Hacker CinemaTexas Ranch House
Texas Ranch House
2006 · TV series · 60 min episodes · 1 season
Texas Ranch House is an PBS American reality television series that premiered in May 2006. Produced by Thirteen/WNET New York, Wall to Wall Media Limited, and PBS, the show placed fifteen modern day people in the context of 1867 Texas. Show participants attempted to run a ranch for two and a-half months using 19th century tools and techniques. The historian Alwyn Barr, professor emeritus at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, was the consultant on the program.
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The best accounting I've seen of how much work people did historically were the mini-series that were aired on PBS a few years back: "Frontier House", "Colonial House", "Texas Ranch House", "1900 House", "The 1940s House", "The 1900 Island", "Prairie House", etc. Average modern families took up residence in a building of the times and had to use only the tools of the day to work as they did then. (Though they didn't have to grow their own food.)
Without exception, the work was backbreaking and unrelenting. Some of the moderns chose to quit rather than finish the month-long 'experiment'. Everyone came away with aspects of shell shock in realizing how hard life was back then for the average person, even just 70 years ago. It also became obvious that the lives of slaves or those working with only hand tools were that much harder still.
No, it's just insane to imagine that anyone in the past had easy lives. Nasty, brutish, and short, indubitably.
Fascinating to see how hard our recent ancestors had it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_1900_House