A great way first day of school activity is a field trip, right Fortunately when you homeschool, field trips are an option any day! Last summer we read a great series of books about some pre-teens who helped a slave family escape to freedom along the Underground Railroad and wanted to learn more. (We highly recommend the Riverboat Adventure Series by Lois Walfrid Johnson.) A little research revealed that there was a house about an hour from us that had been part of the underground railroad, still had access to the hiding places, and was open for tours. We gathered about 20 friends and made the trek south to Salem, Iowa, a Quaker settlement which in it's heyday boasted up to 700 residents and at least 5 UR stations.
It was interesting how much information they were able to gather, considering UR involvement wasn't documented. (I never thought about that....you were either in and knew about it or you weren't and the secrets were too precious to risk telling the wrong people.) The house we toured had 2 separate crawl spaces under the floor that were completely separate and accessed through different areas. One was under an addition, so it was easy to justify that the other one didn't extend that far. We learned of another station that had a large wooden wheel in the attic (it looked like a wagon wheel) that was turned to lift the whole floor of a 9' x 14' room to reveal a stairway and hiding place underneath. Imagine the planning and engineering required in the 1840s to design and build such a house! Being Quakers, the home owners never lied when people came to search for runaway slaves, they simply stated, "You are welcome to search our house. You will not find any runaway slaves here." (And they never did!) We were impressed with their wisdom to find a way to always speak the truth AND do what they believed was morally right, even though it violated the law. (One local couple was asked to care for a 6 month old slave baby who would not survive the trek to freedom in Canada. They took her in around 1858 and raised her to adulthood. As a young adult, she converted to Methodist and had to leave home. She ended up in Des Moines, married, and worked for several well-to-do families. In 1935 she returned to a family reunion in Salem to reconnect with the extended family and express thanks. Can you imagine adopting a black child in 1858 and raising her as your own? Good thing they were in a community where most people supported helping slaves escape to freedom!)
After a picnic lunch (thank God that the shelter was large enough to cover us all from the rain!), we collected geodes from a stream bed. The weather and remote location (zero cell phone reception) prevented us from connecting with an area naturalist who had planned to help us, but that didn't stop us from foraging a path through the poison ivy to search for treasure. Fortunately some of the adults were pretty sure they could recognize geodes -- and there were pieces that had been opened and left behind to confirm their thoughts -- and everyone found several pieces that we think will reveal treasures when opened. Since the naturalist had insisted on providing the tools to crack the geodes -- liability, she claimed -- most of us decided to wait until we got home. But a couple of the dedicated boys expended a great deal of energy repeatedly throwing their rocks onto others in the stream bed until their efforts were rewarded with an open geode. Many had the idea "bigger is better" and struggled to carry their treasures up the muddy bank back to the cars.
Children seem to think something fun should never end. On the way home, the dirty kids all contemplated who should ask to go home with whom to extend their play time together. When I told Maria she needed to stay home and take a bath, she tried to convince me that one of the moms had invited her over to their house for a bath. I never got this confirmed, but an extended time playing and soaking in bubbles seemed to offset her disappointment.
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