About the Book

During her 110-year lifetime, Maude Allen Williams went from oil lamps to a microwave oven, from the horse and buggy to an automobile. She stepped onto an airplane for the first time at age 77 and flew to Phoenix to visit her daughter.

aude graduated in 1902, the first of her Ohio family to receive a high school education. She was married at 19, four months pregnant, to Lee Williams. Her Puritan forefathers, who came from England to Massachusetts in 1632, might not have approved. But they would have approved of everything else about this courageous, unassuming woman.

aude moved with her husband Lee into a farmhouse on the banks of Rush Creek (Ohio)-a drafty, rambling story and a half, 10-room dwelling, built by Lee's grandfather, William Witcraft, in 1854 on a Congressional land grant. She had neither electricity nor running water. She did the washing for her husband and four small children on the washboard in a tub of soapy water. She sewed the children's clothes by hand. She grew and canned the family's fruits and vegetables. The family entertainment was reading by oil lamps, singing along with the player piano, sleigh rides to visit relatives, summer trips to Mt. Victory to watch the latest free movie melodrama projected against the outside wall of the feed store.

aude supported her husband with a quiet kind of faith when a suicide and two murders in his immediate family interrupted their tranquillity. She developed a worry-free outlook, with the observation that you should worry only about those things you can do something about.

aude lived simply, suffered hardships, took in stride the time-consuming hand-labor of the early 1900s-and, when she died at age 110, left family and friends with an enduring memory of her patience, kindness and courage, her quiet acceptance of the conditions over which she had no control, and the exemplary standards by which she lived.