The Tinsleys
There’s a model pioneer era farm next to the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana that fascinates me. The farm buildings were originally constructed in the town of Willow Creek forty miles away beginning in 1889. The structures were carefully moved to the museum grounds and opened to the public on its centenary in 1989. The museum has various goals for its Living History program that include maintaining a historically authentic homestead and encouraging visitors to become more involved in agriculture themselves. Programs are offered in modern urban homesteading, raising chickens, Dutch oven cooking, vegetable gardening, bee keeping, blacksmithing, and so on.
Both William Tinsley and his future wife Lucy were from Missouri families that had migrated west in large part to escape the difficulties associated with the Civil War. As a bachelor Mr. Tinsley scouted out a 120 acre claim in the Montana Territory using the Homestead Act of 1862 which had been signed into law by Abraham Lincoln. Newly married, the couple began farming in 1889, the year Montana became a state. After five years they had fulfilled their requirements by building a house and cultivating the land. At that point the federal government granted them free title to the property.
As I toured the farm I had to balance my romantic sentiments with what life on the frontier was really like. If the Tinsleys wanted vegetables they needed to grow them themselves. If they wanted apple pies, apple sauce, and apple cider in December they needed to preserve the apples in the fall and set sufficient quantities aside in the root cellar. If they wanted eggs, milk, butter, and meat they needed to raise the animals themselves and process them accordingly.
Water came from a shallow well they had to dig themselves. Then they needed to carry that water by hand from the well into the house. A “dry” sink of simple pitchers and wash basins got the job done. Dirty water was carried outdoors for disposal. Laundry was all done by hand and hung to dry. An outhouse was still the standard of the day.
The Tinsleys chopped their own wood to heat the house and keep the cook stove going. Bread and porridge were home made and the wheat, oats, and corn were likely grown and milled by the family themselves. They may have bought some cloth from town or the Sears mail order catalog, but many of their clothes, quilts, and linens were home made.
Horseshoes and iron implements were made on site. Leather and wood were fashioned into yokes and harnesses for farm animals. The fields were plowed and crops harvested by hand. When things broke or wore out they were repaired at home. It wasn’t an easy life. Yet people by the millions signed up for a chance to participate in the federal program to settle the western territories. That says something about what the alternatives must have been like back east, particularly for young people with no money like the Tinsleys.
There were two things that left big impressions on me as I explored the farm. First, it actually took the Tinsleys twenty years to finally build their farmhouse. In the meantime they lived in a one room cabin that measured 16’ x 18’ (2.4M X 4.9M.) That’s two adults and eight children in 288 square feet (27 square meters.)
For comparison that’s the same amount of space as two standard parking spots. Try picturing those ten people living together through a long Montana winter complete with colicky babies, no running water, and no electricity. The oldest of the Tinsley children were already adults by the time the big house was completed.
The second big take away for me was how this pioneer model contrasts with the way our current culture and national institutions create housing now. The Homestead Act provided free land to settlers with the stipulation that the land be made productive. Today housing is expressly and intensively regulated to forbid primary production of any kind.
While I was in the Museum next to the farm I noticed the sponsors that donated funds necessary to keep the place open. One was the Oakland Companies. They’re prominent local land developers who are building the next iteration of homes for today’s population. I suspect there are some great great grandchildren of the Tinsleys around who may well be living in some of these new homes.
Here’s one of the subdivisions built by the Oakland Companies. These are solid respectable middle class homes and neighborhoods that were master planned with all the usual amenity packages. I clicked on the home owners association’s Declaration of Restrictions and Protective Covenants and discovered (to no surprise) that absolutely everything that the model farm is interested in promoting is strictly forbidden.
While animals were a vital part of a productive pioneer homestead they are now rigorously vetted. A contemporary residence must remain upright by not engaging in disruptive or low class animal husbandry. Having more than two dogs is a violation of accepted standards. Proper middle class people are expected to buy food, not cultivate it.
All homes in this subdivision are required to be no less than 1,450 square feet (135 square meters) and that number can’t include porches, garages, basements, et cetera. If you want a garden shed you can only have one and the association board must review and approve it first. No part of the property can be used for rental accommodation. Only single family homes are acceptable. The Tinsley’s original log cabin would not fly here.
There are extremely tight controls on the colors, sizes, shapes, and orientation of absolutely everything. The association insists on shades of beige, ecru, off white, and creme anglaise. Current norms are narrowly defined and there’s zero tolerance for deviation. Evidently this is what consumers expect and demand from new housing in order to keep out the riffraff. And don’t even think of planting a vegetable garden anyplace where one of the neighbors might get a glimpse of it. There are pages and pages of fine print specifying the need for neatly tended lawns and shrubbery. The Tinsley front garden and fence would quickly be hammered into submission.
I have no illusions about the culture that existed in the late 1800s. The Tinsleys had been Confederates. Like many settlers of the western frontier they would have been keen to maintain Montana as an all white region through ad hoc local enforced. They occupied land that had previously belonged to an entirely different group of people who had been removed at gunpoint by federal troops. There was plenty of social engineering at play. Some people today are nostalgic for those Good Old Days. But here’s the question I ask myself…
Would the Tinselys prefer the living arrangement they had or would they grab at today’s homes and environment with both hands instead? The homes built by the Oakland Companies are bigger, more comfortable, and can be purchased fully formed in a finished state with federally guaranteed thirty year low interest mortgages. Would the Tinsleys trade off twenty years in the log cabin in exchange for HOA restrictions, $350,000 in debt, and Lean Cuisine?
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