I have been asked to come from my home in Illinois to meet the few remaining Pioneers of the Firelands and such of their descendents as may assemble here, for the purpose of indulging in reminiscences of the long past, which cover the boyhood days of many of us, and which are a part of the history of this, our boyhood home.

  Although almost half a century intervenes between the present and the bright morning in August, 1852, when my father, with his two-horse wagon, transported two of his boys, with their trunks, containing their few worldly possessions, to the nearest railroad station, for the purpose of taking the train for a distant state, and thereby, in fact, forever terminating our relations to Huron County as home, yet this visit, and the occasion of it, awakens emotions and recollections shared by perhaps by none of you who have yet to sever your connection with the homes of your childhood.

It brings me to my childhood back,
As if I trod its very track,
And felt its very gladness

  But to the story which I am to relate: The eight day of June, 1833, terminated the journey of two immigrant families, the heads of which were brothers, from an eastern state to the Firelands, in far away Ohio. Such it seemed to those families before they started and to their friends left behind, and such they realized it to be before they had completed their journey. A steam craft on Lake Erie had furnished the transportation to the port of Huron, while, after time spent in prospecting by the heads of the families, ox teams did the remainder of the work of landing the families, of one of which the boy to whose experience you are asked to listen to as a member, near the prospective home in the forests of Clarksfield.

  This journey of twenty-five miles made through Berlin, Florence and Wakeman, to the center of Clarksfield, was not made over the good roads and easy grades now to be found, but

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over traces of roads then newly cut out or blazed through the forests, with no bridges over many of the streams and no artificial drainage. Those who remember the vile reputation of “Wakeman Woods,” of that day, will not be at a loss to fully appreciate the horrors of that journey. No wonder that the young mothers turned their thoughts many times with tearful eyes to the homes they had left.

  The family did not find a ready-made farm house, of comfortable capacity, with the accompaniments of barn and out houses, orchard and garden in which to rest its weary and travel-worn members. It did not find friends who had gone before and who were ready to open hospitable doors to the newcomers and make easy their settlement and welcome their coming. What they did find was an unbroken, heavy forest of beech, maple, walnut, oak and other kinds of timber, such as bid a mad defiance to the Pioneers all over Ohio at the beginning of the century.

  The kindness of the Pioneer family which had preceded this family to the depths of this forest by a few months, gave shelter to the unsheltered for six weeks and until an opening in the forest upon the site of the future home could be made and a house could be erected. This house was, of course, of logs, but care was taken that they should be straight logs, and that they should be nicely notched at the corners and smoothly hewn on the inside, as they were placed in position, so that the new house, though covered only with elm bark at the first, was both presentable and comfortable. Think of it, dear housekeepers, the first fireside of this family, where the mother cooked for many months, was beside a large stump, near the door, with no covering over it save that furnished by the native forests left with a purpose.

  This house being finished (and it is remembered that the particular had neither closed window nor door during the first summer, nor until frosts and cold winds of autumn made them necessary), the next thing to be done was with fire and ax [sic] and strong arms to drive back the domain of the forest and make room for the field which was to produce the living. This was a slow process and occupied the labours and efforts of years.

  One of the Pioneer preachers herein named, in 1866, thirty-three years after the immigration of the family to Clarksfield, conducted the services of the father, Hiram W. Cunningham, and in the biographical notice of the deceased given, said that he had personally chopped, burned and cleared one hundred acres of Clarksfield’s heavy timber. Year by year the cleared circle became larger and the demand for cribs and a barn more imperative.

  The first year, of course, yielded no returns for the family support. The limited amount of money brought as a result of the sale of the little farm in York state, was all used up in paying the expense of removal or in making the first payment on the purchased land, so the family must be fed and clothed by some other means. No resources remained other than the hands of the father, which were skilled in carpentry and wood craft of other kinds, and the grinding needs of the immigrant family for many years made the requisition upon this resource continuous and exacting. So, for several years, and until fruitful fields occupied the space of the primevil forest, the day’s work of the father furnished the food of the family from year to year.

  The boy well remembers the first attempt at corn and wheat raising among the green stumps of a patch just cleared of the timber where no plow could be used, or if used, could live an hour. The corn was planted, not with a check-row corn planter, nor with a hoe, even, but an ax [sic], which was driven through the roots into the virgin soil a few inches, the corn dropped in and the ground closed over the seed by the foot. No cultivation could be given it other than by chopping out the fire weeds, but the hot sun and the rich soil did the work, and the returns well repaid the effort. In the fall the removal of the corn made way for a seeding of wheat. In this manner the Pioneer provided for his table.

  The satisfaction felt by the Pioneer in eating from his first crop, produced under the difficulties here delineated, cannot well be told, even by one who has realized it, any more than it can be realized by one who has not passed through the experience.

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The capitalist may say to himself, “Soul, thou hast much good laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink and be merry,” but his satisfaction does not approach the happiness of the Pioneer, who, having cleared the forest, has demonstrated his capacity to produce a crop.

  Being thus established in a home, which for most of the time intervening between the date here given and the legal majority of the boy in question, was his only home, made better year by year as the means were secured, let us look at the surroundings:

  Clarksfield has then been settled sixteen years only, and everything was new, in the town as well as in the adjoining towns. Smith Starr, Benjamin Stiles, Samuel Husted, and possibly some others, had moved “out of the old house into the new” frame and plastered house, but other than the very few lived in their Pioneer houses, similar to the one above described. The Rowlands, Barnums, Woods, Furlongs, Bissells, Clarks, Grays, Days, Lees, Blackmans, Smiths, Perceys, and nearly all of the population of the township had progressed no further than the log-house stage of civilization. These houses were generally built in the most primitive style of architecture of that day, with log gables, roofs held in place by log weight poles, instead of by use of nails, doors hung on wooden hinges, with wooden latches, which obeyed the pull of the leathern string from the outside. With puncheon or slab floors and well-chinked and an annual “daubin’,” the home could defy the elements without, and by the aid of a fire upon the hearth of the wide fireplace, built of rocks gathered from the fields or from the river bed, supporting a mud and stick chimney, the home was made comfortable at all times. Before these fires were cooked and served the homely meals, and around them were gathered as happy families as now gather around the anthracite fires in the elegant houses which have succeeded these Pioneer homes.

  The clearings were small and mostly confined to the neighborhood of the “Hollow,” where the first settlement of the town was made, or along the roads leading therefrom. Dense woods and almost impassable roads shut out the neighboring

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settlements, and to go to Florence or Norwalk, one must encounter the horrors of the roads, or trails, which served for roads, leading through “Wakeman Woods,” or “Townsend Woods,” terms which, even at this distance of time, awaken a shudder.

  The boy remembers a night spent in a mud hole with his parents in the road leading from Norwalk to Clarksfield, about April, 1836, when an almost empty wagon was too much for the team, and it was only after daylight, the next morning, that aid came and enabled us to release ourselves by doubling teams. The good roads now leading to Florence and to Norwalk from Clarksfield, through fruitful fields bordered by beautiful homes, give no intimation of the terrors that awaited the traveler along the same lines sixty-five years since.

  The only roads that existed in the town of Clarksfield at the period written about, which had the semblance of roads or deserved the name, were those leading north, south and west of the Hollow, and these were yet much bordered by woods, and in many places were of the very primitive corduroy character. Other roads, or what are no known as public highways, in the town, were not then even “chopped out,” with few exceptions, and neighborhood trails across lots and through the woods were permitted by tolerant settlers as favors to those who, like our family, had essayed to settle back from the settlements before then made. It is remembered that the families spoken of only reached their leafy, primeval home, at Clarksfield center, by leaving the main road a half mile east of the Hollow, and by following ax-men, who went before the wagons and cut out a trail. It was many years after this time that the roads were so improved as to be passable for teams and wagons, and not until after 1850, were the roads leading south and west from the center of the town, anything more than trails, once chopped out and partly grown up with briers and other impediments. It was a long time, and only after the roads were bordered by enclosed fields, that they were made passable their entire length, and it was unnecessary for the traveler to make detours here and there to avoid the swamps and swales which so often intruded across the roads. The corduroy period was a long one, and the higher

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duty of the settler to provide himself and family a shelter and food before he found time to make roads, kept these necessary appliances of civilization waiting many years.

  Bridges over the two confluences of the Vermillion River were then few and of an ephemeral character. The substantial stone and steel structures which now span those beautiful streams, not only command admiration as triumphs of engineering skill, but they serve to bring back recollection of early efforts at bridge building. Where once long stretches of corduroy passage ways over the black alder swamps, are now seen single stone culverts, which serve to bridge the murky waterway formerly so dreaded by the Pioneer.

  At the period indicated there was no house of worship in the township, nor in any adjoining townships, though worshippers were not wanting; for no district of country within the nation was more largely settled by religious people than was the tract of country known as the Firelands. The Pioneer school houses, the scantily furnished cabins, and the leafy forests were made to do duty as places of religious worship to meet the want of the settlers of which their self-imposed banishment from older homes had deprived them.

  Among the most lasting and thrilling recollections of the boy whose story this is, are those connected with those primitive gatherings. Take the scene of a few settlers gathered up from the scattered settlements, connected only by forest trails, in one of these Pioneer log school houses, where the only furniture was that manufactured by the help of an ax, saw and auger from the outer slab of a saw log; where the log structure, dedicated to learning and the arts, was made without the use of a nail or article of iron, and was as free from metals in its construction as was King Solomon’s temple; where one side of the little room was devoted to the fireplace, and its walls made impenetrable to the cold winds by the “chinkin’ and the daubin’,” but where the hearts of the gathered worshippers were on in the sympathy and love to the Maker, and their speaker, a circuit rider or exhorter, fired by the love of souls, in loud and electrifying appeals called upon the sinner and the backslider to repent while the opportunity yet remained; where the effect of these appeals

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brought the careless and the scoffer to their knees and led wicked men to better lives- these scenes, now no longer to be seen, left impressions upon the beholders not to be forgotten.

  In the way of religious gatherings of that day, the boy remembers most vividly the camp meetings, now known to the people of this day only in tradition. One in Clarksfield in 1837, one in Wakeman in 1841, and one in Rochester in 1846, came under his observation and will serve as typical of the class. These meetings were generally arranged to come off after haying, late in the summer or early in the fall, when worldly cares were less likely to distract attention. A piece of native forest was chosen, where good drainage with shade and water were to be had. A plat of two or three acres or more was cleared of the underbrush and the ground smoothed and levelled; at one end of the plat was erected the preacher’s tent, facing inward, at the front of which was a stand for speakers, under cover. Upon the other three sides were erected tents or cabins to answer for the accommodation of the people. In front of the preachers’ stand was an enclosure of seats for from fifty to one hundred people, the enclosure being formed by poles placed upon the posts or crotches set in the ground. The purpose of this enclosure was for the accommodation of circles for prayer and for those seeking after the light of religious experience, which we might call the anxious seat, but which the irreverent of those days called the “bull-pen.” Beyond this enclosure were seats for hearers, made by placing slabs or planks across supports of logs and timbers, arranged so as to provide aisles leading towards the preachers’ stand. To these tents people came from many miles around, bringing beds, furniture and provisions for a week’s outing, and here were carried on all the household arts for a comfortable stay. Cooking was done by open fires in the rear of tents, and sleeping accommodations made upon piles of clean straw and bed clothing within the apartments of the tents. The tin horn at the preachers’ tent served the purpose of a “church going bell,” in calling the people from their tents to the general auditorium for the several services, and laggards in the tents met the severe reprimand of the “preacher

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in charge.” Rules were enacted for the government of the encampment and severely enforced.

  To these gatherings came all sorts of people for all sorts of purposes. Religious exercises and experiences were not the only incentives. There came the gossiper, the curiosity seeker, fun lover and the horse trader. There came the sincere religionist, yearning for the salvation of his neighbor, and there came the irreverent scoffer of things held sacred by the other class. The gatherings were not always characterized by the sanctity that pervades the church-going assemblies of this day, but frequently made work for the grand juries. In other cases the disorders created by the irreverent were informally and promptly treated on the grounds to doses of muscular Christianity from an athletic preacher or muscular layman, a remedy swifter than that afforded by the law and generally more effective.

  It is far easier now to describe the organization and proceedings of such a gathering than to accurately measure the effects upon the participants. The measure of one relates to Time, while the effects of the other can only be known in Eternity. Many who came to scoff and ridicule, left the grounds rejoicing in a new life, and here steps in the religious life were commenced which terminated only in a hopeful death.

  These school houses and camp meetings produced or furnished the arena of action of such eminent Pioneer preachers of the Firelands as Leonard B. Gurley, William B. Disbrow, James McIntire, James A. Kellum, John Mitchell, Adam Poe, James McMahon, Richard Biggs, H. O. Sheldon, Russell Bigelow, E. R. Jewett, Thomas Barkdull, William C. Pierce, of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and Revs. Betts and Streeter, of the Presbyterian church; Rev. David Marks and Rev. Fairfield, of the Baptist church, as well as many others whose names are remembered by the descendents of the Pioneers with reverence.

  Most of these men were from time to time in the early days guests at the home of the family in question, and the boy remembers of having heard most of them from the pulpit or the desk of the school house.

  In this connection it may be said that it is probable that Sunday schools were organized and carried on upon the Firelands at an early day, for as early as 1836, at Clarksfield Hollow, a school was in operation, conducted by members of different denominations. I remember being in this school at its beginning for that season; remember that Rev. Streeter was at the head of it, and the lesson of the day, which will be found at Matt. III., 1-6, beginning: In the days came John the Baptist preaching in the wilderness of Judea.

  The library in use is remembered for its utter want of adaptation to the needs of children. Instead of being such a character of matter as children would become interested in, its books treated upon the most severe and sober theological questions, such as children of no time take to.

  A Sunday school celebration held near Berlin chapel, between Berlinville and Florence, on July 4, in the year 1843, is remembered by this particular boy for the many children it called together from all the surrounding towns, the pretty address delivered by Mr. Dwight, and particularly for the good things we had to eat.

CLOTHING OF THE PIONEER

  The clothing in which the Pioneer boy was clad was not tailor-made, nor was it even hand-me-down, ready-made clothing, but the result of the summer work and the cunning skill of his mother’s fingers, which worked early and late. In the spring of each year a crop of flax was sown, and at maturity was pulled, rotted, broken in the flax-brake and hatchelled by the men folks, when it was ready to be carded, spun and woven into cloth, called “tow and linen,” for the next year’s clothing. So of the wool of the few sheep kept. The price of wool in the markets of the country was not then a burning question as now; the limited supply was scarcely sufficient for the domestic wants of the families of the Pioneer. The supply was either carded into bats at home or carried to the wooden mill and made into “rolls,” ready fro the spinning wheel. The same mother’s hands pun it into yarn ready for the weaver or ready for her winter’s knitting into socks. The spun yarn, dyed in butternut or blue

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dye, sufficed for the “filling,” in a web, which was of cotton yarn, and the product was known as “jeans.” The weaver’s work done, the same mother’s nimble cut, fitted and made the tow and linen or the jeans into coats, pants and vests for the boys.

  As time passed on and family became more forehanded, which meant, had more sheep and other stuff and something to sell in the market, the cloth was made of all wool and went to the cloth dresser for fulling and dressing, and came home shining like broadcloth. Here came the need of the tailor, who cut the cloth ready for the itinerant sewing woman, and the boy came out in a suit of “fulled cloth,” with shining brass buttons. So the work of clothing the boys developed from year to year until maturity enabled him to dress in “store clothes” from his own earnings.

  It was not always that the last year’s suit lasted well until this year’s suit made its appearance, in which case the boy, in the interim between the passing away of the former and the coming of the latter, might have passed for Riley’s “Raggedy Man.” It must have been during one of these destitute periods that the mother in question, ever alert to the needs of the children, wrote to her mother in the east, in a letter dated November 17, 1839, the original of which came to the hands of your essayist a few years since, and is now preserved with the greatest care, as follows:

We have raised our living this season, and it seems much better than to buy it and not know where it is to come from. Our children are well, but very ragged,- not having any wool of late, we are quite destitute of clothing. You wrote you had sent me some stocking yarn, but I have not received it yet. If I could get it I would make my fingers fly.

  This letter was sealed with a red wafer. It bears the postmark of Clarksfield, November 29, and is charged with eighteen and three-fourths cents postage. Letters patent of nobility from a sovereign king or emperor would not be prized higher. It gives a phase of family and Pioneer history not to be forgotten. It convicts the Pioneer boy of once having belonged of “very ragged” children, but it brings no blush.

  Boots and shoes were not brought to the Pioneer home ready made and in assortments sure to meet all demands. Hides, taken from animals killed for family supplies of meat, or, more often, were taken from domestic animals dying from the murrain, were taken to the near by tannery, dressed into leather and were, by the neighboring shoemaker, made up into boots and shoes for the family, with the emphasis upon the word shoes for, as a matter of true history, the Pioneer boy in question never possessed the greatly coveted boots until he was permitted to earn them by work for a neighbor, at thirteen years of age.

SCHOOLS

  For years after the period of this writing, the settlement in question had no school, and the only school opportunities were obtained by sending the children to neighboring districts, the tenure of which privileges to us outsiders depending upon the demands made by children within the districts. Long tramps through the woods and through the swamps spanned by fallen trees only, was the price paid by the children for the instruction received by them. Finally, in the spring of 1840, a truly Pioneer school house came to the doors of this family, and its description may be taken as that of Pioneer school houses throughout Ohio and the west. It was built, not by direct taxes levied and collected in due course of law, nor by the issue of bonds, as would now be done, perhaps; but by the combined labours of the men in the district, voluntarily given. On a given day, by appointment, all turned out with axes and teams, and from the contiguous woods cut the logs, hauled them to the site of Bissell’s Corners, and within a few days had erected a log building about 20x25 feet in size. The gables were of logs and the roof of shakes, or boards, as they are sometimes called, rived with a frow from an oak tree, and held in place upon the roof by overlaying each course of the roofing with a heavy weight pole.

  Openings were cut in the logs, at appropriate places, for the windows and door. At one end a wide fireplace, without jams, capable of receiving wood six or seven feet in length, was

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provided. This fireplace was built of boulder stones, picked up in the neighborhood, and served as a foundation for a stick and mud chimney terminating above the roof. In this fireplace were piled large quantities of wood in winter, and the fires served well to heat the room. The door was of rough sawed boards, hung upon wooden hinges and held shut by a wooden latch. The windows, while supplied with sash for glazing, were, as the boy well remembers, only covered with greased paper at the first term of school, taught in the summer of 1840. Floors of rough sawed lumber were laid. This building, each autumn during its service, had to be daubed with mud to keep out the cold. The furniture consisted of benches made without backs, from slabs, or the outer cuts from saw logs, supported by legs driven into auger holes. For a writing desk for the larger pupils, a wide board, supported by heavy sticks driven into a log, at the proper height, at one end of the room, did duty.

  Within such a house as this your Pioneer boy and the children of his district were taught from Webster’s Elementary Spelling Book, from Murray’s English Reader, and from Daboll’s Arithmetic, and other antiquated primary books, for three month each winter for ten years, beginning with the year 1840. Near by were the woods and the river and the ample play grounds. Let no one waste any sympathy upon these children on account of this apparent dearth of opportunity. The defects in the opportunity are only apparent and made so by a comparison with the schools of the Firelands of today. That district never added a single man or woman to the ranks of illiteracy. Out of one enrolment of thirty-five pupils, now before the writer, more than one-half, after nearly sixty years, are known to be in life. No one of that company ever entered the ranks of the criminal class. So let no one despise these antecedents of this particular boy, for be assured he does not, but glories in them, for from such surroundings came the Lincolns and the Garfields of loved American fame.

  From out of these humble surroundings, which may be said to be typical school environments of the great majority of schools upon the Firelands in their beginning, came pupils armed with that best of qualifications, self-respect and self-reliance.

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Came also healthy young men and women, taught in the atmosphere of morality and patriotism, to bless society here and in other states.

  In this semi-isolated life, cut off from the far-off outer world, its faint echoes hardly touched this particular family. Books were few, and for many months no newspaper visited the circle. From year to year the only changes were the changing seasons. They waited for the spring with eager longing, for it brought the sugar-making season, so loved by the youth; it brought with it flowers, natural to our woods, and unlocked its treasures of life.

  It may be said with propriety that the schools of the Firelands, from the first, though humble in their pretensions, were fostered by an enlightened and intelligent public sentiment. The Pioneer, though poor, and from a poor New England or New York home, was not illiterate.

