Reminiscences include: bored logs as water pipes, springs, education, religion, family, story-telling, spooks, childhood fears, Christmas, storing apples in holes, spinning wool, flax, linen clothing, cheese-making, crickets in house, early rising, fireplace, brick oven, firewood, making tallow candles, candlelight, snow in cold house, beef, salt pork, raising and slaughtering pigs, buttermilk pop, thickened milk, the Anti-Rent conflict.

Excerpt from Page 6

"The house stood near the highway overlooking a broad valley, and back of it rose a steep smooth hill that had a wooded top. We called this hill the Old Clump. On its slope, forty or fifty rods from the house, was our spring, and the water ran down to the yard through piping made of bored logs. The logs would rot in a few years so they’d leak, and we’d have to dig ‘em up and lay new ones. We’d get the logs from the woods, and a man would come from the village with a long augur, and bore them and shape the ends to fit together. Some one told father that poplar was good for this purpose, and he tried it once, but it decayed so soon he didn’t use it again.

“The spring never gave out while I lived on the old place, nor has it given out since until recently. It seems as though there was less rainfall than formerly. There are streams in which I used to catch trout, where now you can’t catch a lizard. They’ve dwindled wonderfully for some reason or other. The water’s gone. I suppose the time is coming when the old planet will dry up, but the drying during a man’s lifetime would hardly be observable.

“My father’s education went no further than the three R’s, but that didn’t prevent his teaching for a few winters. Mother was one of his pupils. She learned to read, but not to write or cipher.

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“Father thought he was full of the old Adam when he was young, and he used to tell of how quarrelsome and wicked he had been. But he was always true at heart and never would lie, steal, cheat, backbite, or anything of that sort. In early manhood he ‘experienced religion,’ and joined the Old-School Baptist Church, and stopped horse-racing and card-playing, which were considered disreputable, ceased swearing, and went to church.

“He was easily irritated, but as a rule his irritation found vent in loud and harmless barking, and so does mine.

“It is from my mother that I inherit my idealism and my romantic tendencies. She was of Irish descent. Her maiden name was Kelly.

“I had five brothers and four sisters, and was the seventh of the ten children. None of us had more than five children. I had one, a son. All together we had only fifteen.

“You know how much children in the same family will differ. I was an odd one among those at my old home. When we had visitors and they got to asking the children’s names and ages, and my turn came, they’d say to the folks, ‘That ain’t your boy, is it?’

“I used to feel as cheap, and I’d hang my head in shame. Well, I wasn’t like the others. I was different, and always have been -- not better, only different.

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“About the first thing I remember is of being scared. Father and mother had gone off to Pennsylvania on a visit and left us children to take care of things while they were away. We got along well enough in the daytime, but, come night, we were lonesome. I know that the evening after the folks started, the older children were out quite late. I believe they’d gone down to the village. It got dark, and still they didn’t come home, and we three or four younger ones sat huddled up in the kitchen and didn’t dare go to bed. I can’t say what scared the others, but I recall looking into the dark cavity of the bedroom -- that was father’s and mother’s room, and the door was open -- and every time I looked into the bedroom’s gloom and vacancy I was filled with dread and foreboding.

“We used to hear a good many spook stories. Gran’ther Kelly was a great hand for them. His home was eight miles away over a mountain, but he used to come and spend a few days with us occasionally, and he moved to a little house on the borders of our farm when I was about eleven years old. He’d been one of Washington’s soldiers and had had so much experience that we couldn’t help accepting as gospel truth what he said. He believed in spooks just as much as I don’t believe in them, and he’d sit down in the evening and tell ghost stories by the hour. It would make our youthful hair stand on end as we listened to the tale of the things he’d

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seen -- those dreadful apparitions. He used to tell bear stories, war stories, and Indian stories, but the spooks made the most vivid impression.

“Father had two barns near the old home and they were both fearsome places to me. One stood just across the road from the house, but from the age of ten to fourteen I wouldn’t go into that barn after dark lest some hobgoblin should get me. I was afraid to visit the other barn down in the next field even in the daytime. We kept cows there, and each morning it was my task to turn them out and clean the stables.

“I would enter the barn in fear and trembling. My anxiety was greatest in the stable on account of a hole there in the floor that opened down into the barn cellar. This cavity was always dark and mysterious, and I used to call the dog and send him under the barn to drive the spooks away. Then I’d work like a beaver to get the stables cleaned before the dog got sick of his job and came out. My fears all had their source in gran’ther’s stories of witches and things. He was really remarkable good at telling such stories. He was very superstitious, and he gave them a true air of mystery.

