Lucy's Summer

Based on a true story, Donald Hall weaves Lucy's Summer (c. 1995) from the stories he heard as a child.  Michael McCurdy crafts his sketchboard illustrations to look like woodcuts.  Here are the opening lines:
   Lucy Wells lived on a farm in New Hampshire with her mother Kate, her father Wesley, and her little sister Caroline.
   The spring of 1910, when Lucy was seven, her mother turned the front parlor into a millinery shop, to sell hats to her neighbors in the backcountry.

Ox-Cart Man

Do you remember this book?  I think I first discovered it via Reading Rainbow as LeVar Burton read it to his audience.  Ox-Cart Man (c. 1979) by Donald Hall with Caldecott award winning illustrations by our beloved Barbara Cooney recalls the days of a 19th century New England family.  Take a journey back in time from the moment you open the first page:

                                           In October he backed his ox into his cart
                                           and he and his family filled it up
                                          with everything they made or grew all year long
                                          that was left over.

A beautiful depiction of early settler life throughout the seasons, Ox-Cart Man takes the ten day travel to town to trade his goods for the necessities for surviving the next year on his family farm.