By Michael Shannon

1910. A great year in America. The year most often mentioned by those who wish would we could return. Nostalgic days when families came right from Norman Rockwell’s dreams. Can’t you feel it, smell it; why you can almost taste the beauty of the United States, untainted and in all its glory. Our time, when America was great.

Or maybe, not so much, not so much.

Stepping out of the buckboard into the middle of Branch Street where it crosses Bridge street, sticky adobe ankle deep mud or dusty dirt as the seasons dictate. No sidewalks, no electric streetlights, no lights of any kind when you are wending your way home of a night.

Just behind you on Branch street, the Capitol Saloon, a false fronted wooden bar where the town constable was gunned down in the doorway a couple of years ago. There is the old schoolhouse on Nevada Street where two hostlers from the Harloe stables perforated the walls with their six-shooters causing the kiddies to drop to the floor in panic. The citizens hurried to build a new school outside of pistol shot of the main street with its eleven saloons. Revolvers carried in coat pockets, stuck behind a belt, stuffed in the front pocket of the trousers surprisingly killed fewer people than rifle accidents.. Dying by gunshot was practically a weekly occurrence in San Luis County at the time. Children playing with their fathers guns, hunting accidents, accidental homicide, mistaken for a deer, all played their part in what was rather routine. No apparent hand wringing by the news of the day.

There is the old Loomis and Swall meat market with its skinned livestock hanging on hooks, each one slippery with fat and its resident colony of flies. Pheasant and Quail, feet lashed and hanging head down with glazed, dead eyes and lolling tongues. Take your pick madam, fresh a couple of days ago.

Mothers died during childbirth, their babies too. Death by Mumps, Measles, Scarlett Fever, Cholera, Typhoid, Diphtheria, Pneumonia, Diarrhea, Tuberculosis and Influenza. Lets not forget Sepsis; Blood Poisoning, which before antibiotics was almost always a death sentence. Men who worked with their hands were killed by simple cuts. Rusty hayforks, knives and other tools could kill. Mom at home could die from the lead in her house-paint, her babies too. Cast iron wood or coal fired stoves maimed and burned, kerosene lanterns set houses afire.

Bath time. Shannon Family Photo

I asked my dad what my grandmother must have thought about this, she having been brought up in privilege and after marrying my grandfather became a dairyman’s wife. Ranch life with few luxuries and lots of hard work for her delicate hands. He said, “Oh, she was used to it I think.” It seemed a strange thing to hear when I was sixteen but age has put me straight. Of course she was used to it the same as we are today when we look at our lives. At least if we are honest about that.

Your granny got down on her knees and scrubbed the oilcloth covered floors with carbolic (Caustic or Lye) soap and a bristle brush. Draperies were rare in working class homes because there was no easy way to clean them, no washing machine yet. Rugs were hauled outside and beaten with carpet beaters to remove dust and dirt. Floors were generally oak or fir, and varnished. This also and took constant maintenance. Granny brushed them with the same bristle brush she used for the oilcloth in the kitchen. No vacumn cleaner was the norm. Perhaps she had a newfangled carpet cleaner but in a small rural community, likely not. She washed clothes in a tub of hot water she boiled on the cast iron stove and hauled outside in buckets. The washboard and bristle brush were her main tools. Everyone had a clothesline. If she lived in town, she walked to do her shopping. Those that lived on Crown Hill had the a difficult path. It wasn’t paved of course and if you had children it was two trips a day to the grammar school, five days a week. She had to shepard the children and carry her baskets of groceries too. In the winter she slipped and skidded down hill and did the same on the return trip. For Mrs. Bennett, Mrs. Eldridge and Mrs. Paulding this was a daily chore. As always a home with a view comes at a cost.

Annie Gray and Mame Tyler off to town, 1901. Shannon Family Photo.

