Fairchild Family Stories

It is a good thing that mothers understand what no one else seems to when you are the youngest child in the family, and are finally four years old. Bonnie is more than ready to join her older sisters and brother in the many adventures she sees come their way, whether it be sliding along the ice, searching for arrowheads, or going on that journey of all journeys-across the swinging bridge to school.

The Fairchild family is here again, and this time, Bonnie is old enough to begin the great adventure - school! We join Bonnie in the excruciating anticipation of the first day, when she will wear her new dress, carry a first reader and slate, and displaying nonchalance as she braves the swinging bridge - enter into the mysteries of schoolroom learning and playground rites in a woodland setting of the early 1900s.

Bonnie's and Debbie's desire to get rich causes them to respond to a sure-thing magazine advertisement. They are soon embarked upon an ambitious summer of selling up and down the river. Not that circumstances end quite in the way they had imagined!

School in the Kentucky hills goes from August to the last Friday before Christmas. After that the snows are too high, and later, the thawing rivers too full, for the Fairchild children, and their neighbors, the Wattersons, the Sawyers, and the Huffs to make it safely to the little school house in the woods. Now that Althy is 14, Mr. Fairchild has other plans for the long winter months. Learn, along with Bonnie, Debbie, Chris, and Emmy, what it is like to have school at home in the early 1900s.