All in the Days Work
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all in the day's work. An autobiography by ida m Tarbell Chapter one. My start in life If it had not been for the panic of 1857 and the Long Depression which followed it, I should have been born in Taylor county Iowa. That was what my father and mother had planned. In fact, however, I was born in a log house in Erie county pennsylvania on November 5, 1857. It was the home of my pioneering maternal grandfather, walter Raleigh McCullough, no home in which I had ever lived has left me with pleasant her memories of itself. It was a Cape cod house, a story and half high. Built of matched hewn logs, its floors of narrow footed oak planks, it's wall sealed, it's upstairs, finished a big fireplace in its living room. There was spreading frame out buildings to accommodate the multiple activities of a farm which was in my time a going concern. I remember best. The big cool milk room with its dozens of filled pans on the racks. It's huge wooden bowls, heap with yellow butter on its way to the firkin. It's baskets piled with eggs, it's plump dressed poultry ready for market. Like all young married people of pioneer ancestry and experience having their way to make my parents wanted land rand of their own combined with what my father could earn at his profession as a teacher and his trade as a joiner meant future security. It was the proved way of the early american. After much looking about in northwestern Pennsylvania where the families of both were settled, they had decided that the West offered greater opportunity and so in the spring of 1857, a year after his marriage, my father, Franklin Sumner, Tarbell, by name, started out to find a farm. He had but little money in his pocket and the last 150 miles of his search were made on foot. How enthusiastic he was over the claim he had last secured his letters tell of the splendid dome of sky which covered it. Of the far view over the prairie of marvelous flowers and birds of the daily passing along the horizon of a stream of covered wagons, settlers found for California, pikes peak, Kansas Nebraska, and some of them he found were earlier Iowa settlers leaving the very state for which the moment seemed to him the gate to paradise. He sat himself gaily at breaking land building the house for mother working in a sawmill to pay for the lumber. He did it alone even to the making of window frames and doors. I know how he did it, whistling from morning till night, mischief, and tenderness chasing each other across his blue eyes as he thought of my mother's coming their future together. The plan they had made, provided for her going west with their household goods in august the money was arranged for so they thought, but before it was taken from the bank. The panic came and every county bank in pennsylvania was closed, there was no money anywhere, nothing for my mother to do but stay where she was, while my father struggled to earn by teaching and carpenter work. The money which would bring us on, but the panic reached Iowa dried up, its money supply. People were living by barter. My father reported what a heartbreaking waiting it was for them coming as it did after an engagement of six years, every week of which they had both found long The Fall and Winter of 1857. The spring and summer of 1858 past. Still, there was no money to be had. And then in the fall of 1858, father started out to teach his way to us. Before he found a school. He had walked 180 miles, walked until his shoes and clothes were worn and tattered. It was shabby and broke as he had written. It would be that he finally, in the spring of 1859, when I was a year and a half old, made his way back to my mother, still living in the log house in Erie County. According to the family annals, I deeply resented the intimacy between the strange man and my mother so far. My exclusive possession, flinging my arms about my mother. So the story went, I cried, Go away, bad man