Noah Blake

The author found a young man's journal from 1805. It's about daily life and quite a lot to learn. The author gives information regarding some of the more obscure items that perhaps only serious antique collectors would know what they are or perhaps farmers.
We learned about the plumbing of a door based on the lead plumb, which my ds connected to the element of lead being pb.
We learned that it was easier for the settlers to travel during the snowy months than the summer months due to the roads.
Why some bridges had tolls even as early as 1805 and when they became covered. That the women put designs in their dirt flooring. That the rocking chair is truly an American invention, how some farms became separated by roads on purpose by the owners...etc. the list goes on. This book is a wealth of information.
This book was a fun book for history and science.… (mehr)

Sloane wrote this book in 1962 as an annotated, illustrated, and expanded upon version of the journal of Noah Blake from 1805, whom was fifteen at the time. Noah lived in a small New England town, although the book does not specify exactly where (a striking oversight).

The book inspires a sense of wonder and fascination with an era now two centuries past. Much of the book explores and explains novelties from a very different way of life: dirt floors, ten panes of glass per household, the invention of covered bridges, the lack of screws and bolts in construction. There are hundreds of such insights, including an exploration into the language of the era (holidays were “holydays”).

There’s an innocent romanticism to this sort of book.

One passage stands out to me:

"In modern times when everything a person needs may be bought in a store, there are very few hand-made things left. So we are robbed of that rare and wonderful satisfaction that comes with personal accomplishments. In Noah’s time, nearly every single thing that a person touched was the result of his own efforts. The cloth of his clothing, the meal on the table, the chair he sat in, and the floor he walked upon, all were made by the user. This is why those people had an extraordinary awareness of life. They know wood intimately; the knew the ingredients of food and medicines and inks and paints because they grew it and ground it and mixed it themselves. It was this awareness of everything about them that made the early American people so full of inner satisfaction, so grateful for life and all that went with it. Nowadays modern conveniences allow us to be forgetful, and we easily become less aware of the wonders of life."

What would it be like to revive such attention to the things that surround us and their provenance?… (mehr)