court decisions including -- arizona and roe versus wade. landmark cases. the book features introductions, backgrounds, highlights of each written by tony mauro and published by c-span with with cq press, sage incorporated. it is available for $8.95 plus shipping. >> each week american artifacts located in stanton, virginia, the frontier cultural museum tells the story of early

migrants from europe. we visit houses from england, ireland and germany relocated to the museum and interpreters detail life in the early world. and we will see a 1740s american farm and discover similarities and differences with farms in europe. this is the first of a two-part series on the frontier culture museum. >> my name is joe. i'm director of marketing here. we are a living history museum with a mission focused on education. our objective is to teach people how a unique american culture is created with the blending with european and african cultures. today we will start on the old world side and see the english farm, irish farm, and german

farm. lastly, we will move over to america and see the american farm settlement. >> my name is sal there landis. i am an historic interpreter. right now we're on the english farm. this comes from worcester, england. they have 150 to 300 areas, wheat, barley, rye and harvesting and hiring people to help them. 100 sheep. they are sheering them twice a year and selling fleeces. and then the lady of the house, including daughters, would be responsible for milking the cows, say 15 to 30 of them. they are going to go ahead and take the milk and make cheese. they will be selling that at market. those will be the sours of income for this family.

so they are working hard and doing well. basically the top of the working class. you could refer to them as the midland sort. they are yeoman farmers. this house is based on the woodhouse family. edward and cecelia. there is e.w. on the date stone. so this is his home. and his wife had six children. this is quite a common style. it is timber framing you can see the timbers here. there was not as much wood. ship building and tanning have deforested. so you are going need to be resourceful. the fact that they can have wood shows he is doing well.

waddle is a basket weave. so my hand is like the basket weave. you would have dob on one side and dob on the other. it is consistent with what you have on the farm, like straw, animal hair, lime, clay, and manure. that's an important ingredient. we do know that the lady of the house is going to be cooking, of course. she's going to be baking. she's going to be brewing. she's going to be the gardener. she has a kitchen garden to take care of. she's also the doctor for the family and making cheese and selling that. the yeoman farmer has 100 sheep to sheer twice a year and has people to help. he will be selling those at market. he also has the grain to take care of. he's growing grain. 36 acres in wheat, barley, and rye. he would be harvesting that and hiring people to help with the haarest. a good harvester could harvest half an acre grain in a day.

the other thing about the farmer, he is a progressive farmer in the sense that in the fall he is thinking about his fields. okay, you have harvested everything. but what he is going to do is putting in green fertilizer, if you will, for the next year so that your fields will grow and do well. things like turnips and in time clover so you are taking care of your land. and he's got fences to build, fences to repair. and then you're thinking ahead in the winter like what you are going to be planting. so they really -- you're either either in the thick of doing it. planting, harvesting. but then you're planning and preparing for the next season too. so things are seasonal very much. and you are just trying to be prepared. and you want to do well. you have a good situation. this yeo mapp farmer, five 5% to

7% are yeoman farmers. he is in a good position and he wants to keep it that way. the first room you encounter is you're going to encounter the kitchen. that is where we cook, of course, and. and that's where we make cheese as well. is and i guess if i had to say that's probably one of my favorite rooms. because there is a lot of action. and i enjoy baking very much there. next we would take a step up. the room to the left is called the parlor. that is a formal room. you are seldom using that. the door would be shut much of the time. you're having that room for weddings, for funerals, christenings, special occasions. and the family could have light meals in the evening there. the fact that you have a room that you are hardly using shows you are doing well. most people will use every inch of space in their home. then the next room you come to

is the hall. that is a room you are going to be dining. and also spending time knitting, sewing, reading a book, playing a game. the family interacts there and dining primarily. then we have an upstairs. that consists of two bedrooms. one for the parents and one for the children. and then we have a loft room with a bedroom for the servients. it is important because it is a system by which who inherits what. what i mean is the oldest son is going to be getting everything. he gets the house and the land. and of course we're talking about 150 to 300 acres of land in the case of the woodhouses. so second and third sons will be left with you could say nothing tangible. and the second and third sons would be the ones that could be leaving and going to america to

seek their fortune you could say. or they could choose the military, the university. or maybe be apprentice to another tradesman much like joseph woodhouse was. the thing that i would like to mention that is a common thread is people are wanting to have a place of their own. whether english, irish, or german. so if the oldest son gets everything, then the second and third sons will need to leave to go to america. they want to have land. and if you came to america before 1700, paying your passage of course on a ship bound to virginia, you had the right to receive 50 acres of land for free. so that was an enticement for many of these second and third sons. >> my name is gerry kester.

