U.S. Data Repository http://www.us-data.org/ -- USGenNet Inc. -- Please read the U.S. Data Repository Copyright Statementon the following page: ----------------------------------------------------------- CHAPTER VIII. ECONOMIC BEGINNINGS We have seen how the settlers on the western frontier of Virginia maintained their position in spite of the raids and depredations of the Indian allies of Great Britain during the Revolution, and more than held their own against the raids for twelve years afterwards until the troops of the federal government defeated them and compelled them to sign a treaty of peace. The deeds of the Hugheses, the Wests, the Jacksons, and a host of other heroes in the desperate struggle with the Indians have been handed down by a grateful people who owed the peaceful possession of their lands to their efforts. We have also seen the establishment of justice and traced the beginnings of law and order in the settlements of the upper Monongahela valley. Colonel Lowther, John P. Duvall, David Sleeth and others had a great share in the movement and the records in the court house at Clarksburg show how important their work was for the future of Hackers' creek and the surrounding region. There were other pioneers in the region whose deeds have been forgotten for want of a chronicler, and whose very names would be lost if they had not been recorded in connection with the entry of homesteads or the pur- chase of land, or as having been appointed to view the location of a proposed road, or summoned to give evi- dence before a grand jury. These obscure citizens were the ones whose humble efforts finally brought about civ- ilized institutions in place of the primeval forest. Their collective endeavors have made Lewis County what it is. William Powers, Indian fighter, justice of the peace and chronicler of the events of the stirring years of the Indian wars, is said to have made the statement that in his opinion the settlers west of the mountains did not in- tend to remain permanently, but would leave when the game became exhausted. He believed that the soil of the county would not support a white population for any length of time. Others were of the same opinion. They thought that certain fields would bring crops for a certain number of years, and that other fields would bring a greater or less number, according to the lay of the land. The possibility of raising live stock on a com- mercial scale did not apparently present itself as a basis for prosperity in after years. The growing of grain and fruit in large quantities for distant markets was not to be considered without means of transportation better than any known at the beginning of the eighteenth cen- tury. The presence of hidden treasures of petroleum and natural gas was unsuspected. Bituminous coal (called by the settlers stone coal to distinguish it from charcoal) was known to exist in the valley of the upper West Fork and some of its tributaries, but it was ap- parently not much used for fuel by the earliest comers. If any one had suggested that some day it could profita- bly be mined and transported to a seaboard market he would have been considered eligible for transportation to a seaboard lunatic asylum. The principal industries of the pioneers were hunt- ing and trapping. Agriculture was in a very elementary state — so elementary, in fact, that it can not be consid- ered in any other light than as a means of maintaining existence. After the close of the Indian wars many of the settlers came because they had been attracted by the land and intended to make improvements, raise larger crops, breed live stock and gain wealth from the produce of their farms and from the increased value of the land which would follow the expected rush of settlement and the gradual improvement of the country. It was the settler's first care after locating his claim and building a cabin, to clear a small tract of land where he could raise a crop of corn and some vegetables to re- inforce and balance the supply of wild meat which needed only to be sought in the woods with a gun. Most of the clearing's were made by grubbing the bushes and sap- lings and chopping and burning the smaller trees. The monarchs of the primeval forest were deadened by gird- ling them with an ax or by building fires at their bases. It was impracticable to clear the land in any other way, for the labor of chopping the larger trees would have been too great for the pioneer farmers. The deadened trees were sometimes allowed to stand in the clearings for several years until the danger of limbs falling upon the stock or on the corn fields became too great; they were then generally destroyed by piling logs or smaller pieces of wood at their bases and setting them on fire. Often dead trees continued to burn for several days. The smaller trees at the edges of the clearing were not burned, but were split in halves or fourths and used to make rail fences to keep out the stock. Usually the fences needed to be heavier than now. The high bottoms of the streams and the flats were cleared first because the land there was more fertile than elsewhere, and there was no dan- ger of the crops being destroyed by floods. When the ground had been cleared and burned over it was stirred lightly with a shovel plow, an implement made often with a forked sapling for a stock and a small piece of iron rudely fashioned, for the point. The han- dles were fastened to the stock with wooden pins. The horse was hitched to the plow by means of grape vines tied with thongs to hames made from stumps of large ash trees, and the hames fitted around a buckskin collar stuffed with fibers of linden wood. The corn was drop- ped by hand and covered with a hoe. It was cultivated by plowing with the shovel plow and then cutting the weeds around the hills of corn with a hoe — a laborious process which has survived from pioneer days in most parts of the county. The early corn fields were hoed more often than not by the women and children of the family. There were no crop failures unless wild animals or live stock broke