“A woman’s work is never done.” That’s the adage that I whine, as I toil in my garden and house trying to get it in shape. I whine very well. However, yesterday I remembered a story about a pioneer woman from this area, that was written by A.C. Greene. I have a collection of his stories called “Texas Sketches” that first appeared in The Dallas Morning News. That story put me in my place!
Life for the early settlers of Texas was difficult, of course, and any pioneer woman worked harder than I ever have. Amanda Jane Crawford Raines had an even more difficult time … and she made it seem easy.
As a two year old in 1855, Amanda Jane Crawford came to Texas with her family. They moved to the Flower Mound community (which is in Denton County just right down the road from me). On paper, her life seems pretty normal. She married a local man, John M. Raines in 1873 and they had six children. Six kids? That’s a lot of laundry, cooking, cleaning and sleepless nights! She did all the work of raising them without benefit of modern day conveniences and without any hired help.
I hear you thinking, “What’s so great about that? Everybody did that back then.”
Yes, but Amanda Jane Crawford was stricken with polio when she was six years old and was never able to walk or use her feet again! That would be a difficult handicap to surmount in the modern world, but for a 19th century farm child it must have been overwhelming. Nobody coddled her … a youngster had to learn how to survive.
As a child, Amanda Jane shared all the difficult labors involved in running a frontier farm home. She did it on her hands and knees, literally scooting in her work. She drove herself to school in a specially built box hitched to her pony. Can you imagine trying to hitch up a pony or horse from your knees?
There isn’t any record of her courtship with John Raines or her “trip down the aisle,” but Amanda Jane must have been a lively and attractive woman. Most of the people who knew her didn’t even think about her disability … she made up for it quite nicely, without complaint.
In raising her children, she drove them wherever they needed to go in the wagon or the buggy. She made clothing for the family by disconnecting the treadle on the sewing machine so she could operate the machine with one hand and guide the cloth with the other. On top of raising her children, she was active in the church and the community and always did her share of volunteer work.
Amanda Jane Crawford Raines died in 1949, nearing the age of 95. When A.C. Greene talked to her surviving children, he said that they placed more emphasis than she did on something that happened on her 50th birthday: she got a wheel chair after half a century of scooting around on hands and knees.
She was a pretty amazing woman, that’s for sure. Think about her the next time you are tempted to complain about loading the dishwasher, or washing clothes in the washing machine, or vacuuming the floor. In comparison to Amanda Jane Crawford Raines, do we really have any complaints?
[Note: A.C. Greene was considered "The Dean of Texas Letters." If you ever run across a book by him in a used book store, snap it up. He was fascinating.]
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WOW~! Double WOW! What a fantastic story about a truly amazing woman! Thanks for sharing that piece and I’ll think about her and her attitude along with her tremendous abilities every time (which is often frequent) I get to thinking gee, life is hard! Really, for the majority of us though we may think it difficult, it’s actually a piece of cake, isn’t it?
.-= Jeni Hill Ertmer´s last blog ..Regroup or Regrowth =-.
She has been an inspiration for me since the day I read about Amanda Jane
. I wish I were more like her!
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