The Ladies’ Society in Everyday Ramblings

Clearly I need a timeline. Pretty soon my place is going to look like one of those pictures you see of a writer’s study, with the charts on the wall of timelines and maps and… well you get the picture.

I must say though that as the first section draft of the first poem I put up takes place in around 1914, the year my actual live in the real world mother was born in Kansas and the next section takes place in about 1969 I am feeling particularly drawn to the ten year period between 1880 and 1890.

The house you see above (this is the next block down from me) was built in 1886. I took this photo in the late summer of 2008. It is still there and still beautiful in a beat up hippy sort of way. It is at the very edge of where the 54 square block area was torn down for what they called “The South Auditorium Urban Renewal Project.”

The owners are a bit counter culture, with an entrepreneurial bent and passionately love their house, which has been broken up into two flats. The wife’s mother lives in one. It is not the oldest house on the block. The one with the angel wings on the garage is.

That one was built in 1880.

I was quite excited, (like I’d caught a rabbit or something yesterday), to get an actual confirmed location if not an address for the Unitarian Chapel that was located here just about a block and a half away for where I am now and was established in 1880.

It was the home for five years of the Free Kindergarten #2. I found the annual report to the city by Caroline Dunlap in 1890 saying that for the school year there were 80 pupils registered and 59 currently enrolled. #2 was run by Miss Belle Goldman and assisted by Miss Hunsucker and their goal was to instill courtesy, industry, frugality, independence and honesty in the children.

Miss Dunlap assisted in the setting up of the Free Kindergartens in San Francisco and then came to live here to do the work and joined my church and The Ladies’ Society (which started out as a sewing circle) and is the precursor to our Women’s Circle.

The church across the street from me (and what was to become the livery stables) was built as a Baptist church in 1888. The gorgeous apartments across from the church on the other side were built in 1890.

Then had such a radically different idea of space back then. People were smaller but you would have these incredibly narrow houses with paper-thin walls and six kids would live there with their parents and some additional extended family.

“We had had very few sweets. Our desserts usually consisted of fruit. We had fruit trees and she canned everything. In the summer we had fresh fruit, not just from the trees. Frank the farmer came to our house. My mother was the first one on his route so she got brown eggs, and he brought all kinds of whatever was in season. She bought a sack of onions, a sack of potatoes, and a box of apples. When that was gone he supplied her again. Besides Frank the farmer we had an Italian vegetable man. He came every other day and parked his truck. All the neighbors came to buy his vegetables.”

Apparently even though the horse drawn streetcar was only a nickel, proper ladies walked to the shochet with their live chickens for slaughter because I mean, what if the chicken squawked while you were riding!

The book I am getting this particular detail from is due back at the library this weekend so I thought I’d capture some of this and share.

I sure hope I am not boring you with all this. Cause I think you are stuck with me immersed in the past for a patch. :)

Last updated July 15, 2015