USA > West Virginia > Preston County > A History of Preston County, West Virginia, V.1 > Part 11
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For nine years a single voting place was deemed enough for nearly 700 square miles of territory. In 1827 two others were established, at Brandonville and David Stemple's. The next year the house of Isaac Criss, in Reno, was designated as the fourth, but in 1836 the polling place was removed to Evansville. In 1849 another was opened at the store of Jacob Guseman on Muddy Creek, and in 1851 the sixth and seventh were authorized, the houses of Samuel Graham and Jonathan Huddleson, in Valley, being selected.
In 1822 the postoffices were Kingwood, German Settlement (Car- mel), Craborchard, Glady Creek Crossroads, and Sandy Crossroads. The postmasters, given in the same order, were William Johnson, Adam Shaffer, Jacob Guseman, Jesse Phillips, and Andrew Armstrong. In 1827 Brandonville was added to the list, with Harrison Hagans as post- master.
The period now under consideration ushered in the smelting of iron
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ore. Perhaps the first effort in this direction was by a man named Car- lile. About 1818 he built Greenville furnace, four miles west of Bruce- ton, his capital stock, it is said, being a barrel of watered whiskey, a box of home-grown tobacco, and a counterfeit note good for ten dollars among the unwary. Having no working capital, he could do nothing with his furnace. It passed through several hands, little use being made of it. About 1837 it was taken hold of by the Greenville Furnace and Mining Company, with an authorized minimum capital of $25,000 and the power to acquire 10,000 acres of land. The incorporators were chiefly Boston men, and Harrison Hagans was the president. A wooden tramway two miles in length was built into Chestnut Ridge, but after a few years the enterprise was abandoned. There remains as vestiges the ruins of a stone building, some traces of the tramroad, and the holes from which the ore was taken out.
Valley furnace, toward the head of Laurel Run, was in operation about the same time. Its capacity was two and a half tons of iron a day. The hands were paid three dollars a week, and were boarded. Charcoal was used in smelting the ore, and the iron, which was not foundry iron, was hauled over the mountain for shipment from New Geneva to Pitts- burg. There was plenty of ore, but the long, heavy haul proved too great an obstacle, and as at Greenville, nothing has been done for about seventy years.
Evidences of salt had long been noticed in the licks where the deer were accustomed to resort. About 1838, Francis W. Deakins and an- other man sunk a well near the Northwestern bridge to the depth of 700 feet. From the salt water they struck they made for a while about three dozen bushels of salt a week. About the same time a man from Pennsylvania attempted salt making on the Big Buffalo, but for some reason neither effort was long sustained.
Nevertheless, there was much industrial activity. It was an age of village and farmhouse handicrafts. Nearly every sizable stream had its gristmill or its up-and-down sawmill, and nearly every village had its tannery. Linen and woolen cloths were extensively made, both in the farm homes and the little factories, like those at Evansville and Guse- man. Toward the end of the period stoves were made at Brandonville, and of so substantial a sort that several are still in use. Barrels, hats, gloves, edged tools, and farm bells were made by various persons, and in a degree the county was self-supporting with respect to trades and manufactures.
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The farmers were steadily enlarging the cleared acreage. In 1850 a seventh of the county was under fence, and 55 percent was included in farms. Wheat was now generally grown, and the almost exclusive use of pone and johnny-cake was giving way to the white loaf. About 1836 the farmers of Valley had somewhat of a craze for growing to- bacco. The surplus product was wagoned to Alexandria, a distance of more than 200 miles. But as a source of ready money livestock was the principal reliance.
Domestic cloth and some of the less bulky products of the farm could profitably be sent to market by way of the pikes, and people were better able to purchase the now cheapened store goods. The neighbor- hoods within reach of the pikes enjoyed a good measure of prosperity, since the passing teamsters and drovers occasioned a good local mar- ket for hay, oats, and other farm produce.
Church buildings of the local denominations were rising here and there. By the close of the period there were 42 common schools, with 840 teachers, besides the two academies at Brandonville and Kingwood, with their three teachers and 70 students. But in spite of the increasing attention to educational needs, it would seem that less than a half of the young people were actually at school, since in 1850 there were 859 adult illiterates.
Local journalism began in 1848 with the appearance of the "Fellows- ville Democrat."
In 1824 a courthouse and jail of stone were erected on the public square. In the same year there was a bounty of $8 for grown wolves and $4 tor cubs. About 1840 the wage of a common laborer was $6 a month.
The taxes which the Prestonian of today pays, with no more than an occasional grumble, would have fallen with crushing weight during the Sub-Pioneer epoch. The rates in force when the county began its separate career were, on farm land, 75 cents per $100; on village prop- erty, $3 per rental of $100; on slaves above the age of 12 years, 70 cents ; on a "Jersey wagon," $2.50; on a horse, 18 cents. In 1815, the tax bill of William Sigler, a prominent citizen of Kingwood, was what would appear to us the trifling sum of $3.50.
There was, however, a rather rigid system of licensing, applicable to taverns, merchants, and peddlers. In 1824, the 884 "tythes" yielded a revenue of $1,547, the poll tax being $1.75. In 1832, the taxes paid to the state amounted to $546.
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In 1836, it was made unlawful for any nonresident to drive domestic animals into Preston, whether to inclosed or uninclosed land, without first obtaining permission from the landowner. Otherwise there was a penalty of 20 to 50 cents, according to the animal, and the animal itself could be impounded when found.
The only instance where capital punishment was ever inflicted in this county took place in 1836.
A planter of the name of Martin was on his way from Baltimore to Parkersburg, intending to go thence by boat to his home in Mississippi. He was traveling in a spring wagon on the Winchester and Clarksburg Road, and was conveying several slaves he had purchased in Baltimore. All the males were children except a half-witted boy of about eighteen years whose name was Ned. Among the females was a woman named Hetty, sorely grieved at being separated from her mate, whom Martin had unsuccessfully tried to purchase. The party lay over night in the "Green Glades," where is now the town of Terra Alta. The camp was in the glade at the present railroad Y. During the night Hetty secured a pistol from the sleeping planter and induced Ned to shoot him. The boy then crushed the head of the unfortunate man with a rock of almost 30 pounds weight. In the morning the boy told Abraham Jeffers, a justice of the peace living close by, that some one had killed his master. Having a suspicion, Jeffers took the boy to David Freeland, whom he told to put a rope in his pocket. On viewing the mangled remains, Freeland exhibited the rope and scared the boy, who now confessed the deed. Freeland favored a lynching, but was restrained by his neighbor, who arrested the slaves and kept them at his house under guard until they could be turned over to the county authorities. Jeffers took charge of the papers and valuables of the murdered man until they could be delivered to a brother, who appeared in November, the crime having been committed in July. Hetty, the real criminal, was cleared on the ground of mental aberration, and the almost idiotic boy was hanged September 3 of the same year on the hillside at Kingwood, just above the Morgantown and Kingwood station. According to statute law, the state paid to the heirs $300 for the executed slave.
During the period the population of the county rose from 3,000 to 12,000. From 1820 to 1830 the rate of increase was 49 percent. In the next decade it was 35 percent, while from 1840 to 1850 it was 70 per- cent. These figures show an unusually active immigration in the third decade, owing to the improved roads and markets. A portion of the in- flux came from the lower Shenandoah Valley in search of cheaper land.
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In 1836 a colony of German Catholics arrived from Cumberland and purchased wild lands of Hagans and Ludington. Their selections lie west and north from Howesville, on the broad upland of Laurel Hill. The soil is not of the best, yet at the time it appeared to good advan- tage because of the timber growing on it. Through the industry of these people, the timbered plateau is now a succession of well-kept farms and good homes. The usual purchase was 100 acres, and the price per acre was $1.50.
It is worthy of notice that, while Monongalia had 10,000 people after Preston was sheared off, its rate of increase during the next 60 years was only one-twelfth of what it was in this county. In 1880 Preston was the more populous by above 25 percent. But during our Pioneer Period the parent county enjoyed the advantage of a navigable river, with Pittsburgh at its mouth. This was a matter of high importance in an age destitute of good roads. But the coming of piked road and rail- road gave the supremacy to Preston, Monongalia having no pike com- parable to the Northwestern, and no railroad at all until 1886. During the present Industrial Period the pendulum has been swinging back. In supplying a very necessary condition for the growth of a large town, the possession of a navigable river has by this time nearly enabled the old county to catch up with the new.
It will now appear that, if the Pioneer Period was a time of founda- tion digging, the sub-Pioneer Period was a time of rearing a super- structure. The genuine backwoods era, with its novelty and its change, its romance and its peril, its hardship and its privation, had passed away. The new period was a time of better homes, of village founding, of road building, andof making more evident the essential features of American civilization.
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CHAPTER XII PRESTON IN 1825.
"John Dee" - His Home, Family and Neighborhood.
In this chapter we introduce the reader to a neighborhood of Preston in the early days of the political existence of the county. Among the native inhabitants of 1825 were men and women of mature age. The restlessness of the early pioneer day has abated, and a local spirit has had time to arise.
In discussing "John Dee of the Dee Settlement," we are telling of a man who is only nominally fictitious. His home may fit almost any locality, though it may be well to consider it as lying in the older and more developed northern half of Preston.
John Dee is the son of a Scotch-Irish immigrant who wedded the daughter of a native of England and came to these hills in 1785, at the close of the war of the Revolution. But his maternal grandmother, and her own mother also, were born on this side of the Atlantic. The senior Dee, whose name was likewise John, opened the farm on which the son is now living. We may not call the present occupant Mr. Dee, since he vigorously objects to being addressed in any such fashion. John, as we shall have to call him, is forty-five years old, and hard labor has brought him to a realizing sense that he is no longer young. Rheumatic aches have begun to appear. Yet he is a tall, wiry, stalwart man, and is the champion reaper of his settlement, with a record of forty-seven dozen sheaves of wheat in a single day.
The name of his wife is Margaret, but everybody calls her Peggy. She is of the same age as John, and is of ample proportions and matronly air Their living children are four sons and four daughters of assorted sizes. All are still at home save the oldest daughter. A still older girl was taken from them in early womanhood, and two boys passed away in childhood. The parents would look their surprise if asked whether the daughter not at home is a teacher or clerk, or pursuing some other independent career. She is a wife and mother, and lives in the settle- ment.
In approaching the house from the "county road," we pass through a half mile of woodland in which there is hardly "a stick of timber missing." The squirrels and rabbits, and the feathered denizens of the
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forest, are in greater number than we are accustomed to see in 1913. The public road we have followed is so narrow as seldom to permit one wagon to pass another with much convenience. It is variegated with rocks, stumps, and mudholes. It looks, indeed, as though used much more often by a man on horseback than by a man in one of the noisy wagons of the period. The run we lately crossed is without wagon bridge or footlog. The person depending on his own locomotion must either find a couple of rails, or else remove his footgear-if he has any-and wade through the waters. Our track through the belt of woodland is really by a bridle-path, although the passage can admit a wagon, and there are, in fact, some traces of wheel ruts.
The hewed-log dwelling of the Dees was erected fifteen years ago. A crowd of men, gathered from an eight-mile radius, put up the walls in a single day. The chinks are filled with small, flat stones, held in place by a plastering of reddish clay that gives the walls the color of ochre. From one end of the roof projects a massive internal chimney of unhewn stone. We detect, a few feet below the eaves, the ends of a row of joists. An opening in each gable is the only other proof of an upper story. One of the low chambers is lighted after a fashion by a half-window containing six panes of glass, the size of a pane being eight inches by ten. The other chamber is lighted only when a shutter is open. Below are three windows, supplying two rooms. The sashes of these lower windows are of unequal size, there being nine lights in the lower ones and three in the upper. One sash is now raised, being held up by a stick.
The cleated entrance door is furnished with very long strap hinges forged by the neighborhood blacksmith. Those of the door in the board partition are likewise of iron, but smaller. The builder of the house was deemed extravagant for dispensing with wooden hinges. Yet of nails there is scarcely more than a double handful in the whole house. An inducement to the free use of wooden pegs lay in the fact that iron was ten cents a pound, even before it was slowly wrought into hand-made nails and hinges. The floors and partitions are of broad poplar boards, sawed to an uneven thickness by an up-and-down saw driven by an overshot waterwheel. Yet, thanks to a judicious use of the adze, the floors are quite level. In building this house, the strong arms of John Dee and his friends supplied nearly all the materials, as well as the labor. It was no child's play to raise a heavy log. It took four men at each end and one in the middle. The ends had to be kept
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level to prevent a slipping, and perhaps a resulting accident. Even the roof, of riven clapboards, had to be held in place by heavy weight-poles, with their accompaniments of eve-bearers, ribs, and knees. But since this help was gratuitous, save when it was returned in kind, the outlay in cash for materials not otherwise obtainable was very small.
Before entering the open door we notice another building, also of hewn logs, but smaller and not so well made. As an annex to the house it is exceedingly useful. Much farther away, a partially fallen chimney, a collapsed roof, and some mossy, decaying logs are all that remain of the round-log cabin put up by the senior Dee the year of his arrival. The second dwelling was built by him ten years later. In the years to come, a son of the younger Dee will weatherboard the third domicile, yet will finally abandon it in favor of a plain frame house of two stories, painted white, and with a shingled roof. By this time a shapeless rock heap on a grassy slope will alone keep alive the tradition as to where stood the original dwelling of the Dees.
The apartment we enter is the larger of the lower divisions of the house. It is kitchen, dining-room, and living-room, all in one. All the rooms are seemingly unfinished. The wall-logs are in full view within, as are likewise the hewn joists overhead. The fireplace in the main room is such a cavern that it takes the farmer a half of each winter to provide the firewood for warming the room and a portion of the air out- side, a large share of the heat escaping up the flue. The breadth of the fireplace is seven feet, and it takes the united strength of the farmer and his oldest son to put a backlog in position. It would be less labor to dig coal from the hillside, yet there is scarcely a thought of using the black diamonds except when the blacksmith of the settlement mines a sackful for his forge. As for the housekeepers, they would regard this underground fuel as intolerably dirty for domestic use.
Although the living room is not so easy to keep clean as one with plastered walls and painted woodwork, yet Peggy Dee's style of house- keeping is about as good as we can reasonably expect. Her well-popu- lated and not very commodious log farmhouse presents a different prob- lem from the modern cottage of eight rooms. When her daughters in the course of time move into their new framed houses, they will take along with them the somewhat free and easy methods of the old home. There will be some lack of harmony between the new style of house and the old style of housekeeping. But their own granddaughters will be reared in modern homes, and will justly be esteemed very tidy house- keepers.
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The long table is the handiwork of a cabinet-maker in the nearest village. The other furniture, such as there is, was also made within the county. The chairs are few. The most comfortable one has a sheepskin resting against the back. The younger members of the family circle use stools and benches. There are no pictures on the walls. Above a shelf is a small looking-glass in a very plain frame. On the shelf are two horn combs and various other articles, including a few bottles, stoppered according to their size with a small cob or a wound rag. The deer antlers on the opposite side of the room support three long-bar- reled flintlock rifles, with their powder-horns and bullet pouches. The ounce balls from one alone of these now ancient weapons have brought death to several score of deer, to say nothing of other game. Elsewhere we discern a bullet-mould. On a mantel are a small, plain wooden clock, a book or two, much the worse for handling, and a miscellany of other things. On a row of pegs are articles of masculine wearing ap- parel. Each peg has its owner, who expects his possession of it to re- main inviolate.
In a corner is a skillet lid. When a fire is to be made, John brings it to the front of the fireplace and puts on it a piece of maple punk, a piece of tow, and a few grains of powder. Then, holding his big rifle in his left hand, he kneels over the lid and gives the flint several sharp blows with his pocket knife. The resulting sparks ignite the powder, a flame is communicated to the punk and the tow, and presently a fire is blazing among the logs. But a device has just come into the house which may be used as a substitute. It is a little oblong tin box with two partitions. In the larger of these are some punk and tow, and also a flint and a long cord. In the top of the smaller partition is a brass wheel an inch and a half in diameter, with teeth like a clock wheel. The cord is wound around the pin, on which the wheel freely revolves, and the flint is placed in position. There is a quick jerk on the cord, and the wheel rotates too rapidly for us to distinguish its teeth, and a shower of sparks falls from the flint upon the combustibles below.
In one corner is a bed. The bedstead is massive and high. The feather-ticks are upheld by a network of creaking cords, and are hid- den by a figured coverlet of home manufacture. Underneath is a trundle-bed. But the home-made box cradle has reached the end of its long term of service, and has been retired to the upper floor.
At the foot of the bed is the ladder leading to the upper rooms. A big black cat is coming down with as much ease as any other member
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of the family. Were we to climb the ladder we would find two broad, low chambers, looking very bare except for the beds, of which there are two or three in each room, the pile of extra bedding stacked on the floor, the big hardwood chest, and a considerable quantity of wearing ap- parel dangling from pegs. Limited as is the house room, and large as is the family, there is always a place over night for not only one guest, but more than one.
Preparations for dinner are now on, and are watched by Peggy's visiting mother, who, with a red cloth wound about her head and a cob pipe in her almost toothless mouth, is occupying the easy chair. But the grown girls of the settlement rarely smoke, and as yet they know nothing of snuff. Close before the fire is a smooth, semi-carbonized board, on which lies a browning johnny cake. The housewife proceeds to turn it, so that the under side may get done. A pot simmering above a bed of coals contains bacon and vegetables. In another, hot water is bubbling. John would not be true to the usage of the country were he not to insist on our breaking bread with him. So we sit down to a bountiful repast of corn-bread, garden beans, potatoes, bacon, ber- ries, spicewood tea, rye coffee, and milk. If it were Sunday, a loaf of white bread and a plump pie would grace the table, although the wheat loaf is not quite relished by some of the household. If it were later in the year, there would be a dish of apple-butter and another of stewed dried apples or berries. But there are no jellies, and no dish of fruit from a glass jar, the process of airtight canning being yet to come into vogue. "Store tea" and "store coffee" are great rarities on John's table. As for rice, macaroni, or a dessert of bananas, we would never see such articles on John's table from the beginning of a year to its end. But during the colder months we would see venison, wild turkey, or pheas- ant, and perhaps bear meat, or else some fish. The bill of fare is almost strictly a product of these hills.
John and certain of his neighbors maintain a "fishpot" a few miles away on the Cheat. Three hundredweight of the finny tribe may be taken in a single night at a "watch-fish," an occasionel sucker weighing six to eight pounds. The fish are caught with a rake pressed against the barricade of laths and fall-board. Fish under one pound in weight are allowed to go through.
The dishes taken out of the cupboard are meager in variety and very plain in pattern. The plates are white with a blue border. Wooden and pewter spoons and wooden and common earthenware utensils are
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in evidence as we watch the preparations for dinner. The knives and forks have wooden handles.
Out in the dooryard is what Peggy calls her Dutch oven. It is built of stone. She makes a fire in it, and after the wood is reduced to coals she clears out the embers and puts in her loaves of. wheat dough. The heat which has passed into the stonework assures the baking.
John's buttonless blue hunting shirt is a woolen garment, secured at the waist by a belt attached behind, and fastened in front with a buckle. Falling over the shoulders i sa cape attached at the neck. The hem is fringed. The man's lower garment is of jeans, and on his feet are buckskin moccasins. In summer he wears a straw hat with a de- cided lop in the broad brim. In winter he usually wears his foxskin cap, though he now possesses a cloth hat made in his market village. As for an overcoat, there is none in the house. John wears his hair rather long, but in accordance with a custom of his time he displays no beard. However, he does not shave often, and a look at his face tells us his razor is seldom keen.
The costume of the wife is not of calico but of striped plaid, yet otherwise is much the same as that of the granddaughter, who in our day lives on the same farm. The grown sons and daughter are attired somewhat like their parents. The younger girls have plaid dresses of rather pretty colors, and the "least" child wears a flannel garment reaching to its ankles. For their heads the mother and oldest daughter have sunbonnets and hoods. The smaller girls seldom use any head covering except a scarf for cold weather. Knitting is universal among the females of the settlement, and the hoods, scarfs, and socks are home-made. But at the time of our visit John alone has any artificial covering for his feet.
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