is right, and that’s something that Grandmary believes in, too. She is now more open to the suffrage movement than she was before.
The story is partly about growing up and how Samantha realizes that she needs to learn to make her own decisions. She can’t always go by what her grandmother tells her, and sometimes, listening to the twins isn’t always the wisest choice, either. Samantha also begins to see that she has choices to make about the kind of young lady that she will grow up to be. She can be the elegant lady at the party or the public crusader for the causes she believes in or maybe something that combines aspects of both. In the end, Grandmary also begins to see the possibilities of change.
In the back of the book, there is a section about babies and children during the early 1900s. It discusses what children liked to do for fun and how adults would begin training children to be young adults early in life, emphasizing social skills, like dancing, how to behave at the dinner table, and how to engage in polite adult conversation. A girl from a wealthy family, like Samantha, might go to a finishing school instead of college after completing her basic education. At finishing school, she would learn how to manage a household, including how to manage servants (how to hire them, how to tell if they were doing a good job, etc.) and how to throw elegant dinner parties. She might have a coming out or debutante party to introduce her to society as an adult, which meant that she would be ready for introductions and dates with young gentlemen and would probably soon be considering marriage. (This is likely the path that Samantha’s grandmother took in life and the one that she is considering for Samantha.) However, some young ladies did go to college, had careers, or become suffragists, and some did some combination of the above. Samantha’s life is full of possibilities, and her future hasn’t been decided yet. Because Samantha was ten years old in 1904, she would have been eighteen in 1912. For an example of what college life would have been like for an eighteen-year-old girl at a college in the eastern United States in 1912, see the novel Daddy-Long-Legs.
The book is currently available to borrow for free online through Internet Archive.
This book is part of a series by same author about children growing up in Colonial America. Each of the books is the series has photographs of historical reenactors portraying real people from Colonial history. This book focuses on two children who are traveling on the Mayflower in 1620, heading to what would become the Plymouth colony. One of the children is a girl who is a passenger on the ship, and the other is a boy who is part of the crew, a ship’s apprentice. In the section of historical information in the back of the book, the author explains that the girl was based on a real girl who was a passenger on the Mayflower, although the boy was not based on a specific apprentice; he is just meant to show what a ship’s apprentice would have been like at that time and to help explain the duties of the various crew members as he assists them.
The ship’s apprentice is called William Small. He is specifically apprenticed to the ship’s master, Christopher Jones (historical character). As an apprentice, he is learning basic navigation skills and assists the regular crew members with various tasks, including serving food.
The girl is named Ellen Moore. She and the other passengers are traveling in cramped quarters, and people are often seasick or trying to find ways to keep themselves occupied during the long journey. Ellen is traveling with younger siblings, and she plays with them in between performing routine chores, like sewing and preparing food.
During the voyage, there is a terrible storm, and the passengers are all confined below deck without light because lanterns and candles would pose too much risk of fire while the ship is rocked during the storm. William has to help the ship’s carpenter to repair leaks. Before the storm is fully over, Mrs. Hopkins, one of the passengers, gives birth to a baby she names Oceanus (historical person, the real Oceanus made it through the voyage although he sadly died young, possibly about age six, but the date of his death is uncertain).
The book ends with their arrival in the Americas. Because the storm blew them off course, the Mayflower did not arrive at its intended destination in Virginia but further north at Cape Cod in what is now Massachusetts. Because winter was setting in, the passengers decided not to risk further travel and established their colony there, 65 days after their ship first left England.
