Show Nettie Ann AN ADOLESCENT GIRL’S PERSPECTIVE Trenton Utah Mch 10 1890 Dear Brother: You dont need telling you did not get a letter last week from home because I knew it first You can blame Mark Twain for it If he had never written “Innocence Abroad" I feel quite sure it would not have happened Last Friday we had a thaw wind it ended in a day's rain and 5 inches of new snow and a blizzard it looks as if it would snow more Frank is over on the ditch He got ditch fever like all the rest of the boys talked about going a month and then went You needn't be surprised if I tell you none of us has looked at a book since school quite But I think and so does Will that we are progressing as fast as we did In Miss Thom's school Will say I should put Mr Tom Mary was over yesterday Jesse is catching up with his nose We have got 12 cows Will was up on the String yesterday They are working up on the railroad by Weston creek You are keeping a diary Well Mark Twain say They are worth $1000 — when you get them done Done be like the boy who started one few days he wrote 10 aid twelve pages For a a day days (But like evry new thing It gets old) He got behind with U and said "They may be worth $1000 apiece when you get them done But 1 would not finish that one for a million It Is mail time for a few Nettie So wrote Nettie Wood to her brother Charles Wood who had ftemon to study at Amhent College in Massachusetts Over the coune ' of his four years away from home Charles would collect a pile at 83 letters from Nettie which he would carefully save to pass along to his children in later years Charles didn’t rcal- Page52 Photo nulMvallJBUBMetalCoSKflm ChMrsn from lha White Brick school In Trenton posa for a photo at the turn of the century ize dot these mothballed letters would one day offer historians an extremely rare and intimate look into the daily life of an adolescent girl West Nettie's preserved letters are now part of a collection of Wood family letters housed in Special Collections at Utah State University Their importance should not be underestimat- cd says Melissa A Duersch who pored over Nettie’s letters as part of her master’s diesis in history at USU Her thesis ‘“Saying is Not Much Worse Than Thinking’: The Adolescent Perspective of Nettie Ann Wood 1 growingupindielate-19th-centui- y 889-189- 3’ investigates the letters and lets Nettie’s words worries and triumphs recreate the laughs and sorrows barbs and bristles of an adolescence girl in the West “Hers is an incredible voice that hasn’t been there" Duersch says noting that most first-day-to-d- ay hand accounts of die time period were written by older people remembering back to their adolescent days These histories also were typi- cally written fer posterity and sometimes memories become watered down in die editing phase Nettie’s letters on the other hand were the honest outpourings of a 16 year old writing to her older brother simply to tell him what's going on back home With nothing to prove to anyone Nettie lets loose with stories of romance Unringl ugly cousins lazy uncles good teachersbadteachenflirtatious teachers teenage weight problems eastern vs western boys — in other words all the gossip that still fkiws from the mouths of contemporary ado-lescent girls " See WOOD on page 54 |