..there was no electricity in their houses for the first few years of the 1900's. In the winter, the floor was cold when they climbed out of bed. In fact, it was too cold to make an early-morning trip to the two-holer outhouse in the back yard so they used chamber pots. They washed their faces in a basin of cold water. Kids were bathed in wooden tubs.

Each day, it was someone’s job to empty this wash-water and also the chamber pots. Someone had to prime the squeaky backyard pump and carry in buckets of water for drinking and household use. One luxury they enjoyed were the feather quilts on the beds, which kept them cozy. Because when the coals burned down in the iron stove in the parlour, there was little or no heat.

If living like that sounds like misery now, a hundred years later, they didn’t think so.The Fairbrothers considered that they had a perfectly pleasant home... fancy wallpaper, rugs on the floor, lace curtains, a mohair sofa, a handsome writing desk and china dishes for company meals. They had clothes enough (many hand-made)...and certainly enough to eat. They were average middle-class.

From taped interviews with the eldest son, Eddie, in 1984, I learned something of their day-to-day life. The mother, Minnie, worked endlessly to keep the family fed and clothed and clean, with no household help. Monday was always washday. She heated water on the wood stove, grated bars of soap into flakes, used a ribbed metal washboard to scrub on, hand-wrung the garments, and hung them outside to dry..a cold job in Minnesota winters..

Tuesdays she ironed the shirts and sheets, petticoats and ruffled dresses, heating the iron on the stove...(but not too hot!) Every Wednesday she baked enough bread to last a week, in a wood-fired oven. With daily meal prepartions and small children a year apart, she was exhausted much of the time. As soon as the children were big enough, they helped scrub floors and empty chamber pots, haul water and wash and dry dishes. Yet Minnie also found time to sew and mend and crochet fancy items, which seemed to give her pleasure.

They were devout Presbyterian church-goers who attended morning and evening services every Sunday. Yet there is nothing obvious under their Christmas trees (books or cards or icons) that mark their Christmas as a mostly-religious holiday. As you can see from these pictures, gifts (however modest) seemed to be important.

They did not have a car (few people did), and they did not own a horse either. White Bear Lake (about 2000 people then) was a railroad junction with as many as 23 trains a day in the summer. It took Edward about 25 minutes to ride the train to his job in St. Paul from White Bear Lake.

Because Edward worked for Northern Pacific Railroad, he had free train passes and sometimes took the family on a 5-hour trip to Duluth on hot summer weekends, to cool off on the shores of Lake Superior . Often during August, he took the family back to his boyhood farm in Copenhagen, Ontario.