Ohio History Journal

edited by

LOUIS FILLER

 

Prevailing Manners and Customs

on the Frontier: The Memoirs

of Irene Hardy

 

Irene Hardy, schoolmistress, poet, and early Stanford University

professor, was born July 22, 1841, in Eaton, Ohio, the eldest daughter of

Kentucky and Virginia parents. Her father, Walter Buell Hardy, was a

schoolteacher of culture whose four daughters-he also had a son,

Lewis-all taught school successfully. Irene was so named from a

character in Edward Bulwer-Lytton's novel Rienzi, with conscientious

regard for the original Greek pronunciation. Her mother was an

enthusiast for education, who declared that if she had twenty daughters

she would send them all to college if she could.

Irene early became a school teacher, and saved money to enable her

to enter Antioch College. As she had occasion to write in a letter to the

later president of Antioch College, Arthur E. Morgan,

I entered Antioch in September, 1861, as partial freshman. My preparatory

school had given me no Latin, no Greek, and no ancient history. I had, therefore,

to do three years' work in these subjects, which I did in two years. At the end of

that time, owing to conditions brought about by the war, the College classes

were suspended for one year and the faculty gave all their time to the preparatory

school.

I went home to teach. To shorten my story,-I was in and out of college a

number of times to teach, until 1867, when I was nearly ready to take my degree.

Although I was matron of North Hall and teacher in the preparatory school from

1874 to 1876, I did not care to take my degree, notwithstanding I had done work

enough to entitle me to it: nor was I ever afterward a student there. In 1871 I

came to California,¹ and on a return visit in 1883-4, when Dr. David Long was

President, he urged me to take my degree at the next commencement. I could not

return to do so, but the degree was granted in 1885-eighteen years after it was

mainly earned.²

 

 

Dr. Filler is Professor of American Civilization at Antioch College.

1. Irene Hardy returned to Antioch College, as indicated, for the years from 1874 to

1876, then left permanently for California.

2. Irene Hardy to Arthur E. Morgan, June 19, 1921, Hardy File, Antiochiana, Kettering

Library, Antioch College.

• 1
 

42                                               OHIO HISTORY

 

At Antioch, Miss Hardy was of an era of notable women students:

Olympia Brown, known as the first regularly-appointed female minister

in America; Susanna Way Dodds, a pioneer physician and reformer,

who refused to accept her Antioch degree because she was not

permitted to wear her Bloomer costume for the occasion; and Ada

Shepard, who accompanied the Nathaniel Hawthornes to Europe as

governess for their children. As Miss Hardy says, she then went west,

primarily for reasons of health, but stayed to develop a California

career, interrupted then renewed, as a schoolmistress. As such, she was

influential in developing standards for composition and the teaching of

literature for the entire state, publishing a textbook which was used

widely in the public schools. She was influenced by the poet Edward

Sill, of the University of California, and wrote much verse. Some of it

appeared in magazines and in collections such as an 1892 volume,

privately printed in Oakland, and one published by a San Francisco firm

in 1902. These and her teaching activities gave her considerable local

and regional prestige.

In 1894, she joined the Stanford University faculty and gave courses

in American literature, composition, and short story writing. The honor

she accrued is exemplified in an article by a colleague of hers, Melville

B. Anderson.³ Herbert Hoover was among many of her students who

remembered her with affection and respect. In 1919 Hoover, then at the

height of his pre-Presidential fame, opened the assembly at Stanford

University with a talk on the Treaty of Versailles, which recently had

been consummated. Miss Hardy received from him a copy of his

address.

In 1901, she retired from active teaching to a cottage "built for her by

appreciative students."⁴ In 1908 she went blind. That same year she

started the writing of her memoirs, "The Making of a Schoolmistress."

It was completed in 1913, and comprised 530 pages of manuscript. It

took her up to the beginning of her Stanford University career, and

included such matters as her meeting with John Muir and Dr. Edward

Everett Hale; a vignette of Horace Mann, whom she saw during a visit to

Antioch College; a reception for General Ulysses S. Grant; and

friendship with the widow of John Ross Browne, the humorist, traveler,

and government official.