In the back of the book, the section with historical information explains more about both the characters in the story and the reenactors. The historical Ellen Moore and her siblings were traveling to the colony without their parents, under the guardianship of the other families, acting as young servants in their employment. The book mentions that the Moore children were without their parents because of a family tragedy but is not specific about what it was. I looked it up, and the story is both sad and bizarre. I can see why the author didn’t want to explain it in a children’s book. Apparently, the children’s parents had an arranged marriage and were not happy being married to each other. The children’s mother had a long love affair with another man, and also apparently, all of the children were the biological children of her lover. The mother’s husband began to notice that the children physically resembled his wife’s lover. The couple bitterly divorced, and after the husband was granted custody of the children (which, apparently, weren’t his anyway), he decided to send them away to the Americas with the departing pilgrims, paying for them to be taken on the voyage, never seeing them again. Sadly, Ellen probably did not survive the first winter at the Plymouth colony because she disappears from the historical record during that time. Out of the four Moore children traveling on the Mayflower, only one survived to adulthood, Ellen’s young brother Richard. Richard married twice in his life and had seven children of his own. He became a sailor and ship’s captain and eventually died an elderly man in Salem, Massachusetts, during the 1690s, not long after the Salem witch trials. None of this information about Richard is mentioned in the book, but I thought it was interesting background information. In the book, there is also additional information about the ship, The Mayflower, and the reproduction ship used in the pictures, The Mayflower II.
The book is available to borrow for free online through Internet Archive.
The Colonial Cookbook by Lucille Recht Penner, 1976.
This cookbook explains the history of food, cooking, and dining habits in Colonial America and provides recipes that readers can make themselves.
The first part of the book provides most of the historical background, although each section of recipes also has some additional information. The earliest European colonists in North America had to struggle to feed themselves. In many ways, they were unprepared for their lives as colonists, and not all of them had planned to stay as long as they did. The ones who hadn’t planned to stay long had heard stories about gold and silver in the New World, and they had hoped to stay only long enough to seek their fortunes and return home rich. The realities of life in North America did not meet their expectations and survival turned out to be harder than they thought.
The colonists ended up relying on Native Americans (called “Indians” in this book) to help them survive. As they used up the stores of salted beef and hard biscuits that they had brought with them, they began trading for food with the Native American tribes. From the Native Americans, they also learned farming, finishing, hunting, and foraging techniques that they used to help themselves survive. There were many edible plants and animals at hand, but the early colonists were unaccustomed to which plants in the Americas were edible and how to find them and where to find and trap animals. One of the chores colonial children were given was to gather wild plants for the family to eat, like nuts, mushrooms, dandelion greens, wild leeks and onions, and wild fruit, like plums, cherries, melons, and berries.
Gradually, as the colonies grew, the colonists established farms and farm fields. They needed more land for farming to support their population than modern farms would use to support the same number of people because farming has become more efficient since the colonial era. Later, new colonists came and brought livestock with them. Men and boys usually took responsibility for the livestock on family farms. After animals were butchered, the women and girls would clean and prepare them for eating. Food required much more work to prepare because the colonists had to do all the preparation themselves. Families would not only butcher their own animals but make their own cheese. The book provided details about the processes and tools that colonists used for making their food.
The more specific eating habits of colonists changed over time and varied depending on where the colonists lived in North America and where they had originally come from. For early colonists, meals were eaten off of trenchers made from pieces of stale bread, and the day began with a breakfast of mush or pudding with cider or beer to drink. Later, foods became more varied. People in New England often ate fruit pies for breakfast, and people in the Middle Colonies liked scrapple (a cornmeal mush with pork scraps) and oly koeks (a kind of holeless donut containing bits of fruit). (Neither scrapple nor oly koeks appear as recipes in this book, but there are recipes online.) Southern plantation owners had elaborate breakfasts with many different kinds of food, including ham, eggs, pastries, and more, but poor people typically had mush and scraps of leftovers.