Country people traveled by horse. A horse was not a pet. Buckboards, Buggys, Surreys, and farm wagons served as primary transportation. People had to have a barn for the hay, grains and horse. They needed to maintain the leather harness and if they rode, saddles and bridles too. Horses could be cantankerous. A horse can kick you in any direction if you stand too close. They bite. A horse weighs around a half a ton and just leaning on you can break your bones. Falling from a bucking horse never seems to hurt anyone in the movies but in reality the ground is hard and it’s a long way down. A few horses were pets for the kids but in reality they were the same as any other piece of machinery, utilitarian and disposable when no longer useful.

Riding in the Huasna, mother and daughter. Riders unknown. Photographer unknown.

Farm work was all done with horse power. In 1900 around fifty million were at work each day. Not much short of the countries population seventy-six million. About half died every year. Horses, mules and oxen pulled plows up and down the fields. They pulled threshers, rakes, mowers and wagons. They pulled the big Haywain wagons too. Grading and roadwork was done by hand with only the Fresno Grader to lighten some of the load, horse pulled of course.

A blacksmith in Illinois invented the moldboard plow design still used today. It was a plow, basically unchanged for thousands of years but with an added moldboard of polished steel which didn’t stick to heavy soils. The blacksmith, John Deere produced one in 1837. By 1848 he was producing 700 per year. Without the polished moldboard and share, the heavy adobe soils of the Arroyo Grande would have been near impossible to turn. Deeres version of the plow was perhaps the greatest innovation in farming history. It had one small problem though, it still needed a large animal to pull it, which meant that farming on a industrial scale was still impossible in 1910.

Horse drawn threshing on the Shannon Ranch. Jack Shannon standing on the sewing board. 1918. Family Photo

At the turn of the century, stone fruit such as Peaches and apricots or apples and walnuts were the main crops here. Crops that needed little care such as bush beans, squash and pumpkins filled out fields. If a family wanted leaf vegetables, carrots and potatoes they had to have their own little plots. Like many crops that needed refrigeration, they were seasonal and took hard work to make them grow. Likely your greens came canned and you bought them at Frank Bennetts grocery.

Old horses were “knackered” (euthanized) and recycled into useful stuff; leather, bone objects, fertilizer, soap, tallow, lamp oil and, glue. Gelatin can be found in the hides, bone marrow, sinews, hooves, trotters and guts. It can be rendered into glue, known as “hide glue” or “sinew glue”. The horsehair was used as an ingredient in plaster and to stuff cushions or mattresses. People were less sympathetic about animals than today.

Chickens, hogs and cattle were slaughtered for food. Hunting was not a sport but a way to put food on the table. Little Timmy’s favorite hen was, sooner or later, going in the stewpot. As Timmy got a little older, killing the hen would be his job. My dad always said it toughened kids up. Dogs and cats needed to be useful. Unwanted kittens would be put in a sack and thrown in the creek. Thats not a made up story, I’ve seen my father do it. If cats don’t keep the mice away they aren’t useful. If a dog won’t hunt, well you can guess the rest. Dogs that trespassed on the heighbors property, killed chicken or other farm animals faced the death penalty. My dad took our dog and gave it to Lena Parrish because he came home with one of her chickens. She shot it. Nothing worse than a chicken killing dog he said.

Country people in Arroyo Grande didn’t keep little, precious, pampered dogs. No Corgis, Shitzus, Chihuahuas or anything smaller than a terrier. Terriers were good “Ratters” and therefore useful.

Mothers all nursed their children. Why? Cows milk was dangerous. Because of almost no regulation for the conditions of production, much milk was heavily contaminated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The new science of bacteriology demonstrated this. In about 1900, American milk contained pus from the diseased udders of country cows. Particles of manure, dust from the cowshed, dirt from the railway wagon: all of these made milk a dangerous cocktail for those who drank it raw. Its nutrient mix also made it the ideal breeding ground for a wide variety of diseases.

The deadly list includes well-known afflictions such as anthrax, botulism, brucellosis, cholera, diphtheria, dysentery, enteritis, E. coli, gastroenteritis, giardiasis, hepatitis, listeria, paratyphoid, salmonella, scarlet fever, tuberculosis, typhoid, and many others less prominent. In the period under review there were hundreds of recorded milk-borne epidemics across the country. The middle class suffered disproportionately because of their higher milk consumption and because their babies were most likely to be artificially fed rather than breast fed.