Her seventy-fifth birthday in 1916 brought many letters and

felicitations from students and friends. She died of pneumonia at her

home in Palo Alto on June 3, 1922. She was survived by her sister

Adelaide, also a poet and teacher, and her brother Lewis. He made

 

3. "Malcolm Playfair Anderson," The Condor, XXI (May 1919), 115-9.

4. Palo Alto Times, June 5, 1922.

• 2
 

Manners and Customs                                      43

 

efforts to get his sister's memoirs published, but after failing to gain

support, gave the manuscript, along with other materials of Irene and

Adelaide, to the Antiochiana section of the Antioch College Library.

There the poems, letters, clippings, and other matter were preserved,

thanks in large part to the good offices of the late Miss Bessie L. Totten.

Miss Hardy's memoirs deserve ultimately to be republished in full.

Hers was a typical frontier life-style, and her memories of her childhood

illuminate the quality of life in the small Ohio settlements of the

mid-nineteenth century. In the following chapter, for example, she deals

with such things as shelling corn, holding apple-cuttings, sharing food

and work with neighbors, and making quilts. Together, these

descriptions give her readers a good sense of the "prevailing manners

and customs" of rural Ohio in the 1840s.

 

PREVAILING MANNERS AND CUSTOMS

Household Manners

The household manners and customs in the [eighteen] forties and

fifties were necessarily simple. As the furnishings of the settler's cabin

and the later log house were determined beforehand by necessity, there

was little reason for formality and elaboration. When the mistress of the

house had finished preparing the meal she called the family, took off her

apron, sat at the head of the table, and poured the tea, coffee, or milk.

The master of the house took his place opposite. Everything that was to

be eaten at that meal was on the table. The plate of bread stood at the

master's right hand, the pie or pies stood on the other corners of the

table. Meat, vegetables, preserves, butter, and apple butter occupied

the middle of the table. One plate, upside down, one knife and fork

(two-tined) had been put down for each person. Tea and coffee were

poured from the cup into the saucer to drink, the cup was set on a little

cup-plate, in the better ordered families, to prevent rings of stain on the

homespun linen. Nor was there any prejudice against using Solarino's

method of cooling his broth for cooling the tea if it were still too hot after

pouring into the saucer. Pie was usually a part of every meal and was of

course eaten from the same plate as the rest of the dinner. Napkins were

not in use; this omission, however, was not so barbarous as it may

sound, as table rules about dropping things on the floor or on the table

cloth were very severe, both for grown people and for children. There

was no exception to these customs in the neighborhood. It was not until

the middle fifties that the cup-plate wholly disappeared and everybody

drank tea and coffee from cups with handles. Somewhat later than this

the small sauce-plate began to appear. The men were called from the

• 3
 

44                                              OHIO HISTORY

 

field at half-past eleven by a long tin dinner-horn and the dinner was

served promptly at twelve o'clock.

All the cooking and other work requiring fire was done at the

fireplace, except such larger operations as had to be done out-of-doors

in the iron or copper kettles, until my fifth or sixth year, when my father

and mother bought a stove, which was put into the lean-to at the nearer

end. There were but two other stoves in the neighborhood then, I

believe-one at my grandmother's, and one at Mr. Bremerman's. Our

meals had heretofore all been cooked by the open fire, in a three-legged

bake-oven (elsewhere called a Dutch-oven), in three-legged skillets, and

in iron pots which hung on hooks from a bar put across inside the

chimney, which took the place of the crane common in New England.

Bread was baked in the three-legged oven set on coals before the fire,

and covered with coals which were kept in place by the flange around the

iron lid. Yeast-bread, salt-ricing, corn-pone, biscuits, flat-cake,

griddle-cakes, corn-dodger, corn-bread, pumpkin-bread, and

snow-bread in its season, crackling-bread, cakes and pies, rusks and

gingerbread-all came in turn out of the three-legged oven. As I never

knew of snow-bread in use anywhere excepting in our family and my

grandmother's and as I never find anyone now who ever heard of it, it

seems worthwhile to tell what it was, and how it was made. It was a

bread of corn meal made with snow after the following directions: To a

quart of fresh corn meal salted to taste, add two quarts of fine drifting

snow; take the meal out-of-doors in a cold pan, stir in the dry mealy snow

thoroughly, then pour the mixture at once into a large buttered dripping

pan, sizzling hot, in the oven, spread level with a spoon and bake in a

quick oven about as long as ordinary corn bread. If successful, you will

have a crisp, sweet, delicate bread, delicious eaten with new milk for

supper. This bread can be made only in very cold weather, when the

snow is dry, and drifting about. We children used to beg for it whenever

we saw that the snow was right.