The book provides a variety of recipes, organized by type. Most of the recipes in the book do not look too difficult, although some call for more unusual ingredients, like rosewater. You can still find it, although I’ve usually seen it at specialty cooking stores or import stores. The categories are soups, meat, poultry, seafood, vegetables, puddings, breads, sweets, drinks, and sauces and relishes. Not all of the recipes look like things that would interest modern children. I don’t imagine that many children would be excited at the idea of making Scalloped Oysters, for example. (Seafood was an important food source for early colonists.) Even though children might recognize Pease Porridge from the rhyme, I’m not sure that a thick pea soup would be something that they would be excited to eat, either. Hasty pudding is mentioned in the song Yankee Doodle, but the recipe itself is a little bland. The book does mention that you can flavor it with maple syrup, and there are other cornbread pudding recipes that contain spices and sweeteners in the book.
However, there are some recipes that I think would be interesting to try. The book explains that pumpkins were a staple food for the early colonists, as shown by the old rhyme from the Plymouth:
We have pumpkin at morning And pumpkin at noon If it was not for pumpkin We would be undoon.
The book explains the different ways that colonists would prepare pumpkin. You can bake it and eat it in pieces with syrup, molasses, honey, or cream. The book explains how to cook it, and it also provides a recipe for Pumpkin Pudding, which can be made with either fresh pumpkin or canned pumpkin. I haven’t made it yet myself, but from the recipe, it reminds me of a pumpkin pie without the crust:
Johnny Cakes are a little like pancakes but made with cornmeal. The basic recipe is a little plain, but they can be served with butter and maple syrup.
This book was published in 1976, which was the United States’ Bicentennial celebration. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find an online edition yet.
Samantha and her family are spending the summer at their summer home at Piney Point. Besides Grandmary, Uncle Gard and Aunt Cornelia will be there. Cornelia has also brought her younger sisters, a set of twins named Agnes and Agatha. They are close in age to Samantha. Grandmary’s friend, Admiral Archibald Beemis, is also visiting from England.
The family’s summer home isn’t just a single house. They have a lodge in the style of a log cabin and separate guest cottages. This summer, Samantha and the twins will get a cottage to themselves with no adults. The girls have fun exploring the area around the lake together. However, there is one place that Samantha is afraid to go, the island in the lake called Teardrop Island. The only way to get to the island is by boat, and there are sharp, treacherous rocks in that part of the lake. That was where Samantha’s parents had their boating accident and drowned during a storm. To Samantha, Teardrop Island is a place of sadness and danger.
One rainy day, the three girls go up to the attic of the lodge to look for more paintbrushes so they can paint pictures. In the attic, they find old clothes and pictures of Samantha’s family. They also find Samantha’s mother’s old sketch book, labeled “Happy Memories of Teardrop Island.” In the sketch book, she drew pictures of Samantha and her father as they had picnics and played by a waterfall. Samantha was a very young child at the time, and she has no memories of having been on the island with her parents. From the pictures, it looks like it used to be her family’s favorite place.
Seeing the pictures makes Samantha want to visit the island once more, hoping to bring back memories of her earlier visits and her parents. The next day, the three girls go out to the island and try to find the places that Samantha’s mother drew in her book. Teardrop Island turns out to be a beautiful place, and Samantha loves it. The more time she spends there, the more she feels like she has been there before, although her memories are vague and dream-like.
However, the girls forgot to tie up their boat, and they find themselves stranded on the island! A storm comes, and the girls are afraid. When the Admiral tries to come out to the island to help them, he is injured, and the girls realize that they are going to have to find a way to save him! Can they make it home through the storm, or will they meet the same fate as Samantha’s parents?
In the back of the book, there is a section with historical information about how people would spend their summers during the early 1900s. Wealthy families like Samantha’s would go to summer homes in the countryside to escape the heat of the cities.
The book is currently available to borrow for free online through Internet Archive.
Samantha attends Miss Crampton’s Academy for Girls in Mount Bedford. She is doing well and has some friends at school, but she misses her friend Nellie. She knows how poor Nellie’s family is and worries about how they are doing.
One day, Samantha comes home from school to a surprise: Nellie has returned to town with her family. Samantha’s grandmother recommended Nellie’s family to a friend, Mrs. Van Sicklen, who has hired Nellie’s father as a driver and Nellie’s mother as a maid. Nellie and her sisters will also be helping with household chores. They will also get the chance to go to school, although they will be attending public school and not the private school that Samantha attends.
