USA > Pennsylvania > Luzerne County > Nanticoke > History of Hanover Township : including Sugar Notch, Ashley, and Nanticoke boroughs : and also a history of Wyoming Valley, in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania > Part 20
USA > Pennsylvania > Luzerne County > Ashley > History of Hanover Township : including Sugar Notch, Ashley, and Nanticoke boroughs : and also a history of Wyoming Valley, in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania > Part 20
USA > Pennsylvania > Luzerne County > Sugar Notch > History of Hanover Township : including Sugar Notch, Ashley, and Nanticoke boroughs : and also a history of Wyoming Valley, in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania > Part 20
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
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There was no market abroad for anything produced here, except furs and coal, which had to be floated down the river, and there was no way to get to market, if there had been any, except by Dur- ham boat or by sixty miles of teaming through an uninhabited,
*Who is to be thanked for the progress of the country in the past hundred years? We hear some persons who seem to be intelligent men say, " The people have not been bene- fitted by inventions in machinery and scientific discoveries !"
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woody, mountainous or swampy country with no roads and no inhabitants to make roads. The trees were cut, along where a road might be made, and places made to ford the creeks and streams, but no roads were made. Who could make them where there were so few inhabitants, and almost no travel. No loads worth mentioning could be hauled by a team through such ways. The river almost alone was used as a highway for the transpor- tation of merchandise, except perhaps furs.
The farmers kept sheep in numbers proportioned to the number of persons in the family and those to be supported by the farm, in- cluding hired persons, male and female. As all payments were made "in kind" the produce of the farm had to be taken in pay- ment of wages by the hired man and hired woman. But the sheep in the township would not average more than about one or one and a half to each inhabitant, old and young, in 1800. There was no market abroad for their wool, and much leather clothing was also worn. Yet spinning and weaving seemed to be going on all the time. Horned cattle were nearly as numerous as sheep, and a great deal of butter and cheese were made. Some of these people kept large flocks of chickens, and geese, and ducks, and turkeys, and large numbers of hogs, and they were cheap. Some of these things were traded off at the stores in Wilkes-Barre, but there were so few people that did not raise their own that not much was thus disposed of. The most that was sold was to their hired hands to pay for their work. There had to be some measure of value, and that was the price that could be got for these things in trade at the merchants' stores in Wilkes-Barre. There was a store in Hanover, but prices were fixed in Wilkes-Barre stores. The course of trade regulated the prices then as it does now, but Wilkes-Barre was the place where that course developed itself. No set of merchants could fix the price then any more than they can now.
When saw-mills were built and for fifty or sixty years after- wards the very best of white pine lumber could be bought at the mill for four dollars per thousand feet, board measure, and delivered at one's house for six dollars. It has all been used up now, and none of the kind can be found anywhere within fifteen or twenty miles from the township, and it is even doubtful if any of the same
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quality can be found standing anywhere in eastern Pennsylvania. Yellow pine of the best quality once existed in large quantities in Hanover, but there is scarcely a tree now left standing. There are but few trees of any valuable kind left in our woods or groves. They have been cut and used for props in the mines, or for sills-ties-for the railroads.
Carpenter work and cabinet making were all done by hand. The planing was all hand work. It took a great deal of hard labor to plane off all the weather boards for a house, together with all the flooring, and tongue and groove it by pushing the plane by hand. But they knew nothing of machine planing then, or any other machine work about house building, or making sash, blinds and doors. It may be worth while to let our thoughts turn back once in a while and consider with what patience our fathers and mothers worked without the labor-saving machinery of this age, and did their full share, and more, towards the happiness and well- being of their posterity and the stranger that should come after them.
Almost all families had weavers among themselves, but the weaver's trade was a good and busy one. He or she never need be idle. Their work was well done, and much of it as fine and beauti- ful as is done at this day even by machinery. The looms were large wooden things about eight feet wide and ten feet long, and seven feet high to the top of the rollers over which the cords ran that held the harness or "heddle." It would take up nearly half of a moderately sized room. Frequently there was a separate build- ing for it and its necessary accessories. These were a little-wheel, a quill-wheel, spools-a large and small-bobbins, reel, swiffs, reeds, warping-bars, harness or heddle, shuttles, temples, hand cards, and big-wheel, and many other things, the naines of which are not now remembered. There was scarcely a day in the year, leaving out Sundays, that some one was not seated on the loom swinging the "lay," throwing the shuttle, and working the treadles. The machine itself is made to do all that now, and an attendant has only to stand near and watch it and several other looms together at the same time, all running by steam or water power, and with a speed never imagined by these early weavers of the eighteenth century. But nothing of this kind is done in Hanover.
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From eight to ten pence per yard was paid for weaving, that is 88 to II} cents, when it was done by the yard. When a woman was hired by the week with board and washing she was paid six shillings-that is, 80 cents per week. Home-made flannel shirts were made and worn here as late as 1849.
Skilled workmen at their trades received 3s. 9d .- 50 cents per day and board, and a day's work was from sunrise to sunset; un- skilled laborers got 2s. 6d .- 331/3 cents, and all had to take their pay in the produce of the farm, and this was the way wages were paid for more than sixty years, or certainly till 1830, and it was pretty much the same till about 1850. Laborers worked on the farms for ten dollars a month and board through the farming season of about seven months. The rest of the year they did jobs of treading and of breaking flax, and other work about the prepara- tion of it for spinning. But they had no steady work through the winter. The fall work was very pressing and busy, in gathering in the corn, potatoes, pumpkins, turnips, and picking apples and mak- ing cider, hooping barrels, curing tobacco, stripping the flaxseed and rotting the flax, butchering the year's meat of porkers and beeves, and making sausage and sauerkraut, and cutting and drying apples, and securing the winter apples; and apple-cuts and quilt- ings had to be attended to by the young people.
And at this season also, shoes and clothing had to be prepared for the children to go to school. There was much more snow then than now in the winters, and there was but little travel, and roads frequently not broken through the snow to the school-houses. Snow fell frequently three and four feet, and sometimes five feet deep, on the level. Now it is seldom eighteen inches. It was much farther to the school-house than now, but the children had to go every day and wade through and break their own paths. So they needed good warm clothing and thick shoes and boots, and these things had to be made up anew every fall for them. They did not seem to mind the snow or cold, for what rollicking mischief there was among them on the way to and fro-but especially fro! Well, it was much the same, as to that, in later days.
The mason's trade became a good one soon after the Revolu- tionary war ended. He was called on to build all the chimneys, and the chimneys of those days were no small affair. They were
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from six to eight feet thick at the ground floor and from ten to twelve feet wide, and with an enormous hearth and fire-place. Of course this was after the first cabins had rotted down, or the owner had grown able to build a better house. These chimneys were placed generally near the middle of the house, and had a room on each side and a fire-place in each room, and some of them had three rooms and a fire-place on three sides, and on the kitchen side a large stone oven was frequently built in it with the rest. The hearth went across the face of the whole thing, in front of the fire- place and also of the oven, and was paved or laid with flat stones- as it was very difficult here for these people in those times to get a single stone large enough for the whole hearth. The oven had a flue leading into the main chimney. The chimney was much smaller from the chamber floor up than it was below, but would have an opening inside to the top of about two and a half feet square or more; some were nearer three feet. They were all built of stone and laid up with yellow clay for mortar, as there was no lime in the valley of Wyoming, nor within thirty-five miles of it- and that down the river. After 1830 they could get lime by canal. Lime could be brought down the river on arks in the spring floods, but it was very expensive. It came from New York if at all. Plaster or gypsum was procured in that manner by the farmers for use as a manure on their corn and potatoes. It cost, unground, from thirteen to seventeen dollars per ton at the river, and it cost two dollars per ton for grinding. In this way they could get lime for plastering their houses, or for laying up chimneys or walls, but it cost so much that very few ever used any.
These houses were pretty large and comfortable farm-houses at this time, and rag carpets were usually found upon the floor of the best room. These houses and carpets indicated quite a degree of prosperity before the year 1800, but all were not thus housed by any means. In these early settlements they made brooms, out of a young hickory of about three or four inches in diameter, broom- corn not being raised here at that time. The bark was peeled off and the butt was split up for about a foot or more in very fine splints, splint by splint, with a knife, all the splints being held back out of the way until the whole stick was thus split or slit. Then above these splints up the stick, other splints were split
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down the stick to within a half or quarter of an inch of the tops or upper ends of the other splints, and these last were bent down over the first ones. These were split down this way until the stick was small enough for a handle, when these last were all. fast- ened down with a cord and trimmed even on the bottom, and there was a broom. The upper part of the handle was then shaved down to the desired thickness with the drawing-knife on the shaving horse, and they had a very durable broom. After broom-corn was produced these hickory brooms were still made, but they were used only for scrubbing, sweeping walks, and paths, and barn floors and other rough work. It took a great deal of work to make one, but they were quite lasting when made.
Drinking cups and dippers for water and for many other pur- poses were made of gourd-shells, (calabash), as soon as they could raise gourds for the purpose, and every family had them growing in its garden during at least two generations. . They were univer- sally used in the country, but perhaps not much in town. They were needed for water and cider-(it took ten years from the plant- ing of the apple seeds to get apples to make cider) and for milk, and buttermilk, and they were used as ladles for buckwheat batter. There was a more concentrated kind of drink that they did not drink out of a gourd shell. For that they took a beef's horn, cut off. a length of three or four inches of the large end, scraped it ' down thin so light could be seen through it easily, then put a wooden bottom in the small end, and there was a drinking horn. When one drank from that he took a "horn" of the stuff.
They were a very hospitable people. When anyone with whom they were acquainted came to the house, or any visitors came, the pitcher of cider was set out, and if they had any stronger drink, as they usually had-metheglin, cider royal, "apple-jack," it was always brought forth. At meal times these things were set on the table with the rest. Anyone could drink, if so inclined, but it was seldom or never urged on him, any more than a drink of water, or milk or coffee. "Cider royal" was new cider fermented with one- tenth of its quantity of "apple-jack" (cider brandy) in it. Apple- jack was a spirit distilled from cider. Metheglin was a fermented mixture of honey and cider or water and was very intoxicating.
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From its mild and sweet taste it seemed that it must be innocent, but many have been deceived by it and knocked over.
The ancient way of raising bees and honey and making metheglin may as well be told together. There was no other sweet- ening substance to be got here in the early times but honey and a syrup made of the sap of the soft maple. Hard maple or sugar- maple did not grow here, except a few trees in the notch of the little mountain called "Sugar Notch." Soft maple sap would make only syrup. If boiled quite dry it could be made into a waxy, sticky kind of sugar that could hardly be called sugar. Another kind of molasses or syrup will be mentioned further on. Honey" was almost the only sweetening substance they had.
The bees were kept in a yard generally fenced off by itself from all other ground. Trees were first left standing around the bee yard when the land was cleared until apple trees could grow, for the bees to light on when they swarmed. They were well watched in the season by persons about the house, and when they swarmed a hurried fire from a small handful of straw was made, two men were called from the fields if there were so many, a hive was held over the fire, or in the fire, or fire in it, till the inside took fire, (when it was a wooden hive). After burning a little to purify it, water was dashed in, the fire put out, the inside rubbed thoroughly with fresh hickory leaves dipped in salt and water, until particles of the leaves and salt were left all over the inside of the hive. Then the limb of the tree with the bunch of bees hanging on it was sawn off carefully and let down to the ground with a rope, where the prepared hive had been placed with the mouth up on some boards or a table .. One then took the limb with the bees and held the bunch of bees over the upturned mouth of the hive, and by a sudden, sharp knock of the limb on the mouth of the hive shook them all, as nearly as possible, into the hive. The bees dropped in, and before they had time to fly out, the hive was placed upright on the table or boards on two cross sticks, to keep the hive about an inch above the table or boards, so that the bees that had fallen down could crawl up and into the hive. The bees would go up into that hive in almost all cases, and make it their future home. That same evening after dark the hive was taken quietly and placed on the platform prepared for it in the beeyard. The platform was
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made by driving four stakes in the ground, letting them come above. the ground about twenty inches, and standing fifteen to eighteen inches apart, so as to hold up the platform-a board or plank about eighteen or twenty inches square-upon which the hive was placed, mouth down of course. A roof was put over each separate hive to shed the rain. On the side of the mouth of the hive facing the south, three or four V-shaped notches were cut into each of the hives about a half inch deep for passage ways for the bees to go out and into their hives. They would be likely to go to work within a day making comb and honey. A hive of bees would produce naturally two swarms of bees in a year, and the first swarm produced would itself produce another the same season. When they have passed the second year, or come to the fall of the third year in age, they were supposed to have gathered all the honey they would ever get, or rather the hive would be full, with about forty pounds of honey in it; they were then killed and the honey was taken for use. It always seemed barbarous to kill them, but the ancients knew no other way. Bees are not killed now by the best honey producers, nor are they propagated in the same way. They are now robbed of their honey and left to fill the hive up again. Possibly work is their recreation, and they grow sweet on it. They were never known to go on a strike till they got their hives full and were rich-then they would cease to work, and, if left to live on their savings, got lazy, apparently forgot how to work, and starved when the honey was exhausted, never returning to their work.
