Rush County Historical Society

09/01/2026

08/31/2026

in 1955 they wanted to let you know that 7Up is "so pure, so wholesome, you can even give it to babies and feel good about it."

08/31/2026

Soda Fountain circa 1957

08/31/2026

✨️1920s✨️

08/31/2026

Which tools do you recognize?

Liberty Girl (1943) by Norman Rockwell was the cover of the Saturday Evening Post of September 4, 1943.

It is one of several covers he made to honor the American women who stepped up during World War II. With many men in the armed forces, women had to take on all sorts of new jobs. The woman is called Rosie, and the subtitle of this painting is Rosie to the Rescue.

08/31/2026

🏠 In 1950 the average new house in America cost around $7,500. The average worker earned about 75 cents an hour — roughly $1,500 a year if they worked full time. The house cost approximately five years of full wages.

They saved for years. Both of them working toward it — the specific long-term savings discipline of a generation that had come through the Depression and the war and understood that the house was not going to be given to them and was worth whatever it took to get there.

The postwar building boom put those houses up faster than any previous period in American history — the Cape Cods and the ranch houses spreading across the new suburbs, the young families moving in with their new furniture and their new children and their complete belief that what they were building was going to last.

Most of those houses are still standing. Most of them still have families in them.

Did your family buy or build their first house in the postwar years — and do you know the story of how they saved for it? 💛

08/31/2026

I never minded going to the bakery with Mother.

The moment we opened the door, you could smell everything at once—fresh bread, warm rolls, pies cooling somewhere in the back, and that faint floury smell that seemed to cling to the whole place.

Mother usually knew exactly what she wanted.

I did too.

I wanted to watch the bread slicer.

The clerk would take a whole loaf from the rack and set it into that shiny metal machine. At first it looked completely ordinary—one solid loaf with a golden crust.

Then the machine started.

There was a quick mechanical sound, and somehow that loaf disappeared through one side and came out the other in a perfect row of slices.

Every one exactly the same thickness.

I could have watched it ten times.

I stood with both hands on the counter, following the loaf through the machine as though I were watching some great piece of engineering.

Mother was probably thinking about what else she needed to buy.

I was studying bread.

The sliced loaf still held its original shape, only now you could see all those neat little divisions from one end to the other.

Then came the wrapping.

The clerk placed it in that slightly cloudy waxed paper, folded the ends carefully, and secured it for the trip home.

That paper had its own sound when you opened it later.

A soft crinkle that usually meant toast, sandwiches, or a slice of bread with butter was coming next.

Sometimes I tried to convince Mother that we should eat the heel on the way home.

She usually told me to wait.

By the time we reached the house, the bread was still soft and fresh, and the whole kitchen smelled different the moment the wrapper was opened.

Looking back, there was nothing especially complicated about that machine.

It simply sliced bread.

But when you were eight years old, ordinary machinery could be fascinating.

You wanted to know where the loaf went.

How all the slices came out straight.

Why none of them fell apart.

And whether the clerk might run another loaf through while you were still standing there.

Mother went to the bakery because we needed bread.

I went because I wanted to see that machine turn one loaf into twenty perfect slices again.

08/31/2026

The hardest seat in a one room school was not a desk at all. It was a long backless bench at the very front, in full view of forty other children. ✏️

They called it the recitation bench, and it was how one teacher managed eight grades at once.

The arithmetic of the thing looks impossible on its face. A single teacher, one room, children from six to eighteen, all working at different levels, and almost no textbooks to speak of. The solution was to teach in rotations. The teacher called a class forward by name. Third grade readers, come up. Five or six children left their desks, filed to the bench, and worked with the teacher out loud, while everyone else in the room was expected to keep their heads down on slates and pretend not to listen.

Of course they listened. That was the hidden genius of it, though nobody planned it that way.

A first grader on his slate heard the fourth graders do their multiplication tables every single day for a year. A ten year old heard the big scholars read history and name the counties of the state. By the time a child was called up to a level, they had already heard it taught aloud dozens of times. Children in those schools routinely got ahead of themselves, not because anybody pushed them, but because the whole curriculum was in the air all day long.

It cut the other way too. Every mistake was public. You stood at that bench, got a word wrong, and forty people heard it. Old folks who went to those schools could tell you sixty years later exactly which word it was.

We tend to picture a one room school as a charming little building with a bell on top. What it really was is a workaround, invented by communities who could afford exactly one teacher and flatly refused to accept that as a reason their children would go untaught.

The bench is gone. The habit of learning by listening to somebody a little older got handed down anyway. 🤍

08/30/2026

Buying expensive, glossy wrapping paper was a massive insult to the family budget.

We didn't waste hard-earned cash on paper you were literally going to rip apart.

Mom grabbed the heavy Sunday comics and a roll of cheap tape.

She wrapped those birthday boxes with absolute, unapologetic street cred.

It was loud, it was colorful, and it was completely free.

You actually looked forward to reading the wrapping before you opened the gift.

We completely owned the DIY hustle decades before it became a trendy aesthetic.

It wasn't just frugal; it was an absolute flex of creativity.

Kids today demand pristine, matching gift bags that cost five bucks a pop.

We handed over a comic-wrapped box and didn't apologize for it.

That kind of hardcore resourcefulness is what made our generation totally untouchable.