The two foremost causes of milk-related deaths amongst infants were tuberculosis and diarrhea. Bovine tuberculosis has been underemphasized in the literature of medical history, for the understandable reason that its close relative, pulmonary tuberculosis, was such the major killer at all ages and a social problem that afflicted the Victorians and Edwardians. In addition to being an airborne disease that thrives in overcrowded housing, tuberculosis is also potentially a trans-species infection. Milk was the medium of transmission from diseased cattle to unwitting consumers that led to approximately 500,000 deaths amongst infants in the period 1850-1900, and up to 30 per cent of all deaths from tuberculosis before 1930. The hazard was only brought under control gradually as milk was increasingly pasteurized in the 1930s and 1940s. My father and grandfather were dairymen and knew who, exactly, you should not buy milk from. They were not afraid to say so, right out loud. They understood the risks people took by buying cheap unpasteurized milk from those farmers who were trying to make the extra buck.

Domestic contamination is also likely to have been a factor. Only a small minority of houses had satisfactory food storage areas before the First World War and it seems likely that the poor quality milk delivered to the doorstep deteriorated further before it was fed to babies. My grandmother got her first refrigerator in 1924. It’s not likely a coincidence that my father nearly died from Scarlet fever the year before. There was nothing a doctor could do but try and ease the suffering.

Tuberculosis or consumption was the biggest killer in 1900. Cramped living conditions, damp and what might be surprising to the reader, chewing tobacco. Two things were contributory factors, Most men chewed what was known as plug cut. Plug cut was a block of compressed tobacco which a man would cut slices from and “Chaw.” My dad and the other men in our family all chewed. He said it was primarily because hand rolled cigarettes wouldn’t stayed lit so farmers, ranchers and other men who used their hands for work chewed instead. Red Man was his choice. The nicotine rush was much stronger than pipes, cigars or cigarettes. A direct result of chewing was the production of copious amounts of saliva. Men were constantly spitting. In the dirt, the wooden sidewalk, spittoons if they were handy or just on the floors. Not a good idea to swallow. Floors of public buildings were sticky with it. The concept of airborne disease was not well understood at the time so in crowds the bacillus was able to easily transmit itself. Sneezing, coughing and spitting was the most common way to transmit the bacillus.

Some of our greatest literary figures afflicted with TB include John Keats, Percy Shelley, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry David Thoreau, Emily and Charlotte Bronte, Anton Chekov, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. TB was called the “artist’s disease” and was linked with creativity and the bohemian life. Gunslinger and murderer Doc Holliday died of consumption. The composer Frederick Chopin, Edgar Allan Poe, and Sukanta Bhattacharya, the playwright Anton Chekhov, the novelists Franz Kafka, Katherine Mansfield, , Fyodor Dostoevsky, Thomas Mann, the actress Vivian Leigh, D. H. Lawrence, and George Orwell all died from it. Untold numbers of tenement dwellers, those that lived in slums and perhaps worst of all, children. Roughly a half million children under five died from TB in the last fifty years of the nineteenth century. In 1900, if you were attended by a doctor or not your chances were about fifty-fifty. Medicine had few tools with which to help. All in all, total life expectancy was about 49 years. There was little health education, not because people didn’t think it was important but not much was known about disease. There was also no public healthcare providers such as hospitals, few physicians, no community health centers, mental health organizations, laboratories, or nursing homes, which provide preventive, curative, and rehabilitative care. Public safety organizations such as police, fire and emergency medical services were rudimentary or nonexistent. Edward Paulding, Arroyo Grande’s first doctor eventually gave up his practice because he could not make a decent living. He was paid in kind, eggs, fruit, fresh killed game and even some money but it wasn’t enough to pay for his home and his family. His wife, a schoolteacher made more than he did. Teachers themselves made near poverty level wages, around two dollars a week.Teachers bought pens, ink, pencils and paper out of their own pockest the same as they do today. Being a country doctor cost more than it made.

