What did your ancestors do without cellphones, microwave ovens and cars?
Three families got the answers while appearing on “Back to the Frontier,” an eight-part reality show that reset the clock and let them experience life as homesteaders, circa 1880.
Each family got a cabin, tools, money for food and books to help them learn how to do certain tasks.
The first day they were in their little house on the Alberta prairie, Jereme Hall’s children pointed out there weren’t enough beds. The three children slept in the same bed that night but the next day he set out to build another bed.
Three families use 1880s methods to survive for eight weeks in the reality show "Back to the Frontier," produced by Chip and Joanna Gaines.
“I do have a lot of woodworking experience,” Jereme says. He and his wife, Lina, do renovations and flip homes, “but with the 1880s tools, it was all new to me. It was make or break, do or die.”
The result? A surprisingly comfortable piece of furniture, says daughter Mia, who was 19 at the time of filming.
Then, too, bed time was often as soon as the sun went down.
“Sometimes we would have dinner, but we’d have to go outside and do dishes in the dark,” Lina says. “We tried to go to bed when the sun went down because we had to be up when the sun came up.”
Jereme, meanwhile, admits he didn’t sleep much, so he continued doing chores, working in the garden at night. “I went outside, played my guitar, wrote music and sang to the stars and the trees.”
Because the show was designed to mimic the 1880s, Jereme didn’t have Mia and sister Zoe, who was 17, work in the field with him. That fell to son Jet, who was 12.
“That was more of a ‘man’ task,” Mia says. She and Zoe worked with Lina in the kitchen and, yes, the “inside” chores more than filled a day. Making bread could chew up a large part of the morning or afternoon.
Jet became so enamored with a hand-cranked ice cream maker, the family decided to get one when they returned home to Florida.
“We don’t buy ice cream anymore,” Jereme says. “Jet makes ice cream for us now. They’re making all their own butter, pickles, bread. A lot has changed.”
Chief among those changes: Time on the cellphone.
When the family got them back at the end of the series, Mia admits, “It was such a weird experience. Honestly, I was like, ‘I don’t really want anything to do with it right now. I’m so used to not having it.’ I needed to slowly get back into it.”
The three Hall children also warmed to cooking on a wood-burning stove and doing laundry outside.
“They were excited to make a fire on the stove,” Lina says. “It was like their thing to do…and it was exciting for them.”
Friends, Jereme says, didn’t understand why the Halls wanted to experience life in the 1880s.
“We did it because we wanted change in our life,” he explains. “We keep doing the same patterns every day and the only way you’re going to change that is if you make a change in your life. So, we went backwards. That way, we can change some things – in the way we look at things and think about things.”
While the Halls got together with the other families (the Lopers from Alabama and the Hanna-Riggses from Texas), they really enjoyed time spent with each other.
Stacey Loper, second from left, represents what most people would say and do if put into a log cabin and told to survive. She's part of the "Back to the Frontier" reality series.
“I truly do love my family,” Mia says. “They’re like my best friends.”
Rather than embrace the modern conveniences they thought they couldn’t live without, the Halls have talked about moving so they can have more land.
“We want the biggest garden, the biggest orchard,” Jereme says. “We want a pond stocked with our own fish. We want to go all out and relive this. We didn’t do this just to be on TV. We did it to change our lives and teach the world what we learned — we’re getting too far ahead of ourselves. You really need to rethink things.”
Advice for others who might consider this lifestyle?
“You’ve got to have patience. You’ve got to have an open mind, and you have to be willing to change and accept difference,” Jereme says.
Adds Lina: “Don’t fight it. Embrace it and you’ll do good.”
“Back to the Frontier” airs on HBO Max and the Magnolia Network.
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