A Kansas Adventure

These letters sent back home to the family in England give a vivid, detailed account of the ups and downs of setting up and running a farm on the Kansas prairie in the 1880s and 1890s. Due to a setback in the family fortunes in the Manchester cotton trade, John and Marian Whitworth made the enterprising decision to take their family of five children and emigrate to the Mid West of America. Although they were not at all experienced in farming they enjoyed the freedom and less stressed country life. Despite many difficulties including the destruction of their house by fire, they were determined to make a success of this venture, and it was personal tragedies, not external circumstances, which brought it to an abrupt end.

Jane Renfrew is an Emeritus Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge, UK. She is a prehistorian and palaeoethnobotanist and also has a strong interest in the history of her nineteenth-century ancestors.