Students learn of life in the 1800s

During 15 years as teachers at Redcliffe Elementary School, Sandy Erwin and Mary Jon Goodwin frequently taught South Carolina history to third-graders as part of state standards requirements.

Both retired in 2009 but found a way to visit schools and take kids back in time.

Erwin and Goodwin serve as docents for the Aiken County Historical Museum and have visited more than 20 schools with a trunk show, giving children a glimpse of what life would have been like in Aiken 200 years ago. The museum's Mary White had done trunk shows for their students over the years.

"She was looking for docents, but many people aren't used to children or aren't familiar with third-grade history," Erwin said. "It's a lot of fun, as we both missed the classroom."

At Belvedere Elementary School over two days last week, she and Goodwin asked the kids to close their eyes. Think about their homes - the living room, the kitchen, their own bedrooms and all of the things in them. Now imagine, the teachers suggested, a log cabin home with a single room and parents and 11 children crowded in it.

Imagine a life without electricity, which means no television or iPods or computers or cell phones. No refrigerator or oven or video games or air conditioning or flush toilets. No closet full of clothes. No grocery stores down the street. No cars or even bicycles.

Families needed water and would build their cabins near ponds and other bodies of water. Erwin asked third-grader Austin Pace to hold a bucket with a gallon bucket of water in it. Now imagine, she said, carrying buckets to a pond and return to the cabin with two gallons of water a quarter-mile and repeating that nine more times.

More than 90 percent of people living in the Aiken area 200 years ago would be farmers. They grew their own food, of course, relying on a long growing season and preserving food for the winter.

The father and his sons would hunt and handle the other physical labor, the boys starting at ages 6 or 7. The girls would look after younger siblings and help their mother cook the food and keep the cabin as clean as possible.

With 13 people sharing the space, that was a daily necessity. The mother would make their clothes and wash them with a scrub board and dry them on the bushes. Nothing got thrown away. Old ragged clothes might get transformed into rugs; the cotton turned into thread and put on a loom and weaved into a rug or a doll for the girls.

"The children did have fun then," Erwin said. "The boys loved to wrestle and would have deerskin pouches and marbles made of clay. Most people could not read or write, and storytellers would help pass the time or maybe the papa would play a fiddle or harmonica and the family would sing."

Would third-graders Tambric McKnight and Jenna Brown enjoy sharing a one-room cabin with so many brothers and sisters and their folks? No way, they said with big smiles. What would Jenna miss the most if transported back to 1810? She considered the question seriously.

"I think I would really miss my comfy bed," she said.

The museum seeks docents for its community programs. For more information, call Mary White at 642-2015.

Contact Rob Novit at rnovit@aikenstandard.com.