The Temperance Band has gathered outside Marie Kendall’s barn about 1890. Kendall was a member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and the children wear the WCTU’s white ribbon badge. Although they look a little young to be enlisted for the cause of abstinence from alcohol, it was not the first time Norfolk children took on this role. Theron Wilmot Crissey tells us in his History of Norfolkthat just a decade earlier nearly all the young people of the town belonged to the Good Templars, a fraternal temperance society organized in 1851. One moonlit night, the Good Templars seized casks of liquor at the Village Drug Store and loaded them into a four-horse wagon. Crossing the town line, the young folk emptied the casks and cheered as the stream of liquor flowed away. The WCTU’s crusade against alcohol was in part a campaign for women’s and children’s civil rights at the end of the 19th century, when Americans were spending over a billion dollars a year on alcoholic beverages, compared to less than $200 million on public education.

—Ann Havemeyer