When they begin attending school, Nellie’s younger sisters do fine in the first grade, where they are expected to be beginners, but Nellie herself has trouble in the second grade. Nellie is a little old for second grade, so the other children make fun of her for being there, and she is so nervous that she makes embarrassing mistakes in front of her teacher and the other students. Nellie thinks that perhaps she’s too old to start going to school, but Samantha realizes that what she needs is a little extra help.
Samantha talks to her own teacher and explains the situation. She says that she would like to help teach Nellie what she needs to know, but she is not sure what Nellie needs to know in order to pass the second grade. Samantha’s teacher, Miss Stevens, thinks that it is nice that Samantha wants to help Nellie and gives her a set of second grade readers to study with pages marked for assignments. Samantha tells her grandmother what she is planning to do, and she says that it is fine, as long as the extra tutoring doesn’t interfere with Nellie’s house work too much.
Nellie accepts Samantha’s help at their secret, private “school” that Samantha calls “Mount Better School.” During their lessons, Samantha discovers that Nellie is very good at math because she used to have to help her mother with shopping and had to keep track of her money. Nellie cannot always come for lessons because of her work, but Samantha’s tutoring helps her to improve.
One day, when Samantha is walking home from school with Nellie and her sisters, a mean girl from Samantha’s school, Edith, sees them and criticizes Samantha for spending time with servants. She says that her mother would never allow her to play with servants. Samantha asks her grandmother what Edith means, and her grandmother says that Edith is a young lady. When Samantha asks why she is allowed to play with Nellie, her grandmother says that they are not really playing, that Samantha is helping Nellie, which makes it different. That explanation doesn’t entirely satisfy Samantha.
However, her grandmother is both understanding of the help that Samantha has been giving to Nellie and serious about the need to help others. When Edith’s mother and other ladies of the neighborhood come to visit and complain about Nellie’s family and how Samantha is spending time with them, Samantha’s grandmother defends them and says that Samantha is doing good.
Meanwhile, Samantha’s school is preparing for a public speaking contest with the theme “Progress in America.” To prepare for her speech, Samantha asks her grandmother, her Uncle Gard, and other people what they think about progress and what the best inventions are. They mention inventions like the telephone, electric lights, automobiles, and factories. Samantha is fascinated by the idea of factories and the variety of products that they can make. However, when Samantha reads her speech to Nellie, Nellie is not nearly so enthusiastic about factories as a sign of progress. Nellie used to work in a factory herself, and she knows that they are not pleasant places. She tells Samantha how factories are noisy and how dangerous the machines are for the workers. The factory workers are also very poorly paid, which is why the products they make are so cheap.
Nellie’s stories about factories bother Samantha. When it is time for the public speaking contest, Samantha delivers a changed version of her speech in which she discusses the dangers of child labor and how some form of progress, particularly ones that endanger children, are not good forms of progress. Samantha’s thoughtful speech wins the contest, and her grandmother understands that Samantha has been learning things from Nellie even while teaching her.
In the back of the book, there is a section with historical information about education and child labor during the early 1900s.
The book is currently available to borrow for free online through Internet Archive.
Samantha Parkington is a nine-year-old orphan. She belongs to a wealthy family and lives with her grandmother, called Grandmary, in the Hudson Valley in New York. Grandmary is often strict with Samantha, trying to teach her to be a proper young lady, but Samantha finds it difficult. Samantha’s grandmother loves her, but she has very old-fashioned ideas about how girls should behave. When Samantha wants to try making and selling boomerangs in order to earn money to buy a doll, using instructions from The Boys’ Handy Book, her grandmother stops her, saying that young ladies do not earn money. She would rather that Samantha earn the doll as a reward for doing what she is told and practicing her piano lessons. Samantha also has an uncle, Uncle Gard, who has a girlfriend named Cornelia. Cornelia is a more modern woman, who would see nothing wrong with Samantha wanting to earn some money.
