Harry continued:
"Now that the family was settled in their home at Beacher [sic] Island
the old man must have been concerned about the sons' future, so he told
the boys one spring day that he was gong to Pine Creek, and as it was
sugar making time, they were to turn the sap troughs over that ran on
Sunday, but, as it was good run on Saturday, the boys thought it would
be wicked to waste the good run, so they gathered it on Monday and made
it into sugar and sold it and bought a log chain. When their father
came back and he found out about the chain he would never sit by the
fire made from the back lok [log] which was drawn into the fireplace
with the chain."
The story of the maple sugar and the logging chain appears many places,
so either it's literally true or it's "true to life" and resonates with
people's memory of Joseph Sr.'s personality. In some versions he
refuses to eat food cooked over wood brought to the house with the
chain. I could never understand how he would know which pieces of
firewood had come to the house via that chain, and which didn't, but
even though I've cut and split a fair amount of firewood, there could be
a lot I don't know about it.
"I never heard how the old man managed to get his sons to marry the
Blackwell girls, but I have a feeling that was why he made the trip to
Pine Creek"
This is the only place I recall seeing the maple sugar -- log chain
story "linked" (we have to have a pun included now and then) to a trip
to Pine Creek. Since Sarah Lugg and "Uncle Johnnie" were married in
1818, I suspect that Sarah LUGG Clinch Blackwell Campbell and her
children, Mary and Enoch, were living at Beecher's Island and Joseph's
trip was elsewhere and unrelated to finding daughters-in-law. According
to Jane CAMPBELL Tubbs' "Memoir of Mother", in 1821 Sarah wrote to Ann
Clinch in New Hope (or Lamberton or wherever) asking her to come to
Beecher's Island to marry Joseph Jr. It seems much more likely that
Sarah would be concerned about marrying off her daughters than Joseph
would be concerned about finding brides. Mary Blackwell and James
Campbell would have already been acquainted and may have hoped to marry
even before Sarah wrote to Ann. There was some pressure of tradition
for marrying off the older daughters first, so finding a husband for Ann
may have been a prerequisite for James to marry Mary. In any case,
Joseph and Ann married a few months after she arrived and James and Mary
married a week after them. It may not have required much "managing" on
the part of Joseph Campbell, Sr. -- or by Sarah Lugg Clinch Blackwell
Campbell. The Cowanesque Valley was sparsely settled -- "pickins" were
slim. That's why most everybody in northern Tioga Co. and southern
Steuben Co. is related in some way or other to every body else. Joseph
was 28; James was 23. Marriage may not have taken much persuasion.
Harry mentioned the marriages and the grooms building large house along
the main road by the "big bend". This would approximate the present
route PA49 and would have been near the mouth of Thorn Bottom Creek.
Harry continues with a story that I don't recall having heard before,
but seems consistent with what we know of James Campbell.
"James built a large building for a tavern, with a bar for the liquor
trade. But, just before the opening of the tavern a preacher holding
revival meetings asked if he could have meetings in the tavern, and in
the meetings, Campbell was converted and he took out the bar and stored
it in the attic where it has laid for a hundred years."
I wonder what became of the bar.
In the next episode, Harry tell us of his parents -- and of Robert Steele..