into the enclosures and destroyed the crops. In spite of the poor quality of the seed planted the yields compared favorably with crops produced on the same fields today. The crops were gathered and hauled to the houses of the pioneers on sleds. Corn was the staple food of the pioneers. No other grain was raised for many years. When the settlers came across the mountains without having raised a crop of corn they were obliged to subsist throughout the spring and summer without breadstuffs. Dr. Joseph Doddridge, whose father brought him to the west when he was a mere boy, wrote later of his experiences: "The Indian meal which my father brought over the mountains was expended six weeks too soon, so for that length of time we had to live without bread. The lean venison and the breast of wild turkey we were taught to call bread. The flesh of the bear was denominated meat. This artifice did not succeed very well. After living this way for some time we became sickly, the stomach seemed to be always empty and tormented with a sense of hunger. "I remember how narrowly the children watched the growth of the potato tops, pumpkin and squash vines, hoping from day to day to get something to answer in the place of bread. How delicious was the taste of the young potatoes when we got them. What a jubilee when we were permitted to pull the young corn for roast- ing ears. Still more so when it acquired sufficient hard- ness to be made into 'Johnny cakes' by the aid of the tin grater. We then became healthy, vigorous and content- ed with our situation, poor as it was." Besides the tin grater referred to, which was merely a piece of perforated tin affixed to a block of wood, the corn was also prepared for hominy and bread by a mor- tar and pestle. The mortar was usually a block from a beech tree with a hole burned in the center, large enough to hold a peck of grain. The pestle was a short length of a sapling. The settlers on Hacker's creek did not long have to depend upon such primitive appliances for their meal. John Hacker, on one of his trips across the moun- tains, is said to have brought two small buhrstones with him. Edmund West also brought a small hand mill to the fort and rigged it up very early to run by water power. It is thought that this is the mill to which Isaac Washburn had been when he was killed by the Indians while riding toward home in the vicinity of Richards' fort. Both mills were very crude, however. It is sup- posed that their capacity was not much more than one and one-half or two bushels of meal a day. Some of the Hacker's creek settlers may have had their grinding done at George Jackson's mill on the Buckhannon, which was in existence by 1780 or 1781. It was destroyed by the Indians in 1782, after which time the nearest large mill was at Clarksburg. S. Stratton was given permis- sion to erect a mill on Hacker's creek by a court order made in 1785, but apparently he failed to take advantage of it. The first large mill in the upper West Fork valley was built at West's fort in 1793 by Henry McWhorter. It was far superior to any that had thus far existed in the Trans-Alleghany settlements. McWhorter had come three years earlier from New Jersey where he had been apprenticed to a miller and had received a thorough train- ing. His mill had a capacity of only fifteen bushels of corn a day, but it ground practically all the corn meal for the settlers in the vicinity for several years, and finally gave its name to the village which grew up around it. For many years all the settlers from the Buckhannon river valley came to McWhorter's mill with their grists. So also did the settlers of Lost creek and the upper one- third of Harrison County until the establishment of Clement's mill at West Milford in 1800. The earliest mills did not grind wheat or any other grain than corn. After providing for sufficient corn to furnish bread and hominy for his family throughout the year, the chief agricultural interest of the pioneer was in his live stock. None of the farmers thought in the beginning of clear- ing land for pasture, though most of the early comers transported their goods to the west on the backs of horses and drove cattle and hogs and sometimes a few sheep before them when they first came. The live stock were belled and turned into the open woods, where they fed upon succulent grasses, wild pea vines and the edible leaves of some of the trees. The horses and cattle were allowed free range of the woods during the day, but at night they were driven in by the children of the family when they did not come home of their own accord. The stealing of horses and the killing of cattle were the ob- jects of many of the Indian raids against the settlements. Hundreds of horses were ridden away to the Indian vil- lages. Cattle were never stolen from the western Vir- ginia settlements, because they could not travel fast enough to allow the Indians to escape pursuit. Many were killed and their carcasses left to decay on the ground merely to gratify the destructive instincts of the savages and to make life on the frontier intolerable for the settlers. Cattle were kept at first only for their milk. Their flesh was not of such good quality as the beef raised now in Lewis County, and besides there was plenty of bear meat and venison which could be had for the killing. Later, when the national government built forts along the Ohio, the live stock industry of the upper West Fork river received a great stimulus. The large garrisons maintained at the forts required a supply of meat greater than could be secured from hunting or from the farms in the immediate vicinity. Cattle were collected from dif- ferent parts of the West Fork valley and driven overland from Clarksburg as early as 1790 and 1791 by way of the new road to Neal's station, which had been opened by William Raymond, Sr., soon after the establishment of Harrison County. Until their numbers became too great for the forage, the cattle were usually fat after ranging the woods for a summer season. As the herds became larger the set- tlers sought to augment