  Your Pioneer boy, like the school boys of today, improbable as it may appear from the opportunities and surroundings above given, had ambition, and this passion pointed to the Norwalk Seminary as the object to be attained. His few vists to the county capitol, always looked upon with greater favor than a visit to Europe with the Paris exposition as a part of the attraction, would now be viewed, were always more desired by him, for the reason that he could look upon the seminary and indulge his fancies as to his future in that temple of learning; but alas for human ambitions, for before the proper time came the seminary was a thing of the past, and he had to be satisfied with Berea and Oberlin.

  He is in error who supposes that the poverty of opportunity herein delineated as the lot of the Pioneer and his family was an unmixed evil. Poverty in no case is without some compensating benefits. The honest efforts of him who suffers from poverty to overcome its inconveniences, strengthens and builds up his character and renders him stronger for the conflicts of life.

  The spirit of unrest by which this age and the century from which we are about to pass has been so much influenced, invaded the woods of the Firelands in those years of which we

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write, and seized upon the boys then as it does now. Here, then, now, and always, as Willis has expressed it,

Ambition seeks the chamber of the gifted boy,
And lifts the humble window and comes in.

  And more than that it has lifted him out of this and other more eastern states, and that boy and his girl are moving beyond the Mississippi. The west is sapping the east of its best material, and if the fathers and mothers of the latter are asking themselves, “Where is my boy tonight?” the answer comes back from the far west, “He is here and is building up empires.”

AMUSEMENTS.

  Did the boys of that day have any fun, do you ask? Certainly. A healthy boy will manufacture his own amusements, if he does not have to work too hard. The boys of those times were mustered into the ranks of labor at an early age, say at ten or eleven years of age, and made to contribute to the common weal of the family; yet on rainy days fishing was permissible, when it rained too hard for work. So at night, after having performed all the work during the day that an ingenious father could get from a rather unwilling boy, fishing parties were common to the mill ponds. Husking bees, coon huntings, logging bees, and house and barn raisings, called the young men and boys together.

  It may seem to the boy of today, who, with his surroundings of a beautiful country home, a farm productive of everything necessary, as well as of many luxuries, where the labors of the farm are so largely performed by machinery, with the facilities for excursions to distant places, and with frequent trips upon the lake; with concerts and lectures and theaters and conventions the year around, that he has all the fun, and that we of sixty years ago must have had only a dull round. Not so. While we combated roots and stumps in the soil, where the boy of today plows with no obstruction, while riding his plow, we had before us the virgin forests, an open book and a museum of unfailing resources of amusement. They furnished the small game, which we delighted to hunt, in abundance. They furnished nuts of every variety, delicious wild fruits and mandrakes

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and slippery-elm bark. They furnished the materials for his stilts, his darts, his pop-gun, his whistles, and his bows and arrows, as the season for each of these sports came around. Then the boy of long ago had the fun of chopping down little trees, before chopping became a daily task, and of seeing them fall, a pastime of pleasure unalloyed, except by the admonition from his seniors to “cut close to the ground.”

  Then the streams, little and big, now so nearly dried in summer, ran high all year round, and never failed to furnish amusements of the rarest kind. In winter the boy sported upon the ice of the river or skated, if he owned the skates, and in summer he fished or bathed in the water or guided his raft or skiff thereon. No delight in the world is so welcome to a boy as to spend half of his time on a warm summer day in the water at his favorite swimming hole. I see it now, at the bend in the river, embowered by a spreading elm tree’s shade, made more dense and welcome by the wild gravevine which has year by year clambered up its rugged sides. The noon hour of the school day afforded the time, and the disposition was never wanting. Since that experience, in the long past, the Hoosier poet, who knew the joys of the “Old Swimmin’ Hole,” as the Clarksfield boy knew it, has put the whole story in poetic dialect:

Oh, the old swimming’ hole. In the happy days of yore,
When I ust to learn above it on the old sickamore,
My shadder shinin’ up at me with such tenderness,
But them days is past and gone, and old Time’s truck his toll
From the old man come back to the old swimming’ hole.

  Yes, the old man has come back. He finds the river here, but the locus of the old swimming’ hole has yielded to the shifting sand bank; the old sycamore has also passed away, as have the boy playmates, without whose presence the visit is almost a blank.