There was no stint of food anywhere in the settlement. Everybody had

a generous table; the very best home-cured meats, raised on their own

farms by the farmers themselves on the table three times a day, with

changes of fresh killed meats, fowls, eggs, vegetables and fruits,

maple-sugar and syrup made in February and March from their own

sugar-trees, dried apples and peaches in winter with all manner of

sugar-preserved fruits, berries, pears, with loads of apples from the

orchards-all these furnished the tables with an abundance I have since

seen nowhere else. The simple manner of serving in families in which

every part of the work was done by its members made all easy enough in

comparison with the elaborate artificiality of more modern eating.

With sewing, weaving, spinning, dyeing of wool and flax-when all is

• 4
 

Manners and Customs                                       45

 

said, women had more time to live than they find now. Clothing was

simply made, but with the greatest pride in the handwork of the

stitching, hemming, and gathering. Men's best shirts were marvels of

beautiful sewing, counted threads in the gathers, and stitched fronts.

Women's gowns were sewed together at the waist with thread-counted

stitches.

Economics and Occupations

The usual custom of early to bed and early to rise prevailed in the

neighborhood. Breakfast was commonly eaten by candle light in the

winter time, and at night the fire was covered and the lights were out

often by eight o'clock. Unless somebody was sewing or reading, the

fireplace furnished the only light for the evening circle. A single candle

or the lard lamp was the only other light in use even to the early fifties.

Tallow and wax candles were made in my own home, often with my help

in putting the wicks into the molds ready for the tallow or wax. As we

never bleached the beeswax, our wax candles were usually dark in

color.

The dye stuffs used by the various families were lump indigo,

cut-bear,⁵ copperas, log-wood, cochineal, madder, and anatto.⁶ These

were of course bought of the druggist. Saffron from the garden, black

and white walnut barks, yellow poplar bark,⁷ willow bark, mosses and

lichens from the woods were some of the natural vegetable dyes

available, though generally not in favor. Skeins of vari-colored yarns

drying on our yard fence, and often at our neighbors, were familiar sights

to me as a child.

Although matches had been invented, they were not in use in our

neighborhood in the forties and early fifties. I do not remember seeing

matches, though there must have been some in our house before the end

of this decade, as I do remember having, and seeing other children have,

the little wooden cylinder boxes in which matches first came. These

little boxes, as indeed any small box, were a rare and precious plaything

to us children. The candle or lamp was lighted with a burning stick from

the fire. People who smoked searched round on the hearth for a coal of

suitable size to be taken up in the bowl. If in the warm days of spring the

fire was allowed to go out, someone went with a shovel to the neighbors

to bring back live coals to relight the fire. In summer-time fire was kept

on the hearth by covering with ashes.

 

5. The word cud-bear is a corruption of cuthbert from the name of Dr. Cuthbert Gordon,

its discoverer. Botanically it is a lichen, Lecanora tartarea. It makes a rich purple color.

6. Anatto is a yellow dye made from berries of a semi-tropical tree, used for coloring

cloth only, not for butter.

7. Liriodendron tulipifera.

• 5
 

46                                              OHIO HISTORY

 

As there were no postage stamps and no envelopes in those days,

letters were folded in squares without a covering and sealed with wafers.

Letters were prepaid or not, as the writer chose. And it sometimes

happened that an inconveniently large postage fee was demanded before

one could have his letter.

Carpets, even rag-carpets, did not come into general use until about

1850. In the hewn log-houses which succeeded the settler's cabins, there

was generally a "big room" which might have a rag carpet, or on the

more enterprising farms, a "girthing" carpet, which was a home-woven

fabric, made of brightly colored home-dyed woolen yarns, used as very

closely laid warp which covered the woof or filling of coarse yarn. The

reds, greens, and yellows were usually graded in arrangement from dark

to light, and made very bright stripes lengthwise of the web. It was called

girthing because it was woven like saddle-girthing. The first I ever saw of

this kind was at the house of a neighbor named Gardner, about 1847. It

was a piece of news to tell when this or that neighbor had finished her

piece of girthing-carpet and was going to lay it on her big room floor. It

was like walking on rainbows to enter such a room. A little later one or

two families bought what was called a Turkey carpet, a finely woven

two- or three-ply fabric, invariably of brilliant red and green figures on a

ground of the same color.

The larger operations of household economy such as soap-making,

washing, apple-butter making, and dyeing, before the advent of stoves,

were done in large iron or copper kettles, hung over the fire

out-of-doors. A stout pole was laid across two firmly fixed forked posts

about eight feet apart. On this two or three kettles hung by the iron bails

so that the fire could be build directly under. Extra water for scrubbing

the floor, or scouring the wooden covers of the milk crocks, or preparing

the lye for lye-homing was heated out-of-doors. A necessary addition to

this out-door fireplace was the ash-hopper for the making of lye out of

ashes. Sometimes the hopper was made of small logs laid on a slant

platform, but generally of four-foot clapboards set up in the shape of an

inverted truncated pyramid on a slant floor. The ashes were put into this

on a thick layer of straw which served as a filter to the lye running off into

a wooden trough. If lye of greater strength was wanted, the

already-leached ashes were taken out and thrown aside, new ashes put

in, and the lye from the trough poured in once more. The strength of the

lye was tested by seeing whether it would bear up an egg or not. In some

families, as in our own, I remember, a fine starch was made by the

women by stirring and soaking wheat bran in a tub of water, until the

whole fermented, the starch sank to the bottom, the bran was poured off

with the superfluous water, and the cake of starch at the bottom taken

out and dried on plates. This was used for starching the finer linens.

• 6
 

Manners and Customs                                     47

 

Common flour starch served for ordinary use.

Up to the end of my tenth year (July 1851) my life had been that of a

child in a semi-pioneer settlement; for the township in which I lived was

just beginning to emerge from the farm-clearing, log-cabin days, and the

simple manner of living of those times still prevailed. Our clothes were

hand-woven and home-made; we raised our own wool and flax, and

prepared these for the loom; the wool, by washing, picking, and carding,

and afterwards spinning and dyeing; the flax, by pulling and rotting in

the fields, breaking, scutching, hackling, and then by spinning and

weaving into linen cloth for all household purposes, and for summer

clothes. We made all our sugar from the maple trees. Of all these things I

was a part, and took my part, to the extent of learning the processes by

sight, and some by practice. I learned to spin wool and flax, though of

course I did little of it at so early an age. I "handed-in threads" in the

operation of "putting in a piece" of cloth, I "filled the quills" for the

shuttles by turning the little quill-wheel and the winding-blades. Not

until all the quills had been filled in the mornings was I free to go with my

sister to the woods to play. Usually my mother gave me three skeins

from the spun wool or linen hanging in the "loft" to use for filling the

quills. I looked them over, took the most tangled one first-I had learned

this myself because it was my experience already that the nearer the

time came to go out to play, the harder it was to wait to untangle yarn,

that the time seemed to come more quickly when I could turn my wheel

fastest with the smooth last skein.

"Handing-in threads" was a tedious process: I sat behind the heddles,

between them and the warp-beam, passing to my mother on the front

side of these "gears," as they were generally called, each thread, one by

one in its warped order, with nothing to see or to hear, but

"one-thread-at-a-time-with-attention." If by chance one thread was

omitted and the next put into its place undiscovered for some time, then

all must be taken out and done over; and it was warm and close and

stupid. My mother could easily have lightened my task by stories, but if

she had tried to do so she could not have given her attention to "a thread

at a time just so," and mistakes would have crept in. Sometimes my

Grandmother Ryan came in and relieved me by taking my place behind

the heddles.

It should be explained perhaps that the "quills" were made of

branches of elder by cutting them into about four-inch lengths and

pushing out the pith; these were used as bobbins on which to run the

thread for the shuttle.

