Adult Book Club (American Grit: A Woman's Letters from the Ohio Frontier by Emily Foster and Anna Bentley)

Join us on Saturday, December 7, 2024 at 1:00 PM to discuss American Grit: A Woman's Letters from the Ohio Frontier by Emily Foster and Anna Bentley.

In 1826 thirty-year-old Anna Briggs Bentley, her husband, and their six children left their close Quaker community and the worn-out tobacco farms of Sandy Spring, Maryland, for frontier Ohio. Along the way, Anna sent back home the first of scores of letters she wrote her mother and sisters over the next fifty years as she strove to keep herself and her children in their memories.

With Anna's natural talent for storytelling and her unique, female perspective, the letters provide a sustained and vivid account of everyday domestic life on the Ohio frontier. She writes of carving a farm out of the forest, bearing many children, darning and patching the family clothes, standing her ground in religious controversy, nursing wounds and fevers, and burying beloved family and friends.

Emily Foster presents these revealing letters of a pioneer woman in the framework of insightful commentary and historical context, with genealogical appendices. (blurb courtesy of the publisher)

All interested readers (ages 18+) are welcome to attend.

Copies of the book (in regular print, and, if available, in large print and audio) are available to be checked out.

For more information, and a list of the 2024 titles, please visit the Adult Book Club webpage.