Periodicals and papers began to give the settlers much new and needed information. John S. Wright began mailing the prairie settlers a little paper he called The Union Agriculturist and Western Prairie Farmer with 2,500 copies of his first edition dated January, 1841. He bitterly assailed those who decried his "book farming" as reactionaries who were resisting change and improvement. The Farmer's Almanack had been published in the East since 1792 and gave valued hints on agriculture, with an article on the advantages of alfalfa as a legume published in its 1830 edition, a hundred years before the idea was firmly established.

The peddlers and traveling shoemakers and teachers of different degrees of qualification were coming to stay in a settlement for a month or through the winter. Priests, ministers, pastors and circuit riders were arriving to conduct religious meetings in homes and to encourage the early building of churches. These all brought news of the outside world.

As time passed into the middle and late forties, pioneers had their ways of fun with barn raisings, spelling bees, singing schools and quiltings. The men always enjoyed a game of quoits or a shooting match, things which seem very simple pleasures to us.

By 1850 the majority of the immigrants were coming from Germany, England and Ireland. Most of them landed in New York and reached

By 1850 pioneer homes were no longer cabins.

(By courtesy of the Kentucky Department of Publicity.)
 
 

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