“Up the highway from the house was a little cemetery at a turn of the road, and it troubled me a good deal. I knew that spooks liked to haunt just such places, and you couldn’t have drawn me there with ox-chains after dark. I didn’t’ think of spooks in

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broad daylight, but when dusk came and I had to pass the burying-ground, I would walk fast and step lightly. I was too scared to run, for it seemed to me, if I did run, I’d have a whole pack of ghosts right on my heels. I suppose many persons have the same feeling in similar circumstances.

“My dread of spooks wasn’t outgrown until I got old enough to make evening calls on the girls. Then my fears suddenly left me. I’d been thinking I couldn’t go to see the girls at all and stay out late, I was so afraid as soon as night came. What a relief it was! I could come home past the burying-ground in the little hours of the morning without a tremor.

“I don’t think I was naturally timid. The fear was the result of having my imagination stimulated and distorted by what I heard. People believed thoroughly in apparitions then. I wasn’t scared by sounds in nature. Nothing that I knew about frightened me. I was never afraid of thunder-storms. I rather like the racket and was agreeably impressed by the elemental display. I heard owls hoot, but I didn’t mind that, for I knew the birds that did the hooting. Neither did I mind the barking of foxes. I would hear them on the hill back of the house, and their barking was a wild, weird sort of sound that I liked.

“But if I had to go through the woods in the dark, I was scared. I recollect driving the oxen home in the late twilight along the edge of some woodland

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down below the house, and how fearful I was. I didn’t know what I feared, but my nerves were affected by the strangeness of the woods in the coming gloom and the liability to see things. The woods themselves were quiet enough. They always are. You know Thoreau says: ‘A howling wilderness never howls. The howling is done chiefly by the imagination of the traveler.’

“Probably most children have fears similar to mine and go through the same kind of experiences. I doubt, though, if my boy ever did. He certainly was told no ghost stories. Still, he believed in Santa Claus. I think I never had that belief myself. My folks didn’t cultivate the Santa Claus myth. We children would hang up our stockings in the chimney-corner the night before Christmas, but the next morning we always knew where the things in ‘em came from. Perhaps there’d be cakes mother had baked for us, or it might be that the older children had put in some ridiculous things like shavings or a raw potato.

“When my son was a little fellow, he believed in Santa Claus through and through. One day, shortly before Christmas, he found a sled out in the barn. He came to the house in the greatest excitement about that sled. My wife and I said, ‘Perhaps Santa Claus intends to give it to you, and like enough you will get it on Christmas morning.’

“Sure enough, when he woke up on Christmas

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Day, there was the sled hitched to his bed. That made a deep impression on him. Later we told him there was no Santa Claus, and he felt as if he had suffered a personal loss. I remember how he sighed and said, ‘Well, if there ain’t any Santa Claus there’s an awful lot of lying in this world.’

“Speaking about being afraid, there was a half-crazy old man named John Corbin who used to wander about the Catskills country. We children made a good deal of a bugbear of him. He was perfectly harmless and innocent, but we were in mortal terror of the old man. Whenever we saw any one coming slowly along the road the way he did, we’d say, ‘Guess that’s old John Corbin!’ Then we scurried over the fence and hid. He was simply a little off, you know, and mumbled to himself as he walked. He had an orchard down near the schoolhouse, and he buried his apples there in the ground. Some of the bigger boys broke into his apple-hole and stole apples, and I can remember just how he caught them at it and chased them away and shook his stick at them.

“Most every family used to have an apple-hole. We had one up back of our house and each fall stowed fifteen or twenty bushels of our best apples there. Toward spring we’d dig them out, and they had a delightful flavor that apples kept in the house didn’t have. We’d reach down through the opening we’d cut in the frozen ground, and part away the

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straw that lay over them, and pick out such apples as we wanted. We became so expert that we could tell the various kinds by the sense of touch. There was a difference in the shape and in the surface. I recognized the winesap by some peculiarity of the stem. All kinds were there in the apple-hole mixed together. A considerable portion of them we took to school to eat with our dinners.

“Mother used to spin wool. She had a big spinning wheel upstairs in the chamber, and when she was using it you’d hear it every few moments go wz-z-z-z! and you’d hear her footsteps as she walked backward and forward. These were pleasant enough sounds, but they grew rather monotonous when you heard them all day. In the hog-pen chamber back of the house mother carded wool into rolls, and she had a loom there on which she wove cloth.

“I helped her by running the quill-wheel and winding thread on the hollow elder-stalks she used in the shuttles. I can’t say that I liked the work much. A boy isn’t apt to be fond of work. It isn’t natural that he should be. He’d rather go fishing or hunting.

“I pulled flax some, and mother spun and wove it and made garments out of it for us to wear. That linen was amazingly stout. If you fell from a tree, and trousers or shirt made out of that stuff caught on a branch, you’d hang there. The cloth wouldn’t tear. Our new linen shirts were pretty harsh when

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 we put them on at the beginning of warm weather. They were full of shives, and scratched like the blazes. They resembled the hair shirts that were worn by the pious old fellows of the Middle Ages, and if you were doing penance for any of your sins they were good things to have. Use and the rubbing they got on the washboard served to break up the shives by August, and then we’d begin to take a little comfort in wearing the shirts. At first the cloth was grayish in color, but in time it faded to white as the result of scrubbing in soapy water and laying out on the grass to dry.

