Everything changes when you decide to recreate the life of 1900-era subsistence farmers. For instance, when Christmas rolls around, you can no longer drive to the tree lot and pick a blue spruce from a line of 40 identical blue spruces and stop at Wal-Mart for an extra strand of lights on the way home. You have no car, no lights, no Wal-Mart. So during the holiday season the year we traveled back in time, I hitched our draft horse, Belle, to our spring wagon, tossed a saw and some rope in the wagon’s bed, and rattled down Trimble’s Mill Road with my wife, Heather, and our two-year-old son, Luther, bundled beside me against the cold.
When we went in search of our Christmas tree, we were halfway through our yearlong attempt at living the 1900s life. Fed up with the distractions and material excesses of modern life, we pulled the plug on the 21st century six weeks after Luther’s second birthday. We were seeking a healthy—if eccentric—family challenge and a transition to a new life in the country. Plus, we thought it would be fun.
Our project required radical change. My wife, Heather, quit her job at a New York criminal justice think tank, and I put my freelance article writing on hold. We moved from Brooklyn to the Shenandoah Valley community of Swoope, Virginia, where we bought an 1885 farmhouse and spent months doing things like ripping out electrical wiring, adding a wood cookstove, and installing an outhouse. We devoured manuals on animal husbandry, gardening, root cellaring, and other skills we’d need to survive. We would grow our own food—no grocery shopping for a year. Finally, we replaced our car with the spindly-wheeled wagon tethered to Belle, a 2,000-pound draft horse. Before this, the largest animal I had ever handled was a golden retriever.
As we had in New York, Heather and I spent most of our time working, but we no longer tapped away at computer keyboards. We milked goats, split wood, canned food, scrubbed laundry. Every day was take-your-child-to-work day. When we plucked ripe tomatoes, so would Luther. When we weeded, there was Luther hacking at the thistle (and the occasional head of lettuce) with his pint-sized wood-handled hoe.
Luther’s one official chore was to collect eggs, a daily ritual that began with him giggling and screaming and kicking up sawdust while chasing the chickens. Once he settled down, he would stretch his arm into the chickens’ straw-filled nesting boxes, pulling out one egg at a time and place it in a wire basket. (We tried not to make a fuss about cracked eggs.) With every egg, he slowly announced the new tally—one, two, three—trying out this new concept of numbers. That’s how he learned to count to 10, the average number of eggs our dozen Rhode Island Reds laid each day.
There was time for fun too, the kind we never had in New York. We chucked stones in the river to see who could make the biggest splash. We marched up Echo Hill—a bowl-encircled pasture that we named for its stunning acoustics—and screamed “Cow pie!” at the top of our lungs. I would lift Luther onto my shoulders and hike to a nearby blackberry patch. There he learned the hard way how to pick sweet, ripe berries without getting pricked by thorns. When friends from New York visited, we glued paper cutouts to wooden sticks and staged shadow puppet plays using our oil lamps. Luther went wild with delight.
fWe made lots of things from scratch, especially around the holidays. Heather stamped her own Christmas cards using green paint and a homegrown potato carved into the shape of a Christmas tree. For ornaments, we spread the dining table with the craft items we stocked up on the previous spring when we did have a car: wooden beads, spools, ribbon, rickrack, glue. We made toy soldiers by decorating old-fashioned clothes pins. Luther and I rolled his red wagon into the yard and collected spruce cones. Back inside, he helped me drip glue on the cones and we dusted them with corn starch to look like snow. Eat your heart out Martha Stewart!
We found equally creative solutions to the child-rearing challenges presented by swearing off modern conveniences. One of the biggest was potty training. Luther started out in cloth diapers. But during the warm months, when we spent most of our time outdoors, we simply let him run around wearing only a shirt. Instead of a plastic potty seat, we gave him an antique wooden child’s potty chair. I bought it for a few dollars at a country auction. We tucked the chair behind our silver maple and stuck an old pot beneath it. A few months after his second birthday, though, he was using the outhouse, which seemed perfectly normal to a boy who had never perched on porcelain.
We overcame other challenges too, like having to give up that American staple of childrearing—a sippy cup filled with juice. Luther soon forgot about it and began gulping down fresh-squeezed goat’s milk from indestructible enamelware cups.
Most of the few exceptions to our 1900 rule were made for Luther’s sake. For example, while we left behind his plastic toys, we did bring along Luther’s burgeoning library, including such modern-day classics as The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Green Eggs and Ham. In 1900, there weren’t many preschool books. Back then, child development meant either improving manners or learning job skills. We decided we’d rather compromise our rules than Luther’s early exposure to reading.
By the end of our experience, we were much more competent at country living. Heather became an accomplished woodstove cook, wowing visitors with 19th century dishes like the authentic fruitcake she gave as a Christmas present—a rich, dark treat that had nothing in common with the artificially-colored version most people know. I learned to care for a horse and drive the wagon. And we were both more involved parents, spending morning, noon, and night with our son. We made things. We sang songs. We observed nature. Before he turned three, Luther could identify half a dozen birds by call alone.
Our son had grown in other ways too. He had gone from being a city kid who was afraid of grass to a healthy, robust young boy with a perfectly normal penchant for terrorizing chickens. He experienced his share of scrapes and bruises and even bounced back from a goat butt to the forehead that sent him sailing through the air. (“Daddy gave Star loooong timeout,” he said, choking back tears, after I locked the guilty goat in her stall.) But it was never anything more than what a typical boy goes through. And since we got lots of curious local visitors—and forged some lasting friendships as a result—he had plenty of opportunity to grow socially.
Exactly one year after leaving the 21st century, we returned. We piled into a truck we borrowed from a neighbor and drove to Staunton, the nearest town. For the first time in a year, we ate at a restaurant. Happily standing in a booth, Luther pointed to a basket of condiments. “Daddy, what’s that?” he asked. “That’s ketchup,” I began. But before I could continue, Heather nudged me. “Quiet,” she whispered, “Do you want people to think we’re crazy?” Then it dawned on me. Luther may have been the only boy in America who did not know what ketchup was.
It did not take Luther long to readjust to having creature comforts, like ketchup. What has been an adjustment for him and his younger sister (born after our return to the 21st century), as well as for Heather and me, is having less together time. Once again, we have been swept up in the frenetic pace of modern life, answering e-mails, talking on the phone, zooming here and there in the car. We may no longer make our Christmas ornaments or haul a fresh-cut spruce home in a horse-drawn wagon, but those and other experiences have given us a yardstick against which to measure modern life. And when it doesn’t measure up, we park the car, ignore the ringing phone, and enjoy the moment, together.
Logan Ward is the author of the book See You in a Hundred Years: Four Seasons in Forgotten America (BenBella Books), about his family’s quest to become 1900-era subsistence farmers. He lives with his wife and two children in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley.