Manufactures.
The colonists cut and shaped the logs for their houses and made stanchions and clapboards and shingles and laths. They selected pieces of timber and trimmed them for snaths for their scythes and flails, sled-runners and thills for carts, hames and ox-yokes, stakes and poles for various uses, whip-stalks and ax-handles, and handles for spades. They made salt-mortars, hog troughs, maple-sap troughs, and similar articles by burning and scraping out logs cut to the lengths wanted. They made wooden hinges and door-latches and buttons for fastening doors. They made spinning-wheels and reels and looms and the things used with them. They made various kinds of wooden bowls and trays and spoons for household use. They learned from the Indians how to make brooms by taking the length of a small birch tree and slitting the lower end into a brush and shaping the upper end into a handle; they also learned to make a broom by tying about a handle hemlock branches together for the brush. They made spoons from clam-shells set in split sticks. They used gourd-shells for bowls and skimmers and dipper and bottles and pumpkin-shells for seed and grain holders. Turkey-wings were used for hearth-brushes. There was one implement that the colonist in his frontier life spent much time on and that was the powder-horn. "Months of the patient work of every spare moment was spent in beautifying them, and their quaintness, variety, and individuality are a never-ceasing delight to the antiquary. Maps, plans, legends, verses, portraits, landscapes, family history, crests, dates of births, marriages and deaths, lists of battles, patriotic and religious sentiments, all may be found on powder-horns. They have in many cases proved valuable historical records, and have sometimes been the only records of events."[364]