I have said elsewhere that almost everything used by the farmers at

this time was made at home. This included many of the farming utensils

and conveniences for carrying on the varied kinds of farm and household

• 7
 

48                                               OHIO HISTORY

 

work. There was no money to spend, for example, for buckets to be used

in [maple] sugar camps, so that vessels for collecting the maple sap had

to be made by hand. These were usually troughs dug out with chisel and

mallet from a split section of a log, two or three feet long. At the end of

the sugar season the troughs were either gathered up and stacked in the

camp shed or, what was more common, each was turned up on end

against a tree.

Hardships of some kinds were so common that they became the

source of certain habits, which were afterwards followed by

preferences: for example, the habit of going barefoot. No child would

willingly have worn shoes in the spring and summer, nor put them on

until the winter snow fell. As all the farmers made their own shoes and

those of all their family, there was no waste of such necessary work.

Usually, the calf-skin too was of their own manufacture. The

shoe-bench and kit of tools was as necessary a part of the house

furnishing as the wheel and loom. Grown men and women, however,

seldom went barefoot; that was regarded as shiftlessness. My first pair

of shoes, made by my father, served me until I was four, so far as I now

remember. The shoes were always made on straight lasts and the

children were required to change them from left to right as did the grown

people. Very often the lasts were whittled out at home, thread and pegs

were prepared there also. The sewing was done by means of an awl and a

thread with a pig bristle twisted into the waxed end.

The day I was taken to the new schoolhouse in Dooley's district-five

or six, I must have been-was in October. We started early, while the

frost was still on the ground. I was barefoot, for the day promised to be

sunny and so far warm, and besides, I had no shoes, and it was too early

to begin wearing them if I had had any. The road was dry and dusty, but

frosty most of the way. I drove up some cows, still lying in the road

waiting to be milked, and warmed my feet in the spots which they left.

This was a trick I had more than once enjoyed, when there was no

particular need as on this long cold walk.

As almost everything that was eaten on farms was produced there,

few excuses for borrowing ever came; sometimes a cup of green

coffee-beans, or a little saleratus, or any such small matter. Every family

seemed sufficient to its own immediate needs. But there was always a

good deal of friendly exchange of commodities. "Don't you folks want

some currants? We have more than enough, come over and help

yourselves." Or, "Our early apples are ripe, and yours are not in yet.

Send over and get some." Or maybe, "Mother sent over these turnips,

ours are earlier this year." "Why, much obliged surely, and I'll just put

some of these spare-ribs and a mess of sausage into your basket." The

compliments of the season went back and forth between neighbors all

• 8
 

Manners and Customs                                     49

 

the year round; if there were kinds of fruits or vegetables that one's

neighbor had not in his garden and orchard, then it was a privilege to

send them to him. "Come over and help us." was not often said,

because those who could help anticipated the cry. The hard things in

pioneer life were offset by such real compensations. And yet how

simple, uneventful, and slow it looked,-and looks now to those who

see from without! I hardly think our neighborhood was any better or any

worse than the neighborhoods that pieced on all around. True we had

few shiftless, few very poor, and few unthrifty among us. All were at

least trying to live decent self-respecting lives. I do not remember more

than one family-and they disappeared while I was still very

young-whose house was dirty and whose women and children wore

dirty clothes. They were subjects of comment so often that one who

listened even to what she did not understand could not forget,-and

could not on after occasions fail to observe.

Shelling Corn for the Mill

Shelling corn for the mill was an evening occupation which came

whenever fresh corn meal was needed for bread. The best ears of mill

corn were chosen, brought in after supper in the bushel basket, and set

by the fire. At home my father, helped by the two children who were old

enough, shelled, while my mother sat sewing or knitting by the candle or

the lard oil lamp, or perhaps by firelight. When enough cobs had been

stripped of grain my sister and I built cob-houses, which we begged to

have set on the coals between the andirons-"to see the house burn."

