USA > Indiana > Greene County > Biographical memoirs of Greene County, Ind. : with reminiscences of pioneer days, Volume I > Part 3
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time; it was cash in advance, or on delivery, just as the writer saw fit, but almost invariably the receiver had the postage to pay. Paying the postage by the receiver was termed "lifting a letter." Money was often hard to get. The price of a day's work on a farm was twenty-five cents, working from sunrise until sunset, two and one- half bushels of corn at ten cents would, either of them, pay the desired twenty-five cents for postage, and when the contents were scanned and found to be a dun for a debt long past due, or "I take my pen in hand to inform you that I am well and hope these few lines will find you en- joying the same blessing," the feeling toward the writer can better be imagined than told, after the payment of the twenty-five cents.
At the date referred to there wasn't a frame church or school house in the county, and but very few frame houses of any kind. Point Commerce, Fair Play, Bloom- field, Scotland, Newberry and Linton were the only towns in the county, and the entire population was scarcely over two or three hundred. The old court house at Bloomfield was then new," and served for many years as a meeting house for all denominations. The first church in the county was built in Linton in 1842 (Meth- odist), where an organization had been made in 1830. The first name of the town, as well as the first name of the postoffice, was New Jerusalem, and thus remained until the name was changed to Linton some time in the
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thirties. Such is the history of the first church in the county as given by the late Samuel Baldwin Harrah, one of the first settlers at Linton, a lifelong member of the Methodist Episcopal church. Mrs. Nancy Fincher, yet a resident of Linton, and who is nearing the century mark, is the only person left that was a member at the time of the building of the first church in the county, which was at Linton in 1842.
The early preachers had many difficulties to over- come, as but few of them were college graduates or pol- ished scholars, so also with the early teachers, and they well earned the scanty pay they labored hard for. Min- isters generally preached for the good of the soul and for whatever the people saw fit to give them. The early settlers kindly tendered the use of their log cabin homes to the preachers of all denominations for preaching, and all other meetings, and in the winter for night spelling schools. As there were no clubs or secret orders to take up the time of the average church members and others not connected with any church, as they do now, nearly everybody went to meeting, miles and miles away, in all kinds of weather and over all kinds of roads, in their homespun suits, either on foot, on horseback or in the old-time linchpin wagons, seated in hickory bark bot- tomed chairs, happy as happy could be, and in time of "big meetings" and "camp meetings," that often lasted for weeks, everybody went to "meetin'," and nearly
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everybody "jined" the church, and everybody took part in the singing of the old familiar hymns, such as "Happy Day," "The Old Ship of Zion," "Our Bondage Here Shall End By and By." The writer hasn't forgotten yet how the good sisters and brothers, too, used to sing and shout and shake hands. Times have changed somewhat in the last sixty years or more, and those whom we knew in those good old days are about all gone home.
Prior to 1850 all schools were subscription, and for a term of about three months each winter, and the ruling price was one dollar or one dollar and fifty cents a stu- dent, according to the teacher and his or her qualifica- tions. We used to have some good teachers and some very poor ones. The opportunities for good schools were poor and many neighborhoods had no schools.
In the summer of 1840 two brothers and the writer, who was then under eight years old, attended a three months' school in an old log house that was but lit- tle better than a rail pen, so far as comfort was concerned, the house being without chinking or "daubing," an open- ing was made for a door, but no door, two openings were made for windows, but no sash or glass were in them. An opening for a stick and clay chimney about six feet square was in one end of our "college in the woods," but stood open all summer, good ventilation, but in our case it was a little too much so, on cold rainy days and cool mornings, as we could not make a fire except in an iron
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kettle set in the middle of the room, in which was placed a little fire, where we warmed our hands and toasted our feet, occasionally, for not a child in the school wore shoes and stockings. A school day was all day long, and the days were very long for us tow-headed, barefooted chil- dren where we sat and wearily swung our bare feet and legs all the day, while mosquitoes were not forgetful of us in plying their bills on our bare feet and legs, thus re- minding us that they, too, had to live. We had light that shone in on us between the logs of the house on all sides ; we had to rule our paper by hand, and write with goose- quill pens; we had no charts, globes, blackboards or maps, and but little of anything to make school interest- ing or instructive. Our teacher was a good Christian woman and we all loved her as we did our mothers. She went to heaven a long time ago. Of those who attended that school there yet live two besides myself.
After this school there was a period of six years that myself and the rest of our family had no schooling except what our mother gave us at home, for the reason that no schools were near enough for us to attend, which proved a calamity to us. At the end of the six years a cheap log house was built two and one-half miles away, after the blacksmith shop style, as most all school houses were then built. Here we attended school again after a vacation of six years. This was in the fall of 1846. A few years afterward we had the first public schools, but
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not in time to do us much good. As a fair sample of how cheap many of the first school houses of the county were, one in Washington township, built by the lowest bidder for fifty-nine dollars, of the blacksmith shop style, is called to mind.
The early farmers had hard times and dark days in more ways than one, while they had sunshine and flowers in other ways. This the writer knows something about from actual experience.
Sixty-nine years ago there was but one buggy in the county. The axles were wooden and with linchpins, the same as the old-time wagons had. But few of the farm- ers could afford a wagon, but many of them had a sub- stitute which they called a truck wagon, a description of which would be too much to give in print. The old- time farmers well recollect what a truck wagon was.
Many of the old settlers came here from Tennessee and North Carolina, and many of them moved all their household goods on pack horses, not including chairs, ta- bles and bedsteads. It cost more to raise one bushel of corn or wheat sixty years ago than it costs now to raise four or five of either, yet in many ways we lived far bet- ter than we do now, and we had our "side range," so called, for all kinds of stock, and the man that didn't own a foot of land had the same right and privileges that all big land owners had, and no one dared to molest him in his God-given right-a riglit that no poor man can now enjoy.
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Hogs fattened in the woods, that never tasted corn or slop, and cattle that never ate hay made better beef than we now get from the city markets, and it was as good as it was cheap; and meat of some kind we had on our tables three times a day the year around, which did not cost twenty or twenty-five cents a pound, as it does now. And besides this we had all kinds of game and fish that was unmolested by law, and if hog meat or beef ran short, as was sometimes the case, we could go to the woods and lay claim to any part of the game that was in abundance and no one dared to interfere, and if we failed to raise turkeys for the holidays or any other time we could buy a fat turkey for twenty-five cents, and if we did not have the twenty-five cents we could go to the woods and shoot the real wild turkey and have the sport free. The streams and ponds had fish in abundance that we could catch as we pleased. The heavens swarmed every fall and winter with wild ducks, geese, pigeons and prairie chickens more plentiful than blackbirds, and quail as plentiful as those we read of in Bible times.
Sixty-nine years ago we had the real, genuine maple syrup and sugar, luxuries that but few can now have. The prices were five cents a pound for the sugar and twenty cents a gallon for the syrup. The bees made honey in the hollow trees in the woods, and we "sopped" our pancakes and biscuits of both sides in the maple syrup and honey, and the ham gravy from the hogs fat-
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tened in the woods, and ribs and backbones and "dodger" bread our mothers used to roast and bake by the old-time fire-places in our boyhood days can never be enjoyed again or forgotten in the dim future.
The early settlers lived at home and boarded at the same place, and their latch strings hung on the outside of their doors for all their neighbors alike, and in going to a neighbor's house they rapped on the door and at the same time called out in a loud voice, "Who keeps house?" If at home the response, "Housekeeper"-that imeant come in-"Good morning ; throw your hat on the bed and take a 'cheer' (chair). How's all the folks?" Style and manners had no part in the lives of the early settlers. They wore their homespun and buckskin suits when and where they pleased. And the young man who was fortunate enough to be the owner of a horse rode to "meetin' " with his best girl behind him with her arm gently twined about her gallant beau, just to keep from falling off, you see, and many a rosy-cheeked bride in this way rode many miles behind her happy husband to the infair, as infairs were then common.