  The Pioneer boy had little money, in fact he hardly saw enough of it to recognize the different denominations of the currency of the day. This was largely due to the fact that there was little money in the country. Business was largely carried on by barter. A pound of butter would buy a pound of cut

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nails. Two pounds of butter would buy a shilling hat. A good horse could be bought for from $25.00 to $50.00, and a cow for $10.00. The little money that came into the family in big copper cents, sixpences, and shillings, for dimes and half-dimes were rarely seen, had to be carefully saved for tax-paying time. In fact the boy had little use for money. Shows rarely came this way, and a part of our religious teachings was to the effect that a show that had a round ring in the tent, whatever else it may have, was awfully wicked. The railroads of the day, all of which were corduroy roads, always gave free excursions, the passenger carrying his own lunch.

  The gayest of all the year with the boys was the day known as “Trainin’ Day,” when the militia of the town were called out for drill. The bright red and blue colors of the privates’ and non-commissioned officers’ uniforms dazzled the eye of the boy; but the finer uniform of the captain and lieutenants, as they marshalled the men to the stirring music of the fife and drum, or by sharp commands put them through the manual of arms, drove his senses into something like a stupor. The grand event of the day was when the colonel, if he happened to be a near by dweller, gay in his iridescent garb of gray and gold, galloped upon the parade ground, surrounded by his staff, and in thundering tones gave orders to the battalion, which moved the men as a piece of machinery and terrorized and almost froze the heart of the dazed lad from the back woods. The movements of Sherman’s army before Atlanta, or of Grant’s in the Wilderness, could not have been more bewildering.

  Some here will remember the coming through the county of the straggling recruits for the so-called “patriot’s war,” the uprising of a few disappointed men in Canada, in 1837, with arms and pieces of artillery, as does the writer, and of the alarm all felt at the prospect of a border war with Great Britain, growing out of the affairs upon the border at Niagara river. These alarms, with the calling out of the enrolled militia in 1846, when men were wanted for the Mexican war, were such as to awaken the martial spirit of the people and to set the boys at school to playing soldier.

GOING TO MILL.

  The presence in Clarksfield of two water grist mills and saw mills at the time this story begins made life there much more desirable at that time. The prime question was to get something to grind. With that the boy had nothing to do and little concern; but the going to mill upon an ox sled with a little grist of grain, the operation of grinding the grist between the two great stones, the delivery by the dusty miller of the prepared flour or meal, and the great, wide mill pond, were matters, once seen, to be told and talked over for a month, and never to be forgotten by the boy whose experiences and observations had then been so limited. Later on in life, when his muscles and discretion could be trusted to do the business, the boy was himself made the supercargo of a grist of grain on its way to the mill. The grist was equally divided by the parental hand, one-half in one end of the sack and one-half in the other end, thrown across the horse, and the boy mounted on top, with directions to use care in balancing the grist, and he was dispatched upon the errand. That boy has the most rueful recollections of his experiences of the grist falling from the horse in the woods road, away from help, and of his agonizing tears at the disaster. The grist had to be gotten upon a stump and the unwilling horse led between the stump and a near by tree which kept him from stepping to one side before the status of affairs had been restored, but success only awaited perseverance. The varied business ventures of the later life of that boy, with their adverse turns, bear no comparison to these weeping struggles with the grist in the wilderness.

TRANSPORTATION.

  In the early days of our country hereabouts, the team work was mostly done with oxen, now almost a thing of the past.

  Ox teams were used on the farm, for social visits, and for going to church. Your essayist well remembers of many occasions when the whole family went to meeting behind this kind of team, upon a sled or in an old, squeaky wagon. Indeed, this was the rule among the Pioneers sixty years ago, and caused no comment.

  Before roads for wagons were made, horseback riding for both sexes was most common, and the horse-block before every door afforded the aid for mounting. The animal was often taxed to carry double, and this was the favorite mode with beaus and belles among the Pioneers.

  A farm wagon behind a span of plow horses showed the wealth and luxury of the owner, while the buggy and surrey, now so common, were unknown.

POSTAL FACILITIES.

  The boy well remembers when Clarksfield’s mail came but once a week, and then was brought by a post-boy on horseback with a leathern pair of saddle bags as the mail car. When he arrived upon the east hill of the village, to warn Esquire Starr, the postmaster, of his coming, he most vigorously sounded tin horn, which he fastened to his saddle. Mail day, though it brought little of interest to the people, was the day of the week after Sunday. Few newspaper were taken, and letters at eighteen and three-fourths cents or twenty-five cents each, were too costly a luxury to be often indulged in by such a people. The mail carrier often brought from the outside world of the elections, of wars or rumors of wars, which was passed from mouth to mouth.

