Midwestern Pioneers Second Generation: My Mother’s Stories of Growing up on a Kansas Farm, Early 1900’s

Kansas Pioneers, Second Generation is my mother’s stories about growing up on a Kansas farm in the early 1900s.

Her stories include how her family came to be in Kansas, arriving from Sweden, Scotland, and from Wisconsin by way of a Conestoga wagon driven by a woman. Other stories are about encounters with Native Americans, gypsies, hobos, and peddlers. She describes how the family with eight children could survive, feed, and clothe themselves, almost completely self-sustained. She tells stories of some of the farm animals, growing a garden, and being educated in a one-room country school. Life on the farm did not initially include inside water or plumbing, electricity, telephones, cars, or gas-powered farm vehicles.