In order to kill them and get their honey, a hole was dug in the ground in the frosty weather in the fall, about a foot square and about a foot deep, near the hives, in the bottoms of which were set a pair of sticks, sharp at the bottom and split in the top, and a sulphur match placed in the split of each. This match was two inches wide by five inches long, made of linen or cotton cloth dip- ped in melted sulphur. There were generally two hives taken up at one time, and it was always done after dark. A pair of these sulphur matches would be set in each hole or pit with these split sticks, the lower corners of each match would be set on fire, and a hive taken and set over each pit with the burning matches in it. Damp grass or weeds would be put about the edges of the pit and
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hive to keep the fresh air out, and the sulphur fumes in. In fifteen or twenty minutes the bees would all have fallen down out of the hives into the holes, dead, and then the hives would be carried into the house, the honey combs cut loose from the sides of the hive, with a wooden instrument shaped like a broad, thin chisel, taken out and crushed or squeezed by the hands-of generally young men and women-into a basket-strainer over a large tub, and strained by dripping through the mass of comb and the strainer for forty-eight hours. Then another pair of hives would be taken up until all were taken that they desired. This honey when first strained was clear and soft like molasses. It was kept in a tub made for the purpose of keeping the year's honey in, and would hold from two hundred to six hundred pounds. In a few months it would granulate, but would never get hard and dry like maple and other sugars. In this condition the farmers called it "candied" honey. This was the main sweetening material they had for all purposes except the soft maple syrup before spoken of, and another sometimes made, that may as well be described now :-
After boiling a large quantity of green corn, to dry for winter use, the water in which it was boiled, was strained and boiled down to a syrup. It had a slight taste of green corn, but was sweet and good and was not a bad change from honey.
METHEGLIN. The crushed or squeezed honey comb from all the hives taken up would be washed-sometimes with fresh new cider, but generally with water-and then melted and skimmed, and run into cakes for bee's-wax. The water or cider with which they washed the comb, was boiled and skimmed and put into a clean barrel and laid down in the cellar to ferment. It was a long time fermenting, but after fermenting it was tightly bunged up and left to lie there undisturbed till the next summer at harvest time, when it was supposed to be fit for use. It was very sweet and pleasant to the taste, and very intoxicating. This was metheglin.
It is to be supposed that nearly everybody of the present age knows that friction matches had not been invented earlier than about 1838 or 1839, or at least were not in very general use before that, but "everybody" does not know how fire was produced before matches were made. The writer will endeavor to tell how it
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was done here, in the country, in Hanover. How it was produced in town and city he need not tell because it does not belong to any history of Hanover.
