Early 19th Century Life in Pulaski County, Kentucky

I found a book online titled The Kelly Clan, published in 1901, containing reminiscences of the descendants of Thomas and Peggy Kelly, who settled before 1800 in Pulaski County, Kentucky. The couple had nine children and son Samuel, who married in 1808, settled on Clifty Creek seven miles northwest of Somerset. I expect our Rainey ancestors crossed paths with him and his large family. Here are some tidbits:

The old Kelly log cabin might have resembled this one

Some of his family went by wagon train to Oregon in 1849. Two descendants made a trip back in 1882 to view the old homestead that Samuel had built and described it in a letter: The house is of hewn logs, weather-boarded, and at some past age painted white; inside it is chinked with stones and 'pointed' with lime, which gives it a pretty fair appearance.

stone chinking

It was a good house in its day. . . Two rooms above and two below were the original dwelling . . . the stairs are steep and narrow . . . outside to the left still stand the limber-twig apple trees, planted long ago . . .

Old-fashioned limbertwig apple, so-called because the branches droop.

 
 Going down the hill past other ancient apples trees, we are in a pretty grove of spruce and balm-of-Gilead trees . . .

Balm of Gilead is a balsam poplar

 Here, in a cool dell in the side of the hill, walled with stones, is the spring from the bed of which the famous blue stone was taken that furnished the boys of generations ago with slate pencils. The springhouse is nearly as grandfather left it, the little stream that trickles from it gathering force as it hurries away to the bluff, whence it tumbles, a beautiful cascade, into Clifty Creek 50 feet below.

only photo of Clifty Creek I could find

When son Clinton Kelly decided to marry Mary Baston, in order to get the dollar needed for the marriage license, he made a barrel of cider, crushing the apples "by hand in a rude way," then hauling it about six miles into Somerset on a drag and sold the cider for a dollar. Researching their marriage on Ancestry, I see they were married August 15, 1828, so he must have had early apples or carted the cider into town the previous winter. He goes on: The preacher's fee was usually a cornhusk horse collar, the husks being braided together in the proper shape; as they were not very durable, there was no danger of an oversupply.

cornhusk horse collar

A staple meal was cornbread, bacon and coffee, with maple sugar to sweeten it, and delicious peaches. Apparently, there were so many sugar maples, people made large quantities of sugar in the winter.

As I read this book, I could picture our 2nd great-grandfather Everett, a near contemporary of Thomas Kelly, born in 1827, who recalled that boys went barefoot all year 'round, even in snow, and his first pair of shoes was obtained when he was ten by chasing a groundhog to its hole, catching, skinning it, and tanning the hide. His mother then made him a pair of shoes. his much older sisters carried their shoes to church and put them on before going in.

They produced nearly everything they consumed. His mother raised flax and produced many yards of linen. 

Field of flax

Flax thread

He recounts:

When the flax was ripe it was pulled and laid away in a damp place until the soft parts had decayed, when it went through various processes - one of which was 'hackling' - drawing the stems through a sort of comb until nothing was left but the fiber. In the evening she would sit by the fire and 'hackle' flax. The long smooth threads made fine cloth and the short threads went into 'tow linen,' which was the material out of which our shirts were made. We little fellows wore a tow-linen shirt, and little else, in the Summer time; it was a long garment reaching half way below the knees. The linen was spread on the hillside back of the house to bleach, and we had to wet it down twice a day. I remember my mother had a 100 yards of this nice white linen on hand at one time, which she sold at the store in Somerset and bought necessities for the family. She spun and wove wool and made our clothing.

hackling flax

We raised plenty of corn, some wheat and vegetables, and always had sweet potatoes. We had cornbread the year around, but if we had flour enough for biscuit on Sunday morning we were doing well.

I have always baked my cornbread in an iron skillet - must be the South in my blood

 He recounted how they would flail and winnow their wheat:
 Sometimes the wheat had so much weevil that the flour was clammy and looked gray; but there was no way to clean it. The land was poor and full of rock; five or six bushels of wheat to the acre was a good crop. We planted a 'patch' for three or four years, then left it to grow up to briars and tried another.