Arroyo Grande’s Doctor Charles Clark, was the so-called “baby doctor,” in the town He delivered my aunt Mariel in 1917 at her parents home in the Verde district.

The discovery of penicillin in 1928 by Sir Alexander Fleming marked the beginning of the antibiotic revolution. Ernst Chain and Howard Florey purified the first penicillin, penicillin G, in 1942 but it did not became widely available outside the Allied military until 1945. This was the beginning of the antibiotic era. As children of the forties and fifties, my brothers and I might have been living on a different planet than our own parents when it came to medical care.

Home sweet home, Shannon Ranch 1918. L-R, Molly Moore, Annie, George, Jack and Jackie Shannon. Family Photo

So, at the turn of the century you lived in a house that was uninsulated though you might fold newsprint and stuff it in the cracks between boards but there were cracks everywhere and that was pretty much a useless exercise. The only heat was from a fireplace which was small, nothing like the ones we have today. By 1900 county newspapers were complaining about the scarcity of firewood. The once thickly oak forested hills were stripped clean. Old photos of towns in California around the turn of the century show the Sierra foothills almost completely bare save for the occasional lone pine. Wood cutting was a valued and lucrative trade. Not much coal in San Luis county so the boilers that powered machinery, locomotives and homes consumed wood nearly as fast as it could be cut.

Rural homes and many houses in town were lit by kerosene lamps. Untrimmed wicks caused them to smoke and coat the ceiling with greasy soot. There was a gasworks in Arroyo Grande and many houses had been fitted with gas fixtures. Gas provided better light than lanterns but could blow your house up or suffocate you if you weren’t careful. This was long before a scent was added to the invisible, odorless natural gas. A few homes had electricity but the theory behind it was a mystery to most and because of that it could be very dangerous. Unshielded wire and the complete lack of safety devices brought with it a certain amount of peril. Our house had five rooms, each one with a single outlet and one light fixture in the ceiling. That house I grew up in had rudimentary wiring known as Knob and Tube. A set of wires which were exposed in the attic and were a favorite of rats which liked to chew the insulation thereby executing themselves and occasionally burning a house to the ground as a by-product. My father, uncle and grandfather always referred to electricity as “Juice.” As in, “Put the juice to her son,” when they wanted the big exposed bayonet circuit breaker engaged. You know, like the one Gene Wilder used to animate Peter Boyle in the movie Frankenstein. It seemed like it only needed to be switched off and on during rain storms and in the dark of midnight. It was mounted in a wooden box on the side of our tank house where you had to hold the lid open with one hand and throw the switch with other, all while standing in the wet grass. It terrified me. Fuses, If we had none, well, we just used a penny. It was another of my fathers rites of passage though and I guess I passed or I wouldn’t be writing this.

In 1900 there were no airplanes. The Wrights would not fly until 1903. There was no Railroad that connected with the rest of California, that wouldn’t come until 1904. The first automobile to pass through town was a steam car and that was 1901. The town wasn’t actually a town as such. It didn’t incorporate until 1911 which meant there was no tax base to fund things like sidewalks, night lighting, paving streets or any other public improvements. The last lynching had taken place just fourteen years ago. Higher education, the high school was nearly nonexistent, only four girls graduated from high school that year which held its classes in a rented meeting hall. A mob of white men had just run the small community of Chinese out of town and burned their homes. With them went the only commercial laundry. The town constable bragged that he had recently purchased leg irons fitted with ball and chain to be used for any one he considered a vagrant.

There were no banks. If you wanted to borrow money it had to be obtained privately. There was little in the way of credit, most stores were cash and carry. The first bank was opened in 1901 in a saloon. In 1903 it was incorporated as the Bank of Arroyo Grande. You didn’t have to hide your cash anymore but bank deposits would not be insured for more than thirty years so you’d better hope they weren’t robbed.

