These were taken at the 1880s Town in South Dakota. I said I was going to post them and am finally doing it.
A Family Home
A Closer Look
This house only had a bedroom/parlor and a kitchen/laundry room. So there were two rooms total, and those rooms weren’t very big. We are spoiled in today’s homes. 🙂
Here is the bedroom side of one room.
This is the other side of the bedroom. This part is the parlor (of sorts). You can see the edge of the bed in the lower left corner of the picture.
Next to the bed was the crib.
This is in the kitchen/laundry room.
This is taken further back to get a better look at the room. You can see the table where they ate and to the left are the laundry supplies.
Next to the table was the cookstove. They people who run this town had potatoes boiling in the pot, which I thought was a neat touch.
More laundry items along the wall.
This is another angle of the kitchen/laundry room.
Ruth Ann Nordin's Author Blog 
Thanks, Ruth. It’s a cute little house. I like the porch. Simpler times, they didn’t think about more space for more things. Just what they needed to live day by day.
The porch was really nice. So were the curtains in the parlor area. It was the highlight of the town, but I have other pictures to share and will over the next week or two. 😀
Janet Syas Nitsick is very much into the nitty gritty of the time period, so in her stories, the houses are more to real life as they were. Same is true with how people bathed (or didn’t), did chores, and acted in society. I tend to romanticize the past. I realize I’m not as authentic as it really was back then, but I tend to look at romance as a fairytale (and I admit a little extra space in the house helps–LOL). If my husband and I lived in such close quarters, we’d go crazy. 😀
We are so blessed and sometimes don’t even appreciate how much STUFF we have. And how big our houses really are.
It’s funny that you mention how much people bathed or didn’t bathe back then. It really bothers me in a sex scene if I know they haven’t bathed. It kind of grosses me out, even though I know that’s how it was back then. We are so spoiled these days. LOL
We are blessed. I saw chamber pots and outhouses and water pumps through the city and thought, “I’m so glad for running water.” LOL
When I think of the fact that women didn’t shave their legs or armpits and there was no deodorant, I do think “ick” on a sex scene. I like to pretend my heroines shave and that everyone smells nice. 😀 It’s fiction, right? We can make up some rules to help us keep going through the book.
Wonderful pictures, Ruth. Perhaps couples were able to stay together because the man left the house to farm to get away from the close quarters, and the woman stayed inside to do the housework. Do not know but it is a good thought anyway. God bless.
LOL I think that is the secret to a happy marriage. 😀