Milne's New York State Arithmetic, Wadsworth and Ely Nevada, c. 1914

The Piece

Milne's New York State Arithmetic, First Book, With Answers, published by the American Book Company. Blue cloth over boards, the front stamped in darker blue with the title inside a chain-link rule and a small device of a balance scale within a compass figure. Three hundred and fifty odd pages covering the Third, Fourth and Fifth Years, with the answer key bound in at the back.

The contents are a straight look at what an American child was expected to do with numbers. Reading and writing numbers to the millions, long division, divisors and multiples, fractions, United States money, bills and accounts, cancellation, dry measures, volume. The word problems are period pieces in themselves: how many one cent pieces the government coined in a year, how many pounds of white potatoes the Panama Canal workmen got through.

Then at page 338 comes a section headed Problems for Girls, illustrated with four girls sewing in a garden. Hemming handkerchiefs from a yard of linen. Costing braid for a hat. Figuring the ruffling for an apron. A milliner's gain on a dozen hat frames. It is the same arithmetic, aimed at a different life.

A later hand has pencilled French vocabulary in the margin of the contents page, les chiffres and the words for a half, a third, a quarter, a fifth. Someone drew a flag on page 113.

History & Provenance

The front endpaper is signed twice by the same girl, three years apart, in two different Nevada towns, under two different surnames.

The first: Miss Betty Lou Smith, Oct. 31 1947, Wadsworth Nevada, with 10 years old added in pencil above the line.

The second, below it: Miss Betty Lou Walker, May 29, 1950, Ely Nevada, White Pine County, with 13 years old pencilled above. The surname has changed. The book does not say why.

The two towns are three hundred miles apart and could not be less alike. Wadsworth sits on the Truckee River east of Reno and was once a railroad town of real consequence, a Central Pacific division point from 1868 with a roundhouse and shops. It burned in 1884, and in 1904 the Southern Pacific moved the whole division west to a new site that became Sparks, carrying entire houses there on flat cars at no charge. The population fell from 1,309 in 1900 to 250 by 1910. The Wadsworth Betty Lou Smith wrote her name in was what remained.

Ely is the other side of the state and the other kind of Nevada town: county seat of White Pine, a copper camp after the 1906 strike, Kennecott ground, served by the Nevada Northern Railway. In 1950, the year she signed it there, Ely had 3,558 people.

The book itself is older than either inscription. Milne's New York State Arithmetic, First Book was published in 1914 by the American Book Company. William J. Milne, born in Scotland in 1843, was president of the New York State Normal College at Albany and one of the most widely used mathematics textbook authors in the country. He died on 4 September 1914, the year this title appeared, and the college's practice school was later named for him.

Which leaves the oddity worth noticing: a New York State arithmetic, written for New York schools, in the hands of a girl in a played-out railroad town in the Nevada desert thirty-three years later. Schoolbooks traveled, and they lasted.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

This is not a book you buy to read. It is a record of a girl who was ten in a dying railroad town on the Truckee in 1947 and thirteen in a copper town on the other side of Nevada in 1950, who kept the same arithmetic book through the move and through whatever changed her name, and who wrote herself into it both times.

For a Nevada collector that is the whole proposition: two towns, two dates, one hand, all of it verifiable against the record. For anyone else it is a sharp little window into how American children were taught, right down to the page that hands the girls a millinery bill to foot while the boys get the Panama Canal.

It sits open under glass, propped on a shelf of Nevada material, or flat in a cabinet with maps and photographs. Rough condition, but the thing that makes it worth owning is written in ink on the first page and cannot be improved by restoration.