The Carpenters!
This story is about a Father-Daughter Team who traveled the world and wrote Geography books. You remember Geography? The subject we no longer teach our Global Citizen children.
The father’s name was Frank Carpenter and he was born 1855 in Mansfield, Ohio. Frank was a photographer, a journalist and a globetrotter.
His daughter Frances was born 1890 and she accompanied her father as his secretary + backup photographer.
They wrote elementary school geography books with titles like: How The World Is Clothed 1907
Around The World With The Children 1917
The Foods We Eat/Journey Club Travels 1925
The Houses We Live In/Journey Club Travels 1926
The Clothes We Wear/Journey Club Travels 1926
The Ways We Travel/Journey Club Travels 1929
So what was the Journey Club Travels? It was children forming what amounted to a virtual travel club. They wished they could visit people in far-away lands but since they couldn’t, they would venture forth using imagination, research, artifacts, data, photos and much more. They even chose a Motto which was “Let Us Find Out.”
The Journey Club begins to sound like a real club. In the Houses Book someone named Jack is selected as President and he convenes the group by announcing, “The Journey Club will please come to order!” And so they do.
Mary reads from a record book and reports on the trips they have made. Dick tells the kids about a Journey Club Museum that is being organized. They find a space and set up shelves for all the artifacts and info they’ve gathered. Finally, they make what amounts to an exhibit from the Food Trips they had just completed.
A Planning Committee appears with a presentation on trips in the offing. How about great forests, mines, mills, foundries and factories? The Houses Journey gives them the idea to build an actual playhouse calling on guidance from someone’s father who operates a house-building business.
As you can see, it just goes on and on and on!
The Carpenter approach to Geography was not War-Based, Trauma-Based, Famine-Based, Climate Crisis-Based, Immigrant Search & Seizure-Based. It was none of that. Even though all of that was going on everywhere as the Carpenters traveled and published.
“By the 1890s, Frank Carpenter’s convivial Newspaper Column introductions to international understanding quite naturally became directed toward school kids—whose traditional geography textbooks were more effective than sleeping pills. In Carpenter these youth found a companionable voice who spoke in terms of comparisons they understood like breakfast and clothes and pets. His fascination with the variety of humanity was a contagious and welcome force in shaping education and values.
A couple generations of American kids came to adulthood with Carpenter’s friendly regard for the rest of the curious wide world. Friendly is as Friendly does.
By the time Carp died in 1924 at the age of 69, he had written 20 books of travels for children and adults, published a newspaper column every Sunday for 31 years and dozens of travel pieces in Cosmopolitan magazine. And shipped, trained, automobiled and donkeycarted over very nearly the whole of the planet.
He also documented his voyages with a camera. His daughter Frances had the collection of 15,000 photographs placed in the Library of Congress. In recent months the digitized collection has been made available online. So today you can follow Frank Carpenter around the world from the comfort of home on your online screen.
It’s exactly what Frank had in mind. Looking at the photos you can’t help but love the guy. As did millions of Americans a hundred years ago.”
https://richlandcountyhistory.com/2019/08/05/carp-frank-carpenter-and-the-world/
kathyirwin1 