“We didn’t have underclothing in summer, but in winter we wore red flannel undershirts that would shrink in the wash and get thick as boards.
“I used to help make cheese. I was very fond of eating the curd till one day I ate so much of it I was sick -- made a hog of myself, you know. I got thoroughly cloyed that time and never have been able to eat any curd since. But I like the pot-cheese that is made out of lobbered milk.

“We got up at five o’clock in the morning much of the year. In winter it would be a little later, but before daylight, so we had our breakfasts by candlelight. We youngsters went to bed at eight o’clock, and I know I used to get sleepy before that. Mother was apt to sit up latest. I suppose she’d often be up sewing for us till ten or eleven o’clock. What a life of unending toil hers was!

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“We had a wide open fireplace built of stone. Mother would sharpen a knife by rubbing it on the jambs, and she’d fry meat in a long-handled frying-pan. How vividly it all comes back!

“I recall lying on the broad hearthstone before the fire watching the crickets come out of the cracks to sing. I would catch them and kill them. Mother said they ate holes in the stockings. They were never detected in the act so far as I know, and I imagine that was just a household superstition without foundation.

“Up at one side of the fireplace was a great brick oven where our bread was baked. Once a week or so mother would say in the morning, ‘Well, we’re going to bake to-day, and I want some oven-wood.’ Then some of us children would have to hunt the place over for dry wood -- wood that could be depended on to flash up quick and make a hot fire.

“Tallow candles were our light. We used dipped candles. I remember seeing mother make them -- dip, dip, dip, into the melted tallow forty times or more -- and after each dip the rods from which the wicks were suspended were put across the backs of two chairs to let the tallow harden. Our candlesticks had hooks on ‘em. The hook was made to fit over the back of a chair. Mother would hook her candle, or perhaps two of them, on the back of a chair in order to see to do her work, and I’d sit in the chair and study arithmetic, or read

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 ‘Robinson Crusoe’ or some other book that interested me.

“While I was still a small boy, we put a stove in the kitchen in front of the fireplace. I had to bring in wood for it. I thought that was quite a stunt in winter. Back of the house was a great woodpile, and I’d have to dig the sticks out of the snow. For a woodbox we used the big open fireplace behind the stove. It was like a yawning cavern, and filling it was no small matter. I’d dump the wood down in front so it would seem to be full as soon as possible, but father would come and expose my fraud by pushing the wood back, and he would say, ‘John, look at that!’

“Sometimes I’d pile the wood on a hand-sled and jerk the sled up the steps and draw it right into the house. That seemed more fun than to carry the wood in my arms.

“We had a stove in ‘the other room,’ but supplying that with wood didn’t worry me, because we never fired up the stove there unless we had company.

“The house wasn’t very tight, especially around the doors and windows, and we didn’t lack for fresh air. There was a crack under the kitchen door, and when we had a northeast snowstorm we’d get up in the morning to find a little snowdrift blown in half across the room.

“Occasionally, too, the snow would blow in onto

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 my bed. The room where I slept was ceiled, not plastered, and the windows were loose, and perhaps some of the glass would be broken. If a whole pane was gone, the space was stopped up with rags. We got all the fresh air there was going, but we didn’t suffer with the cold. Two of us slept in a bed, or three when we were little, and it was a feather bed -- yes, yes!

“We used to kill our own beef, and in winter you’d see a quarter hung up in the milkhouse frozen hard. As we needed it for eating, we’d take a very sharp knife and shave it off in thin slices.

“I never could eat salt pork as a boy. I sniffed at it and snorted at it, and in the prejudice of youth was sure it wasn’t fit to eat. But I eat it now, and I know it sets well on my stomach.

“How fat our pigs would get! They could hardly see out of their eyes. We’d boil a great cauldron of potatoes and pumpkins for ‘em if we were short of milk. When a litter was born in the winter or early spring, we’d often have to tide the piggies over a cold spell by taking them in the house. The runt, as we called the smallest of the batch, nearly always had to have some care. The piggies were pink and clean with nice little noses, and I liked to handle them and feel their rubber-like flesh as they wriggled around. As pigs grow older, they get coarse and disagreeable, but when they are young, they are so active and springy I want to get in among them and caress them.

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“Pig-killing time came in late autumn, and it was a great day when the pigs were slaughtered. Operations began some cold morning, and it was my business to keep up a fire in the yard under a big kettle of water. I never helped by tackling a pig. We’d kill six or seven, and scrape ‘em, and hang ‘em up in a row. At dark we carried ‘em into the cellar and laid ‘em on planks on the cellar bottom. There they were cut up, and the hams were salted down. The spare-ribs -- how good those were! I tell you they were sweet; and the pickled pigs’ feet were delicious too.

