Rural Skills and Knowledge: Encyclopedia of Household Knowledge from the 1800s

Purpose

In 1840 approximately 89% of the American people lived in rural areas of the country. These "country folk" had the skills and knowledge necessary to supply and/or make most of their food and clothes, tools and shelter, furniture and amusements. They raised crops for food and fodder, cared for livestock, used tools we never knew existed to do things we never knew needed doing. And sometimes, they wrote down their thoughts and knowledge and published them for others.

Since 1840 people have been leaving the farms and heading for the cities, until today there are 89% of us living in urban areas. The skills and knowledge it took to be self sufficient have been lost to us as we have become more and more dependent on modern cities, just in time deliveries, and "super stores". Our great grandparents probably did a wider variety of things before breakfast than we do all day long.

Copyright laws in the U.S. are such that everything published before 1923 is now in the Public Domain, and with the advent of the internet and electronic media, many of those books from the 1700s, 1800s and early 1900s are store online in giant archives in all sorts of formats, made available at the click of a mouse button. This blog is for the purpose of making this knowledge more available.

To download these files, click on link and RIGHT CLICK on the type of file you wish to have and "save" to your computer. Mac users: Click on link, hold down the "control" key, then click as above and save to your mac.

Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Encyclopedia of Household Knowledge from the 1800s

Cassell, Petter and Galpin was a publishing house in London that printed a lot of books in England in it's time. The volumes entitled Cassell's Household Guide: A Complete Encyclopaedia of Domestic and Social Economy and Forming a Guide to Every Department of Practical Life, Volumes 1 through 3.

These volumes, at about 500 pages each in very small type, comprise knowledge on everything from cooking to cleaning to farm buildings and livestock. They are written in cycling topics, such that a topic continues on every three or four pages, with other topics in between.

Topics include: the house, cooking, carving (meats), medicine, raising children, pets,
tools, aquariums, furniture, gardening, farming, health and skincare, livestock, clothing, and decor. These are just the subjects in the first 50 pages of volume 1!

Granted, the recipes may require a search engine to figure out what the ingredients actually are, due mainly to the facts that these are 125 years old and British.

This collection is very wide ranging in its scope and entertaining as well as enlightening as to the skills and knowledge required to keep a household, farm or homestead going on a daily basis.