Rural Skills and Knowledge: Information About Poultry from the Late 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.

Sunday, September 16, 2012

Information About Poultry from the Late 1800s

The first selection this week is The Complete Poultry Book published in 1882. I covers the history and origin of poultry, raising the birds, small and large flock management, diseases of poultry, and different breeds. It is fairly well written and thorough.

The ABC Poultry Book, printed in 1886, is written in topics like an encyclopedia, in alphabetic order. It can be hard to find certain subjects, but does make interesting reading, once you already have a little background in poultry.

Poultry Keeping, from 1898, covers chickens, ducks, geese and turkeys, covers breeds and selection of birds within a breed. It has a chapter on both egg formation and anatomy of the bird. It discusses breeding stock and raising poultry, as well as how to fatten them up and butcher them. All in all this is a very well rounded and thorough book.