August 1989

About this Issue

Note from the Editors

For August, a month of fairs and carnivals, this issue has "Bucky Norris and the Wrestling Match" a recollection by author Edwin N. Harris of the fair at Dundee in his boyhood days. Harris was born close to Dundee in his family's home on the Pre-Emption Road. He went to school in Dundee and remembers many of the people who lived and worked there in the early 1930s.

Bill Treichler provides an account of the refurbishment of the Memorial Pioneer Log Cabin and the Pioneer Museum on the Bath Fairgrounds. Bill also writes about Dick Sherer, who with his wife, Alice, and with former county historian, Jim Hope, carried out the project. You can read how Dick worked his way deeper and deeper into studying history and about the projects he is looking forward to tackling.

Ted Ford recalls how it was raising beans and farming with horses. You can read his reminiscences. The June issue carried a story by John Rezelman about raising dry beans. Ted and Barbara Ford said his article brought back a lot of memories to them of the years that they grew red and white beans as a cash crop.

The usual monthly feature articles begin with the history of May's Mill and its predecessors on the same site along the outlet of Lake Keuka. This article is one of a series prepared and written by Frances Dumas. Fran is the principal energy of the Friends of the Outlet and the more official Keuka Lake Outlet Preservation Area Commission. For a donation of $1 you can receive a copy of the illustrated Outlet Trail Guide by writing to Friends of the Outlet, c/o Yates County Historian's Office, 110 Court Street, Penn Yan, NY 14527.

another installment from Peter Henderson's famous book on market and practical home gardening that he wrote first in 1866 and revised in 1874. This text is from the 1883 printing.

"A Gentleman Settler" is another chapter from Caroline Kirkland's 1839 book about her life in southeastern Michigan. Published then as A New Home—Who'll Follow? under her pen name of Mrs. Mary Clavers the book made the 38-year-old housewife into a literary figure with international recognition. One reviewer said she "opened up a new vein in our national literature."

Born Caroline Matilda Stansbury in January, 1801, she became one of the best educated women in America. After she married William Kirkland in 1828 they moved to Geneva, New York, and founded a girls' school where they both taught and where their first four children were born. In 1835 her husband was offered the principalship of the Detroit Female Seminary. Caroline taught there and the same year had another child. The next year they bought 800 acres of land near Livingston County, Michigan. They moved to Pinckney, their new settlement that Mrs. Kirkland named, and there she wrote A New Home.

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