Kate’s Notes: This touching recollection of pioneer life on the farm was actually published at different times in several papers around the country.  I am providing a copy here that appeared in a Wisconsin paper, though the Salina Gilleland referred to in the article was, I believe, the same Salina Gilleland who was married to John D. Gilleland of Butler County, Pennsylvania. Ironically, John D. Gilleland died the same year that Salina wove “Peace and Prosperity – 1846” into the coverlet inherited by the author of this piece.
    The will of John D. Gilleland, as well as other genealogical information, can be found on ancestry.com, provided by a descendant.

From the Wisconsin Rapids Daily Tribune
Wisconsin Rapids, WI
5 December, 1934

YOUR
CHILDREN
By
Olive Roberts Barton

   Conflicts wear us out. They wear children out. The everlasting war between what we want and what we have, choosing between two duties, having to wear down an urge to be one thing while life points a relentless finger at another – all these fights with ourselves are ruinous.
   We say we won’t go back to the farms our grandparents lived on or the slavish work they endured. We women wouldn’t go through the daily routine that bent shoulders, twisted hands and streaked hair with gray long before its day.
   But I had a lot of country relatives, and as I look back on those old days, one thing registers in memory. The calmness of their features, the quiet peace of their eyes, and their good humor. And I remember tatting and knitting, too, balls of sewed rags for rugs, and neighbors driving in for calls.

Life and Work Sufficed
   No, it was not all potato peeling and churning and feeding thrashers. There was time for relaxing in spite of all opinion to the contrary. Time for reading too.
   It’s too bad that our young mothers today could not have had a peep into one of the old-fashioned farm homes.
   Not that the modern farm is not quiet and peaceful but the point is that those others had little but life and work itself, no way to travel, to absorb, to be entertained through the air, to get all sorts of bright magazines, or mail-order service to make shopping easy.
   Yet they were content.
   One should not say “yet”. It was because of it all they were content, I think. And they did not deteriorate or become sodden or coarse. When I want a lesson in real refinement, I think of my great-grandmother at eighty out in a lonely brick farmhouse miles from anywhere, dressed each day after lunch, regularly, in slate gray silk, black lace cap and lace apron. Her daughters dressed too. I have the woven coverlet still, a beauty, made by her as a young mother in which is woven, “SALINA GILLELAND – PEACE AND PLENTY –1846.”

Conflict Was Lacking
   Peace and Plenty.
   It was a hundred acre farm with no oil or coal or gas stations, or even a dairy herd. Just a farm. The children grew up with the most wonderful dispositions. No conflicts there to wear them out.
   Today there is too much. Today’s children are worn out, particularly the city children.
   Two truths, I think, should be borne in on the parents of little families that seem to me to be fundamental to real happiness.
   One is a quiet household. The other, regular routine in which each one knows each day just about what the hour will bring, time for duty, time for play. Not too much outside world interfering. Not too many choices to make, or wants to be filled.
   We should make a choice for our way of life and then stick to it without grieving. There are always some ahead of us – there always will be. Jealousy and hate quickly ruin. Conflict undermines tempers and patience.
   Home should be a peaceful place and the family unit supreme.

-transcription by Kate Maynard, 2012