During the 1870s, most employed women worked in domestic or personal service. This trend continued into the 1920s. Clara Matilda Anderson (the future mother of Carl Sandburg) was among the many young female immigrants who found a job as a maid or cook. She worked as a maid in a hotel in Bushnell, Illinois. She was also required to help in the kitchen.

 

There she met August Sandburg, also a native of Sweden. She took the chance to marry and have a home of her own.

 

The amount of work she had to do in her small house wasn't any easier. After the children began arriving, Clara had even more work to do. The one advantage was that she was working for her own family. She was respected as a wife and mother with her own household. Clara and her children also had the dedicated support of August Sandburg. He worked a strenuous job in the railroad blacksmith shop for meager pay, but he tried to provide food and shelter for the family, to the best of his ability.

 

When the family moved into a larger house on Berrien Street, rooms were rented out to help pay the mortgage. The space for the growing Sandburg family wasn't that much larger than the cottage on Third Street, but there was more work to be done by father, mother and children.

 

There was no city water piped into the house. There were no bathrooms. The Saturday night baths were conducted in a large wooden laundry tub in the kitchen—that was where the hot water was located. The girls bathed first and then the boys. The toilet was in the privy in the backyard. Someone had to be hired once or twice a year to empty it of “night soil.” Kerosene lamps used for lighting required frequent cleaning and refilling.

 

Food was brought into the house without fancy packaging. It had to be cleaned, cooked and used fairly quickly as only limited refrigeration was provided by the ice box. Gardens provided foods that would keep through the winter. The cast iron stove had to be kept supplied with wood or coal even on the hottest days of the year. The cast iron cooking utensils were heavy to lift on and off the stove.

 

Earnest Elmo Calkins, who wrote They Broke the Prairie in 1937, described the town of Galesburg as having neither extreme wealth nor extreme poverty. The gap between the richest and the poorest was a relatively small one.

 

The town was true to its founders in that the social life centered around the churches. The pioneer tradition of neighborliness was still in force. Providing home-baked goods and foods for social events was a common practice.

 

Calkins wrote of Galesburg as it was in the 1880s during his teenage years: “It was composed of decent, hard-working people, self-respecting people, leading lives rich with a common humanity, raising its children in the fear of the Lord...sending them to Sunday school...educating them at the public schools and Knox College. It was an era of family life.

 

“The life of the town was lived in its houses, much the same in spite of social distinctions. Even the houses of the well-to-do lacked conveniences taken for granted today.

 

“They believed their houses were comfortable, and they were comfortable in their way, but it required an almost unbelievable amount of physical labor to take care of them.”

 

That physical work was performed largely by live-in Irish or colored servants. The more fortunate among them had homes of their own to which they could return at the end of the day. Those who lived in their employer's home had a day which really did not end.