But every grain must have been taken off; it was wicked to burn corn. If

corn-shelling took place at my grandfather's when I stayed all night

there, the scene was much the same, except that more took a hand at it,

there were no cob-houses, and the next morning someone, usually the

youngest, who was I, had to get down on the hearth and pick all the

grains out of the cracks of the flag-stone hearth before sweeping was

done. For it was wicked to burn anything that any creature would eat,

and although there was abundance of grain and other food for all the

fowls, at their command as it were, this rule was so rigidly observed that

none of my grandfather's children would have broken it, for two

reasons,-fear of punishment by my grandfather, and "because it was

wicked." What Grandfather said was wicked was doubly so, because

nobody thought him a religious man.

I have heard my father say that he had gone into the corn-field in

October to get ears of ripened corn to grate on the kitchen grater to make

meal for bread for breakfast. "But," added he, "that was not

uncommon in the wilderness times in Kentucky in my father's early

family life. He lived thirty miles from a mill, and my oldest brother had to

• 9
 

50                                             OHIO HISTORY

go on horseback that distance with a bag of shelled corn behind him to bring back meal for bread." In our part of the country there had been Bruce's Mill since 1812, so that going to mill was a simple matter. In my childhood grating corn for meal was never merely on account of need; but the old necessity of doing it had left a taste in the mouths of the farmer folks for a supper of mush-and-milk made from the freshly grated and sifted meal of the first frost-ripened field corn; and for the new corn-bread next morning of the same sweet handmade meal. When a bag of corn was taken to mill one waited until it had been ground. It was then returned to the bag unbolted, that is, with the bran still mixed with it. The sifting was done by hand at home as the meal was used. When a farmer took a sack of wheat to mill he took home with him the bolted flour, the middlings or shorts, and the bran. In each case his grist was less the miller's toll, which varied, I believe, with the quoted prices of grain. Apple Cuttings An apple-bee, or apple-cutting as it was called in the Middle West, was a common entertainment in the fall among the farmers. After the summer's work was laid by, in the lull of the year, the apple-orchards were scenes of jollity and abundance. The early fall apples and what were left over from the late summer trees were gathered in heaps in the orchards among their own trees, some for the cider-mill and apple-butter making, and some for drying. For both of these processes large quantities of apples, peeled, cored, and quartered, were necessary, as every family made at least a half barrel of apple-butter, or never less than

• 10
 

Manners and Customs                                      51

 

one big copper kettle full. Dried apples were greatly depended upon

also, as fruit-canning was then not known. Preserving meant jellies,

sugar preserves, thick and rich, and made so strong as to require no

sealing.

Usually invitations were sent about by word of mouth a few days

before the apple-cutting was to come off. Tubs, baskets, large kettles, all

sorts of receptacles came into use to hold the apples brought into the

house for the workers. Usually the "married folks" came and worked all

day or afternoon, peeling by hand and with peelers, coring and

quartering, and spreading out on improvised scaffolds in the sun to dry.

At noon or later a dinner, such as [Washington] Irving describes in "The

Legend of Sleepy Hollow," was served. Some of the visiting women

helped the hostess to make ready what was necessarily left to be

done-coffee, hot biscuit, and vegetables. Before the neighbors left

there was a clean-up after the work and more apples were brought in for

the young folks who were to come to work after dusk. More baking of

pies, cakes, and biscuit, and supper for the family alone, while the old

folks went home to send the young ones for their share of work and fun.

Then work, with jokes, tricks, counting apple-seeds to be

named--"One I love, Two I love, Three I love I say, Four he loves, Five

she loves," etc., throwing a long peeling around the head to see what

letter it would make. (How did it always happen to make the right one?)

Jokes about Ben's slow peeling, or Nancy's slow quartering, or Mary

Ann's poor coring, "Leaves half the core-eyes in," "And you leave a

ring 'o peelin' on boths ends of every apple, and that's why I can't keep

up corin' for peelin' after you-huh!"

Then came supper, apple and pumpkin pies, cider, doughnuts, cakes,

cold chicken and turkey; after which games, "Forfeits," "Building a

Bridge," "Snatchability," even "Blind Man's Bluff" and "Pussy

Wants a Corner," then going home in the moonlight. All these customs I

knew of before I was ten years old, by having been present at an apple

peeling in my own home, and one at my grandmother's.

