Voices; Birth-Marks; The Man and the Elephant

by Mathew Joseph Holt

The settlement was not only prosperous, but peaceful and homelike. Its inhabitants had never deemed it necessary to build a block house though more Indians visited their community than the less remote settlements which had suffered from attack and depredation, while they had escaped; it may have been in part due to the natural mountain barrier just at their back, but they attributed it to their treatment of the Indians, with whom they made friends.

The log houses were ruggedly comfortable. As each house had in turn been built at a community log rolling, all exhibited a similarity of style and construction. Each was carefully and cozily built, had four rooms and an attic, a front and ell porch and two large sandstone chimneys. At the edge of the side porch was the well with its pole sweep and back of each house was a barn, the lower story of which was of stone and set in the hill-side, where possible.

[pg 90] While to the casual observer these homes presented little apparent difference, individuality of ownership was perceptible in ornamentation as also prosperity or the reverse by the situation and fertility of the farm and the live stock in the farm yard and pastures.

The church marked the center of the community and was the most pretentious building west of Blue Ridge. It was of hewn stone with a wooden roof and spire; and in the belfry hung a sweet-toned bell which Angus Cameron had brought from Scotland in 1758. There were two front doors; the one on the right for the men and the one on the left for the women; and between, extending from the front wall to within six feet of the pulpit, exactly bisecting the church, was a six foot partition, over or through which no one saw except some of the boys and possibly a girl or two; who during one of the regular two hour services each Sunday, had surreptitiously with jack-knife or gimlet or hair ornament, perforated it.

By crowding, three hundred persons could find seats on the slab benches. They were filled to capacity each Sunday and some of the communicants and visitors rode more than fifteen miles rather than miss the meeting.

When in 1759, Samuel Davies had preached the dedication sermon, more than five hundred had crowded it. All the settlers of the valley had attended as well as many from Blue Ridge, the Shenandoah and Greenaway Court. Now eleven years old, the church was looked upon as an ancient landmark and known throughout Virginia as the Jackson River Meeting House.

More than once its doors had been closed in the name of the law, as enacted and administered by the Burgesses, most of whom were conformists. When this had happened Davies and other Scotch and Irish Presbyterian [pg 91] preachers and long and solemn faced ruling elders, refugees from Scotland and Ulster, Ireland, had gathered at Williamsburg; and so insistently and ably petitioned, that the easy-going planter delegates, worried by importunities; not only rashly promised their influence against further persecution, but legislation permitting to Presbyterians religious freedom throughout the colony. When the Baptists and Quakers learned of these promises, they demanded the same rights for themselves, but met with less favor.

The school house was a large structure of two rooms. The girls sat in one and the boys in the other; though the classes made up of both, recited in either room. There were two teachers, Jeremiah Tyler, a graduate of Oxford and an elder of the church, who taught the advanced classes, and Grandma McDonald, who taught the little children.

The Shorter Catechism and the Westminster Creed were printed in the back of the primer; and were taught all beginners. No one was promoted to the higher grade until he could recite the catechism without material blunder and could answer the essentials of doctrine propounded by the creed. The Bible was the text book of the advanced pupils, not only for its precepts but for its style and because it was the only book, a copy of which each family possessed.

Friday afternoon the boys and girls of the advanced grade held spelling and quotation battles. The sly old teacher watched to catch a boy exhibiting an interest in a girl pupil; then he chose the boy for captain of the boys and the girl for captain of the girls. The side lost whose captain was first quoted or spelled down. All quotations and words were from the Bible and no quotation once recited could be repeated. Each captain when first called [pg 92] upon was supposed to recite such quotations as he knew were known by the opposing captain; but no quotation could exceed a chapter or psalm in length. One of the lazy boys, having learned from the little brother that his sweetheart knew the 119 Psalm memorized and recited the 176 verses as his first quotation.