Notgrass History and God’s Faithfulness, Part 1: 1999-2002

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Ray and I are excited that Notgrass History is celebrating 25 years this year. I enjoyed collaborating with our son John on our special 25th anniversary catalog for 2024. I am thankful a printing company shipped them to us last week, instead of my standing at a copy machine at the local Mail Boxes, Etc. like we used to do.

Here is Ray posing with our Fall 1999 edition.

Here’s the cover of our 25th edition.

To commemorate this special anniversary, I wrote a short history of Notgrass History to include in the catalog. You can request a catalog on our website, but meanwhile, I would like to share that short history with you and show you the pictures I used to illustrate it. I have modified the story for you, added more stories, and changed the narrative from third person to first person.

Celebrating 25 Years, Part 1

On the last day of June in 1999, Ray walked away from his ministry position—and its steady paycheck—to pursue his dream of being a writer and publisher fulltime. He did not come to that decision easily. At one point, he thought, “If I only knew that we would be okay financially . . . ” Then, he realized, “I can know that because God promises to take care of us.”

I also dreamed of writing and publishing, and our son John (then age 20) wanted this endeavor to be his life work. We began a partnership with the three of us. From the beginning, our daughters also worked hard in the business. Eventually they chose to become official owners along with us, and in time one of our sons-in-law joined us, too.

July 1, 1999, was scary and exciting at the same time. Our friend Keith said that it reminded him of a message in a popular contemporary Christian song at the time: We were jumping in and asking God to catch us. He has been doing that faithfully all our lives, and we have seen Him do that in surprising ways in these 25 years of running a family business.

Our Own Homeschool Journey. We began homeschooling in 1990. We put up a bulletin board, displayed an American flag for the Pledge of Allegiance, and unpacked our big stack of textbooks. Homeschooling quickly came to feel like a heavy sack of rocks. In time, when we learned to relax, make homeschooling who we were as a family instead of a chore, and focus on the hearts, souls, and minds of our children, homeschooling became a joy.

One homeschool blessing we learned is that children can learn together some of the time and receive individual instruction at other times. We cherish memories of our family learning together. Sometimes that happened when we were reading aloud or while taking a daylong field trip or a weeklong vacation. Sometimes we learned together while putting on a play, making a craft, taking an art class, teaching a Bible class, or eating a meal from a region of America or the world.

The Notgrass Company. When we began working full time in what we then called The Notgrass Company, we wrote curriculum based on what we had learned and we began learning how to let other people know about what we were writing.

One way we did that was by attending homeschool conventions. I appliquéd fabric books on our convention sign. In the photo below,our son John sits behind it at one of our early homeschool conventions.

In those early days, we printed our curriculum at a local copy shop and put it into three-ring binders, as seen below. Beginning in 2000, we spent a great deal of time on the road, traveling around Tennessee performing a story and song history program and displaying our books. Our local newspaper did a story about our new business. One of their photographers took this photo. Notice the old catalogs behind us!

In this picture, John and I work in our first headquarters in the basement of our house in Cookeville, Tennessee. Check out that up-to-date computer monitor.

I remember the day when Ray told me that he would like to write a year-long American history curriculum for high school. He said, “I don’t know if anyone would buy it, but I would like to write it.” Ray said that he wanted to combine history, literature, and primary sources as his own history and English teachers had done when he was in high school. He told me that he would also like to add Bible study. I encouraged Ray to go for it, and he got to work.

The Notgrass History Approach to Writing Curriculum. As Ray began writing this new curriculum, we put a great deal of thought into our approach. Homeschool textbooks generally provide context and comprehensiveness, while unit studies generally provide depth and richness. Having used unit studies ourselves, we knew how hard it is to pull resources together from many sources. We decided to combine the textbook and unit study approaches to create curriculum that was both comprehensive and fascinating, while being easy to use for both students and parents. We would also combine history, English, and Bible, believing that students could learn better when their literature, writing, and Bible study coordinated with their history. Therefore, high school students could receive credit in all three subjects through this coordinated program.

In addition we would not send parents looking for primary sources. We would include them in our curriculum package. We would also provide optional review questions, quizzes, and tests for parents who wanted to use those. We would also sell the recommended literature to make gathering those books easy for parents, too. With all assignments in the main lesson book, there would be no need for separate teacher guides.

For the last 25 years, we have continued to fine-tune our approach and to use it for elementary, middle school, and high school curriculum. Most importantly, we have written each curriculum from a distinctly Christian worldview to teach the heart, soul, and mind of each student.

Exploring America. In 2002 Ray completed Exploring America. Here is an early edition.

The last lesson in each unit is a Bible study. For the student’s English credit, Ray chose recommended literature (18 books in all; he later changed it to 12) and gave students writing prompts. Eventually we collected all of the needed primary source documents and published them in the Exploring America companion book, American Voices. But when we first began offering Exploring America to homeschoolers, the curriculum set included a book of poetry, a book of speeches, and a book of primary sources that Ray had chosen. At the end of each lesson, Ray told the students what literature title to be reading and what pages to read in the poetry, speeches, and primary source books. He also gave them assignments in the companion review material, which included daily review questions, quizzes, exams, and an answer key.

In mid-June of 2002, Exploring America was ready to offer to homeschoolers. We placed five books, including Exploring America Parts 1 and 2 and the poetry, speeches, and primary source books in white cardboard boxes we had purchased specially and put an Exploring America sticker on the top of each box. On Thursday, June 13, our family loaded up our Suburban with Exploring America and the other products we were offering at the time. Ray and I headed to Memphis, Tennessee, to set up a booth at the regional homeschool convention held there. We had decided that Ray and I would attend this convention alone as part of our celebration of his 50th birthday, which was to occur on Saturday, June 15.

On Friday morning, we had a car accident which broke both of Ray’s wrists. Instead of setting up our booth for the convention, we spent the day in the emergency room. John and Mary Evelyn rushed to Memphis to operate our booth for the weekend, while our daughter Bethany stayed at home, taking care of Ray’s dad. On Sunday Ray sat in a chair in our den and enjoyed his surprise 50th birthday party. The only thing he could do for himself was push up his glasses and put finger food into his mouth. On Monday the 16th, he saw a surgeon. On Wednesday he had surgery.

For the next six months, Ray endured painful physical therapy. Through it all, Ray and our whole family learned the truth of what he had realized in the spring of 1999, while he was deciding whether to take the plunge of starting a new career in his 40s. Yes, God really would see us through, as Jesus said:

“But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, will He not much more clothe you? You of little faith! Do not worry then, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear for clothing?’ For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. So do not worry about tomorrow; for tomorrow will care for itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”

Matthew 6:30-34

After Ray proofread this blog post for me yesterday and we had made the corrections, he said, “We have to give credit to God. We didn’t know diddly about what we were doing.”

I know, O Lord, that a man’s way is not in himself,
Nor is it in a man who walks to direct his steps.
Jeremiah 10:23

 

 

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