Home & Household

Running a 19th century household was hard physical work. Water came from a pump or a well. Heat came from a stove that had to be fed with wood or coal several times a day. Laundry meant hauling and heating water, scrubbing on a board and wringing by hand, and it usually took a full day each week.

The cast-iron cooking stove was one of the great improvements of the century. It replaced cooking over an open hearth, which was smoky and dangerous, and by the later 1800s a big iron range was the center of most American kitchens. Ice boxes kept food cold with blocks of ice delivered from a wagon. Gas lighting came to city homes, and then electricity, though many rural homes did not get electric power until the federal rural electrification program of the 1930s.

The electric appliance changed the picture again. Electric irons, washing machines, vacuum cleaners and refrigerators were advertised heavily in the 1920s and 1930s, usually with a smiling woman who had suddenly found free time. The ads are a good record of what people hoped modern life would be like.

Houses themselves are a big part of this collection. There are farmhouses, city row houses, Victorian homes with their towers and porches, and modest bungalows of the early 1900s. Between 1908 and 1940 Sears, Roebuck sold houses by mail order, shipping every piece by rail in numbered kits, and many of them are still lived in. Castles appear too, mostly the great houses of Europe that Americans admired, copied and sometimes tried to buy.

Worth noticing in the interior photographs is how crowded the Victorian rooms are. Every table has a cloth, every wall has pictures, and every shelf has something on it. By the 1920s rooms are simpler and lighter. Look too at the kitchens. You can often date them by the stove, the sink and whether there is an ice box or a refrigerator in the corner.