USA > Pennsylvania > Greene County > History of Greene County, Pa. : containing an outline of the state from 1682, until the formation of Washington County in 1781. History during 15 years of union. The Virginia and new state controversy--running of Mason's and Dixon's line--whiskey insurrection--history of churches, families, judges, senators, assembly-men, etc., etc. > Part 3
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ILISTORY OF GREENE COUNTY.
some of the men who had made their escape. These four per- sons were confined in the okl log jail at Washington. Thomas Richardson was tried and convicted of various crimes, and : full report of his trial was forwarded to the Supreme Executivo Council at Philadelphia, which after receiving the testimony and findings, made this order on the 10th of September, 1781 : "Ordered, that execution of the sentence of the Court be made and done upon him the said Thomas Richardson, on Saturday. the 2d day of October, next, between the hours of ten of the clock in the forenoon and two of the clock in the afternoon of the same day, at the most proper and public place within the said day." This was the first execution that took place, withun the bounds of the two counties, and was performed on ".Grilo 13 Hill, " a name given at that time and still retained until tids day-an elevated piece of ground a short distance south-east. of the town of Washington, on a part of the same locality the late Dr. LeMoyne, a short time before his death, caused a crem- ating furnace to be erected, in strange contrast with a majority of the acts of his life, in which he always claimed to be an ad- vanced thinker. But when the masses would not keep pace with him in thinking, he seems to have taken a long step back- wards and picked up the eremating idea which was so very old that it had become new again. But to return to the robbers. Old Abraham Doan was rescued from jail by an armed party, and as to what became of the two women who were incarcer- ated at the same time, history, so far as I have been able to discover, is silent. I find the part of a letter however in Dr. Creigh's history, page 367, from Eph Donglass, dated Union- town, May 27, 1784, that no doubt refers to the same gang of robbers, as follows: "The banditti have established themselves in some part of this county not certainly known, but thought to be in the deserted part of Washington county, whence they make frequent incursions into the settlements under cover of
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IIISTORY OF GREENE COUNTY.
the night, terrifying the inhabitants, sometimes beating them unmercifully, and always rob them of such property as they think proper, and then retire to their lurking places." A diver- sity of opinion exists with reference to the locality which Doug- lass calls the "deserted part of Washington county," Some have been kind enough to say that it was that part of Greene county known as Fish Creek. I incline to think that it was some more favored locality, from the fact that it was doubtful whether there had as yet been any settlements made on Fish Creek as early as 1784, much less to have been settled and then deserted at so early a date. I have read in a book entitled the "White Rocks," an account of a robbers' den at one of the over- ยก hanging cliffs of the Monongahela. But there is so much fiction in that book, in my opinion it decides nothing.
HARD TIMES,-Although this is not a pleasant theme, yet the truth of history demands that we should give a passing glance at the painful subject. One of the fruitful sources of hard times was to our ancestors that they settled in an almost un- broken forest where nothing could be raised until the ground was cleared of the heavy timber that almost everywhere ex- isted. How different from the settler in our western prairies at this date. In the month of May, 1879, I was on a western bound train, running swiftly over the great plains between Fargo and Bismarck in Dakota Territory. A man was standing in the baggage car watching the large cedar posts with the great big black figures that told the number of the sections we were passing. Presently he sees his number, the rope is pulled, the whistle snorts "down brakes," the train stops ; the man, wife and three children climb down on the green prairie; the train hands switch off a car containing their household goods and the lumber already framed for dwelling house and stable ; the bell begins to ring and we move off leaving the man and his family and carpenters behind. We pass to the upper Missouri river.
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HISTORY OF GREENE COUNTY.
Five days after as the train returns, that house is up and the family living in it; their cow is grazing on the prairie; the man has gone a few miles to Jamestown, purchased three mules, a sulkey plow, and is quietly turning over the prairie sod as we stop for the empty car. Not so with the early settlers of Greene county. The caravan of pack horses was their train. No saw mill or planing mill prepared their lumber. No nail factory furnished their nails at three cents per pound. Conse- qquently they were compelled to build houses without nails. The horses very seldom had their feet lifted by a blacksmith. Daring the greater part of the year the business of the men was to chop, chop ; the employment of the women-spin, spin. When a small field was cleared during the winter and planted in corn, the soil was so wild, having enjoyed so little sunshine, that it seldom produced more than fifteen bushels of corn to the acre; and yet, light as the crop was, it was not worth more than twenty-five cents per bushel. It seemed like a small busi- uess to plow land so full of stumps and roots; cut the wheat with a sickle; pick out the big weeds with which it was po- luted ; thrash it out with a flail; clean it up with a sheet and then only get from five to eight bushels to the acre, worth forty couts per bushel.
Another of the hardships of our ancestors was the scarcity of milis. After the seanty pittance of a crop was secured, it was difficult to get it manufactured into even course flour. The first effort towards milling in these western counties was the horse mill, where every customer furnished his own power, which was a team of either horses or oxen. These were some- times hitched to & sweep by which they pulled and drove the machinery somewhat on the principle of a threshing machine, only the wheels were all of wood. Sometimes the team was placed on a large tramp wheel which lay almost in a horizontal position, the team being attached to a post and started to pull
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HISTORY OF GREENE COUNTY.
instead of the stationary post moving, the wheel began to re- volve and started the machinery. These mills were unlike the fabled gods ; they did not grind fine if they did grind very slowly. In consequence of this slowness they often got behind time, so much so, that often a dozen, sometimes a score, of teams with their owners were waiting for their turn to come. The miller would be worn out being compelled to attend both day and night. It sometimes happened, however, that some trusty- man came in who had some little knowledge of the simple ina- chinery and who would have to wait some six or eight hours for his turn to come. This man was installed miller pro ten, 1;is pay being that he could grind his own grain toll free. One of the indispensable attachments of a horse mill was to put up large enough sheds for shelter for the waiting teams, for if :: man went away he forfeited his turn. I distinctly recollect sec- ing two of these horse mills in the state of Ohio in 1828. One of them was pulled ronnd with a sweep, the other was driven with a tread wheel. I never expected to see another of these; mills, and was surprised, on my arrival on Ten Mile in 1856. to :ind one of the old fashioned mills still in running order on the farm of old Ephraim Cooper, about eight miles from the bor- ough of Washington.
When the country began to be somewhat improved, water inills soon made their appearance. But as there was almost. a total destitution of capital, the idea was to get them up as cheap as possible, hence some streams were, as a general thing, selected where a fall of from twenty to thirty feet could be obtained. An overshot wheel was generally constructed usually of light timber, on the supposition that it would require less water to drive it than if the wheel was heavy. These small streams seem to have answered the purpose well during, per- haps, half the year. Their capacity, of course, was limited, and as the people lived in a kind of "hand to mouth" way, when
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HISTORY OF GREENE COUNTY
dry weather came there were always people who had nothing to est ; then the tug of war began to come even worse than it did before. The horse mills, being temporarily constructed, had rotted down or were worn out. The steam mill had not yet been erected in Greene county. Indeed, James Barns, whois still living, was the first man who erected a steam engine in the bounds of this county about the year , and that was attached to, I believe, a carding machine and not to a mill. In conso- quence of the drying up of these small streams (many of which can now scarcely be traced at all) the inhabitants were often compelled to boil corn and make what was called "slots hominy" as a substitute for bread. Others would chop and adze out & hollow in the top of a stump. They would then secure a long stone, perhaps six inches in diameter and two feet long ; through the slimest end of this they would chisel a hole; through this hole they would drive a tough piece of wood, to each end of which they attached strong strings of buckskin or tanned hog- skin. A convenient hickory sapling was then bent down and theses trings were attached to the top of it. Corn was pourcd into the artificial hollow in the stump, and the slow process of pounding and sifting meal to make mush for supper commences. The stone was drawn down by the hands generally of one of the stalwart women of those days, in connection with its own weight. The rebound of the stone and the spring of the sapling elevated the stone into the air, when those brawny arms sent it down again, until the woman was tired and the meal was ready for mush. Slow and painful as it was, it nevertheless kept the wolf of starvation from the door. Others would boil wheat for several hours until it would form a kind of pasty pulp, add a little maple sugar and eat it with sweet milk, and it was consid- cred quite good enough for "common people." I have eaten it myself, and had it not been for the terrible stint in the way of the maple sugar, I could have been content if the grist mill
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HISTORY OF GREENE COUNTY.
had stood still a great deal longer, but the quantity of sugar be- - ing so limited made me as anxious as other people for rain.
Another of the hardships of our fathers was from what was called "sick wheat." This was something peculiar to virgin soil where the land had been recently reclaimed from the shade and ,I was, to a great extent, overshadowed, at least part of the day, by the forest. This, it was supposed, had a tendency to leave a small amount of poison adhering to the blossom end of each grain. . Most of this came off in the bran in bolting. So that the bread could be eaten with tolerable safety to those who rel- ished such diet. "Bear's grease," applied as butter on this bread, was said to be an antidote for the poison. But where the wheat "was "sick" no one would dare boil and eat it in the way I have described. A safer food in many localities was buckwheat. This grain was valuable also in taming the soil. It answered the same purpose in Western Pennsylvania that tobacco still does on the new lands of Kentucky; although they are both very ex- hanstive, yet they very speedily remove the wildness from the soil. One of the difficulties with buckwheat is, that it must be baked warm every meal if you wish to have it good. The rigid old Presbyterians and Seceders made a difficulty out of this. Their veneration for the Sabbath was so great that they would by no means allow a buckwheat cake baked in their dwelling on the Lord's day, consequently those great big buckwheat cakes were baked in their skillets on Saturday and piled up for the two Sabbath meals, (for they did not get their meals on Sunday). These cakes were dipped in water and then laid in the same skillet to warm. I am here reminded of what was said by an old Scotch Covenanter at communion in Washington county. He was engaged in that work of superarogation called "fencing the tables. "When he came to the fourth commandment he said "all unnecessary cooking is forbidden; such as roasting and baking." Here he hesitated a moment and then said, "un- !
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HISTORY OF GREENE COUNTY
less you are so unfortunate as to have nothing but this new kind of wheat, I believe they call it bewhate; I dunno about that, for it is no gude cold." My own private opinion is that those old fathers and mothers had enough difficulties without magnifying them. Their soil would produce this grain more abundantly than any other. An abundance of wild honey could then be found in the woods without any danger of a lawsuit for cutting a bee tree. Why not then spread the honey cn their warm buckwheat cake and call the "Sabbath a delight ? "
SCARCITY OF SALT .- Another of the hardships under which: the primitive settlers labored, was the extremely high price of sult. We often hear it said, it is but little difference whether things are high or low, so that they are in proportion, and there is some truth in the declaration. But here we find things vo desperately out of proportion. Wheat 40 cents and salt sis pounds, ten shillings per bushel! A great inducement for a man : turn savage and do without salt. But as salt is considered a: indispensable ingredient in civilization even in its rudest forms, our ancestors considered themselves, under the circumstances, compelled to have salt, and yet the thought of paying thirty-two lollars and fifty cents for one bushel of salt ! Surely it would be a cheat who would skimp the measure, "Ignorance is bliss" sometimes, it is said, but it was hardly such under these circum- stanees, with vast quantities of salt all around them, but a few hundred feet below the surface, and yet they were compelled to go to Winchester, Staunton, London, &e., for this article that some of their ungrateful decendants think it is dear if they have to pay one dollar and fifty cents for three bushels, or fifty cents per bushel! How changed. But there was another inconve- nience in this scarcity of salt. It seemed like taking a man's life to give even the smallest pittance to his stock, and yet their instinctive eraving could not be appeased by informing them of the high price : hence whenever they were released from their
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HISTORY OF GREENE COUNTY.
enclosure, in order to obtain browse, in the absence of pasture, they immediately wandered off in search of those springs slight- 'ly impregnated with salt, which a benificent Creator had placed Jin certain localities for the purpose of satisfying the wants of the beasts of the forests, which springs were denominated by the early settlers, "licks." Hence when the stock was wanted, long weary hunts of days in succession were to be made in which the hunter often became lost. The undergrowth in the woods was so thick that the person in search of the stock might pass within a few rods of it without discovering it. To obviate this difficulty, bells were placed on the necks of the cattle, at least one sheep in each little flock was denominated "the bell weath- er." while bells were sometimes placed on the necks of the horses. Then bells must be bought east of the mountains and transport- ed perhaps two hundred miles on the back of a pack horse.
SCARCITY OF MONEY,-We now come to consider the most . fruitful source of all hard times-the scarcity, almost the en- tire absence of money, That great statesman, Henry Clay, said there were but two sources of wealth known to mankind. One the spontaneous production of the earth; the other-labor. While this is true, all mankind, from the days of Abraham down, have recognized the necessity of having some circulating medium that could be denominated "current money with the merchants." Lycurgus, although one of the wisest rulers of the Grecian States, made a great financial mistake when he made iron money a legal tender with a view of keeping the vices of the surrounding nations out of Greece. While he partly succeeded in doing this, he brought poverty and all its inconveniences into the country he loved so well. Why? Be- cause iron was too abundant to have that intrinsic value so im- paratively demanded by the coin we call money. To the man who is capable of reflecting, it must be evident that money is either real or fictitious. The real is the coin itself, made out
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HISTORY OF GREENE COUNTY
of some metal, so searee as to render it in the strictest sense of the word-precious. The fictitious is some kind of notes, cer- titicates, bonds or bills-promising the hokler that whenever it is his wish to convert them into coin, he can do so, thus ex- changing the fictitious into the real. It is self-evident that this fictitious money would not float a single day unless we have some kind of faith in the promise made on the face of it showing that the terms therein proposed will be complied with; this confidence we call credit. Now credit is different from assurance, for "seeing is believing, but feeling is the naked truth." Now what was the situation of our ancestors at the commencement of the revolution ? They were doing business ahnost altogether by what is denominated barter, or trade. They had their seedule of prices about as follows: "Ten buckskins for a match coat; five doe-skins for a calico shirt ; three fawn skins for a pound of lead ; five pounds of ginseng i'or a wool hat; ten pounds of bees wax for a straw bonnet : three gallons of whiskey or apple jack for a quarter of tea. A hundred gallon copper still would buy a good farm. Two bar- rels of whiskey would buy a corner lot. A five gallon keg would be exchanged for a pound of powder. Five barrels of whiskey was the price of a rifle gun."-Veech's Secular History in Centennial Volume, page 363.
Now that they have determined to go to war with Old Eng- land, with the longest purse in all Europe, they must have mo- ney ; buckskins will no longer answer the purpose ; how are they to get it? They have a small quantity of coin, all foreign, but this is only a "drop in the bucket ;" how are they to get the millions they need; only one way-in the absence of the real, they must have recourse to the fictitious. This was done. On the 22d of June, 1775, an issue of paper money was made amounting to two millions of dollars, and was denominated *Continental Money." From this date up to January, 1780,
HISTORY OF GREENE COUNTY.
other emissions were made until the whole amount was no less than two hundred millions of dollars. Now why was not this fictitious money kept up to a par value, and thus make the war, instead of the source of the hard times, make it the imme- diate cause of good times ? If Clay was right (and I believe he was), the recources were abundant, an almost boundless unsold domain waiting the hand of the laborer to make it spontaneous- ly produce the untold millions of bushels that we now behold. As to laborers the colonies, even at that early day, had millions of them; hence there was no necessity for failure, and yet this paper money did fail. What were the causes? First, it was not made a legal tender. In all my intercourse with mankind I have found we must take them "as they are, and not as they ought to be." All observation proves that men are naturally skeptical; especially is this the case in things that pertain to his pecuniary interests. Hence the first impulse was to doubt whether the holder would ever receive those "Spanish milled dollars" mentioned on the face of these roughly executed notes. Ile might say "I would take this if I thought I could pay a :lebt with it." But the paper did not propose to do that, and consequently this man who, perhaps, is the principal business man in the community, refuse to take this trash, as he calls it, in payment of debts due him, and the report of his act spreads from lip to lip until the credit of the new emission was crippled at the very outset. And yet while there was no well defined legal tender attached to those notes, the Government virtually made them such. For while the stay-at-home patriots were snuffing up their noses at this money and taking their pay in buckskins, ginseng, or anything else, the poor soldier (who was leaving his blood in the tracks made by his bare feet in the snow), was paid off in this depreciated paper money which would not buy him a meal for less than forty dollars. One of my first recollections was hearing my feeble, tottering grand-
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IHISTORY OF GREENE COUNTY
*
father tell that-on his return from the army in Virginia in the beginning of the winter of 1781, after the fall of Cornwallis i at Yorktown-he and three comrades were compelled to travel ! most of the night and lodge the remainder in a barn, and then i in the morning compelled to pay forty-five dollars each for their breakfast of money that they had received at eight dollars per: month, thus serving almost six months for one miserable meal. Surely Esau did not do much worse when he sold his birth- right for a morsel of pottage. And whose fault was it ? Not the Goverment. It could do no better. The war was upon it. It could not borrow from abroad, and the business men of the country would not give the National currency credit. For I take it as a truth that cannot be gainsayed, that the cur- rency of any country is precisely what the business men of that country make it. As an illustration, I recollect hearing men talk in 1828 about the superlative goodness of the notes of the old United States Bank; "better far than gold and silver," and they really made it such. There was a premium on those old votes, while gold and silver only passed at par. Why were the notes of this bank so good? Was it because there was so much specie in its vaults? I do not know but that fictitious character, Major Jack Downing, told Nicholas Biddle that he "had hearn tell that there was not enough silver and gold in the bank to make the Ginneral a pair of specks." Be that as it may Andrew Jackson refused to sign the bill for its re-charter, and it died amidst the loud lamentations of the men of business who could and did make it the best kind of money. With millions in circulation, all the great merchants boasting of its excellence, it did not need more than $1,000 in coin to make it a specie paying bank for millions of outstanding notes. Is any one skeptical yet about the position I have taken that the currency of any country is dependent for its success or failure on the manner its issues are treated by the men who handle the largest
-
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HISTORY OF GREENE COUNTY.
part of that currency? If there be such "a doubting Thomas," please permit another illustration. Martin Van Buren, the suc- cess or of Andrew Jackson, was always regarded as a shrewd, sharp man. He was the only man that could keep on the good side of General Jackson all the time. Yet, when he came into the Presidential chair, he found himself surrounded by so many financial difficulties that, although he was called the "Fox," the "Magician," &e., he scarcely knew how to extricate himself. The plan of putting the public money in the "pet" banks was so loudly reviled that a man's political head almost instantly fell into the basket if he dared to say that he was in favor of it. Van Buren concluded that this clamor on both sides was the result, to a great extent, of prejudice. He therefore pro- posed a kind of compromise measure, known as the "Sub- Treasury." I have no copy of the plan as originally proposed, but my recollection is about this : that the Government money was to be lifted out of the vaults of the "pet" banks, where it was in such imminent danger of being squandered, and placed in the vaults of a building called the Treasury; then, on the strength of this deposit, notes were to be issued as a circulating medium in order to transact the business of the country. The old men of this county remember the long howl of indignation that came up from both sides of the line. The friends of the "pet" banks were loud in their denunciations, because they wanted to keep the money, and the friends of the old bank dc- nounced it as nonsense, not because it was such, but because they were not willing to adopt this measure (that they them- selves had not originated) instead of their "dead baby." Now I do not claim to be a financier, much less a politician, yet, as far as I remember this Sub-Treasury scheme, I am only able to detect some slight differences between it and the present greenback note, and they are all in favor of the Sub-Treasury plan. One of the differences was that these notes of Van
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IHISTORY OF GREENE COUNTY.
Buren's were to start with a full treasury, whereas, in 1862, I believe it was generally admitted that the Treasury was empty. Another difference was that the Sub-Treasury notes were not a legal tender, while the present greenbacks are : which was im- paratively demanded as a war measure, but on terms of equity could never be justified. And yet, with all these advantages in favor of the Sub-Treasury, it was doomed to go down, while the greenbacks have become the best paper money this country ever had. Now in view of all this, why did not the business men of that day rise up in their might and give credit to this continental money and save the occurrence of all the direful calamities and national disgrace that have been the bitter conse- quences of the going down of this money. Among those that suffered most deeply were some of the early inhabitants of Greene county. They had invested their all in these cheap lands, and when Eastern sharks found the money was about to collapse, they bundled it up and hurried across the mountains in sulvance of the mail, and by offering ample compensation for the improvement many a poor man had made, they became possessed of his home, from which they turned him out penni- less, either to again brave the unbroken forest, or beg his way to Kentucky, the then new "Eldorado of the West." Poor man! He asked "bread and they gave him a stone ;" he asked "fish and they gave him a scorpion." The depreciation of this money was one of the bitterest dregs in the poisoned cup of wrong, that was drained to its last drop by the different front- iers of the vast country, whose honor stood pledged for its redemption, which money might have floated, and would have . floated if the business men of the nation had held it up. Why did they not do it? Ah, thereby hangs a tale which I will not unfold further than to suggest a strong probability-perhaps the largest monied men of the land were opposed to the cause for the defense of which this money was issued, and did they es-
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