HOW THE STORY CAME TO BE WRITTEN
A Father came into the Newark Museum to ask help of the educational adviser.
“I cannot get my children interested in their ancestors,” said he. “They don’t feel any pride in being descended from a lady who came over in the Mayflower. They say, ‘Oh, Charlie’s uncle came over in a private yacht, and Mike’s brother is going over in an aeroplane.’ What shall I do? If we were living at the old homestead, I could show them the hole in the shutter through which the Indian shot their great-uncle, and the oven by the fireside where their great-grandmother cooked for the continental soldiers, and the wedding dress of their grandmother. But the old place was sold, and everything is scattered.”
“Bring your children to the Museum,” said the educational adviser. “We will show them colonial costumes and candle-molds and Indian arrows.”
“I’ll try it,” said the father, “but it won’t be the same.”
Then came a teacher.
“I wish,” said she, “that I could make history alive to my pupils. They don’t care how many men were killed in the battle of Monmouth, or what the date was when Washington crossed the Delaware.”
“We will send you some dolls in colonial costume and an old wool-carder,” said the educational adviser.
“Thank you,” said the teacher. “Of course, those things will be better than nothing.”
It was this need to see “the real things” that caused the Museum to build in its big hall at the top of the Newark Library a colonial kitchen, and fill it with colonial furnishings. Then the students from the Normal School dressed up in colonial clothes and went to work in the kitchen, spinning, making candles, and sewing carpet rags, and explaining these things to the children who flocked in to visit them.
Next Miss Prescott began to play with the children who flocked there, and then the Andrews children of this story were born.
The six or eight thousand children who were taken by their teachers to see this kitchen during the ten weeks that it stood there, many of whom then took their parents to see it, will perhaps read this story about the labors, and the play, and the love-making of Mary Jane, with interest.
Any group of manual training boys and domestic art girls can put up such a kitchen, dress the characters, and act out such a story, and in many American neighborhoods they can borrow “real things,” for their stage properties.
Of course, the story was not written to stimulate handwork or theatricals. Nor was it written to Americanize, or re-Americanize anybody. But simple stories without ingenuity of plot or striking incident have always been told by parents and grandparents and maiden aunts to the delight of children. “Tell us what happened when Grandpa was a miller”; “Tell us about when you went to school through the woods”; “Tell us how the bear frightened Great-Aunt.” These are the demands of children of all nations. The peculiarity of our situation is that so many of our children are step-children, half-children, adopted children. It is a mercy that there is an inheritance not only of blood, but of memories, of ideas, and of hopes.
If this story stimulates emulation of the real virtues of our forefathers, who founded the country, and hence leads to real patriotism, it will have achieved the desire in the hearts of the authors and publishers.