A Pioneer Talk
This is the one piece on the site that was spoken before it was printed. Rice read it to the Ashland County Association in 1879, and A. J. Baughman put it in his History of Ashland County in 1909, together with a biographical sketch that quotes the 1860 anthology Poets and Poetry of the West. The original website recommended reading it first, and the advice holds.
Her argument is blunt. The true heroes of pioneer times were the women at the loom and the little wheel, and their overwork was a sad inheritance as well as a proud one. She tells of a mother who died at middle age after resolving to make fifty linen sheets, of a sheep killed and spun into a baby's dress in a day, and of a boy who sold rabbit skins at a cent apiece to buy a spelling book. The second page opens her grandfather's account book, where whisky was sold by the quart and lent by the bottle, and ends with Indian bones turned up by a scraper at the edge of Perrysville.
The talk is split across two pages as it was on the original site.
Contents
A Pioneer Talk
Rosella’s 1879 essay to the Ashland County Association urging writers to record pioneer life. She praises humble heroes, describes the labor of making linen, and tells of a Green Township boy who trapped rabbits to buy a spelling book.
Questions
Did Rice really lecture in public?
Yes. She is described as a public lecturer, she judged bread and butter at the Mansfield fair in 1873, and she gave addresses at anniversaries and birthdays around Richland and Ashland counties. The Golden Anniversary page on this site is another example.
Whose account book is shown?
The original site reproduced a page from an account book kept by Ebenezer Rice, Rosella's grandfather, noting that it was not the specific page she describes. Whisky, rye, rabbit skins and ginseng roots stood in for cash on the Ohio frontier.