Sarah Stewart is not only a successful poet, philosopher, and writer of children’s books, but she is also an experienced Master Gardener. Over the last couple decades, she has managed a large garden in Mendon, Michigan, where she supports her community in many ways, including giving extra produce to the local food pantry. While managing her garden, she has written several gardening journals which she used to help her stay organized each year. Recently she and her husband, David Small, donated a collection of their writing works to the Zhang Legacy Archives at Western Michigan University – including her gardening journals. Although she created these journals as a simple tool for her garden, what she ended up creating was a legacy of knowledge for food cultivation, which has the potential to help people for years to come. One can hope that those who read her journals, with the goal of learning about gardening, will also take on the generous and diligent nature of Sarah Stewart.

The Sandusky Housekeeper was published by the Ladies Library Association of Sandusky, Ohio in 1888. From cornbread to fruit cake, to remedies for ringworm and frosted limbs, “The Sandusky Housekeeper” encapsulates the duties and responsibilities of the average American woman. In addition to their daily activities, they highly valued manners, decorating, housekeeping, motherhood, marriage, and preserving culture. By inscribing her unique recipes in this cherished book, the original owner preserved her history, culture, and legacy. Maintaining one’s legacy was extremely important to late nineteenth-century American women, and they saved their legacies through physical items that they treasured dearly, such as a family cookbook or quilt. Using moveable items to safeguard legacies was very common during this period for women, and men typically used their land or businesses to carry on their separate legacies. Because women in the late nineteenth-century focused on moveable properties rather than fixed properties as their husbands did, they were able to leave behind clues and evidence for future historians to discover and unlock unlimited information regarding America’s family legacies.

When Ella Sheldon Rogers received a small, five-year diary, she most likely had no idea that her musings about the snowy, cold, and windy weather would be viewed as the legacy she left not only to her daughter Eloyse, but to researchers and students enrolled at Western Michigan University for years to come. Even though the golden lock on the outside of the crimson diary no longer clasps, the stories written by this non-traditional, middle-aged student-teacher are still locked within the tightly cramped cursive, reminiscent of a grandparent’s handwriting. From a report on October 11th, 1935, Ella writes about attending a Michigan Education Association meeting, where she met a number of notable alums of Western State Teachers College such as “Dr. Brown, Mr. Sprau, and others.”

This book, written by Malinda Russell in 1866, serves as a diary and a cookbook demonstrating both the hardships she faced during her lifetime as well as the recipes she learned along the way. The book chronologically describes Russell’s life from her birth, post-emancipation, as a freed-by-law African-American woman in Tennessee to the day she published her Cookbook, in hopes to pay for her trip home in 1866. This artifact has a connection to legacy as Mrs. Russell partly created this book to help those who had stayed in her boarding house, so that they may have access to the same creations that had satisfied them during their stay. Additionally, anyone can now explore these pages and learn how women in the past created some things that we take for granted today.