Routine Of A Farm Woman
Late 1800, Early 1900

The Daily Routine of a Farm Woman at the Turn of the Century

This short treatise covers the daily routines of a farm woman at the turn of the century -- the period perhaps from 1880 to 1910. To write a schedule that will truly show her activities I will have to divide it into seasons, because their activities were decided by the season and the weather. Their only activities that occurred daily, were the milking and the feeding of the animals. If you milked the cows at 5 a.m., you milked them at 5 a.m. day in and day out the year around. If you didn't stick to a milking schedule the cows wouldn't produce well.

I will start these schedules with the coming of spring ---- as the farm comes alive and the time of hard work really begins.

If the cows were milked at five, she would probably get up at 4:30, start a fire in the wood cook stove, and call her husband. He would take the milk pails and head for the barn. While he fed the cows and horses and milked the cows, she would make biscuits -- a great tray of them. Depending on their last year's harvest and what she had managed to put up and keep, she would cook a hearty breakfast. She might fry potatoes, make gravy from grease she had saved and fry a big tray of eggs.

The children would be getting up, at least those of school age, because usually they all had chores to do before they left for school. The boys would have to refill the woodbox, so she would have plenty of fuel for the cook stove and the heating stove, if the weather was still cold. A girl would set the table. Depending on the weather, and if the soil was dry enough to work, the boys might have to stay home from school to help in the field. Depending on the ages of her babies, the woman too might head to the fields after she had strained and put the milk down in the well to keep cool, fed the chickens and maybe put a pot of rabbit stew on the stove to cook slowly until noon. If old enough, her girls would do the dishes before leaving for school. If not, she would have to manage some way -- maybe leaving them stacked up until after supper.

In the field she will drive one team with a harrow today while he drives the other with a plow. When the sun gets high and tells her it is close to noon, she will tie her team in the shade and go to the house. There she will stir up the fire, check to see how the stew is doing, and see that all the younger children are okay.

For dinner she will serve the stew with any biscuits that she has left over from breakfast. If she doesn't have enough biscuits she will serve her homemade bread. They have a jar of home canned fruit to eat. How well they eat depends entirely on what they produce, preserve, and save by frugal consumption. She must bake all the bread they use.

Many of the farm women of this time came from Europe and brought with them the lore of centuries of farming. So they made do very well, and raised healthy sons and daughters.

The husband will have brought both teams to the shade of the barn to let them rest and eat while he also eats. After dinner he will water them. She will take the young children to play near the field in the afternoon, where she can keep a watchful eye on them.

She will work in the field until about 3:30 and then go back to the house. The oldest boy will take her team and work with the mister, when he gets home from school. She keeps the flatirons on the stove all the time. She is always behind on the ironing and will try to iron a few pieces after supper. With no permanent press, everything needs ironing. She must consider what to have for supper. In those days people had large families. It was not unusual to have twelve mouths to feed.

She could not run to the corner grocer, but had to manage out of the cave, root cellar or smoke house; bins of fruit she has dried, preserved jars of fruit, or just as some still do today, food such as rabbits they have trapped or caught. It is spring and she knows the store of food they had put up the previous fall is dwindling. She has to make it last until they have raised a new supply. So either she of one of the boys sit the traps often. She won't be able to do that much longer, because the rabbits will be big with young.

For now she still has another two rabbits. She will cut them up and put them in a pan about six inches deep and nearly as big as the oven. She will peel potatoes, put them in with the rabbit, and place the whole lot in the oven. Later she'll put the leftover stew in the same pan. She will now stack the dinner dishes and call the children to the house because as the sun starts down it is getting chilly.

The youngest has had an accident -- she still forgets once in a while. She chides her a little, then changes and kisses her, and puts her in bed to take a nap. The other little ones also lie down. She will go and feed the chickens again and water them because it still gets dark early. She will gather the eggs and check which hens are beginning to sit. She really doesn't want them to start this early in the year but a couple have already begun.

She will think on it overnight and decide whether to let them go ahead or to put them in a crate for a few days to break them. If she decides to let them set, she will have to start sorting the eggs to pick out those shaped and sized well enough to leave. She would like to hatch a lot of chickens this year. On the one hand, she wishes she had one of those incubators. But on the other had, it would be a lot more work to raise the chickens without a mother. She will think for another year about getting one. It would be a boon to have extra eggs to take to town and trade at the grocery store.

The children are home from school. She sends the boys out to fill the wood box, and to clean the barn if the animals have made a mess. The girls must make the beds and empty and wash the chamber pots.

She had put some dried apples to soak at noon so now she would work them up in a sort of applesauce for supper. The rabbit gets tender and the potatoes feel done so she puts the rest of the stew in with the rabbit. She peels some onions, chops them up and adds them to the rabbit and stew. She makes a skillet full of brown gravy and adds it to the oven dish.

