Vinland ? Nicholas Barkley discovered Tuesday how difficult it was to operate a human-powered, single-blade garden plow.

“I’m not ready to throw away the tiller,” said Barkley, a fifth-grader who was among 100 Vinland School students participating in the third annual Founders’ Day.

Dustin Adcock, 10, foreground, portraying Uncle Sam, and Austin Trumble, 11, background, a railroad engineer, wait to pass out programs for a school play. Tuesday Vinland Elementary School celebrated Founders' Day with activities that included candle making and playing hoops and sticks.

Modern also trumped traditional for Hannah Harris, a fifth-grader who now knows that cutting firewood with a two-person saw is grueling. She also learned that a piece of string tied to a stick must be dipped in a kettle of hot wax more than two dozen times to produce a candle.

“It takes a lot of patience,” Harris said.

That’s precisely the point, said Bill Scott, principal of the elementary school.

He said the community event coordinated by Vinland Heritage Committee helped children step back in time and get a taste of challenges settlers faced when they joined American Indians in the Douglas County area during the 1850s.

“It isn’t all about video games and computers,” Scott said. “Back then, they had to work.”

Of course, parent volunteers didn’t make the youngsters sweat too much. Mixed in with manual labor were sessions on quilt making, storytelling, arrowhead chipping, wheat weaving, seed art and games of long ago.

First-grader Sally Spurgeon, in a red dress and bonnet reminiscent of a style worn 150 years ago, was among the first to try walking on homemade wood stilts in the game area.

“This is harder than riding a bike,” she said.

Other children in period costumes used wood sticks to roll metal hoops across the grass.

The school’s first- and fourth-graders performed a play, “The Great Iron Horse Races of Kansas.” It traced construction of a railroad from Lawrence to Ottawa in the 1860s. It was that now-defunct line that led to development of Vinland.

A chuckwagon lunch was prepared with help of students, who made noodles from scratch for a chicken soup, squeezed lemons for lemonade and prepared strawberries.

To help students get a feel for the culture of American Indians living around Vinland before settlers arrived, Galen Hubbard of the Prairie Band Potawatomi in Holton performed traditional dances with his wife, Sue, and grandchildren, Chester, 6, and Cassidy, 3. All wore native clothing and adornments.

At one time, Hubbard said, there were about 23 different tribes in Kansas. Many were forced by the U.S. government to relocate to reservations in Oklahoma. Only four tribes are now recognized by the government in this state.

Powwows are the primary means of keeping native dance traditions alive, Hubbard said.

“We get together to dance and sing, have meals, see family and make friends,” he said.

Hubbard, who works for the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, said he’d been sharing native traditions with Kansas audiences for about 10 years. Interest in the old ways appears to be growing, he said.

“It’s important to get out and teach the kids about American Indians.”