OUR INDEBTEDNESS TO INVENTORS AND MECHANICS, 211 



fanned it with the winds of March. Threshing machines without separators 

 ■were coming into use, and some farmers had fanning mills.* 



Tlien he must draw his wheat with an- ox team on a clumsy, squeaking 

 home-made wagon or cart over a corduroy road from 10 to 40 miles to market 

 or to mill. He has a log house and a frame barn. He pitches his hay twice a 

 year and fodders his cattle and sheep on the ground, and the only shelter they 

 have is the bushes or the sunny side of the barn. If his hay is short or the 

 winter long, he fells trees that his cattle may browse upon the young branches. 

 His pigs wallow and squeal in a rail pen partly shingled with buckwheat straw. 

 His hoes, forks, and shovels, his clevises, chains and axes are made or 

 mended by the neighborhood blacksmith, who also irons his wagon and in win- 

 ter shoes his oxen. His own feet and his wife's are shod m the brogans made 

 by the cobbler, who sometimes traveled from house to house; the feet of his 

 children were bare. His house of logs is floored with split puncheons or with 

 rough oak boards, and is shingled with shakes. The single door, battened and 

 cleated and painted brick-red outside, swings on wooden hinges, fastens with a 

 wooden latch that has a leather string hanging hospitably on the outside, and 

 there is a square hole in the corner of it for the convenience of the house-cat. 

 The two windows give light through twelve pains of ?x9 glass. The single 

 room below is kitchen, dining-room, parlor, and bed-chamber at once, or by 

 turns. The huge chimney at one end of the house, that serves for warmth, for 

 cooking and for light in the evening, is made of sticks, stones and mud. The 

 cracks between the logs are chinked with split sticks and plastered with clay. 

 His clock is a noon-mark on the floor, the setting of the sun and the crowing 

 ■ of the cock. His children at dark climb to bed up a ladder that leads to the 

 loose rough boards constituting the chamber floor, and here they sleep or listen 

 to the rain, or watch the stars that twinkle through the holes in the shake 

 roof, while kindly nature on winter nights carpets the floors and covers their 

 bed with a beauc ful white counterpane of snow. His wife cooks all their food 

 in the great fireplace, boiling the vegetables in a pot that hangs from a wooden 

 crane, frying or roasting the meat in a " spider " standing among the glowing 

 coals, and baking the bread in a "Dutch oven" or bake-kettle buried in the 

 coals, sometimes indeed in an out-door oven or in one adjoining the fire-place, 

 or in a tin-baker before the fire. Here was the chimney corner where the 

 grandmother sometimes sat. It furnished warmth for the family — all the 

 warmth there was— and blazing with split sticks at night gave illumination for 

 social entertainments, — sometimes, indeed, there were for additional light, lard 

 "slats" or tallow "dips." Here our fathers read their Bibles, our mothers 

 spun or knit the thick woolen stocking. The last thing at night was to cover 

 up the fife, for there were no matches to rekindle it. The linen for clothing 

 and other purposes was grown and dressed upon the farm, spun and woven by 

 the busy housewives of the time. So, too, the woolen garments and blankets 

 were home made, the wool was sorted and carded and spun and reeled into 

 skeins and colored with butternut bark, and warped and woven and m^de up 

 by the same busy fingers, while time was found to care for the children, go to 

 tea parties and to church. — My good old New England great grandmother 

 couldn't write her name, although her husband was a college graduate ; and 

 when one remembers all the long and varied tasks those fingers must be 

 schooled to do, there is not much wonder nor much blame that they did not 



* Sir Walter Scott says that in his day, 1771-1832, many people in Scotland refused to use fanning 

 mills, deeming it an impiety to wish for anything better to fan their grain than the winds that 

 Providence sends. 



