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Even once railroads were in place, it was often to expensive to ship livestock by rail, so hog drives continued to be common sights throughout most of the 1800s. This illustration shows a drive in the Midwest, headed for the slaughterhouses in Chicago.
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This vintage illustration from Harper’s Magazine shows a large hog drive in progress in the Appalachian Mountains. Before widespread railways and trucks, this was how farmers got livestock to market.
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Root cellars were the way root vegetables could be stored underground, beneath the frost line, during the winter months. Unfortunately for Harvey Devoe in 1861, he did not have a root cellar on his farm, and hadn’t had time to build one, so he resorted to an ad hoc sort of root cellar: he dug a hole in the ground and stowed his beets and turnips there.
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Wilbur Foote was the son of a local Berlin Township farmer. He joined the army as the Civil War got underway, but stopped to visit Harvey and deliver a letter from Ed Devoe. Foote was known his whole life for good-natured help to his neighbors, until he passed away at age 85 in the 1920s.
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This tintype photograph from around the time this diary was written gives us a glimpse of the farmer Harvey Devoe and his wife Martha. Focused on setting up his new farm, Harvey rarely says much about his wife, but she must have been pleased one morning when he did the dishes after breakfast, as he noted in his diary.
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