No Time on My Hands: The Story of Grace Snyder

Lecture by Charlotte Endorf 

When Grace Snyder, the matriarch of a pioneer Nebraska family, wrote these reminiscences in her eightieth year, she felt she had been blessed “by having no time on my hands.” The story of her busy life begins on the high plains of Nebraska, where her parents homesteaded in 1885. She recalls her childhood in a sod house on a frontier that required everyone to pull together in the face of hostile weather, serious illness, and economic depression. “As a child of seven and up,” writes Grace Snyder, “I wished that I might grow up to make the most beautiful quilts in the world, to marry a cowboy, and to look down on the top of a cloud. At the time I dreamed those dreams and wished those wishes, it seemed impossible that any of them could ever come true.” Grace saw all of them realized.

Funded project of Humanities Nebraska, a state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.