Sherry Chandler

Houses

From Daniel Drake‘s Pioneer Life in Kentucky 1785-1800 (Henry Schuman, Inc., 1948):

Now fancy to yourself a log cabin of the size and form of Dove’s dining room — one story high — without a window — with a door opening to the south — with a half finished wooden chimney — with a roof on one side only — without any upper or lower floor — and fancy, still further, a man and two women stepping from sleeper to sleeper (poles lad down to support the floor, when [my father] should have time to split the puncheons), with two children — a brother & sister — sitting on the ground between them, as joyous as you ever saw . . . and you will have the picture which constitutes my first memory. [ p. 15]

. . .

The first event I can remember I have described in my letter to Harriet Echo. It occurred in the autumn or beginning of the winter of 1788 when I had entered my 4^th year. For the next 6 years my father continued to reside at the same place, in the original log cabin, which in due course of time acquired a roof, a puncheon floor belown and a clap board floor above, a small square window without glass, and a chimney, carried up with cats & clay to the height of the ridge pole. These cats & clay were pieces of small poles, well imbeded in mortar. The rifle, indespensable both for hunting & defense, lay on two pegs driven into one of the logs. The axe and a scythe (no Jerseyman emigrated without that implement) were kep at night under the bed as weapons of defense, in case the Indians should make an attack. On the morning the first duty was to ascend the ladder which always stood, leaning behind the door, to the loft and look through the cracks for Indians lest they might have planted themselves near the door, to rush in when the strong crossbar should be removed, and the heavy latch raised from its resting place. But no attack was ever made on his or any other of the five cabins which composed the station.[p. 24]

From Annette Kolodny’s The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630 – 1860 (UNC Press, 1984):

As late as 1859, for example, the forty-eight-year-old Nicolas Stott Shaw accompanied her children on a week-long trek “through a dense and often trackless forest,” nervously making her way from the railroad station in Grand Rapids to a waiting cabin about ten miles from present-day Big Rapids, Michigan. Sustained by the belief “that we were going to a farm . . . [with] some resemblance at least to the prosperous farms we had seen in New England,” Nicolas was shocked to discover at the end of her journey only “the four walls and the roof of a good-sized log-house, standing in a small cleared strip of the wilderness, its doors and windows represented by square holes, its floor also a thing of the future, its whole effect achingly forlorn and desolate.” To be sure, Nicolas Shaw and her children succeeded in making a home of the cabin some “one hundred miles from a railroad, forty miles from the nearest post-office, and half a dozen miles from any neighbors save Indians, wolves, and wildcats.” But in the first shock of recognition “that this was really the place father had prepared for us,” she could only bury her face in her hands, and in that way she sat for hours without moving or speaking.” Indeed, as her daughter would insist many years later, Nicolas’s “face never lost the deep lines those first hours of her pioneer life had cut upon it.” [pp. 229-230]

A snowy woods in the 18th Century

In 1847-48, Daniel Drake, a prominent physician in the Ohio Valley, sat down to write a series of letters to his children about his life as an early settle in Kentucky. His parents came from New Jersey to Mays Lick, just a few miles down the road from where I now live, when he was three years old and he lived there until he left, at 15, to study medicine. The letters he wrote were subsequently published as Pioneer Life in Kentucky1785-1800. Drake was a charming writer, as many of these pioneers seem to be, if maybe just a little coy in apologizing to his children for rattling on about old times.

This morning I came across this passage, which seemed appropriately Currier and Ives for the Christmas season, and so I decided I’d share it here:

[In winter], my equipments were a substantial suite of butternut-linsey, a wool hat, a pair of mittens, and a pair of old stocking legs drawn down, like gaithers, over the tops of my shoes to keep out the snow which was quite as deep in those days as in later times and a great deal prettier. (Don’t smile, if you please, till you hear me out.) I do not mean that the separate flakes were more beautiful than at present; but that a snow in the woods in those days was far more picturesque than a snow in or around town as we see it now.

The woods immediately beyond our fields were unmutilated and not thinned out as you see them at present. They were, in fact, as nature received them from the hand of her Creator. When a snow had fallen without wind, the upper surface of every bough bent gracefully under its weight, and contrasted beautifully with the dark and rugged bark beneath; — the half decayed logs had their deformities covered up; the ground was overspread with a covering as pure and white as the souls of Nelly or Anna or Mary or Etta (sweet darlings, how I want to kiss them!). The cane as high as my head and shoulders, with its long green leaves made the alto relievo of the snowy carpet: — the winter grapes hung in what seemed rich clusters, from the limbs of many trees, which were decorated with tufts of green mistletoe, embellished with berries as white as pearls; while the Celastrus Scandens [Climbing bittersweet), a climbing vine hung out from others, its bunches of orange red berries, and the Indian Arrow wood (Euonymus Carolinensis) [E. Americanus, L., Strawberry Bush] below, displayed its scarlet seeds suspended by threads of the same colour. [pp. 76-77]

The bracketed interpolations were made by the editor, one Emmet Field Horine, M.D., of the old edition I found, published by Henry Schuman of New York in 1948.

Wild bittersweet used to grow in the fencerows of the country lane I lived on, but I haven’t seen it for years now. Farmers tend to clear out their fencerows. What he means by winter grapes I do not know. Back home in Owen County, I used to make wild grape jelly but we didn’t call them winter grapes. Cane, a form of bamboo, disappeared from Kentucky nearly as quickly as the buffalo.

For instance in central Kentucky in 1790, one canebrake was reported to be ‘‘15 miles long and nearly half as wide.’’ Today it is estimated that less than 2% of original habitat remains.

Overgrazing and cultivation are the primary culprits of native Arundinaria’s habitat loss. Decades of fire suppression have also been harmful in two ways: the canopy grows too thick for understory plants like river cane, and when fires do occur, they tend to be catastrophic and leave too much sunlight for the cane to reestablish itself.

I’m not sure what he means by Indian Arrow Wood, which is identified in my Google search as the wahoo (Euonymus atropurpurea), which is not the same as the strawberry bush, and neither is what we have in our yard and call a burning bush (Euonymus alata). Mistletoe is still around in abundance.

Butternut, I think, was a brown dye made from the bark of the butternut tree.