Rensselaer Standard, Volume 1, Number 25, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 December 1879 — COUNTRY HOMES. [ARTICLE]

COUNTRY HOMES.

The Poverty of the Toiling Wives Farmers —Dilapidated Houses —Over-Taxed Women, Discontented Boys and Girls. Mary H. Krout In Kokomo (Ind.) Tribune. The wives of many wealthy, well-to-do farmers are practically paupers. They work as hard as their husbands for scanty clothing; of pleasures that cost money they are deprived. Their ife is a long, monotonous routine of work without reward. Beyond the little they manage to heard up by the sale of butter and eggs, they have no money, and no chance to earn it. To this poverty may be traced the cause of much at the squalor of many of the country .homes, for love of order, cleanliness and beauty are the characteristics of most women. '

The barn, an ambitious structure glaring with red paint, surmounted by rgilt weather-cock, must have a whole oof, stroug doors and windows, for it shelters horses and grain that have a market value. There are troughs out of which the sleek cattle slake their thirst, out of which they leisurely and contentedly eat the wholesome food which has been provided for them. At the same time, the house in which the farmer resides with hiß children and overworked wife grows more and more dilapidated. The doors refuse to shut; the knobs are broken and lost old hats, old clothes and paper supply missing window panes, the weatnerboard’ng warps and comes off, and the last vestige of paiut disappears; the porch is a venerable ruin; chimneys crumble and fall, and door-steps become a snare to the feet of the unwary. Within there may be a pretentious “best room.” But thick green shades exclude the light, which perhaps is well, as its rays would only reveal a carpet of hideous ugliness; splint-bot-tom chairs ranged stiflv around the wall; a table strewn with Masonic literature and family w photographß, and hanging side by side, a framed hair wreath and the inevitable and all pervading “Wide Awake” and “Fast Asleep.” Of the good taste that costs nothing and can make the most inexpensive room look attractive, there is not a trace—no pretty prints, no books, none of the ornamental things that womeu’s flnge.’s devise, no plants, that, with a little care and sunshine, would convert that domestic desert into a blossoming bower. The chambers are close, badly ventilated and smell of feathers. The kitchen approaches the climax of dilapidation. There the family “most do congregate.” Here among the chaos of pots, pans, kettles, churns and tubs, they sit down three times a day to the table, where the quantity of fooddttes not makeup for tbe shabby mauner in which it is served. The yard about the house is equally dirty and disorderly. The fences are broken, the gates are propped up—their only fastenings pieces of rusty chain or knotty rope. The “building spot,”—to use a provincialism—has been selected because the sterility of sell has rendered it unfit for the cultivation of wheat and corn. And though lovely forests stretch away on every side, with waving boughs beneath which in summer lie soft, cool shadows flecked with Ktches of yellow sunshine, haunted ■ birds and squirrels and all the gentle spirits that love the solitude, yet the house'must stand on a level tract — unshaded by any tree save perhaps a funeral pine or cedar. There are no walks, save narrow, beaten paths, half •bliterated by long grass and rank plantain. Here and there are clumps of peonies or snowball bushes. The front yard is strewn with wisps of hay and straw, agricultural implements that have served their time, and possibly a wagon, bed or two. There may be a horse block by the front gate. If there is, there is also or has been a wood pile neat' it, for a mysterious friendship seems to exist between the two, and where one is the other is almost certain to bo found. Here the family fuel has been prepared for years, and the decayed and decaying chips, chunks and logs are well scattered over the ground. If the front view is unattractive, how utterly dreary is the back yard. Back yards, even in orderly families, are places that are screened from public view by lattices or impervious walls.

In country homes like these the evi genius that presides over the back yard holds undisputed possession, and revels in offensive sights and odors. There are neither sinks nor drains to carry away the floods of dish water, whose only mission is lo convert the solid ground into a reeking swamp. Old barrels, ash hoppers, okl bones, bleaching skeletons or fowls, feathers, disabled rakes, hoes and spades, broken crockery, mud In winter and dust in summer offend the sight and one’s sense of smell. Through this wild rt wander droves of fowls, Shanghai :;kens. with amazing scratching powers; ducks and geese, that spatter about with their broad bills and large webbed feet. Friendly swine crawl through convenient crevices and hobnob with shabby looking cats. Big, gaunt dogs divide their time

acting as scavengers in chief, barking at passers-by, or dozing on porches, or under the kitchen ‘stove or table, snapping at flies or gnats, if It is summer, with a load explosive noise that would sicken one, if the sight of their moist mouths would not. Cistern there is none. Half the time the well is out of order, and the “women folks” carry water from “the spring”—rods away—bucketful at a time, i Indiana has become a synonym for

ague. It Is not difficult to understand i why. Houses and yards like these are hot beds of malaria. And what else can be expected, where every sanitary law is violated? -Is it useless to tell careless and indifferent formers that they spend enough annually in quinine and doctor's fees to pay for everything necessary to make their homes comfortable, clean and convenient. They cling to the good old doctrin that what was good enough for their fathers is good enough for them—which perhaps is true; and the consequences would not be of so much importance did not they visit iqoet heavir Iy those who suffer innocently—for most of the women who call these places home, are, as I have already said, powerless to help themse'ves

Their husbands have beoome possessed with the mania for buying land, while they count their acres by hundreds, permit their families to live inhovels, not considering that a small form well tended is more productive than a large one which must be neglected. They lose their ambition and tneir energy—the burdens of rearing children, the rough, hard work of farmlife that falls so heavily upon their over-taxed shoulders; successive seasons of harvesting, threshing and slaughtering, enlivened by few pleasures and little variety, rob them of their comeliness, their health, and the ijesire for bptter surroundings. Their hands are hopelessly tied, and they can only submit to their hard lot in 6ullen gloom, in fretful complaining or good humored Indifference. It should occasion no surprise that the sons of formers—boys who grow up in such homes—find the gaudy interior of the village saloon a paradise in comparison, or that their daughters are ready to throw themselves away on the first worthless suitor who pre sents himself, in the vain hope of bet tering their conditions. Perhaps the most serious evil is in the fact that these children will grow up with blunted sensibilities, coarse in thought, vulgar in manner and speech. They will hate, with an envious hatred, those whom they feel are their superiors, despise all that tends to elevate and refine, and their children wili inherit their traits and dispositions after them.

It really seems almost folly to hope much for the future of Indiana until the health and comfort aud happiness of their families become as important to Indiana farmers as the prosperity of their flocks and herds. And tne era of the better days that must dawn will be ushered in by a radical change and improvement in country homes.