Home Life in Colonial Days

by Alice Morse Earle

The boy's jack-knife was a possession so highly desired, so closely treasured in those days when boys had so few belongings, that it is pathetic to read of many a farm lad's struggles and long hours of weary work to obtain a good knife. Barlow knives were the most highly prized for certainly sixty years, and had, I am told, a vast popularity for over a century. May they forever rest in glorious memory, as they lived the happiest of lots! To be the best beloved of a century of Yankee boys is indeed an enviable destiny. A few battered old soldiers of this vast army of Barlow jack-knives still linger to show us the homely features borne by the century's well beloved: the Smithsonian Institution cherishes some of colonial days; and from Deerfield Memorial Hall are shown three Barlow knives whose picture should appear to every American something more than the presentment of dull bits of wood and rusted metal. These Yankee jack-knives were, said Daniel Webster, the direct forerunners of the cotton-gin and thousands of noble American inventions; the New England boy's whittling was his alphabet of mechanics.

In this connection, let us note the skilful and utilitarian adaptation not only of natural materials for domestic and farm use, but also natural forms. The farmer and his wife both turned to Nature for implements and utensils, or for parts adapted to shape readily into the implements and utensils of every-day life. When we read of the first Boston settlers that "the dainty Indian maize was eat with clam-shells out of wooden trays," we learn of a primitive spoon, a clam-shell set in a split stick, which has been used till this century. Large flat clam-shells were used and highly esteemed by housewives, as skimming-shells in the dairy, to skim cream from the milk. Gourd-shells made capital bowls, skimmers, dippers, and bottles; pumpkin-shells, good seed and grain holders. Turkey-wings made an ever-ready hearth-brush. In the forests were many "crooked sticks" that were more useful than any straight ones could be. When the mower wanted a new snathe or snead, as he called it, for his scythe, he found in the woods a deformed sapling that had grown under a log or twisted around a rock in a double bend, which made it the exact shape desired. He then whittled it, dressed it with a draw-shave, fastened the nebs with a neb-wedge, hung it with an iron ring, and was ready for the mowing-field.

Sled-runners were made from saplings bent at the root. The best thills for a cart were those naturally shaped by growth. The curved pieces of wood in the harness of a draught-horse, called the hames, to which the traces are fastened, could be found in twisted growths, as could also portions of ox-yokes. The gambrels used in slaughtering times, hay-hooks, long-handled pothooks for brick ovens, could all be cut ready-shaped.

The smaller underbrush and saplings had many uses. Sled and cart stakes were cut from some; long bean-poles from others; specially straight clean sticks were saved for whip-stocks. Sections of birch bark could be bottomed and served for baskets, or for potash cans, while capital feed-boxes could be made in the same way of sections cut from a hollow hemlock. Elm rind and portions of brown ash butts were natural materials for chair-seats and baskets, as were flags for door-mats. Forked branches made geese and hog yokes. Hogs that ran at large had to wear yokes. It was ordered that these yokes should measure as long as twice and a half times the depth of the neck, while the bottom piece was three times the width of the neck.

In the shaping of heavy and large vessels such as salt-mortars, pig troughs, maple-sap troughs, the jack-knife was abandoned and the methods of the Indians adopted. These vessels were burnt and scraped out of a single log, and thus had a weighty stability and permanence. Wooden bread troughs were also made from a single piece of wood. These were oblong, trencher-shaped bowls about eighteen inches long; across the trough ran lengthwise a stick or rod on which rested the sieve, searse, or temse, when flour was sifted into the trough. The saying "set the Thames (or temse) on fire," meant that hard work and active friction would set the wooden temse on fire.

Sometimes the mould for an ox-bow was dug out of a log of wood. Oftener a plank of wood was cut into the desired shape as a frame or mould, and fastened to a heavy backboard. The ox-bow was steamed, placed in the bow-mould, pinned in, and then carefully seasoned.

The boys whittled cheese-ladders, cheese-hoops, and red-cherry butter-paddles for their mothers' dairy; also many parts of cheese-presses and churns. To the toys enumerated by Rev. Mr. Pierpont, they added box-traps and "figure 4" traps of various sizes for catching vari-sized animals.

Many farm implements other than those already named were made, and many portions of tools and implements; among them were shovels, swingling-knives, sled-neaps, stanchions, handles for spades and bill-hooks, rake-stales, fork-stales, flails. A group of old farm implements from Memorial Hall, at Deerfield, is here given. The handleless scythe-snathe is said to have come over on the Mayflower.

The making of flails was an important and useful work. Many were broken and worn out during a great threshing. Both parts, the staff or handle, and the swingle or swiple, were carefully shaped from well-chosen wood, to be joined together later by an eelskin or leather strap.

The flail is little seen on farms to-day. Threshing and winnowing machines have taken its place. The father of Robert Burns declared threshing with a flail to be the only degrading and stultifying work on a farm; but I never knew another farmer who deemed it so, though it was certainly hard work. Last autumn I visited the "Poor Farm" on Quonsett Point in old Narragansett. In the vast barn of that beautiful and sparsely occupied country home, two powerful men, picturesque in blue jeans tucked in heavy boots, in scarlet shirts and great straw hats, were threshing out grain with flails. Both men were blind, one wholly, the other partially so—and were "Town Poor." Their strong, bare arms swung the long flails in alternate strokes with the precision of clockwork, bringing each blow down on the piled-up wheat-straw which covered the barn-floor, as they advanced, one stepping backward while the other stepped forward, and then receded with mechanical and rhythmic regularity, a step and a blow, from one end of the long barn to the other. The half-blind thresher could see the outline of the open door against the sunlight, and his steps and voice guided his sightless fellow-worker. Thus healthful and useful employment was given to two stricken waifs through the use of primitive methods, which no modern machine could ever have afforded; and the blue sky and bay, with autumnal sunshine on the piled-up golden wheat on floor and in rack, idealized and even made of the threshers, paupers though they were, a beautiful picture of old-time farm-life.