In the long time ago we burned tallow candles, or "dips," as they were then termed, for lights, and in the absence of candles we often burned any kind of soft grease at the end of a rag out of a saucer or other shal- low dish, that made a good substitute for a light. And, many a fair maiden entertained her blushing beau by this
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kind of a light, while the old folks snoozed away the wee hours of the night. This fact the writer well knows, for he has been there.
Jack Maber's history of Greene county, written in 1875, recites the fact that the first white man buried in Eel River township was interred in a poplar trough made expressly for the occupant. Mrs. Josephine Andrews, widow of William C. Andrews, one of the founders of Worthington, tells of early coffins made of hickory bark. when in the peeling season a tree of sufficient size was selected, the bark chopped around about a foot from the ground and again about six or seven feet higher up the tree. The bark was then split up and down the tree, when it was taken off in a whole piece, and so placed in the ground, and spread open enough to take the corpse in, when the bark was again closed up and the burial in a hickory bark coffin was so completed. This was when there were no saw-mills in the county from which to get lumber for coffins, and this did not require much skill or labor in the making: John Weatherwax used to tell of the making of coffins out of clapboards of white-oak timber.
The first saw-mills in the county were the whip saw- mills, but it was a very slow way of making lumber, and about the first mill of the kind in the county was operated by Benjamin and Jesse Stafford, brothers, on the farm where now lives Henry C. Morgan, in Stafford town-
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ship, where some of the lumber is yet in use that was sawed about 1818. After the buildings made of the lum- ber sawed by the first water power saw-mill in the county, lumber of all kinds was cheap, and coffins were cheap, as there was but little material or labor used in the mak- ing. My father was a cabinet maker by trade, so coffin making was a part of his business. The best grade pop- lar lumber was only fifty cents a hundred feet, so the amount used in making a common-sized coffin cost less than twenty-five cents, and for a child's coffin five or ten cents, to which add the work, and the entire cost would be about fifty cents or one dollar-no lining, no costly handles, no plates with "Father" or "Mother" engraved on them. The highest priced coffin I ever knew my father to make was six dollars, and he made many for nothing. The first hearse in the county was about the time of the building of the Indiana & Dayton Railroad, about forty years ago. In the spring of 1842 two men came to my father's shop driving a yoke of oxen, hitched to a sled, drawn through the mud. They ivanted a coffin' made as quickly as possible. It was made while they waited and placed on the sled without any kind of covering, and was taken to the house, four miles away, where lay the corpse. After the corpse was laid in the coffin it was again placed on the sled and was so followed to the cemetery by the friends and relatives. Such funerals were quite common in early times. Contrast the present prices of coffins or caskets with those of fifty or sixty years ago.
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Owing to a scarcity of preachers their services could not be had at funerals, so funeral sermons were often de- ferred for many weeks, months or years, as best suited the early-time preachers.
The early preachers and justices of the peace did not receive much pay for performing marriage ceremonies. Many amusing incidents might be related of early-time weddings, one in particular-that of Robert Inman and Rhoda Wines, the father and mother of the writer's wife, in the early spring of 1832. Elisha Cushman, a jus- tice of the peace of Bloomfield, performed the marriage ceremony at the residence of the bride's parents, Mr. and Mrs. Martin Wines, well known. to almost every one in the county, or at Linton (known at that time as New Je- rusalem). The distance from Bloomfield was about fif- teen miles. The justice of the peace rode over in the morning on horseback, married the happy couple, got his horse fed and a good dinner and returned in the evening, and charged fifty cents for his services.
Near where Linton now is lived a young man, in the early forties, who concluded it was not best to live longer single. He started to Bloomfield, the county seat, fifteen miles away, early in the morning and on foot, to get a marriage license. He was without money to pay the fee, but trusted to luck for a credit, as the clerk often trusted his many friends in times of need. The road was all the way through the woods, and footmen nearly
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always went where their business called them with their trusty rifles on their shoulders, ready for any and all kinds of game that might come in their way. So it was with young Moss (for that was his name), who went with his trusty gun, and on the way he shot a wild tur- key, which he carried through to the clerk's office and traded it for the license.