the amount of forage by going into the woods and cutting poplar, linden and other trees both in summer and winter. Cattle were allowed to run out all winter, subsisting on corn fodder, browse, or other forage. As a rule they were extremely poor in the spring. There was no attempt to breed the cattle scien- tifically; indeed only scrub stock was to be found west of the mountains in the eighteenth century. "Linebacks" were common, as shown by old sale bills, and some of them were good dairy cattle though they were not as a rule good beef cattle. Sheep raising was a necessary industry in the new community, and it was perhaps the most discouraging of all to the settlers. Many of the pioneers brought a few sheep with them in order to raise wool for the manufac- ture of cloth and yarn. The small flocks were given the greatest possible care to prevent their being killed by wolves. In the thinly settled districts it was impossible for many years to allow the sheep to run in the woods, and they were therefore kept on clearings adjacent to the houses of the pioneers. The depredations of the wolves, which sometimes grew so bold as to come to the enclosures in broad daylight and throttle the sheep at the very doors of the cabins, always kept the number of sheep very low. As a substitute for wool, flax was grown on almost every farm, and the housewives of the early day were skilled in the manufacture of coarse cloth from it by means of the hackle and the spinning wheel. Hogs were owned in large numbers by the pioneers. "Hog and hominy" had an important place on the tables of the pioneers. Pork was a welcome change from veni- son and bear meat, especially since it was of good quality. The hogs were always fat in the autumn from feeding on the plentiful mast, and the flavor of the meat was sometimes preferred to that of corn-fed hogs. Of all the live stock of the farmers, hogs alone were able to brave all the dangers of the forests and come out unscathed. For many years they were allowed to run wild. Each owner had an old boar at the head of his drove which would protect it against the attacks of wild animals, and the boars, with their long tusks, were able to ward off all comers. Instances have been known of their having killed bears; and even men were sometimes compelled to climb trees when charged by one of the fierce brutes. The hogs did not seek the protection of the cabins as the other live stock did, and often they were neglected by their owners until different herds united, making prop- erty in hogs exceedingly difficult to identify. Much of the business of early county courts was in determining law suits concerning the ownership of hogs. To obviate the difficulty of determining ownership the farmers adopted the practice of branding their live stock. "A swallowfork in the right ear," or "two notches on the lower side of the right ear," were marks of prom- inent stock raisers of that day. In order to prove owner- ship in case of a lawsuit, the mark was recorded with the clerk of the county court. Hunting and trapping, which had begun even before settlements were made, long remained the principal in- dustries of the country. From the time of John Simp- son, adventurers penetrated into the wilderness to shoot deer, bears and buffaloes and to trap beavers, otters and smaller animals for their furs. Buffalo robes were in great demand east of the mountains, and furs were eager- ly sought by the merchants of the old world. The trap- pers usually selected their fields of operations in the autumn and established their camps. During the winter they secured as many furs as they could and then left their exposed camps in the early spring before the Indian forays began. Their furs were hidden in a hole of water in some stream and securely tied to prevent their being washed away. There they would be preserved for many months. In the summer the trappers would return to their caches with packhorses and transport their furs to the nearest market. Some were carried over the mountains to Winches- ter on packhorses; others, and perhaps the greater num- ber, were loaded on boats and taken to Pittsburgh where they were sold to the fur dealers. In 1791 or 1792, a party of hunters came to Leading creek and other branches of the Little Kanawha river where they made an extended hunt. They carried their spoils, consisting of beaver skins, buffalo robes and bear skins and meat, by canoe down the Little Kanawha river to Neal's sta- tion and thence up the Ohio to Marietta, where they dis- posed of the furs to traders and the meat to the garrison at Fort Harmar. Exports of furs by professional hunters and trappers were of little economic advantage to the country. They did not add to the wealth of the permanent residents or improve the conditions of living. On the contrary, as the supply of fur-bearing animals decreased, conditions of living on the frontier became harder. It was for- tunate for the settlers that there was in the beginning a large number of fur-bearing animals in the country, for they afforded practically the only convenient article of export. Every settler was a hunter and most were trap- pers. The furs which they secured in the winter became the basis of their first commerce with the older settle- ments. It was the custom for every settler to make at least one trip to Winchester every year to procure sup- plies. As a rule their wants were few and simple. Ammu- nition, salt and iron were the only absolute necessities that could not be secured from the forests. The trip was made by packhorse over trails only wide enough for a horse to walk without danger of scrap- ing off the packs against trees. There were no hotels on the way at which the pioneer could stop and procure food for himself and forage for his horses. For practi- cally the whole distance there were no settlements. The traveler was compelled to sleep out under the stars and eat the johnny-cake which he had brought for his lunch and such game as he was able to kill on the way. The horses secured their food by foraging in the woods, for it was not