A Woman of Courage on the West Virginia Frontier (5 page)

As he approached the last years of his life, William Haymond Jr., the son of Colonel William Haymond, thought back on his childhood growing up on the frontier and wrote, “When I think of those times…it seems strange to me how the people survived many times with-out [
sic
] anything to eat and with but little to wear.”
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As those words indicate, life on the Allegheny Plateau frontier was often a simple struggle for survival. Although natural resources were plentiful, the land could be very unforgiving, and settlers had to conduct a constant battle to maintain even a subsistence-based existence.

There was no immediate source of supplies or European-manufactured tools and materials, and the terrain did not lend itself to traditional European farming methods. Not surprisingly, therefore, settlers soon began a process of cultural borrowing from the Indians. Indian clothing designs and the use of natural materials in them were quickly adopted, as was the use of canoes, herbal remedies, foods, farming techniques and even vocabulary. Employing natural materials also applied to settler’s homes, which were primarily constructed from logs, given the complete absence of any sawmills for more refined lumber. Swedes, Finns and Germans from Silesia, Bohemia and Moravia brought the practice and knowledge required for horizontal log homes from Europe to Delaware and eastern Pennsylvania, from where this custom spread to the Shenandoah Valley during the mid-eighteenth century. By the time settlers began crossing the Alleghenies in significant numbers, the basic skills needed to build log homes had proliferated to nearly every social and ethnic group.

Furthermore, log homes were an ideal solution not solely because raw timber was so plentiful on the plateau but also because building them did not require anything but the most rudimentary of tools. Essentially, if a settler possessed a good felling axe, broad axe, adz,
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froe,
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crosscut saw, auger, hammer and perhaps a chisel or hand plane, he was in business. With these few tools and a forest filled with trees, a settler could build an entire log cabin in less than a week, assuming he had neighbors or extended family willing to lend a hand. In addition, the opportunity to have a communal cabin “raising” provided a welcome excuse for community socializing, combining much-needed merriment with the hard work of building the cabin.
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While the typical cabin was relatively small, if the area was new to settlement and there was no one to share the workload, it could take substantial effort for a single family to complete just the preliminary steps required to build their home. First, you had to prepare the site, which often meant clearing trees and burning down the stumps. Then, using the felling axe, the settler cut down the trees required to provide the right amount of logs for the home. Next, the trees were cut to the proper length, their bark peeled and the resulting logs hewn flat on two opposite sides with a broad axe. Once the logs were prepared, the settlers used a horse to skid the logs through the forest to the construction site. If weather and time permitted, the logs were stacked and allowed to at least partially season, which helped prevent warping.
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Photo of Daniel Boone’s Kentucky cabin, which was probably similar to many of those scattered across the Allegheny Plateau.
New York Public Library
.

Log homes on the Allegheny Plateau were not only small, but they also had few, if any, amenities. The Reverend Francis Asbury described his stay with a northwest Virginia family in their isolated cabin, saying, “We have, not unfrequently [
sic
], to lodge in the same room with the family, the houses having but the one room, so that necessity compels us to seek retirement in the woods.” On one occasion, however, the good reverend did stay inside, recording, “we had, literally, to lie as thick as three in a bed.”
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Often, the floors were merely packed dirt, and many homes lacked even so much as one piece of iron hardware in their walls or roofs because, as settler Joseph Doddridge recalled, “Such things were not to be had.”
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A few of the crudest cabins might not even have a fireplace, but, in most of them, the fireplace was the center of the home’s activity. The central fire would burn continuously throughout the year, providing a means of cooking and baking, as well as warming the house in the cold winter months. Usually, a greenwood lung pole bisected the chimney flue six to eight feet above the hearth, from which chains extended to suspend pots during cooking. When cooking more than one item, one would rake coals to the side of the hearth apron to create additional cooking stations. This also served to allow for a more controlled source of heat away from the open flame. Naturally, this required a great deal of fuel, and a typical cabin with a single fireplace burned between fifteen and twenty cords of wood each year.
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While the traditional image of a colonial frontier fireplace includes a hearth filled with numerous pots, pans, griddles and skillets, the average frontier settler did not possess such a bounty of cooking equipment. Their “kitchens” were far more Spartan, as at least one early frontier probate inventory indicates, wherein the deceased left a wife, six children and an estate for which the household goods consisted of “some pewter, a pot, two bedstands [
sic
], bedding, one chest, and a box.”
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The fireplace also served as an important source of light. Windows were usually small, and the light they provided was poor even on the brightest of days. However, lighting supplements were used, among them the pine knot, also referred to as “candlewood.” A Reverend Higginson, writing in 1633, described them, saying, “They are such candles as the Indians commonly use, having no other, and they are nothing else but the wood of the pine tree, cloven in two little slices, something thin, which are so full of the moysture [
sic
] of turpentine and pitch that they burne [
sic
] as cleere [
sic
] as a torch.” The candlewood was often held in an iron, pincer-like device, and it “droppeth [
sic
] a pitchy kind of substance where it stands.” For this reason and because they could fill the room with smoke, the candlewood was usually burned in a corner of the fireplace, on a flat stone.
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Grease or fat lamps were also used. These were small, shallow containers, usually iron, containing tallow, grease or oil. A wick was held in a projecting spout, and these lamps often had a hook and chain link, allowing them be hung from a nail in the wall or from the back of a chair. When used on a table, they were placed on a thick wooden stand. The simplest form of candles were called “rushlights” because they were made by stripping away the outer layer of common rushes, leaving the pith. The pith was, in turn, soaked in tallow or grease and allowed to harden. When lit, rushlights were placed in holders similar to those that held the candlewood.
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Natural materials also found their way into the making of farm implements. Lucullus McWhorter, the stepson of Phebe Cunningham’s granddaughter, wrote that she told him how she and Thomas made horse collars from the soft fiber of the linden tree, saying, “When the sap was in full flow the bark was stripped from the trunk in long sheets and thrown into the water and left there until the sap-fiber became loosened; when it could be separated from the rough outer coating in thin ribbon-like layers. This was plaited into thick pads and used for horse collars. Grape vines or hickory bark twisted into ropes, answered for traces.”
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Raw natural materials were also employed in clothing. Cotton and silk were very popular in colonial-era clothing, but they were seldom seen on the Virginia frontier because they had to be purchased at trading posts, which were few in number, and these fabrics tended to be prohibitively expensive. Therefore, the isolated, cash-strapped settlers of the plateau had to rely on what they could obtain from the forest and their fields, while applying some ingenuity. Wild game provided a source of leather, which settlers used for leggings, breeches and hunting shirts. However, leather provided little protection from the cold, so settlers relied heavily on cloth, primarily linen made from flax. As one settler recalled, “Everybody made their own clothes of flax beginning with the cultivation of the staple.”
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Settlers planted flax in mid-spring by broadcasting seeds into a prepared field, which was referred to as a “flax patch.” The flax patch was decidedly low maintenance in that it only had to be weeded once prior to harvesting the crop in mid-July. Because the fiber needed for manufacturing linen was in the stalk, which stretches well downward into the root system, flax could not be harvested by merely cutting it down. Instead, the plants had to be carefully pulled from the ground, roots and all. Moreover, if the harvesting was labor-intensive, the process of turning the raw crop into fabric was even more so:

As a general thing the people raised a patch of flax. This was pulled and spread on the ground to dry and then staked. After this it was spread out on a clear grassy sod to “rot” as it was called. When sufficiently rotted from the stem to break easily, it was taken up and securely stacked for use as it might be wanted. The next operation was to brake it on a home made wooden brake. Then it was “swingled”
[sic]
or skutched
[sic]
over the end of a board some 8 or 10 inches wide the other end being driven into the ground, and standing some three or four feet high. The fiber as it came from the brake was held in the left hand and about one half of it thrown over the board & scutched
[sic]
with a long wooden blade till it was clean and soft. It was then hackled which separated the courser part from the finer part of the
[illegible]
…The flax was then spun on a wheel by the mother and her daughters. The thread thus produced constituted the
[illegible]
of the finer quality of linsey
[sic]
which constituted the principal part of the material worn by the men and boys of the country
.
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However, one of the biggest challenges facing the frontier settler was farming and the ability to not just grow and transport sufficient crops to market but, more so, to simply provide enough food to feed themselves. When the first settlers crossed the mountains, they naturally brought the farming methods and practices they had used in the eastern lowlands and Shenandoah Valley with them. These included the use of horse-drawn plows in large, open, sunlit fields with widely diversified crops such as wheat, oats and rye, as well as orchards of apple, peach and cherry trees. However, while most of these same crops could be grown on the Allegheny Plateau, the dense forest made it far more difficult to produce them in any meaningful quantity, and it often took years of hard labor to gain enough headway against the woodlands to allow for something as sophisticated as an orchard.

First, the dense forest made it almost impossible for the earliest of settlers to farm with a plow or any other horse-drawn implements. Second, and perhaps more importantly, the massive forest canopy placed most of the land in dark shade for a substantial portion of the growing season. As a result, the settlers again borrowed from the Indians and employed the “slash and burn” method used by generations of Native Americans. First, the settlers would clear the proposed field area of smaller trees using axes and then girdle the larger trees and strip off as many of their branches as possible. The branches were then dried until they could be burned, at which point they were stacked at the bases of the girdled trees and set afire. This killed the trees, and they were quickly cut down.
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In the early 1780s, an American Loyalist named John Ferdinand Smyth toured the rural regions of America and, after moving to England following the Revolutionary War, wrote a book on his observations in which he included a description of the clearing process: “The general mode of clearing the land in this country, where timber is of no value, and labour [
sic
] is of great, is by cutting a circle round the tree, through the bark, quite to the wood, before the sap rises, which kills it; and they cultivate the ground below immediately, leaving the trees to rot landing, which happens within a very few years, and they never bear leaves more.”
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Once this process was complete, settlers cleared the “deadenings” away and planted crops between the dead stumps, which often were simply left in place. Sometimes the settlers would plant their crops in rows, as was traditional in European farming, or, more often than not, they would once more borrow from the Indians and build small mounds on which to plant. Although they probably did not realize it, the Indians had long ago figured out that planting their crops on these little hills helped reduce the damage done by frosts by trapping the cold air near the ground in the small valleys created between the mounds of earth.
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Now the settlers could plant, and the typical farm on the Allegheny Plateau might include corn, potatoes, pumpkins, squash, beans, turnips and other vegetables. Once settlers harvested a crop, it needed to be stockpiled, which they accomplished via a variety of means. If the family managed to build a root cellar, they could store vegetables such as beets, cabbage, carrots, onions, parsnips, potatoes, radishes, turnips and winter squash. Absent this method, they packed vegetables in barrels filled with straw, the latter serving to prevent spoilage from spreading throughout the barrel. Carrots were often buried in sawdust or sandboxes, and other vegetables such as corn, beans and peas were dried and used later for cooking. Green corn, meanwhile, could be preserved by turning back the husk to expose the last, thin layer and then hanging it in the sun or a very warm room to dry. Sweet corn, however, was typically either parboiled, removed from the cob, dried in the sun and then bagged in a cool, dry place or dried in the husk and buried in salt. String beans, squash, apples and pumpkins were strung on thread and hung to dry.
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