USA > Ohio > Seneca County > History of Seneca County, Ohio; a narrative account of its historical progress, its people, and its principal interests, Vo. I > Part 10
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As to the furniture of these early cabins, an old settler writes thus : The furniture of the backwoods matched the architecture well. There were a few quaint specimens of cabinet work dragged into the wilderness, but these were sporadic and not common. I can best describe it by what I saw in my father's house. First of all a table had to be improvised, and there was no cabinet-maker to make it, and no lumber to make it of. Our floor was laid with
broad chestnut puncheons, well and smoothly hewn, for the now obsolete art of hewing timber was then in its prime. Father took one of these puncheons, two feet and a half broad, putting two narrow ones in its place, bored four large augur holes and put in four legs, or round poles with the bark on. On this hospitable board many a wholesome meal was spread, and many an honest man, and many a wayworn stranger ate his fill and was grateful.
On great occasions, when an extension table was needed, the door was lifted off its hinges, and added to the puncheon. What we sat upon at first I cannot conjecture ; but I remember well when my father loaded his horses down with wheat and corn, and crossed the country a distance of eight or ten miles, and brought home, in exchange, a set of oak splint-bottomed chairs, some of which are intact to this day. Huge band-boxes, made of blue ash bark, sup- plied the place of bureaus, and wardrobes; and a large tea chest cut in two, and hung by strings in the corners, with the hollow sides outward, constituted the book cases. A respectable old bed-stead. still in the family, was lugged across from Red Stone. An old turner and wheelwright added a trundle bed, and the rest were hewn and whittled out according to the fashion of the times, to serve their day and be supplanted by others as the civilization of the country advanced.
But the grand flourish of furniture was the dresser. Here were spread out in grand display pewter dishes, pewter plates, pewter basins and pewter spoons, scoured as bright as silver.
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About three months in the year was all the schooling a farmer's boy. could get. He was sadly needed at home from the age of five years, to do all sorts of chores and work on the farm. He was wanted to drive the cows to water and to pasture; to feed the pigs and chickens and gather the eggs. His duties in the summer were multifarious; the men were at work in the field harvesting, and generally worked from early morning until late at night, and the boys were depended on to "do the chores," hence it was impossible to spare them to attend school in summer. There was no school in spring and fall. In winter they were given three month's schooling-a very poor article of schooling, too, generally. Their books were generally anything they happened to have around the
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house, and even as late as 1850 there was no system in the pur- chase of school books.
Parents of children bought whatever book pleased their fancy, or whatever the children desired them to purchase. A geography was a geography, and a grammar a grammar, regardless of who was the author. This great confusion in school books. made trouble for the teacher, but that was of small moment. He was hired and paid to teach whatever branches, out of whatever books the par- ents thought the best. The branches generally taught in the early schools, however, were reading, writing, spelling and arithmetic, and, later, geography and grammar. Boys attending school but three months in a year made but little progress. They began at the beginning of their books every winter, and went as far as they could in three months, then forgot it all during the nine months out of school, commencing again the next winter just where they com- menced the previous one. In this way they went over and over the same lessons every year.
AMUSEMENTS OF THE PIONEER BOY.
A prominent citizen of Tiffin, who is a son of a Seneca county pioneer, upon being interview by the author of this work, gives the following sketch of his boy hood days :
"Did the boys of that day have any fun, do you ask? Cer- tainly. A healthy boy will manufacture his own amusements, if he does not have to work too hard. The boys of those times were mustered into ranks of labor at an early age, say at ten or eleven. and made to contribute to the common weal of the family; yet on rainy days fishing was permissible, when it rained too hard for work. So at night, after having performed all the work during the day that an ingenious father could get from a rather unwilling boy, fishing parties were common to the mill ponds .. Husking bees,' coon huntings, logging bees, and house or barn raisings, called the young men and boys together.
"It may seem to the boys of today, who, with his surround- ings of a beautiful country home. a farm productive of everything necessary, as well as of many luxuries. where the labors of the farm are so largely performed by machinery, with the facilities for ex- cursions to distant places, and with frequent trips upon the lake, with concerts and lectures and theatres and conventions the year around-that he has all the fun, and that we of sixty years ago must have had only a dull round.
"Not so. While we combated roots and stumps in the soil, where the boy of today plows with no obstruction, while riding his plow, we had before us the virgin forests, an open book and a museum of unfailing resources of amusement. They furnished
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the small game, which we delighted to hunt in abundance. They furnished nuts of every variety, delicious wild fruits and mand- rakes, and slippery elm bark. They furnished the material for his stilts, his dart, his pop gun, his whistles and his bows and ar- rows, as the season of each of these sports came around. Then the boy of long ago had the sport of chopping down little trees before chopping became a daily task, and of seeing them fall, a pastime of pleasure unalloyed, except by the admonition from his seniors, to cut close to the ground.
"Then the streams little and big. now so nearly dried up in summer, ran high all the year around, and never failed to furnish amusement of the rarest kind. In winter the boy sported upon the ice of the river or skated, if he owned skates, and in summer he fished or bathed in the water or guided his raft or skiff thereon.
"The. pioneer boy had little money, in fact he hardly saw enough of it to recognize the different denomination of the currency of the day. This was largely due to the fact that there was little money in the country. Business was largely carried on by barter. A pound of butter would buy a pound of cut nails. Two pounds of butter would buy a shilling hat. A good horse could be bought for from twenty-five dollars to fifty dollars, and a cow for ten dollars. The little money that came into the family in big copper cents, six pences and shillings, for dimes and half dimes, were rarely seen, had to be carefully saved for tax paying time. In fact, the boy had little use for money. Shows rarely came this way, and part of our religious teachings was to the effect that a show that had a round ring in the tent, whatever else it may have had, was awfully wicked.
"The railroads of the day, all of which were corduroy roads, always gave free excursions, the passenger carrying his own lunch.
"The clothing in which the pioneer boy was clad was not tailor made, was not even hand-me-downs, but the result of the summer work and the cunning skill of his mother's fingers, which worked early and late. In the spring of each year a crop of flax was sown, and at maturity was pulled, rotted, broken in the flax- brake and hatcheled by the men folks, when it was ready to be carded, spun and woven into cloth, called 'tow and linen' for the next year's clothing. So of the wool of the sheep kept. The price of wool in the markets of the country was not then a burning question as now; the limited supply was scarcely sufficient for the families of the pioneers. The supply was either carded into bats at home or carried to the woolen mill and made into 'rolls' ready for the spinning wheel. The same mother's hands spun it into yarn ready for the weaver or ready for her winter's knitting into socks. The spun yarn, dyed in butternut or blue dye, sufficed for the 'filling' in a web, which was of cotton yarn, and the product
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was known as 'jeans.'. The weavers work done, the same mother's nimble fingers cut, fitted and made the tow and linen or the jeans into coats, pants and vests for the boys.
"As the time passed on and the family became more fore- handed, which meant, had more sheep and other stuff and some- thing to sell in the market. the cloth was made of all-wool and went to the cloth dresser. for fulling and dressing, and came home shin- ing like broadcloth. Here came the need of the tailor who cut the cloth ready for the itinerant sewing woman, and the boy came out in a suit of 'fulled cloth' with shining brass buttons. So the work of clothing the boys developed from year to year until maturity en- abled him to dress in store clothes from his own earnings.
"It was not always that the last year's suit lasted well until this year's suit made its appearance. in which case, the boy, in the interim between the passing away of the former and the com- ing of the latter, might have passed for Riley's 'Raggedy Man.'
"Boots and shoes were not brought to the pioneer home ready- made and in assortments sure to meet all demands. Hides, taken from animals killed for family supplies of meat, or more often, hides taken from domestic animals dying from the murrain, were taken to the near-by tannery, dressed into leather and were, by the neighboring shoemaker, made up into boots and shoes for the family, with the emphasis upon the word shoes; for, as a matter of true history. the pioneer boy in question never possessed the greatly coveted boots until he was permitted to earn them by work for a neighbor, at thirteen years of age."
It is interesting to recall some of the industrial, social and religious gatherings of the pioneers of Ohio. In the early settle- ment of the country, there were cabin and barn raisings, log rol- lings, and wood ehoppings, corn huskings, and sewing and quilting parties, and at such gatherings utility and amusements were usually blended. Rich and poor then met upon lines of social equality and the old and the young mingled together in those old time gatherings. The pioneers were helpful to each other, not only in "raisings" and "rollings" requiring a force of men. but also, in other ways. If a settler was incapacitated from work by sickness or other cause his neighbors set a day and gathered in force and plowed his corn. harvested his grain, or eut his wood for the winter. as the season or occasion required. And when a pig or calf or sheep was killed, a piece of the same was sent to the several families in the neighbor- hood, each of whom reciprocated in kind, and in this neighborly way all had fresh meats the greater part of the summer.
Cornhuskings were great occasions. Sometimes the corn ears were stripped from the stalks. and hauled to a favorable place and put in parallel or semi-circular winnows, convenient for the husk- ers. Moonlight nights were usually chosen for the husking-bees,
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and sometimes bonfire lights were improvised. After the company gathered, captains were selected who chose the men off into squads or plattoons which competed in the work, each trying to finish its row first. The captain of the winning squad would then be carried around on the shoulders of his men. amid their triumphal cheers, and then the bottle would be passed.
Women also attended these pioneer gatherings and sometimes assisted at the husking, but more frequently were engaged in the early evening in quilting or sewing, or in helping to prepare the great supper-feast that was served after the work was done. .
There was a rule that a young man could kiss a girl for each red ear of corn found at a husking, and it goes, without saying that all the girls were kissed, some of them several times; for it was surprising how many red ears were found-so many that the number was prima-facie evidence that some of the boys went to the huskings with their pockets full of red corn ears.
Nearly all the pioneer gatherings wound up after supper with dancing, in which the old joined as well as the young, and, when a fiddler could not be obtained, music for the occasion was furnished by some one blowing on a leaf, or whistling "dancing" tunes. The dancing then was more vigorous than artistic, perhaps, for the people were vigorous in those days, effeminacy not becoming fash- ionable until later years.
The pioneers were industrious people. The situation required that the men must chop and grub and clear the land ere they could plow and sow and reap. And the women had to card and spin and knit and weave and make garments for their families, in addi- tion to their household work. A pioneer minister's wife, in telling about her work upon a certain occasion, said: "I've made a pair of pants and a bed tick, and washed and ironed, and baked six pies today."
The spinning wheels of the pioneer period, what few are yet left, are cherished as heirlooms by their fortunate possessors. There was the large wheel for wool and the small one for flax. Flax was a necessity. A clearing was made in the winter and in the spring the flax seed was sown, which grew and was harvested. It was spread on the ground to receive the autumnal rains and early frost, which was necessary to prepare it for the breaking, the scutching and the hackling. The tow was then separated from the flax and both were in readiness for the spinning. The hum of the spinning wheel and the reel was the piano music of the pioneer home; and, when echoed by the loom with its quick-moving shuttle, furnished the tow cloth and the linen so useful in those early times, when calico was a dollar a yard, and money was very scarce. The wool and the linen and cotton used for clothing had to be colored by the housewife to suit the tastes of the family. The dyes usual-
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ly used were copperas, butternut, madder and walnut. But the men clad in linsey-woolsey or tow pants and home-made linen shirts laid broad and deep the foundations of social, moral, indus- trial and religious life, which have been preserved by their descen- dants as a priceless inheritance.
Wool had to be carded into rolls by hand, and after the rolls had been spun into yarn and the yarn woven into flannel the pro- ducts of the loom had to be "fulled" into thicker cloth for men's wear. As this was a hand, or rather a foot, process, it necessitated "fulling" or "kicking" parties. Upon such occasions the web was stretched out loosely on the puncheon floor and held at each end, while men with bared feet sat in rows at the dies and kicked the cloth, while the women poured on warm soap suds, and white foam of the suds would often be thrown over both the kickers and the attendants. Carding the woolen mills and spinning and weav- ing factories came later. served their purposes and time, but are no more, and now people go to stores and get "hand-me-down" suits neither asking nor caring where or how they were made.
While there were social amusements in pioneer times in Seneca county, religious services were not neglected. As there were but few church buildings then, camp-meetings were frequently held during the summer season. Camp-meeting trips were enjoyable outings. The roads to camp-grounds often ran by sequestered farm homes and through shady woodlands, where the rays of the sun shimmered charmingly through the leafy tree-tops, and the fragrance of the wayside flowers deliciously perfumed the summer air. At the camp white tents in a semicircle partly surrounded . an amphitheater of seats in front of a pulpit canopied by trees.
The Creator of heaven and earth reared the columns of those camp cathedrals, along whose bough-spanned dome soft winds whispered and in whose leafy fretwork birds sang. From the mossy floor flowers sent up their perfume like altar incense, and. in accord with place and surroundings, the congregation was wont to sing :
"There seems a voice in every gale, A tongue in every flower, Which tells, O Lord, the wondrous tale Of Thy Almighty power."
At the camp visitors were received with cordial greeting. for the campers had the warmth of friendship in their hearts and of Christian zeal in their souls, and their frank manner and winsome ways were favorable preludes to the services that followed.
At these camp meetings, some of the worshipers would become quite demonstrative at times, for the personal manifestations of joy or devotion differ as much as our natures differ. No two persons
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give expression in the same way to any human emotion. Religion can come to you only in accordance with your nature, and you can respond to it only in the same way.
Singing was a prominent feature of camp meeting services. It was the old-fashioned singing, without instrumental accompani- inent. Singing such as our dear old mother sang, and although faulty, perhaps, in note, came from the heart and went to the heart. The singing of today may be more artistically rendered, but it is the old-time songs that comfort us in sorrow and sustain us in our trials, as they come back to us in the hallowed remen- brance from the years that are past.
"Johnny cake" was the principal form of bread for breakfast and pone for dinner, with wild game, hominy and honey, while the standard dish for supper was mush and milk. Log-rollings, house- raisings and wood-choppings were big occasions then, and dinners of "pot-pie" were served. Corn-huskings were also great events, and nearly all the pioneer gatherings would wind up with a dance after supper. in which all present joined. In the absence of a fiddle, the music was furnished by some one whistling or blowing on a leaf.
The hominy block was a piece of log about two feet long, set up on end, with a hole burnt into the upper end, forming a mortar. The end of a hand-spike was split to receive the sharp end of an iron wedge, which was held to the handle by an iron ring driven down tightly upon it. The head of the wedge crushed the corn in the hominy block, and thus they had a mortar and pestel. The corn often required a great deal of pounding before it would become fine enough for meal. The meal was then sifted, and the finer portion used for cakes, while the coarser part was the hominy. Fanning the hominy a little, while in a tin pan, drove all the shells out of it.
A very good hominy was also made without pounding it, by soaking the corn a day or two in strong lye made of wood ashes. This loosened the shell, and softened the hard part of the grain. The lye being poured off the corn soaked again in fresh water for awhile, would swell very large, and lose the taste of the lye, and when boiled soft made very good hominy.
Some of the settlers who had ingenuity enough. and could find flagstones that answered the purpose, constructed instruments they called "hand mills." Let me describe one of these, for they an- swered not only the purpose of the family that owned one, but also that of the neighbors round about, who brought their corn already shelled to grind it. When two or three of the neighbors met at the hand mill the same evening, one had to wait until the other was done, and it often took steady work until away beyond midnight. to grind corn enough for bread to last during the next day.
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It was a very simple affair. Two stones, about twenty inches in diameter, dressed round, formed the real mill. The mill was erected near the chimney corner. The lower stone was made sta- tionary on a block; the upper stone, called the runner, was turned by the hand in this wise: A pole was firmly fixed into a square hole on the top, near the edge. The upper end of the pole entered a hole in a board, or a log, overhead. loosely. 3 A broad hoop, made of a clap-board shaved thin, was fixed around the stones to keep them to their places and keep in the corn. One person would then turn the stone, while the other fed the mill through a hole in the side called "the eye." It was hard and slow work, and the
men took "turn about." While this work would take two men two hours to grind meal enough for the family for the next day, yet it was an improvement on the hominy block, after all.
