Before dawn on an October Saturday in 1858, an Ohio farm wife lies awake counting the sleepers in her house: two in the trundle bed, three girls overhead, two boys under the rafters, a baby in the cradle. Spend one whole day with a family of thirteen under one roof, from the first coal in the tongs to the last child asleep.

Sources for this episode
Harriet Connor Brown, Grandmother Brown's Hundred Years, 1827-1927 (1929)
Martin Welker, Farm Life in Central Ohio Sixty Years Ago (1892)
William Dean Howells, My Year in a Log Cabin (1893)
William Cooper Howells, Recollections of Life in Ohio, from 1813 to 1840 (1895)
Catharine E. Beecher, A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841)
Lydia Maria Child, The Mother's Book (1831)
Mrs. Cornelius, The Young Housekeeper's Friend (1859)
The Ohio Cultivator, October 1858
Scientific American, 9 October 1858
Michael Haines, "Fertility and Mortality in the United States", EH.Net Encyclopedia

About this episode
The Harlan family is a composite, drawn from the records above; they are not one real household. Narration is a synthetic voice and the images are AI-generated illustrations.

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