Today is Saturday. I’m pretty sure some of you will be off to the grocery store to pick up groceries for the upcoming week or month. On the average person’s shopping list would probably be milk, bread, butter, and all other types of staples that we’ve become accustomed to eating.

Over the past few years, I’ve become interested in what my great-great-grandparents would have been thinking or doing. What was going on during the 1800’s? For the most part, I do know that my great-great-grandparents and great-grandfather lived on a farms just outside of Jacksonville Alabama.

Can you imagine…?

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Growing enough food to feed your family throughout the year?

Not having electricity and having to chop enough wood to keep your family warm all winter?

Wood to keep the stove or fireplace going so that food could be cooked?

Growing crops that would keep a couple of months so that there was food to eat once the cold weather arrived?

To go to town was an all-day ordeal. Farmers sold extra crops to purchase things that they could not grow like sugar, coffee, and oil for lamps. Chickens were kept for eggs and meat. Cows were milked. Butter and buttermilk could be made from the milk. Pigs were raised for their meat and fat. People ate what they had and fed their families as best as they could.

My mom grew up on a farm in the 1930s-1940s. I’ve heard stories from my mom of the house getting so cold that the water in the washstand would freeze overnight. She and her sister would sleep together under so many quilts that it was hard to move, but they would be warm. Their father, my grandfather, would be first up in the morning to get the fire in the wood stove going again to take the chill out of the air.

Ever so often they would take a trip into town to buy flour, coffee, and sugar, things they did not or could not grow themselves. It was a treat when she was asked to pick out the flour sack that she liked best. This meant that her mother would make her a new dress from the material of the flour sack.
Let’s go shopping in 1883…

So how hungry are you?

Do you appreciate that you can jump in your car and go to the local burger place if you are hungry?

Need one of those new-fangled sewing machines?

While doing some family research I came across my great-great-grandfather’s accounting records. These were items submitted to probate court when he died in 1864. Among his papers were the accounting ledgers from where he made purchases on credit at a nearby store. It’s been interesting to see the purchases. This also is probably where the phrase “keeping your papers in order” came from as there are also various other “IOU” type documents on scraps of paper when he purchases other items on credit.

In 1862 there was a purchase of 33 yards of osnaburg which is a type of muslin fabric usually for making work clothes for the lower class and also for shirts and petticoats. 20 yards of domestic possibly for bed sheets, and towels, 5 yards of calico maybe for a shirt or dress, shoes, and a silk handkerchief. This was purchased during winter so most likely this time of year may be when new clothes are made for the family before the new growing season begins.

Old advertisements can give you a little inside look at what may have been popular back then. Especially when I found this one and know that my relative purchased goods from them during that time.

I’m curious. I wonder what my great-great-grandfather did with 25 gallons of molasses? Baked beans? Shoofly pie? I read one article that talked about putting molasses in coffee. I’m pretty sure they may have had molasses at breakfast with a nice hot biscuit!