The old saying that "necessity is the mother of invention," never was applied any where with greater force than in the life of the pioneer. As soon as ground enough was cleared, and wheat could be raised, no time was lost to try it. It was very difficult to stir up loose ground enough between the roots and stumps to re- ceive the seed. Wheat drills would have been of no value then. But small crops were raised in the start. The threshing was done with flails or thin poles, sometimes on the ground. cleared up for that purpose. Now, to get the chaff away from the wheat was another difficulty. When the wind would blow, a sheet was spread on the ground, and a handful of wheat, held high up over the sheet, was allowed to run through the hand, while the wind blew the chaff to one side-a natural fanning mill. They had another way to clean wheat when the wind did not blow. Two men took hold of the four corners of a sheet, and wafted it, with a strong sweep, to- wards another man, thus creating a current of air in his directin, which separated the chaff from the wheat as it fell from his hands on to a second sheet provided to catch the clean grain. This was cleaning wheat in a calm.
The tales of the hardships, trials, difficulties, privations and sufferings of the pioneers can hardly be realized by those of the present generation. The pioneers of Seneca county have gone to their long homes. Occasionally a log cabin may yet be seen along the roadside for
The cabin homes of Seneca some still are left today,
In shady nooks by babbling brooks or on the great highway.
These cabins were once the homes of peace and happiness. Little feet danced cheerily over those puncheon floors. and the great log fires in those old chimneys cheered the inmates on many long winter evenings.
Vol. I-6
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The pioneers who came to Seneca in the end had peaceful and happy homes on the old hunting grounds of the Indians, and from them has descended a sturdy people, whose pluck and energy have never been surpassed anywhere.
It is a great thing to make history. The men who participated in the Indian wars won victories for civilization and mankind. And these victories we are all enjoying today. Nothing therefore could be more appropriate than the stirring events of those times and the peace which followed should be recorded in history, there- by doing honor to the brave men who participated in them. It is fitting to rejoice over the prosperity attained in securing the fair- est and most beautiful land to be found anywhere.
We should not ignore our obligations to the pioneers, but in remembering them, congratulate ourselves that we live in an age of improved utilities. The pioneers were the manufacturers of almost everything they used, not only their farming implements, but also the fabrics with which they were clothed. How different now.
All earthly things are given to change, and the firesides of the pioneer period have given place to the furnaces and registers of to- day. But the remembrance of the associations of the past has an attractive charm and a strong hold on our sentiments and affections. Though the scenes of our memory may be darkened with the shadows of bereavements and of sorrows, yet it is still a cherished indulgence to recall them. The rose and the thorn grow on the same bush; so the remembrance of the past, of our friends who have "gone before," is mingled with both pleasure and sorrow.
As the roads were mere bridle paths, the people walked or rode on horseback. The cabins were built of logs, and the first ones had greased paper windows. The chimneys were on the outside and were made of sticks and mortar. The floors were of puncheon. The fireplaces were large enough for "back-logs" and "fore- sticks." Very few families had clocks. They guessed the hour of noon, or ascertained it by the creeping of the sunlight up to the
"noon mark" drawn upon the floor. The furniture of a cabin was usually a few chairs, a plain table and a bedstead. The bed- steads were made by poles being crossed and stuck into the wall at one end and resting on Y sticks at the other end. A little later came the trundle-bed, which was low and was pushed beneath the other bed during the day. There were no carpets upon these cabin floors, and a set of dishes consisted of six plates and six cups and saucers, and happy was the housewife who possessed these luxuries, for many families had only a few pewter plates which they brought with them. The cooking utensils were a tea-kettle. an iron pot and a skillet, also brought from the other side of the mountains upon the backs of horses. They grew gourds and hard
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