Add to this no unemployment insurance, no social security, no Medicare or Medicaid, doctors treated you in their homes or yours. Newspapers advertised sarsaparilla as a cure all and people used it for cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, and many other conditions, but there is no scientific evidence to support any of these uses. In fact, it was banned in 1960 for being dangerous. Both my great-great uncle and aunt, Patrick Moore and his wife Sarah died from stomach cancer and it didn’t help them. Plus, as any western movie fan knows, drinking it in a saloon can get you shot by the local homicidal bully, Liberty Valance.

The good news? Since there were no radios, TV’s, or I-Phones meant that other forms of entertainment had to fill the time. People read much more, newspapers which were readily available, books, the town had a flourishing library, entertainments such as plays, live music, every town had an orchestra who would entertain at the drop of a hat. There were traveling public speakers and the ubiquitous Chautauqua. The Chautauqua brought entertainment and culture for the whole community, with speakers, teachers, musicians, showmen, preachers, and specialists of the day. U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt is often quoted as saying that Chautauqua is “the most American thing in America”. What he actually said was: “it is a source of positive strength and refreshment of mind and body to come to meet a typical American gathering like this—a gathering that is typically American in that it is typical of America at its best.”

The annual Chautauqua shows were held west of town next to the race track, horse racing being perhaps the most exciting sport of the time. Baseball was king though. There were dozens of amateur teams spread around the county. Grammar, high schools and Cal Poly played each other. Each little town had one or more teams. In one case, a Nipomo team was comprised of players, all from one family, the Dana’s.

The Nipomo Ball Team, Dana family, used by permission

Dad slept in his night dress and so did mother. Most fabric was wool. Men wore suits as a matter of course with a vest and tie. Bathing once a week meant if you tended to be lazy, your long johns, supposedly named for the boxing costume of prizefighter John L Sullivan, stayed on for a week. If the missus washed on Mondays, the long underwear would be grey when washday came around again. High laced shoes, a pocket watch and hat made up a man’s daily dress. A farm hand din’t wear special clothes to work, he simply took of his coat before grabbing his hoe. A man didn’t have, or need many clothes. He likely had only a dresser drawer or two and since homes were not likely to have hanging closets, he and the wife made do with a wardrobe in the corner of the bedroom.

Women wore nothing you would wear today. The fashionable silhouette continued to be dominated by the S-shape created by a new “health” corset. These corsets pushed the bust forward and the hips back in an attempt to avoid pressure on the abdomen. The shape emphasized a narrow waist and large “mono-bosom,” sometimes referred to as a Pigeon Breast. Tops were blousy and loose, the extra fabric helping to emphasize this top-heavy shape. Sleeves were equally dramatic. The effect was enhanced with petticoats that had full backs and smooth fronts. Modesty was emphasized with day dresses covering the body from the neck to the floor and long sleeves covering the arms. Skirts were bell-shaped and lace was a popular decoration. For those who couldn’t afford lace, Irish crochet was a good alternative. Rich fabrics were used with silk satin and chiffon two popular choices. Colors were light, but embellished with decoration. Women were beginning to work outside the home. These women needed something more practical to wear and this came in the form of the “tailor-made.” These suits were introduced in the late 1800s and both working and the wealthy wore them in the 1900s. The suits allowed women to change the bodice or the blouse while keeping the skirt, an economic way to stay fashionable. This type of dress would stay in favor until after WWI.

Modesty was the watchword. No part of a woman’s body was allowed exposed below the collar. An exposed ankle while crossing the street would supposedly drive men wild. One of my grandmothers friends was expelled from the University of Califonia for shortening her skirts and exposing just the smallest part of her ankle to view. Entire portions of the english language were verboten in polite company.

Fashionable young women of Arroyo Grande. Bottom, Clockwise: Tootsie Lierley, Mamie Tyler, Grace Whiteley, Cliffie Carpenter, Annie Gray and Maggie Phoenix. 1903, Shannon Family Photo.

