THE OLD HOMESTEAD. 



17 



saddlebags, my grandfather came to this, his final home, 

 in January, 1822, almost blazing his way through the 

 woods; and here he began the hard life of a pioneer, 

 felling trees and opening up the land for cultivation. 

 His father had settled near the homestead in 1795, 

 not long after Mad Anthony Wayne had gone through 

 these parts after the Indians, having come from Penn- 

 sylvania to the Western frontier with just one hundred 

 and fifty dollars in silver, which he had saved from the 

 wreck of the Continental currency; and his father had 

 been a soldier in the Revolution, and gave his life at 

 the battle of the Brandywine. He (grandfather's 

 father) simply followed Wayne's trail, or the old mili- 

 tary road, until he found the situation he wished, and 

 there settled. The homestead was a gift to his son, 

 for the old gentleman managed to leave a large farm 

 to each of the seven children that survived him; and 

 grandfather, having the choice of two, between one in 

 the bottoms and one on the hills, chose this on the up- 

 land. In later years grandfather added to his original 

 patrimony by purchases of adjoining tracts, until finally 

 he footed up the grand total of some three hundred 

 and sixty solid acres of some of the best farming land 

 in the county — one hundred acres of woodland, and the 

 rest in pastures and tilled ground. 



Grandmother herself had in 1820, at the age of 

 seventeen, along with others, made the long trip in a 

 prairie schooner from far-off New Jersey, in the dead 

 of winter, cooking her meals, as did the rest, by open- 

 air fires all through the snow-clad Alleghanies. She 

 came with memories of how her mother, when once 

 in attendance as a young girl at Commencement Day 



