Mason Jars - a trip all alone and a kidnapping

Mason jars - Part 2
These are my 90 year-old mother's autobiographical words about growing up in the rural west:

We would start a fire in the Round Oak heater in the living room on weekends, and would play cards during the long winter evenings. We would sometimes have popcorn or other treats. We had a wind-up Victrola with records which we would play often.
We had no electricity or running water. When I was about 8 years old, Mother inherited $4,000 from her father's estate and we built on to the house. We originally had a kitchen, living room and two bedrooms. The new part has a basement, 2 bedrooms, a new kitchen (the old kitchen became a dining room), a bathroom (with hope of someday having water from plumbing), and a closed-in porch where there was a sink with a pitcher pump. Our water was from a deep well pumped into a cistern by a windmill. This was the closest my mother ever came to having running water in the house. She never had electricity.
She always cooked on the big Majestic range, using corn cobs and some coal in Nebraska, and wood and coal in Wyoming. We used kerosene lamps, and, later, gasoline lamps that we "pumped up."
When I was a child, I always helped my mother in the house, since I was the only girl. My mother usually had hired men to cook for.
She baked all the bread and canned several hundred jars of vegetables form the garden, meat from butchering, old hens culled from the laying-flock, old roosters, and fruit that we bought by the bushel. (I suppose these came from the wonderful fruit-growing areas of Colorado).
When neighbors came in, the women would always visit the garden and the root cellar where the jars and jars of colorful produce stood. My mother used a steam canner on the cook stove to process the food. . .

Her story is continued in a later section (about high school) in Mom's autobiographical material (written in 1990):

We all worked hard at home. We put up hay, and I did a lot of the raking and drove the hay-stacker team. I helped with the cooking, dish washing, washed the milk separator, helped with the canning and the garden.

Mother was a 4-H leader for our sewing and cooking clubs. We always entered exhibits at the State Fair at Douglas. One year I won First (prize) on my five jars of 5 varieties of vegetables. They went on to the International 4-H Club Congress in Chicago where they took 9th place in the nation. They were then sent to the Livestock Show in Denver. Some of them were stolen, and I never got my whole display back.

When I talked to Mom on the phone last weekend I asked her about this story and she gave me a few more details: The vegetable varieties included green beans, carrots and peas. The canned vegetable Mason jars went to Chicago without Mom because her folks could not affort to send her on such a trip. Some of them went missing in Denver, and the set of five that she got back contained substituted vegetables. She's never solved the mystery, but she recalls her canning honor with shy pride to this very day.

Tags: canning and preserving recollections personal family history 19th century rural life nostalgia
My topical post today at South by Southwest is about checks and balances. There is also a small post with links to good fact-finding tools.