It’s always a pleasure to start out the summer with a trip to Lincoln Park. It’s small and unpretentious. There is a little museum there, and I always have the children look through it and then try either to remember or to guess at the most important tool the pioneers had. They look at the tools, the bedding, the clothes, the wagon, the cow, the spinning wheel, and they report all those things. The answer is the ax.

We visit the grave of Abraham’s mother and then walk up to the model of Lincoln’s boyhood home. It’s a one room cabin with a fireplace and a loft. There is always cooking there, and as the fire burns on a hot day, one can glean just how uncomfortable it must have been wearing a woolen dress that had been washed maybe once in the past month. 

There are cows, sheep, chickens, horses, and a garden to look at. Some of the children love the whole thing. Some don’t get it at all…mostly because they left their DS on the bus. It’s hard to try to explain to the children what it must have been like back then. Spending a few minutes at the little farm won’t warm many hearts. The rangers are fabulous and tell us so many interesting things. But it’s hard to put on any real sense of historical perspective. 

Historical perspective is something most adults can’t bring themselves to understand. But we will take aim at the twenty-first century and see how many children come to understand just how lonely, how scary, how  independent these people were who came and built our country.

None of our children will remember the twentieth century. No one will remember going without a toilet, or not having running water. Few will remember such things as a milk man or know what a green grocer is or a haberdasher, a milliner, a butcher or baker. But on this trip, we will try to tell them stories that will endear them to the past. 

Part of our summer is an attempt to educate beyond books. It’s a time when we experience different kinds of things, take them in and store thoughts, memories and ideas that will create a broader and more intelligent and respectable person. This world of the pioneer is our introduction to this “broader life.” 

When we finish with the cabin, we will trot across the street and play on the playground, eat a fabulous lunch and then visit the cultural center for a talk about pioneers…just after we cross the dam and look at the lake where we will swim later this summer…

This is one of my favorite trips because I could live at that farm and be as content as a pig in a poke. But then I’m a child of every year. I know how to do all those obnoxious things like weave, spin, quilt, find wild fruit and make jam…bread…grow stuff…cook over a live fire…and that kind of thing I find is peaceful…