Written in the year 1888 or 1889 by William Henry Harrison Yeager, cont.
Part II
"I will now turn back to the first of our settling on the place when the
neighbors began to think about some schools for their children. About
the year twenty-one all agreed on a site for a school house which was
three fourths of a mile northeast of Middletown. Here they constructed a
rude log house which was very common in those days. The fashion was very
plain and simple leaving the logs all in nature's growth chopping out a
door in
one end and also a place to make a fire place in one side and building
the back wall and jams by throwing in dirt and pounding it down with a
mall and cutting a log out of the side to from one end to the other for
a window and at the opposite end from the door and put up sticks
perpendicular and paste paper on them and grease it to toughen it which
answered for the windows for there was no glass and sash in them days.
The door was made of long boards riven out like clapboards and shaved a
little and the ceiling was made out of split logs and the flat side
turned down and filled on top with dirt. And the roof made with old
fashion clapboards four to four and one half feet long and waited down
with poles and pins to hold them down. The floor was sometimes made of
rude puncheons and sometimes of Mother earth. The school house completed
there was a teacher to select and they all selected my father who taught
the first school that I went to. They soon wanted some officer to keep
peace and they elected my father Justice of the Peace, and Conrad FRAKES
constable. He filled that office until he lift the state and moved to
Louisiana in the spring of thirty six.
"When my father first bought his land for his farm he had to borrow the
money to purchase the land at the land office at Vincennes and he made a
loan of old Uncle Tommy POUND and he had not yet got able to replace
that money all these years, Uncle Tommy using much leniency with him. So
about the spring of twenty six he concluded to go down the river on a
flat boat to New Orleans to try to make some money which was forty
dollars for oarsmen at that time and he also went that spring and
thinking that when he got down there he could make money faster there
than here he stayed fifteen months sometimes picking cotton but about
the middle of June the second year he got home. I well remember the day
when he got home. We was all out in the field plowing and hoeing the
corn. One of my sisters came running to tell us the news of father's
coming and we all started the nearest way to the house and all bare
headed and when we got there, father seemed to chide our mother for
letting us go without any hats but my mother was one of these economical
women and did not go in debt for anything. But it was not a few days
until my father took us all to town and got us all a hat apiece of John
F. CRUFT.
"Mother had increased the stock of cattle to twenty eight head. My Uncle
Nicholas and John BAILEY had got out house logs with the help of us boys
the fall before to build a hewed log house twenty by thirty two feet,
two stories high and two rooms and had raised it in the spring before
father had got home. It took three days to raise it. Some of the logs
pasted two feet at butt which made the raising very heavy, but we had
not done anything towards putting on the roof when father came home only
hewn out the rafters on account of our crops but after the harvest we
went to work at the house. And we also had brick to make for the
chimneys which took a great many - eight thousand apiece for each
chimney - a double fire place in each of the upstairs rooms and also a
brick kitchen, sixteen by twenty feet and a brick bake oven in the south
east corner which in all took some thirty or thirty-five thousand bricks
and Old Uncle Jerry TYRON and his boys laid the brick. So we got part of
the house so we could live in it the next winter.
"I had forgotten to relate a serious accident which occured to
Grandmother BAILEY the winter after we landed at Terre Haute. While
carrying water from the river for house use she slipped and fell and put
her hip out of place which they never got set right again and it made
her a cripple the balance of her life. So she had to use two crutches
while she lived. She was a very religious women ever after I knew her.
She made it a daily practice to read a chapter in the Bible every day
and when she got unable to read herself she would get some of us
children to read a chapter for her. So in about the spring of twenty
six, she took down sick and did not last but eight or ten days being in
her eighty-fifth year. They soon finished up the new house so we had
plenty of room, although our family still numbered fifteen. About the
summer of 1826 on June twenty-fourth, my oldest sister married Joseph
THOMPSON and they had a son born the ninth day of May 1827 and she lived
just one year and on the ninth day of May 1828 she expired.
"About the year twenty-seven, my father and mother both made a trip to
see his father again in Tennessee. By this time we had plenty of horses
and they each rode horseback and went again by Uncle Ben YEAGERS in
Kentucky, both coming and going. People them days did not mind riding
three or four hundred miles on horseback, both women as well as men. In
the spring of twenty-eight, I had another brother born on the twenty
sixth day of April A.D. 1828, Clement B. YEAGER. In the same summer in
June, I think, my next oldest sister, Eliza, was married to John
THOMPSON. On the twelfth day of May, three days after my oldest sister
died, Uncle Nicholas BAILEY died with the lingering complaint of the
dispepsia or indigestion which was not a common disease as it is now.
