4 A UTOBIOGRAPHY. [1812, 



grandfather's fingers. This appears to have qualified 

 him to be the clerk in charge, or manager, of the 

 office and store of the Paris Furnace Company, which 

 established a small iron-smelting furnace on the 

 Sauquoit, two and a half miles above the village of 

 Sauquoit, in a deep and narrow valley which had the 

 name of Paris Furnace Hollow, now called Clayville, 

 the furnace long since having disappeared, a natural 

 consequence of the exhaustion of the charcoal fur- 

 nished by the woods of the surrounding hills. My 

 earliest recollections are of Paris Furnace Hollow, 

 for not long after I was born, as aforesaid, in 

 Sauquoit, on the eastern or Methodist side of the 

 creek, on the 18th of November, 1810, my father and 

 mother removed to Paris Furnace with me, their first- 

 born, and set up a small tannery there. Of this I 

 retain some vivid recollections, especially those con- 

 nected with the first use to which I was put, the 

 driving round the ring of the old horse which turned 

 the bark-mill, and the supplying the said mill with its 

 grist of bark, a lonely and monotonous occupation. 1 



1 Moses Gray was a man of great activity and energy. He soon 

 added a shoe-shop to his tannery, where he hired a few hands to make 

 shoes from the hides he tanned, taking these again by wagon to 

 Albany, a journey of many days, where he bought his skins and some 

 necessary supplies. Money was scarce in the newly settled country, 

 and the things needed were mostly got by exchange. Meantime, as 

 the chance came, he was buying land on the hills around. Clay- 

 ville is where the valley narrows towards the source of the Sauquoit 

 Creek, as " rivers " are called in that neighborhood in old Dutch 

 fashion, and the hills are sharper and rougher. The scenery, how- 

 ever, is still beautiful, and the house which Moses Gray built two 

 or three years later yet stands, with a lovely near view of stream 

 and hill and wood. Asa Gray remembered his father building it. 

 Busy as the father was out of doors, the mother was perhaps busier 

 still. Asa, the younger brother by the first wife, was dying of con- 

 sumption ; he was moved on a bed from Sauquoit to Paris Furnace, 