i am a costume interpreter. the time period is between 1720 and 1740. and the family comes from oster, northern province of ireland. and this is the home of a farmer as well as a weaver. and 1720s, 40s, that's when they started leaving ireland to come to america because they wanted a better life. part of the reason they're leaving is there has been a depression in the linen market because of a whole series of droughts. you are having food shortages and famines. the quality of linen is really bad. there is a big depression on the market. the landlord doubles and triples the rents. economically you can't afford to live there anymore. if you want a better life, you sell everything you have and off you go to america. daily life, oh, you get up

early. the women and girls go out and start milking cows, cook breakfast, dishes, and go out and work in the gardens, herb beds, make butter, take care of the kids, sew. but the most important job they have to do is spin. because the man is a weaver, it takes three spinners to keep up with one weaver. so the women and girls are busy with that. they will stop late in the day, get up in the morning and do it again. the boys will be pretty much outside working. it will soon be time to harvest our oats and flax. if you don't get them harvested, you won't have anything to eat or anything to make linen with. very important jobs. but also in the meantime you have all these other is jobs to do like taking care of animals, upkeep on the farm, maintenance, that sort of thing. taking care of stone walls and everything. so quite a busy life, busy days.

now, this farm, this is the first farm at the museum. it is laid out exactly as it was. behind me is the big pen. and the kreubgen house down below. the house itself, the long buyer at the far end. that is scott itch for barn. so the first two rooms is for storage. and then the other two are for livestock. basically it's a very -- it's a two-room house. classic irish architecture is one deep with a chimney on the end. so when you first come in the front door you're in the kitchen. that's really the main room of the house where all the activities take place. you also have a fire burning night and day year-round. so that of course is where everyone is. behind it is the shop. that is the boys's bedroom.

24e8d have a mattress on the floor where they would sleep. and of course the loom is in there too. one day they will take over the wheeling so they are close to their work. the weaving process is why those things -- i'm sure they were planted by the agricultural year. if it is very good year for the linen trades, they may hire weavers to take care of it or irish laborers to work on the fields and you can concentrate on the weaving. of course a lot of it take place in the wintertime. for the laborers that's the only way to make money in the wintertime so they have a year-round income. of course northern ireland, you have lots of rain. even though it is raining, you're not inside. so you would only weave at night after supper. economically at the same time you would say he was a strong farmer. but he was a midland sort, which meant he was middleclass.

far from being the poorest. in the early years of the linen are trade, everyone was making lots of money so life is good. with the depression, things started going bad really quick. the linen board, the linen industry goes to northern ireland with the french teach everybody how things are done. they set up the linen board to govern the production of linen. and for the girls they would go and learn how to spin. they had the tiny little fingers. part of their graduation present is they would get their own spin issing wheel. now, for the loom in the early years, the linen trade, if you planted a certain amount of flax seed, they will give you a loom. by now they aren't giving anything away.

even itself right now all we have. one of the ways around that. that way you have less down time so you have more production going on. everyone is convinced they see the door they are convinced it was short. of course the beds, how short they were, they are totally convinced by then. the reason the door is so low, structurally that holds up half the weight of the roof. the reason the beds are so short, the peat when it burns is smoky. it is easier to breathe if you're propped up. judging by barn space, they probably didn't have more than two pigs. maybe five or six cows.

of course all milk cows. probably one horse. everyone has ducks, geese, chickens. and maybe you will find a few sheep. pretty much the animals we have, something like the pigs, we will sell those to the butcher to pay the rent. then we buy it back by the slice. we can only afford the pig ears, tail for soup. the cows, we get milk and make butter. occasionally three or four neighbors get-together to buy a steer so you have fresh meat for a few days. when it starts going bad, you sell that to help pay the rent. the only time you eat a chicken is when they get old and stop laying eggs. you have to make soup because they are so is old and tough. this farm, the closest village is about five miles down the

road. that would be awful far for the kids to walk and come back. once you get to america, that's one of their thing they take with them is their belief in education. the minister is the teacher. he is going to run pretty much a boarding school. so some of the kids, the smarter ones will go and stay. and everyone else is pretty much home-schooled. they read the bible. the girls would work on samplers so they learn how to read and write. presbyterians are one of the few groups that believe in educating girls. you hear all sorts of stories about what their ancestors brought. like a spoon or a cup or some bowls or plates. but you definitely would bring the family bible. because religion was so important. furniture wise, maybe a odds and

ends. but you had to pay storage on the ship for the more stuff you brought. a lot of people had strong ties with the linen trades. a lot of the flagships take seeds in the spring. so you would arrive in the fall. and of course you would either arrive in the delaware valley or philadelphia. and of course being farms, you end up in some odd places called the shenandoah valley. once you get there, pretty much they said from stanton to lexington was called the irish track tract. that's where pretty much everyone would have settled. you talked to the county surveyor and he would tell you where all the land is. you would go look at it and tell him what you liked, what you saw. he would go to williamsburg and have it registered. then you have your land and the

american dream has begun. once the olster scots get to america, they become the dominant culture there. because they believe in education, because they build churches some schools and whatnot they are predominant leaders in that community. especially when elections come by. because they are educated. then a lot of them are elected as officials. and they are also some early signers and supporters of the declaration of independence thank for coming by and come and see us again. >> my name is cris raymond. i am an enterer here at frontier culture museum of virginia. early life was pretty much hard work.