  Now the mail is brought to Clarksfield’s dwellers daily from the east to the west and from the west to the east, upon the fast mail trains of the Wheeling & Lake Erie Railroad; and instead of the horns of the mail-boy, is heard the scream of the locomotive engine and the thunderous rumbling of heavy trains of cars, bearing the commerce of the continent. Smith Starr, the first and long time postmaster of the town, who handed out to the boy in question, sixty-five years ago, the Western Christian Advocate, the family paper, sleeps with the neighbors whom he served upon the hill, while the mail is distributed and served to patrons by a woman postmistress, a descendent of Aaron Rowland, another of the Pioneers of the town.

DEATH AMONG THE PIONEERS.

  In those Pioneer days people died as they do now only oftener and earlier in life; for the hard life of privation most of them lived reduced the average term of life, and the Pioneer fell an early victim to the ague or to the fever which followed in its train.

  As people wore home-made clothing in life, so their dead were enconffined in a home-made, walnut coffin, made to order from an actual measure taken, by a local cabinet maker or by a carpenter, the funeral always awaiting the convenience of the mechanic. The account books of Capt. Samuel Husted, Pioneer merchant and first manufacturer of Clarksfield, still preserved, furnish the only vital statistics of the town in the charges made therein for coffins, furnished for the dead among the Pioneers.

  Funerals among the Pioneers were always formal affairs. The newest and best farm wagon of the settlement served as the hearse, and not until in the forties did our town furnish a pall for such occasions. A minister, if one could be had, must come, say a prayer and deliver a sermon. If no minister could be had, then some devout layman solemnized the occasion by a prayer. The old hymn beginning, “Hark from the tombs a doleful sound,” sung to the tune of China, by uncultured voices, made the solemnity of the occasion almost gloomy, and always awakened doubts of the reality of the resurrection.

  The neighbors for miles around turned out and the funeral rites were decorously and solemnly performed.

  The writer has a vivid recollection of his attendance upon a funeral in Clarksfield, the first that fell under his observation. It was that of a young mother who had yielded up her life in a forest home. The bereaved home was reached from our home by a tramp with mother and a neighbor, through a mile of dense forest. After the ceremony the burial took place upon a knoll in the deep woods near by. The sight of the dead mother and of the bereaved little ones made an impression upon the mind of the five-year-old boy which was deep and lasting. The little procession bore the body from the lonely cabin home to the grave where the neighbors filled in the earth and departed.

(p. 24)

For some years the mound reminded the observer of the departed, but finally all traces of the entombment were eradicated and the affair was forgotten. The place of interment has long since passed over by the stranger occupant of the farm with no knowledge of the burial.

  Early burials were in most cases made upon the home farm, for cemeteries were not then established. In a few years, as in the instance above given, these places of burial were forgotten, so that now the plow and the reaper, unknown to the farmer in charge, desecrate the places once sacred to the Pioneer.

CONCLUSION.

  The story you have listened to contains nothing startling, and has, I fear, hardly been interesting. It is but a recitation of common place affairs, with an antique odor, of which every Pioneer boy knows, and perhaps, yes surely, this is all it has to commend it. Be this as it may, the story has its counterpart in the history of every section of our country, which has, with such marvellous celerity, emerged from the wilderness, the dwelling place of the savage, to a densely populated empire of civilization, within the lifetime and recollections of many here. The story begins contemporaneously with the first term of President Jackson, the seventh president, and runs to that of the twenty-fifth, counted consecutively, and covers one-half of the lifetime of our republic. It has seen the republic doubled and more than doubled in the extent of its territory, and more than quadrupled in its population; while in material resources and national virility the infant has become the giant of this globe.

  During this period the last of the men who at the beginning of the story grappled with the wilderness here, has passed to the beyond. The children of the Pioneer have in many cases, as in the case of the families most conspicuously in this story, gone to aid in developing other states, so that the only memory of their names is to be gathered from the tombstones in your cemeteries. But such is the glory of American life everywhere.