Because there were no traveled roads through the forests, trails leading to the church were blazed on trees extending as far as five miles.
There were three small settlements in the township in those early days: Centerville, near the center of the township; Woodburn to the northwest, and Stringtown to the southeast.
No one was very rich or very poor in those days, and everyone worked. Of all living creatures, wrote Benjamin Franklin, quoting an old Negro saying, only the hog doesn’t work: “He eat, he drink, he walk about, he go to sleep when he please, he live like a gentleman.”
It was true. The hogs roamed the forests at will, fattening on nuts, but the horses and oxen and humans worked!
There was grain to be planted, but there were none except hand-wrought plows, made from jack-oak sticks shaped and sharpened as best they could be and more than often drawn by a team of slow-moving oxen broken to the yoke. A few years later this primitive plow was improved by being tipped with an iron point. The axe was often used to break the ground for planting, and seed was dropped in by hand. There were no barns, so the newly cut unthreshed grain was stacked in the fields. It was threshed with flails or tramped out under animals’ hooves. Corn was gathered, husked, and shelled by hand, and potatoes were dug with a sturdy pointed stick.
The tilled land was used as much as possible. It was not unusual for a flax patch to be sowed in March, harvested in June, and then planted with potatoes.
Life in the early 1800’s was not all work, however, and sometimes pleasure was combined with the chores that had to be done.
Erecting a cabin called for a log rolling or house raising party. The men of the community assembled and then divided into small groups: one group to fell the trees, another to drive the horses and drag the logs to the site, another to shape the logs, another to saddle and notch the corner logs and put them in place, and another to chink the cracks between the logs. Thus, a cabin usually was erected in a single day, and the work was accompanied by much merriment, usually ending with a party in the new house that night.
Husking bees also enabled the young people to combine work with pleasure. The work was accompanied by songs and stories, and occasional squeals of laughter when one of the boys husked a red ear of corn, for that entitled him to kiss the nearest girl. In the evening, supper was served and it was followed by a dance and perhaps an opportunity for couples to walk home by moonlight.