you're always working the farm. there was always work to do no matter what time of the year. so there is definitely yard work, field work, cooking, food preservation, cleaning. there is always something to do. it's a very busy life. not a lot of leisure time. spinning pretty much is just twisting. and this is flax fiber. it comes from the stalk of the flax plant. it is the type of fiber that makes linen. all the clothing that i'm wearing is linen. so it is nothing more than the fiber that is here. so when you spin it, you feed it into the spinning wheel. you let the spinning wheel twist it. you smooth it with water. it will go across the hooks and wrap right onto the spool. of course once the thread is made, you have to hand it to a weaver. the weaver will use a loom and actually make fabric. and that can be made into clothing. spinning wheel just makes the

thread. this time of year you were really out in your fields. everyone is working. if you can work, you're doing it. doing something. you possibly could give some of your thread that you made to a weaving family, make a little extra money. but this family's primary revenue source is the grain. lots of wheat was swelt. it is becoming popular again today. rye, barley, and some oats are some of the grains. we have a pretty large barn out there.

our family would have kept maybe a couple cows. milking them, making cheese and butter out of the cow's milk. pigs. pork was definitely one of the primary meats that a lot of peasant families would use in their cooking. >> this family is doing pretty good. they are still peasants. they have ties to their land, to their landlord, to their local ruler of their region. and they must pay fees and money as well as perform work on certain days of the year to the local ward or prince. so basically this house is a decent home. this family is not rich, but they're not impoverished.

the building the frontier museum acquired from germany. it was dismantled and numbered and brought here. it is not a replica. the region that we are really discussing is the rhine province in southwestern germany. it was back then known as the holy roman empire. that region really had a tough time with the series of wars in the 1600s and early 1700s. the region took hard hits. now is a time when families have been working to recover to fix the land and the towns. without some really terrible issues going on, the population has grown.

and they have been raising reasonably sized families. there just isn't enough land for everybody to farm comfortably. some local rulers levied fees that must be paid in order to integrate legally. there are exit fees. sometimes it was a little more expensive for women than it was for men. they don't want to lose too many people. also, it's costly. you basically have to come up with the money to pay for the trip. you are living in a region that's landlocked. so you need to get to a sea port. so you are going to have to sell off as many belongings as you can manage to help raise additional money for the boat

rider that is going to take you down the rhine river, pay any tolls along the river that you come to. and then also, you know, you need money for passage. it's a hall kitchen house. you have your hallway area and the kitchen. and the kitchen is relatively small. it's just where you cook and do the dirty work. a lot of the wood that they are using is kindling, whatever they could collect on the ground in the forest. so we have a raised hearth where you burn small fires on top of the hearth. then to the side, the family would bring the food into the stuba, which is a stove room. it is mainly for heat. it is radiant heat. and families would take meals in the stove room or stuba, they

would do textile work, spend family time. this is really the heart of the home where you stay warm in the winter. and we have a small bedroom in the back which gets some heat as well. and the calmer basically is where the oldest couple would sleep or whoever had the greatest need. so if you had grandparents in the home, there is a good chance they're in there. if you don't have grand parents in the home, usually it's mom and dad. but children, a lot of times, slept upstairs. and there really wasn't a lot of heat in those areas of the house. the chest is an example of one that a family actually immigrated with in the early 1700s. so if you were thinking about immigrating, that's the type of chest you might pack up with extra clothes, blankets, and food, seeds perhaps so you can plant a garden in the british

colonies wherever you're going to settle. you also will want to put a lot of tools in there. pause you're going to have to possibly build yourself a new home or replace things that you had to sell and leave behind. and anything that you think that might be desirable in the british colonies where people want to pay you good money, where there is a market for it, you might want to pack some of those things because you can sell or barter them in the new world. there were germans that did go to new york state and parts of virginia, different ventures. but a lot of them took the path and went to pennsylvania. and then of course a number of them once they got there were looking for cheap land and they leave pennsylvania eventually and move out into other areas, spreading out. the pennsylvania germans are still very well known today.