"By this time the boys had grown up so they could take charge of the
farm and run it father spent most of his time in teaching school having
the advantage of most of the neighbors in education generally; sending
Saturdays attending to his office as esquire.
Occasionally the parties concerned would call some lawyer down from town
to plead for them. About the year thirty, the country had settled up so
much we had a very respectable neighborhood and in them days the people
had more socialbility than is manifested in this day and age. They were
a good deal more obliging and accomodating in helping in house raising
and log rollings and dividing the necessities of life such as dividing a
buck or a hog and other productions of the field, which showed they were
not only trying to live for themselves but wanted to help others to live
also which caused more of an attachment with neighbors.
"In the summer of thirty-one we had another addition to the family, the
last one on June the second A.D. 1831, Solomon Nicholas YEAGER was born.
In the fall after Father and mother was down to Tennessee there was one
of my cousins come up to see us from White County, Tennessee whose name
was Richard BROILS who stayed all winter and in the spring he went to
New Orleans on a flat boat with Uncle John BAILEY, with a boat load of
corn. He returned and stayed, working a different places until September
when he returned home on horseback.
"In the first settling of the country, people used to raise cotton. But
it was quite a troublesome job to get the seeds from the main fibre. At
first they picked them out with their fingers. That being so tedious
they invented an eaiser way. By turning two rollers the size of a chair
rong, and fastening in a small upright post and turning vertically would
take the seed by feeding the cotton between them. It took two hands to
run one
but it seemed to be eaiser than picking with the fingers for one pint of
a night after supper was the stint. But there was still an improvement
in ginning cotton yet. Shortley after Isaiah WILSON who lived down on
Battle Row sent and got a set of cotton gin saws and erected a gin house
and ginned the neighbors cotton, either for a toll or so much a pound
which was a great convenience for the neighborhood in making cotton
cloth and shortley after that domestics were brought on and people got
sale for their produce so they began to be able to buy their cotton wear
and shirting and sheeting. And soon Mr. WILSON's gin had nothing to do
and run down.
"When the people began to ship off their pork and corn to New Orleans
they felt more independent and they could get the necessary things of
life much eaiser. Coffee came down and many other things. I can remember
when coffee was seventy-five cents a
pound. And the first calico dress my sister got out of Chancy ROSE's
store and they cost fifty cents a yard. I remember an incident which
occured in the fall of thirty-three. We had been clearing up a deadning
we had north of the house and after supper we heard somebody hollering
up in the clearing where we had a fire in the clearing and we answered
the men who was hollering and after awhile they came on to the house.
They were men hunting my father as Justice of the Peace, to get a state
warrant renewed, being after some horse thieves and after they had some
supper prepared they concluded to stay all night. After they had eaten
supper, as near as I can recollect, at ten o'clock P.M. the meteors
commenced falling or the stars as some would have it and continued until
after midnight, near as my memory serves, it was in the after part of
the night before we all went to our beds. It was on the thirteenth of
November, 1833 for the next morning I noted it down on the ceiling
upstairs, and I still have kept it in memory ever since.
"In the winter of thirty my oldest brother, Vincent YEAGER, married to
Miss Sarah MILLER and he bought a piece of land near Middletown and
built on it the site where the widow WEIR now lives on. In the following
November his oldest son was born on the seventeenth of that month,
Nicholas YEAGER. Middletown had been laid out in the year and several
small stores started, one by Jonas LYKINS and another by Riley PADDOCK
and a tavern stand by James COPELAND and afterwards kept by Stephen
TAYLOR and in the meantime John FRAKES and David CANADY started a
pottery on the old state road south west of the town and run it a few
years until it run down.
"In the winter of thirty-three I hired out to a Mr. Daniel McDANIEL to
help build two flat boats for James JOHNSTON and Philip FRAKES. I also
hired at the same time at eight dollars a month. We had a very severe
winter and McDANIEL did not finish the boats and Mr. JOHNSTON hired two
SANDERS, Bill and Jim to finish them and they got completed and loaded
them with corn and got them out at the mouth of Greenfield Bayou.
"On the twenty-third day of February, they started the two boats for New
Orleans and the hands were as follows: Oscar GILBERT, John McCRANEY, Joe
STANELY, William H.H. YEAGER and Merit SMITH, a colored man and Mr.
JOHNSON for the main stearsman, expecting to lash the two boats together
after we got out of the Wabash. Oscar GILBERT we put in for an Assistant
Stearsman, but Oscar loved his whiskey too well to make a good
stearsman. He and McCRANEY and myself was put on one of the boats to man
it out of the Wabash and we were running some of the night. And the
second night after we had started GILBERT got so much of the joyful in
him [don't you just love how he phrases that!] he was unable to manage
the boat; there being plenty of the essence of corn on our boat, the
captain had bought a barrel of it and put it on our boat and McCRANEY
and myself had to manage the boat as best we could.
"When running we ran over a snag, but it happened to point downwards and
only rocked the boat a little not quite enough to capsize it. Captain
JOHNSTON kept in hollering distance of us and we would signal each
other. Just before day, the captain landed his boat below us and SMITH
got in the skiff to meet us and we commenced pulling to land. But it
being dark, we run one of the side oars into the bank and broke it loose
from the rolock, SMITH having hold of it when it fastened in the bank.
It run him over and injured him considerable but we landed the boat just
below the other one and by this time day was breaking and we got our
breakfast and while we were eating it, the lost oar came floating down
and the boys ran out in the skiff and brought it in and we fixed it on
again. We were just above Vincennes. After that, the captain lashed the
two boats together only at short intervals.
"After that we got along tolerbaly well until we got down just above New
Madrid, on one evening the wind rose high about four o'clock p.m. and we
had to make a landing. Two of us was minus a hat after the storm, myself
and Joe STANLEY. We lay by that night until twelve o'clock, the captain
mistaking it for daybreak by the roosters crowing. He pulled out and we
had not been running for an hour till we come in hearing of a Sawyer in
the river. The captain and McCRANEY was up on deck at the steering oar
and John wanted to know of him what it was that made so much roaring and
JOHNSTON supposed it was a snag and John thought he had better pull but
the captain being loathe to pull, he being a fearful man on water and
got almost in sight of the snag before he hollered oars. The boys all
being in the cabin but two and when they got to their oars only gave one
or two licks till she struck. It was a large cotton wood tree buried in
the sand on a bar with root partially out of the water. One of the boats
ran outside and the other across the log but it broke two or three of
the bough stiddings in and the lower plank. JOHNSTON ran and jumped
down in the cabin but the water was running in eighteen or twenty inches
wide. I remember the first word the captain spoke was "O, God, boys, she
is gone". But he wanted all the bed clothing fetched to stop the hole,
but it was no more than a bunch of straw; she went right down. He had
fifteen hundred pounds of bacon on the boat and all of the cooking
utensils. Joe STANLEY got out the bacon by getting a piece between his
feet and stooping down and getting hold of it with his hands, but he had
a bitter pill, being in March the water was very cold. He got out most
of the cooking utensils. She only sank down to the roofing. There was
some three or four hundred bushels of dry corn on top in the round of
the roofing but it was impossible to do anything with it in the darkness
of the night and it was foggy also. Mr. JOHNSTON cut off the cable and
steering line, rowed off and left it, although he preferred to five it
to three of us to make what we could out of it, but we did not see fit
to stay on board of it. He started with four thousand bushel, eighteen
hundred in one and twenty two hundred in the other. It was the largest
boat that sank so we all got on the smaller boat and run on till day
light and run down to Bluefords landing and landed there and waited
until evening for a steamboat going north for three of us to return back
home and it was McCRANEY, Joe STANLEY, and myself. The captain, Oscar
GILBERT and Merit SMITH was to go on with the other boat.
"It was on the point three miles above Madrid where we saved the other
boat, and the same spring after that, Miner JONES saw the boat as he
came up from New Orleans lodged on Plumb Point bottom upward. In the
evening we got on a steamboat going to Evansville
but STANLEY nor myself, neither one of us had a hat to wear but shortly
after we got on the boat I was lucky enough to get an old Beaver hat
from a Mr. ARNET for seventy-five cents. But Joe went bare headed till
we got to Princeton before he bought one. We
walked from Evansville home. We got home about the tenth of March. We
only got ten dollars out of the trip, we were to have thirty-five
dollars for the trip to New Orleans. We blistered out feet walking home.
"In two or three weeks after I got home, I hired out to Holum HUNTINGTON
for three months to put in his crop and tend it for eight dollars per
month, while he run a boat load of corn to New Orleans for Charles
BENTLEY, Charley BENNIGHT and himself. I worked my time out and a few
days over and then went to work for John STRAIN helping to frame a barn,
but did not work long till I took the billious fever and was laid up for
four or five weeks. I then worked at home awhile until the fall, I
worked some for Charley BENNIGHT making rails."
That's it folks. What a hard and eventful life he had. I just love his
story for its purity and detail. Really lets you know what life was
like back. Hope you enjoyed it!
Kim