miles to a neighbors to spend the day spinning. A fine spinning wheel sold for a dollar and a clock-reel and a wool-wheel for two dollars.
Few persons now living have ever seen a woman hatchet flax or card tow, or
heard the buzzing of the foot wheel, or seen bunches of flaxen yarn hanging in the kitchen, or linen cloth whitening on the grass. The flax dresser with the shives, fibers and dirt of flax covering his garments and his face begrimed with flax dirt has disappeared. The noise of his brake and swingling knife has ended, and the boys no longer make bonfires of his swingling tow. The sound of the spinning wheel, the song of the spinner, and the snapping of the clock reel have ceased, the warping bars and quill wheel are gone, and the thwack of the loom is heard only in the factory. Alice Morse Earle, Home Life in Colonial Days. (1906).
The weaving of the cloth does not include the hours spent in knitting the wool yarn which was knitted often by the entire family, including father, boys and girls. A mother could not keep her family in mittens, hoods, hose, knitted suspenders and long scarfs worn by both men and women unless all helped, for mother had no idle time. Boys herding cattle and sheep took along knitting. One mother said when she saw her son sitting on a large stone watching the cattle grazing or listening for their bell, "If he can stone sit, he can knit." If father went fishing to aid the family food problem, he also could quietly employ his time with knitting. One large family in Panola Township as late as 1880 spent their evenings knitting; father, sons and daughters joined to help a tiny little mother who had so many to clothe and feed.
There was also the complicated art of candle dipping, though homemade candles were thought too expensive to use by our earliest pioneers. Another task was the growing of hops and the making of homemade yeast, and the method of keeping a starter. The father had to solve problems in keeping the seed, in caring for the stock, drainage, and problems of the harvesting. Corn was often left in the shock all winter and the hay or grasses piled in ticks. Did he hang the seed corn, the ears and husks, over the cabin rafters? Did he keep his tools and axes in the cabin? Did his wife scour the hoe with wood ashes and then use it in making a hoe cake? How much wood did he cut and pile to assure the blue smoke would curl out of his chimney all winter long?
Pioneers continued coming until by 1840 our area was settled by people from Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Maryland, Pennsylvania and a few shrewd Yankees from New England. With the Erie Canal open from Albany to Buffalo and the National Highway half across Illinois, a great immigration to the West started in large numbers, both by water and Conestoga wagons with their low curving beds, which kept their contents from sliding about. Their high, broad wheels were made to withstand mountain roads.
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