Quiltings and wood-choppings were other forms of neighborhood

helpings in common. There were no hired people in those days in that

community, so that when a man or woman had too much of any one thing

to be done by one person, everybody lent a hand and made good times

and quick work out of it all; always, of course, with much good eating

and plenty of simple and wholesome fun. Husking, sheep-shearing,

wool-picking, carpet-rag cuttings, geese-plucking, corn-planting,

house-raising, log-rolling, sewings, furnished times and occasions for

festivities. With most of these forms of amusement I had become

familiar before my father moved his family to Eaton, where there was

seldom need of neighborhood civilities of this kind.

• 11
 

52                                               OHIO HISTORY

 

The custom of serving a drink of whiskey to the men in the

harvest-field and at house-raisings was going out of favor in the middle

forties, as was that of offering toddy to casual callers. I have a dim

recollection of hearing an argument by someone with my father because

he had said he did not intend to offer drink to the men at his hay-harvest.

"Then the men will not come." "Well, they can stay away then,"

answered my father. This seemed to be about the time of the last struggle

for existence of this custom, as I never saw or heard of any further use of

it. I never heard of any custom of this kind in my Grandfather Hardy's

family who, though Kentuckians, were decided total abstainers.

Patchwork Quilts and Garden Seeds

Whenever a neighbor came to spend the day on a visit to my mother, a

part of the entertainment consisted, as a matter of course, in showing her

patch-work quilts, finished or in process of making, a piece of cloth in the

loom, or lately woven, and any new garment made or in the making. In

the same way every quilt pieced and quilted in the neighborhood was

known and spoken of in other houses. For the most part the quilts were

pieced of scraps of calico or gingham left from the few dresses of those

materials owned by the maker and added to by the friendly exchange

with neighbors, each woman generally brought back from a visit a little

roll of quilt pieces, and every woman could tell, in showing her quilt, of

whose dress or apron or bonnet each square was a piece. Before I was

eight years old I used, while still in bed in the mornings, to say, "This is a

piece of mother's dress, and this one of grandmother's, and this of Mrs.

Arrasmith's, and this of Aunt Marget's" and, "Mother, whose is this?"

and so on. These "nine patches," as they usually were, often contained

a good deal of family history. A little later in this decade, young women

made quilts of bright colored calicoes, bought for the purpose and cut

into various intricate designs, which were sewed down or applied on

white cotton cloth. Months of work were often sewed into the closely

wrought and elaborately quilted designs. Such quilts were much

admired and usually put upon the best beds on great occasions. The

designs often had fanciful names, as "Mary's Dream," "Morning

Star," "Rose of Sharon," and the like. My mother never made any of

these elaborate bed-covers, as she did not admire them very much.

Another part of a visitor's entertainment, if it was winter or spring,

was the bringing out of the seed-bag and dividing up of the

kitchen-garden and flower-seeds. Very often these seeds were named

from the neighbor who had given the start of the plants. I remember

hearing my mother say, as she gave some large white beans with pink

specks on them to a neighbor, "These are Maria Crane beans." Each

kind of seed was tied up in a piece of cloth in a little round bunch. I can

• 12
 

Manners and Customs                                      53

 

still see myself standing by my mother's knee, looking on with interest

as she opened the mysterious little bunches of cloth.

A Marriage Custom

One spring Sunday morning (in 1846 I have since learned) I was at my

grandmother's in the living-room, with some of my younger aunts about,

when in came Uncle John Obed and his bride, Mary Bremerman. They

had just been married at the bride's home on a farm a mile away, and had

walked over to the groom's home for a wedding trip. One of my aunts

went to the bride, took off her bonnet and laid it on the bed, she then

untied her cap strings and said laughingly, "You shan't have this thing

on," took it off and laid it with the bonnet. I stared at the lovely pink

cheeks and blue eyes of my new aunt without understanding anything of

what it all meant. I only knew that this pretty lady was another aunt

somehow. The simple ceremony at the house, the bridal cap, the walk to

the husband's home, were all characteristic of the time. A few days later

the newly married couple went to their new home in Howard County,

Indiana. Sometimes in the more well-to-do families, especially if the

couple had the approval of everybody concerned, there was what was

called an "Infair," a great dinner to which the relatives of both families

with other neighborhood guests, were bidden.

• 13