The Daughters of the Utah Pioneers Orangeville Camp under the supervision of School Principal John Hughes demonstrated pioneer skills to the Cottonwood Elementary fourth grade students on March 2.
Janice Spencer led a group of seven DUP daughters and two men in demonstrations of how pioneers accomplished many difficult household chores that we take for granted today.
Janice Spencer said, “About 10 years ago the DUP Emery Company started a yearly sharing program of pioneer information with interested fourth grade school students in their respective schools.”
At the beginning of this event Murleen Bean accompanied by Jean Scoville on the piano introduced to Kari Alton’s 20 excited fourth grade students an early Utah song “Utah, We Love Thee,” written by Evan Stephens.
Following the song several student participation demonstrations were made to help Kari Alton’s fourth grade class learn and understand more about early pioneer life.
Murleen Bean demonstrated how to make butter from the cream skimmed from cow’s milk. After shaking the bottle of cream and forming butter, the students used the butter spread on crackers.
Lauraly Jones and Marilyn Fauver assisted the students to learn how to braid colorful string into ribbons, bracelets or other useful items.
Victoria Sharp and Karen Cox helped them dye cloth red and yellow using dyes made from garden plants and other vegetation. This illustrated how dyed cloth can be manufactured by soaking the cloth in beet juice to get red dye and in boiled onion juice to get yellow dye.
How the pioneers washed clothes was another task the students learned about from Kathleen Beckstead. Instead of an electric clothes washing machine, washing clothes was accomplished by soaking the dirty clothes in warm soapy water, scrubbing the clothes on a scrub board, rinsing the clothes in fresh water, ringing out the water and then hanging the clothes on a line to dry.
The students were then given the opportunity to practice ironing cloth with antique flat irons. Such flat irons were usually kept on the back of the wood or coal burning cook stove to get them hot enough to iron clothes.
Willard Tharp and Gerry Spencer told the legend of the prairie diamond while they made or turned out prairie diamonds from horseshoe nails for each student. In the legend a couple wanted to get married and there were no stores available for the purchase of a wedding ring. Therefore the local blacksmith came up with a solution by making a ring from a shiny horseshoe nail.
Kari Alton’s class thanked the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers for sharing this information with them.
DUPs keep pioneer history alive
"Bracelets are made from ribbons with the help of Marilyn Fauver."