One of her grandmother’s servants, a black woman named Jessie, is kind and motherly to Samantha. Jessie often patches Samantha up after her various escapades and mishaps. Jessie’s husband, Lincoln, is a train porter, and Jessie tells Samantha exciting stories about the places that Lincoln has seen in his work, like New Orleans. Sometimes, Lincoln brings Samantha post cards from these places.
Samantha soon learns that a new girl her age is coming to a neighbor’s house. She has been wanting a playmate, so she goes over to the neighbor’s house to introduce herself. The new girl’s name is Nellie, but she has come to be a servant for the neighbors, the Rylands. Nellie’s family is poor, so Nellie needs to work as a maid help her parents earn money and support her younger sisters. Samantha is surprised when Nellie describes her family’s circumstances in New York City. Samantha has never been poor, and she doesn’t know what it’s like to be cold and hungry. Nellie says that the air in the countryside is better for her, and she gets better food working for the Rylands. Nellie tells Samantha that she has never been to school, and Samantha offers to teach her.
Then, Jessie suddenly announces that she is leaving her job at Grandmary’s house. Grandmary doesn’t seem surprised, but Samantha is. Jessie offers no explanation for leaving, and when Samantha tries to ask, Grandmary and the other servants do not want to talk about it. Samantha tells Nellie about Jessie leaving, coming up with fanciful reasons why she might leave her job, but Nellie offers the practical explanation that Jessie might be having a baby. Nellie knows more about it than Samantha because she has younger sisters, but she acknowledges that adults of this time period do not like to talk about people having babies, particularly in front of children. Neither Nellie nor Samantha entirely knows why.
However, Samantha is still concerned about Jessie. Samantha doesn’t know where Jessie lives, but Nellie does. The two girls sneak out one evening to visit Jessie and learn for themselves what the matter is. This is the first time that Samantha has been to the part of her town where black people live, further opening her eyes to the lives of people from lower classes of society. Nellie is a little surprised at how Samantha, who is more educated, sometimes knows so little about the ways that other people live.
It turns out that Jessie does have a new baby. Jessie reassures Samantha that she and the baby are fine, but since her husband needs to travel because of his job as a train porter, she needs to stay at home with her baby now. Samantha thinks of a way to help Jessie keep her job and care for her baby at the same time, persuading her grandmother to let Jessie come back. Unfortunately, Nellie soon has to leave because Mrs. Ryland doesn’t think that she’s strong enough to work as a maid and decides to send her back to her family in New York City. Samantha gives Nellie her new doll as a going-away present, and she is very concerned about how Nellie and her family will manage.
In the back of the book, there is a section with historical information about how wealthy people and their servants lived during the early 1900s.
Something that occurred to me later is that Jessie is about the right age to be Addy‘s daughter, from another American Girls series. I don’t think that there’s a real connection between Jessie and Addy because the Samantha books were written before the Addy series. However, when I stopped to think about their relative ages (Addy would be about 49 years old in 1904, and Jessie is probably in her 20s), it occurred to me that if Addy had a daughter, she would probably be an adult at this time, and she might be doing something very similar to what Jessie is doing, working as a seamstress.
The book is currently available to borrow for free online through Internet Archive.
The year is 1925, and what 14-year-old Ida Bidson wants most is to graduate from her community’s small, one-room schoolhouse so that she can go to high school in a nearby city. She dreams of becoming a teacher when she grows up, and she knows that she can’t do that without more education. The problem is that, in her rural community in Colorado, not everyone thinks that higher education is important, especially for girls.
