Unionist Texas

Here's our final entry in this year's TCC guest blogger series. Today's entry by Joshua Russell discusses the Civil War and opposing viewpoints in Texas...

Unionist Texas by lcveducator

School Journal

A fictitious frontier school teacher shares an excerpt from her journal in this creative entry from TCC guest blogger Hannah Stewart...

School Journal

Herb Garden--Log Cabin Village

Enjoy our next TCC blog entry about herbs from Yajaira Garcia!

Herb Garden--Log Cabin Village

Schools and Education on the American Frontier

Happy Wednesday! Please enjoy this entry on 19th c. education from TCC guest blogger Brandon Claridge...

Schools and Education on the American Frontier

Religion in frontier Texas

Today's TCC blog series entry comes from Karla Camacho. Very interesting!

Religion in frontier Texas

Expanding Homes

Greetings! Today's entry in our TCC Blog series is by Diana Medrano and D.M. Ruiz. Enjoy!

Dogtrot cabins by lcveducator

Nineteenth Century Cooking...

Here's our next installment in the TCC blog series, an article about 19th c. cooking by Molly Arkel.  Bon appetit!

19th c. cooking by lcveducator

Aunt Molly and Uncle Jeff

Faithful blog followers may remember that we've had an ongoing service-learning partnership with Tarrant County College--Trinity River Campus for a few years now.  Every year, dedicated students come tour the Village, help us preserve the cabins by raking leaves, and research and write blog entries for us.  This year's entries also include creative fiction writing inspired by Village content.

We will publish these entries here for you to enjoy over the next few weeks.  Thank you so much, Professor Blank and students!!!!

Today's entry is from Jazmyn Garcia.  In this fictional account, she imagines what a child in the Foster household might have felt upon learning that their freed slaves were staying with the family.  Enjoy!

Aunt Molly and Uncle Jeff by lcveducator

Cooking Then and Now...

More from our TCC friends...

Lilia Rodriguez

Professor Blank

History 1301

20 April 2012

Hungry? No time to sit down and have dinner or lunch? Not a problem at all, because you can drive to any fast food place and your hunger problems will be solved in a matter of minutes. With so many fast food places now a days as an option to have a quick meal we have lost appreciation for  the work put into preparing our food.                                                                                             

Not so long ago preparing a meal was not as easy as going to a super market and buying the ingredients ready just to be cooked. According to Courtney Hybarger author of When Dinner wasn’t Quick and Easy “fruits and vegetables were grown on the farmstead and families processed meats, such as poultry, beef and pork”. In the 1800s families did not have the option of simply going to the store and buying what they needed. Everything had to be grown at home for example “spices (nutmeg, cinnamon), seasonings (salt and pepper) had to be ground up with mortars and pestles (Hybarger)”. These families actually had to make their foods out of scratch and sometimes this process was an all day thing. They did not have the convenience of being able to go to a store and buying food that just needed to be popped in the microwave or cooked on the stove. In the 1800s there was a huge difference in technology as well.

Refrigerators an electronic appliance that we consider a necessity to keep our foods from spoiling was non existent in the 1800s. In the 1800s to keep meats from spoiling women used a process of curing. In this process meat was dipped in “brine or salt and then exposed to sun and wind” (Bogan). Fruits and vegetables on the other hand were placed out in the sun or near a heat source (Hybarger). It is interesting to say that with very limited resources people managed to be creative to surpass such obstacles as to how to preserve their foods. Another creative tool was how they cooked their food.

We might have microwaves and stoves but in the 1800s none of that existed. Without stoves in the 1800s, women used what was a Dutch Oven (Hybarger). They placed this oven in the hearths of brick fireplaces where they used different types of fires and flames to cook their meals (Hybarger). For example in todays time you might be used to running down to a Churches Chicken or KFC if you have a craving for some chicken but in 1800s as Fannie Farmers states in her book The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book cooking a Roast Chicken required a long process. For the chicken you first had to dress, clean, stuff and truss it, then you had to season it and while it is cooking you had to be checking and turning it so it will not burn (Farmers 251). This process might sound pretty easy and something that many do at a Thanksgiving meal but imagine not having a stove with an oven and having to cook it over a fire.

While in the 1800s cooking was an all day chore because they had to make everything from scratch and they had to make the perfect fire, today all of that has dramatically changed. Now in the 21^st century we can count on refrigerators to preserve our foods and we have stoves and microwaves that are life savers. Besides that we now even have a number of restaurants and fast food places that provide us with a quick meal without all of the hard work that was needed in the 1800s.