The delicate female was guarded from all knowledge, and even from all suspicion or suggestion of evil. “To utter aloud in her presence the word shirt,” said my father, “was an open insult.” No man or woman would pronounce the word corset in front of ladies. The word “woman,” in those days, became a term of reproach, the uncouth female took its place. In the same way the legs of the fair became limbs and their breasts, bosoms. The word lady was substituted for wife. Stomach was transformed, by some unfathomable magic, into a euphemism denoting the whole region from the nipples to the pelvic arch. It was during this time that the newspapers invented such locutions as delicate condition, criminal operation, house of ill repute, disorderly-house, sporting-house, statutory offense, fallen woman and criminal assault. Servant girls ceased to be seduced, and began to be betrayed. That happened to my grandmother’s hired girl Clara who was betrayed by the hired hand. She was “sent away,” another euphemism for the obvious. Syphilis became transformed into blood-poison, specific blood-poison and secret disease, and it and gonorrhea into social diseases. Various French terms, enceinte and accouchement among them, were imported to conceal the fact that careless wives occasionally became pregnant and had lyings-in. In public, my grandmother and her friends never used the word limb or leg. The term organ was equally forbidden. No belly button was ever to be mentioned or seen. Grandmother was given a chaffing dish as a wedding present but it’s handle was deer horn. That was just too, too vulgar and it spent 75 years in a dusty corner of the garage.

The last look is at the kids. They don’t care. What once was is what still is. Same kids, same concerns and thank goodness for that because their dreams keep moving them forward. The clothes are different but they wore them with elan, panache and like today, cool. They want change, they want things to be better, they, unlike their parents don’t want or need the status quo.

When I was in high school, kids were trying to figure out how to overturn the dress code. My wife secretly rolled the waistband of her skirts to make them shorter after she left her parents house for school. My dad told me the girls at Arroyo Grande high school wore nothing but a shimmy under their summer dresses and you could see right through them. I could tell you who they were because they were the 1960’s mothers who supported the dress code. My mom rolled her stockings like Louise Brooks and God forbid, wore trousers in public. And smoked, horrors, what is the world coming too?

My grandmother and her friends could well be imagined as having the same conversation as the girls above.

Lying in the summer grass with a dog. What boy hasn’t done that. Talking about nothing of import, just shootin’ the breeze. The future is made from such as these. No matter the age, kids have not yet had imagination beaten out of them by “Practical Matters.” Be eternally thankful for that.

People would be the same of course. Same hopes, same dreams. Humanity has remained static for millennia. People deal with the problems in their lives like they always have. History repeats itself like turning a page. No one seems to learn much from it. The conversation, be it family, work, or politics doesn’t change, just the names. If you don’t study history you are doomed to repeat it, the man said. Study has changed little. People believe, it’s what makes them and few seem inclined to introspection. The original idea for this article was that, no, you really wouldn’t want to go back to 1900. There are few reasons to do so, but you can bet your bottom dollar that people would go. Human experience is as deep as the ocean but most of us live very near the top. For myself, I would go, but I’d also want to come back. It’s too bad you can’t have both.

Credits:

J. R. Williams was an American cartoonist, animator, and fine artist best known for his late 1980s/early 1990s work in alternative comics. Known for his manic, exaggerated cartooning style, Williams brought an underground comix edge to his work during this period. Born Thirty Years To Soon” and “Out Our Way” are mostly long forgotten today. The books these drawings come from was a Christmas gift to my father and mother in 1946. My uncle Bob who was a great teller of Jokes found it somewhere. He, my dad, Uncle Ray Long and my two grandfathers all lived it. Printed in 1936 it sat on a bookshelf in my parent house where I discovered it when I was about twelve. The many questions I asked about the drawings were my first research project. My parents and grandparents lived those days and loved to talk about them. They all said they’d lived hard lives in a way, but they’d do it again. They wouldn’t trade it for anything.

The title comes from a song by Mary Chapin Carpenter. “Twist and Shout,” a song about dreams contains the line, “When they play you a waltz from 1910. You’re gonna feel a little bit young again” is more than just words.

Michael Shannon is a lifelong Californian. Product of small town life with all its mysterious ins and outs. He lives in Arroyo Grande, California