“We used to have buttermilk pop. I’d like some now. It was made by putting the buttermilk on the stove and stirring in cornmeal to make quite a thick porridge. We’d eat it hot with molasses.

“Another dish we were crazy for was thickened milk. We had it regularly on Sunday night. I’ve never had it anywhere else, but it was good all the same. We’d heat new milk to the boiling point and stir in flour and add a little salt. The flour would form into small lumps, and then we’d take out three or four spoonfuls at a time and eat it with cold milk. We’d chew those soggy lumps, and they had a sweet agreeable taste, but were perfectly indigestible, I suppose.

“Now and then we’d have a bag pudding or yellow cornmeal put into a kettle of pork and po-

Excerpt from Page 19

tatoes when a boiled dinner was being prepared. Mother was sure to make those bag puddings in haying-time. I don’t suppose I’ll ever have one again.

“It’s a wonder where our folks ever got enough to stop all our mouths. What appetites we did have! We’d come home from school at night famished and go round each eating a buttered pancake. We couldn’t wait till we got to the supper-table.

Page 19 continues with a description of the Anti-Rent conflict:

“I was about seven years old when we had an anti-rent war in the Catskills. A great many of the farms there were leased land. Back in Colonial times the English King had granted immense sections of that region to certain of his court favorites, who divided it up among favorites of their own. All this land had to pay the heirs of those old favorites a tax of a shilling an acre. Of course they never had anything to do with the land, but settlers took it and improved it and made their homes on it.

“The people who lived on the land thought the tax was unjust. So they took the law into their own hands and said they weren’t going to pay this tax any more. They got the idea of disguising themselves as Indians. They wore leather caps pulled over their faces, and were all paint, fur, and feathers -- dreadful-looking creatures! Father sympathized with their side, and they used to call at our house, and we would give them apples and other things to eat or drink. They were usually just out on a lark.

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It was all foolishness, and didn’t amount to anything; but the feeling was very bitter and divided the neighborhood.

“The down-renters, disguised as Indians, did most of their roaming round nights, but they would come together any time of day at the signal of the blowing of a horn. They gave orders that nobody should blow a horn except as a summons for them to gather. Jay Gould’s father lived in our same district, not much more than a mile away, and he was one of the up-renters, or “Tories” as their opponents liked to call them. He was a stiff-necked old fellow, and he declared he was going to blow his horn to call his men to dinner, whether or no. So blow it he did, and the first thing the old gentleman knew he had his house full of those hobgoblin Indians threatening to tar and feather him.

“On another occasion, when news had got round that the sheriff was going to sell out a man who wouldn’t pay his rent, the Indians gathered at the sale and shot the sheriff.

“They became so lawless that the legislature had to take the matter in hand and try to suppress the Indians and imprison their leaders. I’d see the sheriff and his posse ride past -- twenty or thirty or even fifty men galloping pell-mell -- and I was scared. They’d go rushing along on their horses, flourishing swords and muskets. It was a terrible sight for a youngster. My fears were the greater

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 because the posse represented the law, and my sympathy, of course, was with my own people. I wasn’t so afraid of the down-renter Indians.

“Father thought the posse was after him one day, and he ran over to Gran’ther Kelly’s and got under a bed. We had great fun over that, for it was said that his feet stuck out, and that his hiding wouldn’t have done him any good if the sheriff’s men had really been after him, which they weren’t. But they did try to lay hands on a neighbor who was a leader among the down-renters. He got away to Michigan and stayed there several years before he dared to come back.

“I went to a great down-renter meeting one time. The horns blew long and loud over the hills, and the men put on their Indian disguise and started for the meeting-place. Their leather caps were something like a bag with holes cut for the eyes, nose, and mouth. There were horns on the caps, and a fringe round the neck, and a cow’s tail tied on behind, and I don’t know what-all. Oh! those caps were hideous-looking things -- perfectly infernal -- and no two were alike. The Indians had blouses of striped calico, belted at the waist, and some of them had pants of the same material or of red flannel. Take a hundred men together dressed up in that style, and it made a sight to behold.

“The meeting was held in a big empty hay-barn. I went and peeked through the cracks, and the

Excerpt from Page  22

Indians stuck out straw at me. They had their orators, and it seemed to me that the affair was something tremendous. There was such a lot of them I was convinced they’d carry everything before them.

“But they didn’t go at the matter in the right way. Their lawlessness and outlandishness hurt their cause, and the farmers still have to pay rent. Our old farm, like the rest, has to pay its yearly shilling an acre just as it did when I was a boy.”

Transcribed for this web site by Terri Ahrens.

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