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With the cold spell upon us, I've wondered how our anscestors did it back in the day. How did they stay warm when they were on the frontier or even in sparsely-populated villages in many of the unsettled areas? Why would they even want to settle in such areas of brutal cold? Funny thing is that many people did just that.
I just read the book 'Mayflower' and in it he mentions that an average pilgram family would use 15 cords of wood each year. I grew up with wood stoves and let me tell you that is a lot of wood!
I can imagine that a good part of their time during the late summer/fall would have been to gather supplies to last the winter. In a family history that we have it said that some of my ancestors lived in what sounded like a mud home along the banks of a river when they first got to their destination in central Minnesota perhaps in the latter-19th Century. Sounds pretty harsh. While it was probably something made of some sort of mud brick (rather than living in a hobbit hole in the side of a river bank) it's still not the nicest way to live.
I wonder how many after surviving a cold hard winter thought 'you know, things wernt that bad back home'.
This evening I read the tidbit in the family history report I had done some years ago. I guess the dugout in the banks of the river were done by my ancestors in the 1860s. Mind you, this is in Central Minnesota, so the weather can get quite cold. I believe that the global Mini Ice Age may have ended by the 1850s, but it's not as if the north became a tropical wonderland after that. Tough living indeed.