customary to burden them with grain. It was considered that two bushels, or 168 pounds, of salt was all that one horse should be made to carry. The journey was often very dangerous. The wild beasts were of course a menace to the traveler. There were also undesirable characters who lay in wait for an opportunity to waylay and kill the lonely traveler in order to secure his horses and goods. The cause of great- est fear, however, was the intense cold of the mountains in winter. It is related that John Hacker was caught one night in a terrific snowstorm somewhere high in the Alleghanies. He tried to make a fire from the flint and tinder he carried, but could not on account of the in- creasing numbness of his hands and arms. He would certainly have perished but for the fact that he bethought himself to lash his two horses together and lie between their backs with two deerskins over him. Once when John Sims and Henry McWhorter were making the trip to Winchester together, Sims was over- come by the cold while walking and sat down by the side of the trail to rest. His companion, realizing the danger, cut a beech withe and began beating him with it. Sims roused and made for his tormentor. He failed to catch him and, after a short distance, again sat down. Again McWhorter vigorously plied the beech withe and again Sims became angry and attempted to lay hands on Mc- Whorter. After enduring several beatings in this way Sims at length became warm enough to proceed. The difficulties of carrying on commerce with Win- chester were so great that the settlers could not have brought to the West Fork anything other than the barest necessities of life even if their stock of furs had been suffi- cient to purchase luxuries. When John Reger married Elizabeth West at West's fort in 1788, the bride wore a wonderful store gown of calico which the groom had pur- chased in Winchester, having walked the entire trip with a gun on his shoulder. The incident caused such a flurry of excitement in the settlement that it has been handed down in tradition to the present day. The commerce with Pittsburgh, which later became considerable, was of slower growth. The settlers took their furs and meat down the West Fork and Mononga- hela rivers in canoes and flatboats and exchanged them for powder and lead. They also resorted to the village to have their guns repaired by the gunsmiths there. Salt at Pittsburgh was more expensive than at Winches- ter, and it was more difficult to transport up the river. The shipbuilding industry which developed around Pitts- burgh, created a market for walnut logs from the upper Monongahela. The building of forts on the Ohio river, as we have seen, furnished a market for the agricultural produce of the West Fork valley, and led afterwards to considerable trade. Clarksburg, the county seat and the metropolis of the upper Monongahela valley, was without a store until 1788, and perhaps after that time. The records of that year show that one Joseph Anderson was licensed "to retail goods in this County as the law directs." Whether Anderson was a merchant or a peddler is not clear. There is, unfortunately, no corroborative tradition. The fact that there was a pioneer on the upper West Fork with sufficient enterprise to make a business of trans- porting goods from the east and exchanging them for furs and other produce was a long step in advance. It marked the beginning of trade — of an important division of labor — in the community. The lack of roads was keenly felt by all the set- tlers in northwestern Virginia. Pittsburgh had taken the lead as a commercial center largely owing to the fact that a good military road had been built from Cumber- land by Braddock in 1754, which had been somewhat im- proved and kept in repair after that time. Shortly after the close of the Revolution, when it had been definitely determined by the boundary commission that Pittsburgh was in Pennsylvania and not in Virginia, the General Assembly, desiring to cement the upper Monongahela valley to the eastern section of the state by commercial ties, opened a wagon road from Winchester via Romney to Morgantown. This was the famous State road. In 1786, the legislature appointed a commission of Harrison County citizens to lay out and open a wagon road from some point on the State road to the mouth of the Little Kanawha river. The road was first located and con- structed from Clarksburg east to some point on the Cheat river, now in Preston County. It could not have been a well constructed thoroughfare until a later date. The first wagon did not reach Clarksburg until 1798, twelve years after the road was located. West of Clarksburg the road was only a blazed trail through the wilderness until the beginning of the new century. The roads which had been established by the Har- rison County court to connect different sections of the county were mere trails cut through the woods, barely wide enough to allow a packhorse to pass over them without scraping off his pack. On account of the value of every bit of cleared ground no road was ever located through a clearing. It followed the bounds of the clear- ing on one side. The unfavorable location of many of the roads in Lewis County at the present time is due to this fact. A traveler inquiring his way from one place to another would be told to follow the beech or other blazes. Cross roads or branch roads were marked with blazings on different kinds of trees. In spite of the lack of good roads, there must have been some travel through Clarksburg, for there were taverns in the county seat from the beginning of Harri- son County. This fact is partly explained by the fact that many citizens came from the outlying sections of the county to attend court, but there were also many emi- grants with their worldly possessions on packhorses, passing through the town on their way to lands farther west. There was no postoffice in the village until 1798. The postoffice address of citizens of Hacker's creek was "Winchester, Va," until that date. -----------------------------------------------------------