When their teacher’s mother becomes ill toward the end of the school year and the teacher has to leave, the man in charge of the local school board, Mr. Jordan, doesn’t want to bother to hire a new teacher to finish off the year. In fact, it seems a little dubious about whether they’ll even get a new teacher in the fall. Ida is crushed because, without a teacher, she can’t graduate this year as planned, and she had just about persuaded her parents to let her attend high school in the fall. Her friend, Tom, is in a similar position. More than anything, he wants to work with radio, the latest technological development of their time, and he also needs to attend high school. (So far, he’s just been teaching himself by reading Popular Mechanics – the magazine started in 1902 and is still in circulation today.) However, Tom comes up with a plan that could help everyone: What if Ida becomes their teacher?
Ida
knows that there’s no way that Mr. Jordan would actually hire her as the new
teacher. Everyone knows that he’s a
miser and that a large part of the reason they’re not getting a new teacher is
that he doesn’t want to have to pay for one.
Besides, what school board would hire a 14-year-old girl who hasn’t yet
graduated? After discussing it with the other
children, they make the decision to keep their school open secretly with Ida as
their secret teacher. Although Ida
confesses the truth about what they’re doing to her parents, most of the others
don’t, figuring that they’ll wait to tell them when the school year officially ends
in another month.
Although
it’s a daunting challenge, going from student to teacher while still continuing
her own studies, Ida sees it as the only way to get what she wants. She does her best to act out the part of
teacher, telling her friends to call her “Miss Bidson” when she’s teaching
instead of “Ida”, giving them their assignments to study, and checking their
work.
Most of
the other children agree to her terms as their new, secret teacher, although
one boy, Herbert, deliberately gives her a hard time. Herbert’s future ambitions don’t include
higher education, and he was originally looking forward to having an early
summer break. At first, he delights in
trying to push Ida, to see how she’ll deal with him as a discipline problem. Ida partly earns his cooperation by pointing out
with him that their secret school is voluntary, that no one is making him come,
that they had all voted to make her the teacher, and that if he makes problems
for the other students, they can also vote him out of the school. The thought of being rejected by his friends
for making problems keeps him more or less in line.
Then, a
woman from the County Education Office, Miss Sedgewick, comes to the school and
finds Ida teaching there. She is the one
who administers tests to graduating students, and she has come to ask how many
students will be tested this year. Ida
is forced to admit her circumstances to Miss Sedgewick. Miss Sedgewick is surprised to discover that
Ida is both teacher and student and says that she isn’t quite sure if she can
give the exams if the local school board has officially closed the school. She leaves, promising to look into the matter. What she eventually tells them is that they
can keep the school open with Ida as the teacher, but in order for the children
to get credit for their work, they will all have to take exams at the end of
the year, not just Tom and Ida.
As the
end of the school year approaches, Ida does her best to prepare the other
children for the exams and thinks about how her relationships with them have
changed. Tom, her best friend, has become
more her student and less her friend, which feels uncomfortable to her. She also has her own studying to do if she
hopes to pass the exams herself, which is difficult both with her teaching work
and the work that she must do on her family’s sheep farm.
Then,
Herbert’s father, who doesn’t value education at all and just wants Herbert
home to work their farm, finds out what they’re doing and gets Mr. Jordan to
shut the school down for good. Ida feels
like all her dreams and hard work have been for nothing. However, a talk with Herbert changes her
mind. Herbert knows that his father
fears his education. Herbert’s father is
afraid that Herbert will look down on him for not having as much education or
that Herbert will want to leave him.
Herbert admits that he’s been very unhappy at home because his father is
a bitter, angry man who doesn’t treat him much better than he does other
people. Herbert has actually learned
more than he pretends at school and really does have plans to leave home. Herbert also tells Ida that his father and
Mr. Jordan are planning a secret meeting to close the local school permanently,
purposely telling only people they know will agree about it, not local people
who value education.
Knowing about the secret meeting gives Ida’s parents, as well as other parents in the community who support their children’s education, to show their support for their children’s hard work. Faced with their opposition, Mr. Jordan agrees to let the school remain open while the children take their final exams. Ida not only does better on the final exam than she had feared, but she finds an ally in Miss Sedgewick, who will help her fulfill her wish to attend high school and become a real teacher.