>> hi. i'm sarah gant. i am a costume interpreter. we are at the 1740s american settlement. also known as the back country of the american colonies or the colonial frontiers. it would have been west of the blue ridge mountains. so people had already settled in this area maybe a decade or so before the 1740s. people had already started to move a bit west and settle in that area. there were land grants that were given. and the families would be recruited to come down and settle the va is va area. occasionally, it would be just one man coming out here and settling the area. but most of the time it would she families. on average, we would say about

four to nine people. they would have established themselves in the pennsylvania area first. so they would be familiar with living here and, you know, they would have had the means to purchase land down here, getting land about 300 to 800 acres. so they were pretty well off in terms of being able to buy the land. to begin with, they would need to clear the land. and that was a big change for them. because the environment was very wooded here. so clearly the land was a big deal. and then getting the fields ready for their crops. and they were given a lot moreland than they were used to. so it took a lot of work. so keeping up with their crops was a big thing. and then eventually getting to the building of their house and chopping wood, that sort of thing. it was difficult here. especially in comparison to the

old world. climate is very different. harsher summers and winters. very hot all the time. so hot weather, which would affect your crops. it is also different in that it is, like i said earlier, very wooded, which is very different, especially if you're coming from ireland where they don't have as many trees and would have been making their homes out of stone as opposed to logs. so using the material that's available. another big thing would be the kitchen garden that we have. and that would include crops that would have come over from europe. and the kitchen garden would have been a style that would have been used in europe as well. we have carrots in the garden. we have something called sals

phi, mustard, turnips, lettuce, spinach. we had rye growing at one point. they would grow wheat and hemp and that sort of thing. and then we also have tobacco as well. and then we also have down that way corn, beans, and squash. which is not an influence from the old world but from the american indians. they were grown from the same mound. the corn, beans, and squash grew together. the american indians taught them how to do that. oftentimes, because they were so isolated and there weren't a whole lot of people to help, really whoever was strong enough to do the work did the work. sometimes, you know, the men would do more of the woodworking or building. and then maybe the women would have tended to the garden a bit

more. and housework. but oftentimes even kids would have been expected to do starting at maybe 7 years old. basically as soon as they were strong enough to pick up a tool and use it. the children's education, if they would have gotten a formal education they would have needed to go back to an older settlement to learn. oftentimes there was no formal education. it was whatever the parents had learned before coming to this area. then they would teach their children. but the skills, reading, writing, math, were very, very basic. they would have brought maybe a pack horse or a cow. maybe chickens and sheep. pigs especially. because pigs were very easy to take care of or hogs in that they were just released out into

the acreage that they owned just to fend for themselves. so they didn't have to provide for them and keep up with them as much. and, in fact, they were able to feed themselves a bit better on nuts and mushrooms, that sort of thing. so pigs were a great animal to have here. i really love talking about the chimney that we have because it really surprises a lot of people. you will see maybe a fourth or third of the way up it is made with stone. and then the rest of the way up it is made with wood. so that surprises people. and we talk about that a little bit because a lot of people ask, well, would the house have caught on fire? and a lot of times it would. it would. the chimney is built away from the house to begin with. it is kind of leaning a bit.

they would have had a way in which if they knew the chimney caught fire, they could pull it away from the house and smother the fire and at least get it away from the house. so you could save your house you would have to rebuild the chimney. but you wouldn't have to start from scratch. so that really intrigues a lot of people. it is pretty bare inside really. not a whole lot. we've got a bed stead inside where the parents would have slept or the most senior couple would have slept. we have a dirt floor where everybody else would have slept. we also have a fireplace inside where oftentimes it would have been used for warmth during the wintertime and to provide a little light at night. most of the cooking would have been done outside. number one, during the summer, you would want the house to stay as cool as possible. you know, as we were talking

about before with the chimney, you know, you wouldn't want to potentially have your chimney catch on fire. the majority of the time the cooking was done outside. you also see some chests in there filled with -- one is filled with tools. and just other odds and ends. you'll see a cross-cut saw on the wall, which would have been an essential tool to have here at the settlement. the large logs we have set up over there are to demonstrate how someone would split wood by a process of using either an iron wedge or a big wooden wedge. and they would have made -- it would have looked like a giant wooden hammer. they are actually pretty hefty. they are actually called beatles, which means to strike or to hit. you would drive it into the iron wedge, which would eventually

split the log by length. and you could continue splitting it and splitting it and splitting it until you could get sizes big enough for a split rail fence or the shakes or shingles on the house. it was app easier way to split the wood up. we have chinking in between and it is also called dobbing. the logs have space in between. on the outside it is a mixture of mud and straw or grass sometimes. if you had horse hair, you would use horse hair. you would have to mix that up typically using your feet to do that and put it on probably in cooler weather, in fall or early spring. because the mud mixture would need to dry pretty