Jacob Dobbins, a long-time justice of the peace of Richmond township, was never known to charge more than twenty-five cents for a marriage ceremony when at home, and only fifty cents when miles away.
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THE GOOD OLD TIMES.
BY HENRY BAKER.
It was in 1839 when my father moved his family in wagons from Niagara county, New York, to Greene - county, Indiana. We were thirty-two days on the way. More days than it now takes hours to travel the same distance, seven hundred and fifty miles. His family con- sisted of my mother and an even half dozen small boys.
I was then just turned into my eighth year. Our parents and half of the boys have been long since passed away. My father came to the county the winter before looking for land and a location for himself and family, for a home in the wilds of Greene county, and he found it five miles east of Bloomfield, where the hills were almost like mountains and the hollows were so deep that we had to look straight up to see the sky. Here he bought one hundred and twenty acres and entered fifty-eight acres, making in all one hundred and seventy- eight acres, of which about thirty acres was cleared and was about worn out by continued cultivating in corn. A very cheap log house and barn were about all the im- provements. My father got carpenter work until the 9th of July following, when he started home for his fami-
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ly on foot, and walked the entire distance to New York, seven hundred and fifty miles, in the hottest weather in the summer. He arrived at home in just a month, and this was when he was fifty-two years old. Blackberries were just in their prime and he said he had blackberries all along the roadside the entire distance. The day he started from Bloomfield he mailed a letter to my mother saying he was going to start to walk home and he beat the letter through. Most all mail routes then were by horseback. The postage on a single letter was twenty- five cents, the price of two and one-half bushels of corn, or a day's work on a farm. The postage on all papers was paid by the subscribers.
On the 20th of September following (1839) he loaded his family and household goods into two wagons and bade old New York state a long farewell and drove ยท through to the wilds of Greene county in just one month, all tired and worn out, and unloaded our goods and our- selves into the hardest-looking old log house that ever sheltered poor mortal flesh-just one room about sixteen by sixteen feet, with a very low loft. It was very close quarters for a family of eight, after leaving a good house in New York. We had everything to buy and but little to buy with. Corn was ten cents a bushel de- livered ; wheat, twenty-five to thirty-five cents; oats, ten cents. A good cow sold for seven or eight dollars, and most everybody had something to sell, and awfully cheap,
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to the newcomers. Full grown chickens were six and one-half cents apiece. So great was the strife for a little ready cash that the prices looked fabulously small.
The winter following was a hard winter and with many deep snows; the roof to our cabin was of clap- boards and weighted down with heavy-weight poles (not nailed) and was a good roof when there was no snow or rain and not much cold weather.
My two oldest brothers had their bed in the loft, where it took lots of clothes to keep from freezing. I shall never forget one night of an awful snow storm that sent snow all through our cabin, much to our dis- comfort. Next morning when mother had breakfast ready I was sent up the ladder to the loft to call my brothers to breakfast. I found the bed and the loft floor covered with two or three inches of snow, and my brothers sleeping soundly and wholly unconscious of the storm that raged through the night, as they were covered up head and ears. Before breakfast was over the fire from the old-time fireplace had warmed the loft floor so that the dirty snow water began to trickle down through the loft floor onto everything in the house, in a way that made us almost wish we were back in old New York state again. I assure you it was no place for girls with white dresses. Unfortunately our stick and mud chimney was wrong end up, as more than half the smoke came out in the room and up into the loft, to our great annoy-
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ance. I haven't forgotten how often my mother cried over the situation that to her was almost past endurance. We wintered through as best we could, roasting on one side and freezing on the other. Before the next winter came around my father, with the help of my older broth- ers, turned the chimney the other end up, and made other improvements that were badly needed.