The book is available to borrow for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
Ten-year-old Ann Hamilton hasn’t been very happy since her family decided to move West. Her family lives in 18th century Pennsylvania, and moving West means homesteading in an area where there are few other families, none of which have girls Ann’s age. Her father and brothers love the adventure of starting over in a new place on the western frontier (what is considered the frontier for their era), but Ann is lonely, surrounded by boys, and missing their old home. When her father built their cabin, he purposely placed it so that the door faces to the west because he says that’s where their future lies. Ann’s brothers, Daniel and David, also make up a rule that no one can complain about the west (partly because Ann had already been doing a lot of complaining), saying that anyone who does so will get a bucket of water poured over their head, and they make a game out of trying to catch each other complaining about something. So, there is nothing Ann can do but suffer in silence and write in her diary, a present from her cousin Margaret when the family left Gettysburg.
There’s
a boy close to her age who lives nearby, Andy McPhale, but Ann doesn’t think
much of him. He makes jokes about her
being “eddicated” because she can read and write. Sometimes, he seems like he wants to play
with her, but she’s a girl, and he doesn’t want to play girl games.
Andy McPhale also worries about his mother. His father believes in hunting and trapping more than planting. Rather than grow some of their food, Andy’s father goes off for days at a time on hunting expeditions, leaving his family with very little while he’s gone. Ann’s family thinks that this is a sign of poor planning for the future and don’t think highly of Andy’s father for it.
Later, they
meet a young man named Arthur Scott who has just arrived in the area and is
looking for land to settle on. When Mr.
Scott first arrives, he meets Ann on the road. Ann has allowed the hearth fire to go out, and
she is on her way to her aunt and uncle’s house to borrow some from them
because she doesn’t know how to start a fire by herself. Understanding her problem, Mr. Scott gives
Ann a ride home on his horse and helps her to restart the fire, promising not
to tell her parents. They invite him to
stay for lunch, and he talks about his time at Valley Forge with Washington’s
soldiers when he was only 13 years old.
He was too young to fight, but he volunteered to drive an ammunition wagon. Ann thinks of George Washington as a hero,
and she finds it thrilling that Mr. Scott served with him.
Arthur Scott becomes a friend of the Hamilton family, and Andy McPhale seems jealous of him and the attention that Ann pays to him. Then, Andy tells her that his family has decided to go back to town for the winter. In the spring, they will return to the area and try farming, persuaded by their experiences working with the Hamiltons. To Ann’s surprise, Andy offers for Ann to come with them. She could visit Gettysburg and stay with her cousin Margaret again. Ann has been lonely, being the only girl in the area, and it’s a tempting offer. However, Ann feels like she must stay for her family’s sake and so she won’t feel like a deserter. When a storm destroys a good part of her family’s crop, she feels terrible and wonders if it’s all really worth it.
In the end, there is a great surprise coming for Ann: she gets to meet her hero, George Washington, when he comes to see some land that he has purchased nearby.
I first read this book when I was a kid in elementary school. As the cover of the book says, the author won the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal, which honors authors and illustrators for children who have made long-term contributions to children’s literature. Laura Ingalls Wilder was the author of the semi-autobiographical Little House on the Prairie books, but because those books contain uncomfortable racial language and situations, her name were removed from the award in 2018. The award still exists, but it’s now called the Children’s Literature Legacy Award, which is more descriptive of its purpose.
I liked this book as a kid, although I had forgotten many of the details before I reread it as an adult, and I’m not sure if I fully understood the history behind the story when I was a kid. I think stories actually become more interesting when you know the background, so I’d like to discuss the history a little.