Every man, and nearly every boy old enough, carried in his pocket a "flint and steel." "Punk," "spunk," "touchwood," was also carried in the pocket, always ready for use. To make a fire, a piece of this spunk was held, together with a flint, between the thumb and bent finger firmly, the spunk close to the edge of the flint, on the upper side of it; a piece of steel, made for the purpose, about three or four inches long, a sixteenth of an inch or more in thickness, a half inch wide and shaped otherwise like the link of a chain-but sometimes only a flat piece of steel slightly convex on the edge, so it could be held easily in the hand-was sharply struck a sliding blow against the edge of the flint as near the spunk as possible to make the sparks fly, and the striking and spark-making was continued until a spark flew into the spunk and set it burning. It would burn very slowly, but very persistently. Now with some dry kindling, shavings and chips of wood and a little breath judiciously expended upon it, a fire could be made in a few minutes. Sometimes it occurred that the family's supply of spunk had run out or was lost, or the flint or steel was lost, or not on hand, then some one of the family had to go to a neighbor's, however far off he might live, to "borrow" some fire. Then it would do one good to see the "hurry and scurry" of that borrower towards home with a live coal of fire in some receptacle! Their fires in the early times here being always made of wood the live coals at night would be covered up with ashes to keep them alive till morning, and generally they kept.
Flint and steel went out of use when the lucifer or friction match was introduced. It seems but a little thing, but that was a great invention-or discovery. There was a kind of tinder made by charring linen cloth that was sometimes used in place of spunk. The rubbing or twisting of sticks or pieces of wood together, to make fire, the writer never saw, but he has seen a blaze raised by a stick held hard against a revolving piece of wood in a lathe. Fire was also made with a sun glass, and has been made with a piece of ice melted to the proper convexity for concentrating the sun's rays.
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For lights in the house at night, the big wood fire in the fire- place in the winter gave a pretty good light, but in warm weather sometimes a torch of pitch pine knots split up was used, but it made a great deal of smoke and could be used only in the chimney. When the people had been here long enough to have tallow of their own raising, they had as good lights in their houses, if they chose to, as anybody, for candles were about the best of anything then known for lights, and they could make their own "tallow dips" at home, and of any size they pleased. They some- times used bee's-wax mixed with tallow for candles, and sometimes used wax alone. Their bee's-wax was not allowed to waste. An iron lamp made by a blacksmith was used for burning lard. It was hung by a cord from the ceiling or beams overhead, and was so made as to keep the lard melted into oil by the heat of the flame. These lamps made a good deal of smoke. These were all dull lights when compared with the gas, kerosene and electric lights of these days-1884-5.
Fishing was not a business among the early settlers. But in the spring, when the shad ran up the river to spawn, every family in Hanover had at least one of its members down at the river, generally at Nanticoke. There were falls in the river there then, and the shad could be caught in immense quantities. Seines were used by some, but the shad could be caught by any one with a hook and line. They needed no bait-only just throw in and pull out, and you would have a shad on your hook nearly every time. Blacksmiths made the hooks. They were large for fish-hooks- they had three prongs with a barb on each, and they hardly ever missed catching a fish at each cast, and they frequently came up with two at once. This method of fishing was especially success- ful one season after the dam was built there. The dam or dams below had been washed out by the floods in the river, and the shad came up to the Nanticoke dam in such numbers that the water seemed thick with them. The whole country around came there and caught all they wanted. Since the dams were built there have been but few fish of any kind in the river. There is a story told that about 1809, one haul was made with a seine at Nanticoke catching 9,999 fish. These exact figures being so near to a round 10,000, only lacking one fish-and it being a "fish story"-let us not
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express the doubt. Col. Wright says it was between 1790 and 1800. Miner speaks of the "great haul" as being made in the year 1778.
Within a few years past black bass have been put in the river, and now, persons skilled in catching them can catch a pretty good string of them in a day with hook and line and the proper bait. It is said they are a peculiar fish to catch, as one never knows from day to day what particular kind of bait will tempt them. Hunters were very successful in those early days, the woods being filled with game. Deer, bears, turkeys, pheasants, wild pigeons, wild geese, wild ducks, quails, ground-hogs, squirrels, rabbits and beavers were very numerous. Beavers' tails were eaten as a great luxury, and their furs were worn as another. Some animals were altogether too numerous, and a bounty was soon offered for their scalps, such as wolves, panthers, catamounts, wild cats, foxes and skunks. Minks and muskrats were hunted for their furs.
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