We don’t write many letters these days. We don’t want to spend the time writing them, we don’t want to spend the time reading them, and we certainly don’t want to wait for them to be carried physically to distant places. We want it short, and we want it now. The era of Twitter.

I’ve recently been immersed in a project involving letters, about 700 of them. Obviously artifacts of another era. Specifically, they were written during the Great Depression. A man named James Linsley, a street-car operator at Minneapolis, Minnesota, longed to return to farming, and wanted his son to learn the ways of the farmer. With his wife Martha, he bought a small farm at Nevis, Minnesota, but there was no way to give up his paycheck. So in the summer of 1932, Martha and their two children, John and Ruth, decamped for Nevis, while James stayed in town.

It didn’t work. Two years later they had lost the farm and all were back in the city. But while they were giving it their best shot, the letters flew back and forth. On some days, all three of the Nevis group wrote to James, and James sometimes wrote to all three of them on the same day as well.

Many years later, when little Ruth was in her 80s, she bought a manual typewriter and transcribed the text of all the letters, and wrote a charming narrative about the experience. The letters are full of marvelous details about, both letters and narrative present a close-up look at life in that time and place.

Ruth’s daughter took the typescript to a friend of mine to be converted to text, and started editing the files. I was hired to build a website. I’m pretty proud of it right now, and when all the navigation is finished in a few days, I’ll be unbearable. Fifteen of the forty chapters are now up, along with about 170 of the letters. The DearDaddy.com home page is up, but if you want to dig into the content now you’ll need this link to the Our Story page.

Now that we are in the hardest economic times since the Linsley’s tried their hands at farming three quarters of a century ago, there may be some value in taking a look at those letters. Just don’t expect it to be as quick as digesting the 140 characters of a tweet.