The Olden Time: Stories for Betty

About the Book

This project is based on the reminiscences of Elizabeth Hawley Bowen Everett (1857-1940). She originally compiled these stories, records, and reflections about her life and her family in response to curiosity expressed by her grand-daughter, Betty Bowen Hanes. Her collection is called, The Olden Time or Stories for Betty.

As we immersed ourselves in this family’s history, we became convinced that the experiences of its various members represented those of countless Americans. Their participation in this country’s struggle for independence, the western migration, the establishment of towns on the prairie, in school teaching from Maine to Mississippi and Nebraska, make this story significant beyond its interest to the family’s descendents. In consequence, we made the decision to annotate the collection in an effort to aid the modern reader with obscure references and to provide some historical background. We have presented Elizabeth Hawley’s own work with only the slightest editing and occasional rearrangement, and we have clearly identified our additions as footnotes, by brackets or a change in typeface.

Several observations should be mentioned here. The influence of New England culture on the prairie society is marked. The interest in education is attested by both the number of schools established in these small towns and the number of students who enrolled. Women and girls attended school as well as boys and young men. Women taught, even in male preparatory schools, and ran their own schools. Religion, in the form of protestant denominations, was a strong influence and along with it temperance societies. Little distinction was made among the various protestant traditions as long as the preaching was “faithful” and “effective,” for the church of one’s family might well be unrepresented in a new town. Customs of dress and manners were transported from New England along with the settlers. Land divisions took similar forms as did the governing bodies of townships.

As a family history, this is an odyssey of school teachers. Their devotion to education is represented first in Maine, by The Reverend Reuben Nason’s Gorham Academy, now located on the campus of the University of Southern Maine, and finally, at the end of the western journey, by the presence of the family home facing the campus of the University of Nebraska. There were teachers in each generation, both men and women, in preparatory schools and seminaries from Maine and New York to Mississippi, Iowa, and Nebraska and, beginning with Reuben Nason’s graduation from Harvard in 1802, students at Bowdoin and Dartmouth Colleges, at the University of Illinois and finally the University of Nebraska, where the young Hawleys studied. We offer this collection of memories, stories, and anecdotes to all who are interested in this period of American history and to the descendents of these hardy folk.