Sepia Saturday: Book 'em

Sepia Saturday challenges bloggers to share family history through old photographs.

This week’s Sepia Saturday photo prompt of a library full of boys reading inspired me to take a good look at some old textbooks passed down from my great-grandfather and grandfather.

Literature and history books belonged to my grandfather.
The little math book belonged to my great-grandfather.

WALTER’S ARITHMETIC BOOK

My great-grandfather proudly wrote his name on several pages of his arithmetic book.  “Walter B. S. M. Davis.” 

But he was not the first to use it.  The inscription “A. N. Davis” suggests at least one older brother of the 15 Davis children used the book too:  Amaziah Nathaniel.

Amaziah Nathaniel Davis wrote his name
on several pages of the arithmetic book.

The book was Ray’s Practical Arithmetic, Part Third.  The Ray’s series was one of the most respected textbooks of its day because it emphasized “real life” math that students could apply to practical pursuits of running a farm, a business, a household, even a grocery store.  Early on the series was praised for beginning with the basics using concrete items like blocks and marbles in order to prepare students to be able to visualize the abstract later on when higher level critical thinking was required.  Ray’s almost exclusive use of word problems is credited with improving students’ reading comprehension. 

This textbook is very unappealing by today's standards.
No colorful charts.  Very little "white space."

Dr. Ray believed education could help students develop high moral character.  So his math problems often showed honest men and women hard at work plowing fields, planting and harvesting crops, building, buying and selling, being generous and sharing their goods.  






Look at some typical math problems:

• If 16 men build 18 rods of fence in 12 days, at the same rate, how many men can build 72 rods in 8 days?
• When cloth costs $4.37 ½ per yard, at what price per yard must it be sold to gain 33 1/3 percent?
• What is the value of 1 pound 3 pennyweights of gold ore at 3 cents a grain?

Although Dr. Joseph Ray died in 1855, his arithmetic books are still in use today, especially among homeschoolers.  However, I’m not sure how the homeschoolers feel about the explanation of pints, barrels, and hogsheads required in beer measurements.   But I must admit, the explanation of apothecary measurements could be helpful to today’s drug dealers who might need to know how to answer this one:

• What will 1 pound 1 dram 1 ounce of opium cost at 4 cents a scruple?

ORVIN’S HISTORY BOOK

I don’t know how much American history was included in my high school history textbooks, but only once did we make it to World War II.  How far did the teachers of my grandfather Orvin Davis get exposing him to American history? 

His book is about the size of a 5”x7” photograph and just about ¾” thick.  The last chapter is entitled  “The Reconstruction Period 1865-1890.”  

I guess there’s something to be said for being born early. 

ORVIN’S LITERATURE BOOK

Stepping Stones to Literature: A Reader for Fifth Grades is one ambitious collection of works by such people as Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Cowper, Sir Walter Scott, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and John Ruskin.  JOHN RUSKIN!!!  Has anyone read Ruskin?  I have.  Hopefully my grandfather at age 10 was exposed to some lighter weight Ruskin than I got in graduate school.  Good grief.

The introduction to the book says it all:  “…its authors aimed to include nothing but good literature …. The tendency of the day is to scrappy reading.  It is fostered by newspapers, periodicals, and compendia of literature; and it is hoped that these Readers will help to combat this unfortunate tendency, and lead to the reading of good books.”

As textbooks always do, this one gives teaching suggestions, especially on ways to improve oral reading.  The authors are not shy about saying Americans have poor speech habits and “disagreeable voices.”  They deem it a “national defect.”  They even recommend calisthenics to improve students’ carriage, breathing through the nostrils, drilling for proper enunciation, using a dictionary to assure proper pronunciation, and learning to incorporate the right inflections to express the feeling of the written word. 

So noble.  But these are fifth graders. 

Here is what fifth graders did to their books even in 1910:

The message has been erased for the most part, but it says, "Look on page [?] and you will see my sweethearts name."










Flipping pages, I found this on page 25: 

On page 300, there's this message saying "She ran away from me and nobody knows where she is." 

So who was she, for crying out loud??  Hrmph.  I thought books held the key to all knowledge. What a let-down.

Looking closely at these very old books (over 100 years old) makes me rethink the rural one-room schoolhouse.  I always assumed those poor kids probably got a second-rate education because the school couldn’t afford to do any better.  But I see now that Rockingham County and Page County in Virginia provided the best textbooks to be had in their day. 

Stand up straight, breathe through your nostrils, and turn the page to Sepia Saturday where you can read more about books and libraries, with feeling, of course.  

© 2014, Wendy Mathias.  All rights reserved.