Downen Family 1901

While substitute teaching in a grade 2 class today, I read the children a book about pioneers. When I told them it took the pioneers, in their covered wagons, six months to cross the country, and it is now possible to drive across in six days, they could hardly believe me. Travel has become so easy--driving, flying, fast trains and ships, we have trouble putting ourselves in the shoes of those pioneers. Travel for them was a struggle that often ended in disaster. They trusted God with their lives and future, and looked to him for daily help, and comfort.
I told the students that my great-great-grandmother rode from Missioui to California in her rocking chair, placed in the back of her daughter and son-in-law's wagon. I also told them I may have that chair. That great-great-grandmother Cynthia Piper is not shown in this pictue. The older lady and gentleman in the front row are her daughter, Mary Jane and her son-in-law, Stephen Tiner Lacy Downen.

If you look closely at the chair Mary Jane is using, and compare it to the one in the header at the top of this blog, you will see it is the same one. I don't know, for sure, that this chair crossed the plains, but it could have.

Another thing we do, that people back then didn't do, is constantly discard furniture in-order to purchase the latest style. Of course, furniture back then was built to last, and I am grateful that it was. Much of what I use daily is at least 100 years old.