Should Almanzo Become a Wheelwright?
In Laura Ingalls Wilder’s book Little House on the Prairie we learn about her experience growing up in a small cabin as her family homesteaded on the American frontier. Wilder also wrote a less known, but to me, even more interesting book, called Farmer Boy, which tells the story of one year of her future husband’s life, living on his parent’s farm in far upstate New York.
More a memoir of the year 1869 than a history, we learn how nine year-old Almanzo Wilder planted and harvested potatoes in the cold (and how an exploding roast potato hurt his eye), how he almost fell into freezing water when his father was cutting ice, how he had to awake with his family in the middle of the night to save the corn from freezing, and how he helped butcher livestock and made candles from the rendered fat. We hear about the long days working in all sorts of weather, peppered with time off on Sundays and to visit local fairs.
While Almanzo’s parents are experts at running a farm and profiting from sales of butter, potatoes, and wool, they choose what new tools to adopt, for example, when threshing wheat. From Farmer Boy:
