USA > West Virginia > Lewis County > A history of Lewis County, West Virginia > Part 8
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).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32
After providing for sufficient corn to furnish bread and hominy for his family throughout the year, the chief agricultural interest of the pioneer was in his live stock.
103
ECONOMIC BEGINNINGS
None of the farmers thought in the beginning of clear- ing land for pasture, though most of the early comers transported their goods to the west on the backs of horses and drove cattle and hogs and sometimes a few sheep before them when they first came. The live stock were belled and turned into the open woods, where they fed upon succulent grasses, wild pea vines and the edible leaves of some of the trees. The horses and cattle were allowed free range of the woods during the day, but at night they were driven in by the children of the family when they did not come home of their own accord. The stealing of horses and the killing of cattle were the ob- jects of many of the Indian raids against the settlements. Hundreds of horses were ridden away to the Indian vil- lages. Cattle were never stolen from the western Vir- ginia settlements, because they could not travel fast enough to allow the Indians to escape pursuit. Many were killed and their carcasses left to decay on the ground merely to gratify the destructive instincts of the savages and to make life on the frontier intolerable for the settlers.
Cattle were kept at first only for their milk. Their flesh was not of such good quality as the beef raised now in Lewis County, and besides there was plenty of bear meat and venison which could be had for the killing. Later, when the national government built forts along the Ohio, the live stock industry of the upper West Fork river received a great stimulus. The large garrisons maintained at the forts required a supply of meat greater than could be secured from hunting or from the farms in the immediate vicinity. Cattle were collected from dif- ferent parts of the West Fork valley and driven overland from Clarksburg as early as 1790 and 1791 by way of the new road to Neal's station, which had been opened by William Haymond, Sr., soon after the establishment of Harrison County.
Until their numbers became too great for the forage, the cattle were usually fat after ranging the woods for
104
A HISTORY OF LEWIS COUNTY
a summer season. As the herds became larger the set- tlers sought to augment the amount of forage by going into the woods and cutting poplar, linden and other trees both in summer and winter. Cattle were allowed to run out all winter, subsisting on corn fodder, browse, or other forage. As a rule they were extremely poor in the spring. There was no attempt to breed the cattle scien- tifically ; indeed only scrub stock was to be found west of the mountains in the eighteenth century. "Linebacks" were common, as shown by old sale bills, and some of them were good dairy cattle though they were not as a rule good beef cattle.
Sheep raising was a necessary industry in the new community, and it was perhaps the most discouraging of all to the settlers. Many of the pioneers brought a few sheep with them in order to raise wool for the manufac- ture of cloth and yarn. The small flocks were given the greatest possible care to prevent their being killed by wolves. In the thinly settled districts it was impossible for many years to allow the sheep to run in the woods, and they were therefore kept on clearings adjacent to the houses of the pioneers. The depredations of the wolves, which sometimes grew so bold as to come to the enclosures in broad daylight and throttle the sheep at the very doors of the cabins, always kept the number of sheep very low. As a substitute for wool, flax was grown on almost every farm, and the housewives of the early day were skilled in the manufacture of coarse cloth from it by means of the hackle and the spinning wheel.
Hogs were owned in large numbers by the pioneers. "Hog and hominy" had an important place on the tables of the pioneers. Pork was a welcome change from veni- son and bear meat, especially since it was of good quality. The hogs were always fat in the autumn from feeding on the plentiful mast, and the flavor of the meat was sometimes preferred to that of corn-fed hogs. Of all the live stock of the farmers, hogs alone were able to brave all the dangers of the forests and come out unscathed.
105
ECONOMIC BEGINNINGS
For many years they were allowed to run wild. Each owner had an old boar at the head of his drove which would protect it against the attacks of wild animals, and the boars, with their long tusks, were able to ward off all comers. Instances have been known of their having killed bears; and even men were sometimes compelled to climb trees when charged by one of the fierce brutes. The hogs did not seek the protection of the cabins as the other live stock did, and often they were neglected by their owners until different herds united, making prop- erty in hogs exceedingly difficult to identify. Much of the business of early county courts was in determining law suits concerning the ownership of hogs.
To obviate the difficulty of determining ownership the farmers adopted the practice of branding their live stock. "A swallowfork in the right ear," or "two notches on the lower side of the right ear," were marks of prom- inent stock raisers of that day. In order to prove owner- ship in case of a lawsuit, the mark was recorded with the clerk of the county court.
Hunting and trapping, which had begun even before settlements were made, long remained the principal in- dustries of the country. From the time of John Simp- son, adventurers penetrated into the wilderness to shoot deer, bears and buffaloes and to trap beavers, otters and smaller animals for their furs. Buffalo robes were in great demand east of the mountains, and furs were eager- ly sought by the merchants of the old world. The trap- pers usually selected their fields of operations in the autumn and established their camps. During the winter they secured as many furs as they could and then left their exposed camps in the early spring before the Indian forays began. Their furs were hidden in a hole of water in some stream and securely tied to prevent their being washed away. There they would be preserved for many months. In the summer the trappers would return to their caches with packhorses and transport their furs to the nearest market.
106
A HISTORY OF LEWIS COUNTY
Some were carried over the mountains to Winches- ter on packhorses; others, and perhaps the greater num- ber, were loaded on boats and taken to Pittsburgh where they were sold to the fur dealers. In 1791 or 1792, a party of hunters came to Leading creek and other branches of the Little Kanawha river where they made an extended hunt. They carried their spoils, consisting of beaver skins, buffalo robes and bear skins and meat, by canoe down the Little Kanawha river to Neal's sta- tion and thence up the Ohio to Marietta, where they dis- posed of the furs to traders and the meat to the garrison at Fort Harmar.
Exports of furs by professional hunters and trappers were of little economic advantage to the country. They did not add to the wealth of the permanent residents or improve the conditions of living. On the contrary, as the supply of fur-bearing animals decreased, conditions of living on the frontier became harder. It was for- tunate for the settlers that there was in the beginning a large number of fur-bearing animals in the country, for they afforded practically the only convenient article of export. Every settler was a hunter and most were trap- pers. The furs which they secured in the winter became the basis of their first commerce with the older settle- ments. It was the custom for every settler to make at least one trip to Winchester every year to procure sup- plies.
As a rule their wants were few and simple. Ammu- nition, salt and iron were the only absolute necessities that could not be secured from the forests.
The trip was made by packhorse over trails only wide enough for a horse to walk without danger of scrap- ing off the packs against trees. There were no hotels on the way at which the pioneer could stop and procure food for himself and forage for his horses. For practi- cally the whole distance there were no settlements. The traveler was compelled to sleep out under the stars and eat the johnny-cake which he had brought for his lunch
107
ECONOMIC BEGINNINGS
and such game as he was able to kill on the way. The horses secured their food by foraging in the woods, for it was not customary to burden them with grain. It was considered that two bushels, or 168 pounds, of salt was all that one horse should be made to carry.
The journey was often very dangerous. The wild beasts were of course a menace to the traveler. There were also undesirable characters who lay in wait for an opportunity to waylay and kill the lonely traveler in order to secure his horses and goods. The cause of great- est fear, however, was the intense cold of the mountains in winter. It is related that John Hacker was caught one night in a terrific snowstorm somewhere high in the Alleghanies. He tried to make a fire from the flint and tinder he carried, but could not on account of the in- creasing numbness of his hands and arms. He would certainly have perished but for the fact that he bethought himself to lash his two horses together and lie between their backs with two deerskins over him.
Once when John Sims and Henry McWhorter were making the trip to Winchester together, Sims was over- come by the cold while walking and sat down by the side of the trail to rest. His companion, realizing the danger, cut a beech withe and began beating him with it. Sims roused and made for his tormentor. He failed to catch him and, after a short distance, again sat down. Again Mc Whorter vigorously plied the beech withe and again Sims became angry and attempted to lay hands on Mc- Whorter. After enduring several beatings in this way Sims at length became warm enough to proceed.
The difficulties of carrying on commerce with Win- chester were so great that the settlers could not have brought to the West Fork anything other than the barest necessities of life even if their stock of furs had been suffi- cient to purchase luxuries. When John Reger married Elizabeth West at West's fort in 1788, the bride wore a wonderful store gown of calico which the groom had pur- chased in Winchester, having walked the entire trip with
108
A HISTORY OF LEWIS COUNTY
a gun on his shoulder. The incident caused such a flurry of excitement in the settlement that it has been handed down in tradition to the present day.
The commerce with Pittsburgh, which later became considerable, was of slower growth. The settlers took their furs and meat down the West Fork and Mononga- hela rivers in canoes and flatboats and exchanged them for powder and lead. They also resorted to the village to have their guns repaired by the gunsmiths there. Salt at Pittsburgh was more expensive than at Winches- ter, and it was more difficult to transport up the river. The shipbuilding industry which developed around Pitts- burgh, created a market for walnut logs from the upper Monongahela.
The building of forts on the Ohio river, as we have seen, furnished a market for the agricultural produce of the West Fork valley, and led afterwards to considerable trade.
Clarksburg, the county seat and the metropolis of the upper Monongahela valley, was without a store until 1788, and perhaps after that time. The records of that year show that one Joseph Anderson was licensed "to retail goods in this County as the law directs." Whether Anderson was a merchant or a peddler is not clear. There is, unfortunately, no corroborative tradition. The fact that there was a pioneer on the upper West Fork with sufficient enterprise to make a business of trans- porting goods from the east and exchanging them for furs and other produce was a long step in advance. It marked the beginning of trade-of an important division of labor-in the community.
The lack of roads was keenly felt by all the set- tlers in northwestern Virginia. Pittsburgh had taken the lead as a commercial center largely owing to the fact that a good military road had been built from Cumber- land by Braddock in 1754, which had been somewhat im- proved and kept in repair after that time. Shortly after the close of the Revolution, when it had been definitely
109
ECONOMIC BEGINNINGS
determined by the boundary commission that Pittsburgh was in Pennsylvania and not in Virginia, the General Assembly, desiring to cement the upper Monongahela valley to the eastern section of the state by commercial ties, opened a wagon road from Winchester via Romney to Morgantown. This was the famous State road. In 1786, the legislature appointed a commission of Harrison County citizens to lay out and open a wagon road from some point on the State road to the mouth of the Little Kanawha river. The road was first located and con- structed from Clarksburg east to some point on the Cheat river, now in Preston County. It could not have been a well constructed thoroughfare until a later date. The first wagon did not reach Clarksburg until 1798, twelve years after the road was located. West of Clarksburg the road was only a blazed trail through the wilderness until the beginning of the new century.
The roads which had been established by the Har- rison County court to connect different sections of the county were mere trails cut through the woods, barely wide enough to allow a packhorse to pass over them without scraping off his pack. On account of the value of every bit of cleared ground no road was ever located through a clearing. It followed the bounds of the clear- ing on one side. The unfavorable location of many of the roads in Lewis County at the present time is due to this fact. A traveler inquiring his way from one place to another would be told to follow the beech or other blazes. Cross roads or branch roads were marked with blazings on different kinds of trees.
In spite of the lack of good roads, there must have been some travel through Clarksburg, for there were taverns in the county seat from the beginning of Harri- son County. This fact is partly explained by the fact that many citizens came from the outlying sections of
110
A HISTORY OF LEWIS COUNTY
the county to attend court, but there were also many emi- grants with their worldly possessions on packhorses, passing through the town on their way to lands farther west.
There was no postoffice in the village until 1798. The postoffice address of citizens of Hacker's creek was "Winchester, Va." until that date.
CHAPTER IX. LIFE OF THE PIONEERS
Conditions of living among the pioneers were simple in the extreme. There were no social castes, neither were there persons of great wealth or extreme poverty. All were the owners of four hundred acres of land which might be worth a hunting dog and a captured rifle or it might not; it depended partly upon the location but far more upon the extent of the clearings. It was impossi- ble for a man to have a house much better than those of his neighbors; if he did, it was because he was more in- dustrious or a better workman. If there was an aristoc- racy of fine houses it was not a bad sort of aristocracy. The furniture in one log house could not be far su- perior to that in other cabins nor could there be a much greater quantity of imported utensils, for the lim- ited transportation facilities prevented settlers from bringing more than the barest necessities.
The settler usually walked all the way across the mountains with his goods on packhorses. Only the sim- plest tools could be brought. The ax was of course indis- pensable; so also was the mattock for grubbing, the hoe for cultivating and a small plow point for stirring the ground. The frow was necessary in splitting shingles for the roof of the house. An indispensable tool was the auger, which was used for boring holes for pins to fasten various parts of the house together in the total absence of nails of any kind. A few pots and pans and spoons and skillets and an oven made up the kitchen furniture. The spinning wheel, or such parts of it as could not easily be made in the woods, and a pair of wool-cards made the re- mainder of the furniture. There were also a supply of salt, some ammunition, seeds of various kinds including
112
A HISTORY OF LEWIS COUNTY
sometimes some flower seeds, and corn for bread in greater or less quantity, depending upon the amount of other goods brought and the number of pack horses.
Upon arriving on the land selected by the settler for his future home, he chose the best possible site for his cabin near a spring. He then began to fell trees nearby and cut them into the proper lengths for the side and end walls of his cabin. If there were neighbors, they would assist the newcomer in his house-raising, which would often be completed within a day or two. The first dwell- ing was extremely rude and hurriedly made. The logs composing it were untouched by the ax except near the ends where they were notched and roughly fitted to- gether. The space between the logs was blocked up with short pieces of rails and small stones, and the wall was made tight by daubing all the crevices with mud. The chimney was built of rough stones half way up the end of the house, and for the remainder of the distance there was a crib of sticks. Both stones and sticks were cemented together with clay mortar.
After the first year the settler usually erected a more pretentious house of tulip poplar logs hewed square and notched so carefully that only a small crack was left be- tween them.
The cabins of the pioneers reflected the conditions under which they lived. When John Hacker first came to Hacker's creek the whites and the Indians were at peace, and the first cabin he built is said to have been crudely built of logs, and with the cracks chinked with slabs and mud. The chimney stood at the end of the house on the outside. Later the houses were built of logs which had been nicely squared so that there were only small crevices to be filled up, and the chimney was placed on the inside of the house to prevent the Indians' tearing away the stones from the mud mortar which held them and gaining an entrance through the fireplace, which af- forded a far larger opening in the log wall than the door. With the chimney on the inside of the house, the in-
113
LIFE OF THE PIONEERS
habitants were protected on all sides by a wall of logs which the Indians could destroy only by burning. Some of the great interior chimneys took up nearly all the space in one end of the cabin, and afforded openings for two fire places on the ground floor and one on the sec- ond floor. The third development was the fortress-like cabin which could readily stand a siege provided the de- fenders were numerous and active. A second floor was added, which was sometimes made to project about a foot beyond the walls of the lower rooms. From it the settlers conducted their principal defense. They were en- abled to gain a wider field of fire, and at the same time shoot down upon any of the warriors who might attempt to force an entrance through the doorway or set fire to the house.
The door of the cabin was built especially strong so as to resist any attempt to force it open. It was com- posed of two thicknesses of heavy boards hewn out and fastened together diagonally with wooden pins. The door was hung on ponderous iron or wooden hinges that reached nearly across it. Space was sometimes left for windows, but heavy shutters were provided. The floor was made of puncheons, that is, thick boards split out of white oak trees in the same manner that shingles are made. They were afterwards smoothed with an ax or drawing knife, No nails were used in the construction of the houses except perhaps for the door. They were too scarce. The roof was held in place by timbers laid on the clapboards. Sometimes a log was placed on the roof just above the door, so fixed that it could be released from the inside upon the heads of Indians who tried to gain entrance. Secure within the walls of such houses the frontier settler could bid defiance to a small band of savages until help should arrive from the other settlers.
The early homes of the settlers were not uncomfort- able. In summer the greased paper in the windows was taken out, and the air was free to circulate. In winter even with the greased paper in the windows the air was
114
A HISTORY OF LEWIS COUNTY
also free to circulate through the house, especially through the loft or second story where the boys of the family slept. The snow frequently sifted through the spaces between the rough shingles or was blown through the cracks in the end of the house. The deerskins under which they slept would be covered with snow in the morning after every snow storm. On the lower floor it was comfortable on the long winter evenings when the hickory logs roared in the huge fireplace. The family sat around the fire doing some simple tasks to while away the time. The hunting dog toasted his nose at the very edge of the fireplace in front of the group.
The furniture of the earliest settlers was extremely simple. Chairs were frequently only blocks of wood which had been hewn into shape. Beds consisted of poles laid upon a framework built in the corner of the house and supported by one block or post. As might be ex- pected they were exceedingly uncomfortable. Deerskins were the coverings universally used. Bishop Francis Asbury wrote in his journal an account of a trip to Clarksburg, in 1788. After an all day's ride he came to a cabin where the settler agreed to take him in. All the beds were already occupied. "I lay along the floor on a few deerskins with the fleas," he says, and continued fur- ther, "Oh, how glad I should be for a clean plank to lie on, as preferable to most of the beds, and where the beds are in a bad state the floors are worse. This country will require much work to make it tolerable."
The tables consisted of two or three slabs with one end stuck into the crack between two logs and the other end supported on two legs in the middle of the cabin. Wooden platters and bowls were used almost to the ex- clusion of other ware, and the settlers drank from gourds. Pewter ware was considered unusually elegant. Most of the early blacksmith shops had copper moulds for mak- ing pewter spoons. China ware was slow in being adopt- ed by the pioneers. It was many years before the old "ironstone china" made in England and considered ele-
115
LIFE OF THE PIONEERS
gant by the newcomers from east of the mountains found a place on the tables in the Trans-Alleghany region. It was too easily broken, and besides it dulled the hunting knives of the pioneers.
Cooking utensils were few and simple. The meat was generally prepared in a frying pan or roasted by placing a piece of meat on a sharp stick and holding it over the coals. A cooking pot for boiling vegetables and meat, a tea-kettle and a covered oven consisting of a large pan with an iron cover, completed the list of vessels found in most of the cabins. The food was nearly always well cooked. The pioneers delighted to have it said of them that they set good tables.
Corn and game were the staple articles of food for every frontier household. The venison was sometimes cured for emergency use in the winter by "jerking" it. The process consisted of cutting it into narrow strips and drying it before the fire. It was carried on every journey along with the johnny-cake, and eaten raw. Corn pone and johnny-cake were the only kinds of bread used for breakfast and dinner, and the children of the settlers who came from the centers of a higher civiliza- tion sometimes forgot the taste of wheat bread. It is re- lated that once when John Hacker made a trip to the South Branch for salt and ammunition, he brought some biscuit on his return, and gave it to a small child. The child looked at it a moment, then evidently thinking it some strange toy, he began rolling it on the floor. It is said that the father wept to think that his children had been so long in the wilderness that they had forgotten the taste of bread. The evening meal was perhaps the simplest of all. The staple dish was mush and milk when it was possible to procure the milk. Mush was also eaten with maple syrup, bear's grease or gravy. Hog and hominy was a substantial dish. Vegetables and fruits seem to have been used only in the summer, fall and early winter, owing to the limited supply grown and the inroads made upon the stock of provisions by large
116
A HISTORY OF LEWIS COUNTY
families of hungry children. "Few settlers had land in cultivation more than sufficient to raise food for their own consumption," says an early resident of northwestern Virginia, writing of conditions in 1792. "Generally by spring there would be no bread in the country and people lived on greens, of spontaneous growth, which were daily gathered by women and children until they could raise vegetables. It was some time before we had tillable land enough to raise wheat. Butter we could not indulge in. with our maple sugar at six cents a pound and a few eggs was all we could market to get money to pay taxes."
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.