Ah, Friday…

I had been looking forward to Friday all week–not only is the weekend coming, but today eighth graders and I went on a field trip to a harvest festival celebrating local and regional history.

My students and I have been studying local history. Among other things, we have laughed at the antics of the early grifters who made money electing themselves to county offices and then faking the building of schools and bridges to get bond money.

We have also been creating an online museum of artifacts belonging to our grandparents’ generation (or an older generation). Some of the photos in the collection are just beautiful, contributing value to the world of images available with a Creative Commons license. I am so proud of them! Check out these gems from Becca and Paul and Paris.

At the harvest festival today we saw apple cider pressing, blacksmithing, rope making, a peg barn, a one-room schoolhouse and a sod house. We talked to historian interpreters who shared much about the history of our local area. I took many photos that showed life on the prairie one to two hundred years ago, but my #TFotoFri favorite was one that conjured a laugh outloud family memory for me. It’s a picture of a syrup pail, which when emptied would have been cleaned out and used as a lunch pail.

I grew up hearing this story of a lunch pail:

When it was (great) Aunt Sally’s turn to make the lunch, she took leftover biscuits and made sandwiches. The filling she used? Leftover dumplings, which in my family means biscuits cooked in chicken soupy gravy. That day when the older boys, including my grandpa, took the lunch pail out of the coatroom and dug in for lunch, they found their sandwiches–basically biscuits on biscuits. How does that sound for a meal loaded with carbs? The family of five siblings ate their dry sandwiches, but they never forgot the day their little sister made that lunch. My siblings and I were the third generation who laughed about that one.

Here are a few more pictures from the Harvest Festival.