It is already starting to get dark outside and the mister is coming in from the field. He will unharness the horses and he and one of the sons will give them a good rubdown. They are important to his family's health and welfare so he cares for them as best as he knows.

The horses cared for, he gets the milk pails and calls the cows. The boys have already put the feed in their mangers. The oldest boy milks one while he milks the other two. But when the boy has finished his cow, the mister checks the cow to see that the boy has stripped her of every bit of milk.

He will leave one of the big doors open so the cows and horses can go in and out as they please, in case the weather turns bad. He and the boy carry water and corn to the hogs. In the morning he had made a slop for them out of dish water, potato peelings and shorts (leavings) from the mill when they made flower. The lye soap in the dish water will keep them from getting worms.

She mixes a big batch of biscuits and puts them on top of the rabbit dish she has in the oven. The men will be in shortly. The girls have set the table and the smell of apple and cinnamon fills the room. It feels warm and cheery and the kerosene lights are lit.

The man comes in carrying the milk. He sits down in a rocker for a few minutes until she calls him to supper. Supper is a special time with all the children spilling over with their day's activities.

One of them has found a patch of wild asparagus and in a few days they will feast on it -- their first greens since fall. During dinner the family plans the routine of the next few days. The boys must tell the teacher tomorrow that they must stay home until the corn is planted, unless it rains. The oldest girls must tell the teacher that she will have to stay home Monday to help wash clothes. The teacher will have only the youngest students for several days.

Supper over, she and the older girls do up the dishes, strain the milk, and put it in the well. In the morning she will have to skim the milk that is left over. Soon she will have enough cream to churn. It is always a treat to have fresh butter and butter milk. By a little after eight everyone is in bed.

On these spring days this schedule changes in bits and parts. There will be the days when she is planting the vegetable garden. Wash day is a big day. She will put the clothes in tubs of water to soak overnight. She will build a fire under the iron pot in the yard, fill it, and later boil the white clothes in it. The clothes will be scrubbed and rubbed on a corrugated wash board with soap she had made from grease and lye. No drop of grease is wasted in the household. The soap is getting low so she is hoping for a 60 or 70 degree day to make some more.

Each day the same routine is followed with the animals, the chickens, and their own meals. But from day to day the routine is changed according to the growing and harvesting needs. They pull the wild asparagus for a meal one day, the girls gather dandelion greens for another, and tender leaves of young polk root for still another.

Weeding the garden, mending the clothes, each day through the spring is the same, yet different. She finally has nine hens sitting on eggs. Sometimes they have no eggs for breakfast. But the young fryers and the addition to the flock will be worth it in the end. Two of the cows are dry and will have calves in April, and the other will go dry in April. One of the sows has nine little pigs. They are fat and healthy. Life is going on.

If you have noticed how I skipped ordinary housework, it was simply because all these other things come first.

Usually on Saturday all the girls tear in and clean the house. During the rest of the week only the kitchen is cleaned each day.

As it gets along towards summer the chickens have hatched. She has been very lucky and now has ninety baby chicks. She keeps one dog tied near the chicken house so the others will stay close and keep good watch on all the chicks, pigs and calves. She is lucky to have such good dogs to help take care of the helpless. The days always start the same; milking, feeding the animals, and cooking breakfast. But now her garden is getting close to harvest. She spends lots of time weeding. The children are out of school, so the boys work in the field or do other chores around the place. The mister is trying to get another cave ready in time to store potatoes in it. There will also be more room for onions and other root plants. The grocer in town sells lard and he has agreed to save for her the large cans in which it is shipped. She can store dried apples in them. She will can some green beans, but that is a lot of work. To be sure the beans are safe to eat, she will cook them, put them in sterilized jars, and then give them a boiling water bath. She will use the wash boiler for the water bath. That way she can put them in two-quart jars.

Before the summer is over, she will have canned tomatoes, cherries, ketchup, chili sauce, dill pickles, sauerkraut, dried apples, canned peaches, and several different kinds of jams, jellies, and preserves. She will try to preserve and save every thing she can for the long winter ahead.

As soon a school is out, he will put the girls to work cleaning the house from end to end: washing the windows and curtains; washing and, if necessary, mending all the bed cloths; turning the mattresses; and hanging outside and beating all the rugs. During the summer, the school clothes must be examined. Those that are still in good condition will be mended and put away to be worn the next year by whomever they fit. Clothing which is too seedy will be worn around the farm. When they are past the stage where they can be mended and worn, the remaining good spots of material will be cut out and used for patches. The rest will be used for cleaning rags. The turn of the century generation recycled everything again and again.

During the summer, the woman of the house will probably have to make at least one dress for each girl and one shirt for each boy so they will have something new to wear the first day of school. She will also make underwear for the girls. She may even have to make a coat or two.

