Posts by Pamela
Looking Forward to Juneteenth
On June 19, 1865, Union General Gordon Granger read General Order No. 3, which announced the emancipation of enslaved people in Texas, from a balcony in Galveston Texas, or so the story goes. It was two and a half years after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation went into effect and 2 months after the Civil War had…
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Laundry Day (Not the Band)
In my last post, I made a casual reference to just how hard it was to do laundry in the mid-nineteenth century, but I didn’t bother to elaborate.* Time to correct that oversight. Laundry in the mid-nineteenth century was a difficult job, one that most households undertook no more than once a week.** Washing machines…
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“Stagecoach Mary” Fields Carries the Mail
Fifty years before the Six Triple Eight Central Postal Directory Battalion made postal history, a six-foot tall, powerfully built formerly enslaved woman named “Stagecoach Mary” Fields delivered the mail in rural Montana as a Star Route Carrier for the United States Post Office.* When Mary was emancipated, she left West Virginia, where she had been…
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