Works Cited

Cracker Women Cooking Outside their Poor, Rural Cabin in Georgia. 1800. Painting. Web. 20 Apr 2012.

Farmers, Fannie. The Boston cooking-School Cook Book. Little Brown: 1918. 251. Print.

(Farmers 251)

Goldman, G Jason. Your Brain on Fast Food. 2010. Scientific America. Web. April 20, 2012

Hybarger, Courtney. "Cooking in the 1800s." When Dinner Wasn’t Quick and Easy. Web. 20 Apr. 2012

Lessons from the Native Americans

Faithful blog followers may remember that we've had an ongoing service-learning partnership with Tarrant County College--Trinity River Campus for a few years now.  Every year, dedicated students come tour the Village, help us preserve the cabins by raking leaves, and research and write blog entries for us.  

We will publish these entries here for you to enjoy over the next few weeks.  Thank you so much, Professor Blank and students!!!!

Andrea Winburn

History 1301

Lisa Blank

Lessons from the Native Americans

Life as a pioneer, most definitely contained struggle and hardship.  Plenty of new experiences took place in these pioneers lives. They were traveling through landscapes that were foreign to them and encountered Native Americans, who were also foreign to them.  Pioneers included people from all walks of life, including women. Pioneer women have been described  to be, “weary, overworked…taken from her happy home, and thrust onto the frontier with all of its threats and dangers”(Williams). They have also been  romanticized as a “strong, brave, moral woman who headed West as a sort of civilizer and Christianizer of the frontier”(Williams). 

Many women had to endure encounters with Native Americans and were pressed with the duty of protecting their families and defending their belongings.  One account of a conflict with Native Americans comes from Mrs. Samuel A. Maverick, “Two Indians rushed by me on Commerce Street and another reached my door, and turned to push it just as I slammed it to and beat down the heavy bar…One had stopped near Jinny Anderson, our cook, who stood bravely in front of the children, mine and hers. She held a great stone in her hands, lifting it above her head, and I heard her cry out to the Indians: 'G'way from heah, or I'll mash your head with this rock!'”(Looscan).  There was also quite a bit of fear amongst women as they encountered Indians for the first time along the trail westward. “They were the first Indians I had ever seen, and to my frightened vision, dressed in their long mackinaw blankets with eagle feathers in their hair — my thought was that they would kill us all, and take my baby in captivity” (Williams). One woman, Catherine Haun, described her group as performing drills in order to prepare for a possible Indian raid upon their camp.

However, after repeated encounters with groups of Indians, the pioneers soon learned that most Indians actually posed no threat to them. As the two groups became accustomed to each other, they were able to interact in different ways, like trading food and learning how to craft different items. Indians that were encountered along the trail, also acted as guides for the pioneers. The emigrant women took note of the differences between their culture and that of the Indians.  They noted the dress and the jewelry of the Indians. “A piece of scarlet broadcloth edged with several rows of white beads decorates the top of the moccasin and from either side of this extends around the top of the quarters a little drop curtain effect fringed by making fine cuts an inch deep around the edges”(Williams). 

Overall, pioneer women’s ideas and opinions about the Indian peoples changed. They were first seen as worrisome and fear invoking, but soon many women learned that some of the Indians they encountered were civil people and learned a great deal from them.

Works Cited

Looscan, Adele. "Texian Women by Adele Briscoe Looscan." Texas A&M University. Sons of Dewitt Colony Texas, 1997. Web. 19 Mar. 2012.

Williams, Carol. "My First Indian: Interaction Between Women And Indians On The Trail, 1845-1865." Overland Journal 4.3 (1986): 13-18. America: History and Life with Full Text. Web. 19 Mar. 2012.

Sundance Square

Another TCC-Trinity River blog entry...this time on Sundance Square!

Sundance Square

Texas Takes Flight...

Another blog entry from one of our TCC students. This time, Charles Ya tackles Jacob Brodbeck and early flight...

Texas Takes Flight

Glad to Gasp the Gas...

We've written before about our ongoing partnership with Tarrant County College--Trinity River Campus. Over the upcoming months, we will be featuring blog entries and reflective essays written by some of the students who participated this past fall. These entries will be left exactly as the students wrote them.

Today's blog entry comes from Anya Conway. In it, she describes medical advances made in the 19th c., particularly in the area of anesthesia.

Glad to Gasp the Gas