She has sliced peaches and spread them on a barn roof in the sun and left to dry. When she is sure all the juice is gone, and they feel like leather, she will pack them in the tins and store them in the cave to be used in the winter. She will preserve part of her peaches in fruit jars. Later she will dry apples and store them in the lard tins. Her girls will work along with her on all these projects. It's part of their education to learn how to take care of the harvest all through the year when their turn comes. And when she sews, she will have the girls' help. By the time school starts, the oldest girl will be able to make a dress or shirt by herself. So the farm wife is not just a housewife, but also a gardener and a teacher.

Meanwhile, the usual chores are done each day. They try to observe Sunday as a day of rest, but even then the cows must be milked, and the animals fed and watered, eggs gathered, wood carried in for cooking, water pumped, and meals cooked. With each milking it must be strained and sat in the well, and the strain cloth thoroughly cleaned and hung outside, and of course they always have to find food for the dogs each day. They rarely work in the garden on Sunday unless a lot of rain during the week has kept them from it. And so the summer passes. On the 4th of July they have their first fried chickens. She will kill and dress three, flour and fry them in the great iron skillets until they are golden brown. She washes and boils a big pot of potatoes. They had churned the day before so the potatoes will be rich with butter. She has servings of ripe tomatoes for each person, a big pot of green beans, and homemade bread. And because this is a celebration of Sunday, she has baked a cake. On this day they feast.

It has been a good year in the henhouse. She managed to raise all but seven of the chicks, and thirty-seven of them were pullets. This builds up her laying flock and provides a few eggs to take to town once in a while to trade for something special or even for cash.

The long, hot summer passes slowly-- with emphasis on the word hot.

The routine described here was very typical of Kansas. But as elsewhere, all the cooking and canning were done over a wood stove without the benefit of electric fans, let alone air-conditioning. But the woman manages to make it through the tedious succession, day and night, through the stifling heat of the indoor tasks, and the sun beating on her while working in the field.

With fall the routine changes again. The children go back to school. The growing time is almost over. The harvest is ready. The man cuts hay and puts it up one more time. With good weather they had gotten three good cuttings. The barn was already full, so this cutting is stacked outside the pasture fence where it is handy to pitch to the animals. She follows much of the pattern of the other seasons, day in and day out; doing the inside work she had planned each day, and working in the field with her husband when necessary. In her "spare" time she continues to gather whatever comes in season -- apples, pears, walnuts, pumpkins -- anything she can store and save for the cold, winter months ahead. All through the winter she will be glad, that she stored and canned this harvest.

For the turn of the century farm family, winter was rather when it froze hard the first time. In that kind of weather the man would butcher a hog. A lot of time and energy would be consumed in cutting it up. The fat in deep kettles on the back of the stove slowly separates. She renders every ounce possible and puts it in jars to save for future use. He lights the fire in the smokehouse and hangs the fresh hams there to cure. They keep the smoking fire going, day and night, until the meat is smoked through and through.

For a while the family eats fresh pork chops, cut at the time of the butchering and frozen hard by the weather. But they can't depend on them staying frozen, so as the weather eases she busies herself cutting the remaining meat into small chunks, cooking them in deep grease, and canning them in glass jars covered and sealed in their own grease. That meat, taken from the jar and recooked on a cold winter day, once tasted one would never be forgot.

Some meat scraps could be ground into sausage, cooked and canned in the same way. With the pungent aroma of sage, this sausage, heated and eaten with hot biscuits and gravy, was close to heaven.

On the very cold days, she would have to work with the man in the field to shuck the corn. But it was always she who cooked the breakfast, strained the milk, got the children off to school, washed the milk pails and strainers, put it away to cool, cooked dinner, fed the chickens, gathered the eggs, and, literally, kept the fires going.

As a footnote, it should be stated that the description of this farm routine, although no doubt typical has a specific person in mind: the author's grandmother, was born Kate Rott, in Bohemia, came to the United States, met and married George Henick in Iowa. Moved first with him to Republic County, Kansas, where they endured nine years of drought. Then moved near Tonganoxie, in Leavenworth County, Kansas.

The house George Henick built there on the hill overlooking Friendship School is still standing. Later he built another house west and north of Linwood, Leavenworth County.

George Henick died in 1925 but Katie lived to the age of ninety four. But in addition to what is reflected in this short narrative, Katie Hennick was sort of the neighborhood nurse and midwife for that sparsely settled country. The only doctor was half a day's trip away by horse and buggy, and so other struggling families usually came to her for help. She bore eleven children between the years of 1876 and 1901. Nine survived to pass on the skills, and to settle other parts of the country.

Written by Georgie L. Steifer

(Pictures courtesy of Texas A&M University and Texas Agricultural Extension Service)