by Eric Sloane
Temporarily out of stock, more on the way
On his fifteenth birthday in 1805, young Noah Blake’s parents gave him a little leatherbound diary in which he recorded the various activities on his father’s farm. This reprint of the actual early nineteenth-century book provides today’s readers with a charming rarity—a view of bygone days through the eyes of a young boy. Eric Sloane has taken the notebook with its brief comments and expanded the daily entries with explanatory narrative and 72 of his own delightful drawings.
Verbal sketches and drawings detail the construction of an entire backwoods farm, as well as such common tasks as making nails, building a bridge, splitting shingles, spring plowing, and maple-sugaring. The result is a remarkable window into the customs and preoccupations of rural New England two centuries ago.
Here is an excerpt from Sloane's introduction:
One time a young boy visited a museum of early American things. There were ladies’ bustles and men’s wigs and other obsolete things. There were tremendous planes and broadaxes that appeared much too heavy for actual use. There were whole aisles of kitchen equipment and farm tools that no one would care to use now. To the boy, it all looked very much like a neatly arranged and well-cared-for junk yard. He wasn’t quite sure what was meant by the title “Americana”: all he could think of was, “How dreary life must have been in those days and how unhappy the people must have been, and how glad I am that I live today instead of then.”
I am sure that whoever collected and arranged those things did so to excite admiration for the old days; he would have been very displeased with the boy’s reaction. Yet I cannot blame the boy, for just as in so many museums of early Americana, the chief attraction of the pieces was made to be just old age.
Even now (for I was the little boy), I can feel no reverence for old. Respect is not due older people for their age and wrinkles or gray hair; respect is due them simply for the things they have learned and for their extra years of experience.
The old-time craftsmen would have been the very first to have junked crude or obsolete things, so why should we seek them and collect them for display as examples of early American life? Indeed, there are ugly things in all ages which should be discarded and forgotten. Only the good things of either the past or the present are worthy of collection.
The good things of the past were not so often articles as they were the manner in which people lived or the things that people thought. This, of course, is still true; the fine TV sets and modern kitchen equipment we prize now will be junk within a matter of years; the lasting examples of our time will turn out to be the ways that we live or the things that we think.
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