Our land was of a very poor quality, and made us but a poor support ; the timber was first-class, no better anywhere, poplar, white oak, black oak, red oak, black and white walnut, sugar tree and beech, and many other varieties, as good as ever grew anywhere in the state. A large part of the land was good, while some was poor, fit only for fruit of various kinds. The virgin soil yielded bountiful crops of apples and peaches mostly that were not infested with insects that we now have to contend with. Nearly all the first orchards were raised from the seed plantings, and from which we had good apples ; the yellow Bellflowers, the big Roman- ites, the Baldwins and many other varities that we now rarely see, and the peaches that grew in every fence cor- ner and on every hillside, such as the old Mixon frees and clings, the Indian clings and frees, and almost a countless number that can't be named now. No peaches were then canned as we do now, but nearly every farm had their dry kilns, where they dried peaches and apples for the family use, as well as for sale, that yielded a good
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profit. With the coming of white frost we had the wild grapes and the lusty pawpaws, that would tempt the appetite of an epicure. A little later on we had the hazel- nuts and the big shellbark hickory nuts, that were plenty everywhere, and everybody laid in a good supply for the long winter evenings and cold days, to crack while they cracked jokes and ate the big apples that were laid by for winter use.
Less than a mile away was a waterpower saw grist mill, where we got logs sawed for the half, and our corn and heat ground for one-eighth toll, when there was plenty of water to run the mill, and that was generally in the late fall, winter and early spring. In the summer time there was but little sawing or grinding done for lack of water. Then the only chance was the hand mills, horse mills and hominy blocks that were then common, or a trip to the Vincennes mills, forty-five miles away. That used to take three or four days to make the trip and return. Milling was often a serious matter to the man who had no team or wagon to go to mill with. It would often be the case that families had to live many weeks in succession without meal or flour-their living being roasting ears, hominy and potatoes, with wild meat, which was then plentiful. Most of the early dry milling was on horseback, or sleds (without snow) or on truck wagons drawn by oxen, many, many miles, and in bad roads and often bad weather.
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Here we lived in the old log house until we built a frame house in the summer of 1844, into which we moved the next winter. Lumber was all sawed at the half, shingles were hand-made, and all other work. The house is yet standing and in good repair, and is about the oldest frame house in the county. My mother had the first cook stove in our neighborhood, while there were but few anywhere else in the county, consequently nearly all the cooking was done around the old-time fire- places, where our mothers baked the cornpone and corn dodgers that showed the finger prints in the baking-the best bread ever made-the bread that made bone and nerve. "Go away with your pound cake and nick-nacks," the farmers had no use for such feed. They plowed the land with their wooden mold-board plows and harrowed the ground with their wooden harrows, and harvested with reap hooks and wooden cradles; and cradled the children in sugar troughs and pitched their wheat and hay with wooden pitchforks, while the women and girls spun and wove their flax and wool and made their clothes for every-day wear and Sunday, too.
The happiest days we ever saw in our lives, except in the fall of the year when nearly everybody had the real shaking ague that made the dishes rattle in the chimney corner clapboard cupboard, and the glass rattle in the windows, where there was any glass, as many houses had no glass in them. Then it was that we al-
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most wished that we had never been born, almost sick enough to die. With many the chill came to stay and did stay a whole year or more.
With the coming of white frosts the chills began to abate, and the rosy tint began to show on the once pallid cheeks of all alike.
The cooking stove mentioned cost thirty dollars, the price of three hundred bushels of corn at ten cents a bushel, then the standard price, and Vincennes was the nearest place to get a stove; and four dollars was the price of a barrel of salt.
In the summer of 1845, and many years before, there lived, in fairly good circumstances, in the eastern part of Greene county, on a small farm, an honest man in the person of John Cooper, better known as "Uncle John," a farmer and Campbellite preacher, so called in early times, who preached the gospel on Sundays, and on week days worked the farm he earned the price of in his early manhood. The living was made almost entire- ly from his farm, as he was never known to accept a stated salary for his services, but whatever the good peo- ple saw fit to give him was thankfully received, and nothing more. It will be remembered by the old people that many of the early time preachers knew but little about stated salaries; so it was with Uncle John Cooper. A few of the oldest citizens of Greene and adjoining counties where his services were called for will ever re-
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