The story is based on the real life of Ann Hamilton, the great-great-grandmother of the author of this book, who did get to meet George Washington in 1784. The author is essentially retelling an old family story. The real Ann Hamilton married Arthur Scott when she grew up. The place where they lived, called Hamilton Hill in the story, is now called Ginger Hill. In fact, it seems that a member of the Hamilton family caused the name change, although that story isn’t really one for children.
One of the parts of the story that I always remembered from when I read it in school as a kid was the part where Ann talks about “mother’s fried wonders”, basically describing a fried donut. People in the 18th century did make various types of fried pastries, varying in style and name depending on where they lived. For an example of early American donuts, see this video by Townsends about 18th century doughnuts, where they make doughnuts and talk about the history and evolution of American “dough nuts” (they talk about the name and how it seems to come from the original shape – nut-shaped pieces of dough).
Felicity’s Craft Book by Rebecca Sample Bernstein and Jodi Evert, 1994.
This is a companion book to the Felicity, An American Girl series. It explains about the types of crafts that people would do in Colonial America and gives instructions for projects that readers can make at home.
In the beginning of the book, there is a brief history of crafting in America. It explains that, in the earliest days of the American colonies, people had to get most of their goods from Europe because they had to spend their time and energy on building homes and establishing farms in order to survive. However, as the colonies became more established, people were more able to make goods for themselves, both in their own homes and as professional craftspeople. By the time that Felicity lived, during the late 1700s, there were many skilled craftspeople, and those craftspeople also trained new people in their professions in apprenticeships.
Before presenting craft projects that readers can make, the book also offers a few tips for safety and neatness while making things. The crafts are also divided into sections relating to topics like writing, sewing, games and toys, and scented objects that you can make with plants.
The projects explained in this book include:
A quill
pen and two types of ink – The book gives instructions for making ink from
different types of berries (such as raspberries, strawberries, and blackberries,
which make red or purple ink) and walnut shells (which makes a brown ink).
A wax
seal – To be used with sealing wax or wax from a candle. These were used to
seal letters before the invention of envelopes with glue. (I know that there
are people and companies that still make these because I have one myself and
the sealing wax to use with it.)
Game of
Graces – A hoop with a pair of sticks that were used for a tossing game.
Cup and
Ball Game – A common toy in which a cup is attached to the end of a short stick
and a ball is tied to it. Players have
to move the toy around and make the ball swing into the cup.
Kites –
Made with lightweight paper.
Folding
Fan – Made with poster board and ribbon.
Fancy
Straw Hat – Explains how to decorate a hat with flowers and ribbon.
Fruit
Pyramid – Used as a table centerpiece.
Cross-Stitch
Sampler – A basic sampler using only the cross-stitch. (Colonial girls would create
more elaborate samplers to show off the range of stitches they could make.)
Sachet –
A small bag of potpourri (sweet-smelling dried plants). Colonists would put sachets into trunks and
wardrobes where they were storing their clothes to make them smell nice. (Some people still do this in modern times.) In a later part of the book, they also give instructions
for making potpourri with herbs and flower petals.
Friendship
Pincushion – An embroidered pincushion.
Tussie-Mussie
– A small bouquet, like the kind that bridesmaids and flower girls might carry. (The book says that people in Colonial times
might carry one or maybe a pomander ball if they went to visit a sick person
because they had an idea that breathing bad air would spread sickness and they
were trying to freshen the air with fresh scents. That’s not quite how sickness is spread, but
they were partly correct about sicknesses being airborn.)
Pomander Ball – An orange scented and decorated with spices and cloves. Besides freshening the air, they can also make nice decorations.
In the sections about different types of projects, there is additional historical information about life and crafts in Colonial America. Because, in the books, Felicity’s grandfather owns a plantation and one of the books takes place there, the craft book also has a section about plantations that includes a brief description of plantation life and slavery, noting that the lifestyle and pastimes that plantation owners enjoyed would not have been possible without their slaves to take care of the plantation chores for them.
The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.
Jestress's Forgotten Books and Stories 