Everyday Life in the 1800s by Marc McCutcheon

There was usually a pan with water in it (that you carried from the well in a bucket) for rinsing your fingers before meals and washing your face in the morning. Of course, if you stayed in one of the “big” cities, you would have access to whale oil or kerosene for your lights.)īe prepared to slaughter pigs and use everything except the “oink.” (Think pickled pig’s feet.) And you had better spend all day Sunday at church. (Yes, the Franklin stove was invented in the late 1700s, but it weighed so much, most folks who went west didn’t take it with them. Be prepared to get up with the sun and read by the light of your drafty fireplace. If you truly want to try life in the 1800s, be expected to have 18-20 children, all born at home, and have half of them die before the age of five because of dysentery, typhoid, scarlet fever or measles. Dig your own well, do your own blacksmithing and starve in the winter when you’ve had a bad crop year. Simple homesteading of this era means you learn how to knit, spin and weave, and use only your own feet (or those of a horse) for transportation. Grow your own linen (hemp is preferable to flax for durability and comfort), and wool.

Go to the grocery store for only flour, coffee, and sugar. Reading these diaries gives a very good insight into how people lived.Īre you interested in the day-to-day life of agrarian people as opposed to those who live in the city? If so-I recommend becoming a homesteader without electricity, power tools or indoor plumbing.Īlso take away modern medicine, familiarize yourself with a healing herbs list and learn to recognize gangrene. There are numerous diaries that have been left behind by the folks who “traveled West” and the hardships of simple homesteading they endured as well as diaries of those who “stayed behind” in the civilized world of chamber pots and chimney fires.

Everyday Life in the 1800s by Marc McCutcheon