B1-03 · How People Used to Live

How People Used to Live

Today, we switch on the light, turn on the tap and open the fridge without thinking about it. But only a hundred years ago, everyday life was very different. Let's visit two homes from the past: a Czech village and an American log cabin.

A Czech village in the 1920s. In many Czech villages, people didn't use to have electricity. In the evenings, families would sit around an oil lamp, and everybody went to bed early. There was no running water, so the children used to carry water from the well in the yard every morning. A typical family had five or six children, and grandparents often lived in the same house.

Most villagers were farmers, and children used to help from a very early age. They would feed the geese, look after the cows and work in the fields in summer. School was important, but in the harvest season, many classrooms were half empty. Children used to walk to school, sometimes several kilometers, and in winter they would come home in the dark.

Food was simple. The mother would bake bread once a week in a big oven. Meat was a treat for Sundays. In winter, many families used to have a pig-killing day, called zabijačka, when neighbors came to help and everybody ate well. And bath time? The whole family used to wash in one wooden tub on Saturday evening, starting with the father and ending with the smallest child.

A log cabin in the American West. In 1862, the US government passed the Homestead Act. It gave families 160 acres (about 65 hectares) of land for free if they lived on it and farmed it for five years. Thousands of families used to travel west in covered wagons. The trip could take four to six months.

When they arrived, there were often no trees, no shops and no neighbors. Where there was a forest, families built log cabins with one or two rooms. On the open prairie, where wood was rare, they would cut blocks of grass and soil and build "sod houses". These homes were warm in winter, but snakes and insects used to fall from the ceiling!

Life was hard. Fathers would hunt and plow the fields, and mothers would cook, sew and make soap and candles. Children didn't use to have many toys, but they used to play with corn-husk dolls and wooden balls. You can read about this life in the famous books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House on the Prairie.

Would you like to live like that? Probably not for long. But maybe we can learn from these people: they didn't use to waste anything.