This last is a clue to why James Rainey removed from Pulaski County to Indiana. Toward the end of this small gem of a book, he wrote: When a young couple began a new life for themselves, if they had a good horse, two or three sheep, a sow and pigs, they had a good outfit.

Pigs in colonial times were small and had long snouts

                                                            *     *     *     *
I'm presently reading another work of nonfiction, Seedtime on the Cumberland, by Harriette Simpson Arnow (1908-1986), who grew up in Burnside, Pulaski County, Kentucky. She wrote in depth on the early history of settlement along the Cumberland River from the Nashville area of Tennessee, up into the headwaters of the Cumberland in Pulaski and other southern Kentucky counties. 
 

Cumberland River

I'd wondered how settlers managed to survive their first few years on new land. She wrote that without corn, there never would have been that mass migration across the Appalachians. It took a couple of years of tilling before the virgin soil was fit to raise a crop of wheat. But to immediately prepare the soil for corn, the settler plowed one long furrow and then another long furrow next to it. On the raised soil between the furrows, he planted his dried corn kernels, brought with him from Virginia or the Carolinas. The weeds would grow up, but the corn stalks would grow taller - and that was how families survived their first couple of years in new territory.

The British still think corn is good only as pig feed, but we Americans have always known better. And more than anyone, southerners loved their corn, turning it into a variety of edibles, from when it first greened to when it filled with milk to when it matured into roasting ears or 'rosen yers,' as Kentuckians pronounced it. They ate it boiled, roasted, or cut off and fried, seasoned with milk and butter.  Corn grits, corn pone (pone or dodger), rokahominy (or big and little hominy), corn cake (Johnny cake or hoe cake), corn bread, and corn whiskey. Before it even contained milk, the ears would be scraped, the dry young corn gritted on a primitive tin grater punched with holes to be turned into 'gritted bread,' the first bread of summer. Settlers who dried their corn could have gritted bread all year 'round. Corn pounders and hand mills were implements for grinding meal. By 1801 Hickman's and Bell's merchandiser in Pulaski County was offering horse mill bolts and screws for sale - a horse mill beat a hand mill every time for grinding dried corn.

 Less we think our ancestors cooked simply, here's how the author described the making of hominy:

"Hominy like meal began with good white corn, a thing not always to be had, and many a  pioneer wife sighed because she had to serve bread or mush or hominy that might be any shade from bright orange-yellow to gray-blue . . . Hominy, or at least my great-grandmother's version, was best when made from undented, flinty corn. She selected the corn, ear by ear, from the crib, saw to it that it was shelled as for meal, that is with small and chaffy grains from both ends nubbed off.

Corn Crib

Some used lye water, but she took clean ashes from the hearth, and in most homes woe to anybody who spat in the fireplace . . . The half bushel or so of hominy corn with plenty of water was put into the big three-legged iron kettle, that usually stood outside a shed on a semi-permanent rock foundation, then enough ashes were poured in to yellow the corn hulls. The corn was cooked, and only an experienced hominy maker could know exactly the right time to take it off the fire. If cooked too short a time, little flakes of hull would stick and that was disgraceful; but if too long a time or with too many ashes, not only hulls but hearts also would disappear; and hominy without hearts was shapeless and mushy, "an abomination."

The hominy, when boiled exactly the right length of time, was dipped out into a bushel split basket, kept especially for the purpose; smoking hot, it was rushed to the spring branch, where, using the basket as a sieve, the corn was repeatedly rinsed with much rubbing; whatever ashes were left in the corn helped take off the skins and gradually with many rinsings disappeared. If cooked that right amount of time with the right amount of ashes or lye water, the hulls would slip with little trouble, and the whole grains come clean and white and plump. 

The hulled corn was put on the fire again, cooked awhile, then "changed," that is dipped out and washed in the spring again, just to make certain lye and hulls were gone. It was put on the fire in fresh water and cooked until the corn grains were tender. Finished it was known as raw hominy. This, in cold weather, could be kept or some days in the spring house. 

Called big hominy, it was often fried, milk poured in, and the whole left to simmer for a time; properly cooked, the grains remained firm and shaped but around them was the milk gravy.