The neighbors helped not only to raise and cover the house, but to make the furniture also. A table was made from a slab of wood with four legs driven into auger holes; some three-legged stools were made of like material. Sticks driven into auger holes in the wall supported clapboard shelves where various articles were kept. A few pegs were likewise driven in the wall where the wearing apparel of both men and women was hung. A pair of buck horns or two small forks fastened to the logs held the ever trusty rifle and shot pouch.
Nor did they stop here. Through a fork placed with its lower end in a hole in the floor and its upper end fastened to a joist, they placed poles with their ends through cracks in the walls. Over these, clapboards were laid. When the whole had been covered with skins of bear and deer, this made a most comfortable bed.
At these house raisings, log rollings, and harvest homes there was much merriment coupled with the hard labor. Any man who failed to perform his part of the work was dubbed "Lazy Lawrence" and was denied similar help when he needed it.
PIONEER CHILDREN
The boys and girls of to-day with all the comforts and luxuries surrounding them often pity the pioneer children and wonder how they spent their time. However, they doubtless were as happy and ambitious as we are. The boys early learned to chop, to grub bushes up by the roots, maul rails, trap turkeys, tree coons, and shoot a rifle. When severe weather kept them in the fort, there were not only the duties of making brooms and brushes but also the wrestling, leaping, and shooting matches where each strove to excel the other. How proud was the youth when he could "bark a squirrel," that is, shoot off the bark so near the squirrel that the force killed it, without inflicting a wound.
The girls also had their work and play. They watched the cattle to keep them from straying too far away, they hunted flat rocks on which to bake "journey cakes," they helped to pound hominy, bring water, gather wild nettles, and assisted in soap making, sugaring, sewing, candle molding, and wool carding. There were likewise near-by excursions for hickory nuts, walnuts, hazelnuts, grapes, pawpaws, honey locusts, hackberries, huckleberries, blackberries, dewberries, and raspberries.
But you say, "All this sounds like fun. Boy Scouts and Camp-Fire Girls do many of these things and count them sport. The boys and girls of the early days in Kentucky must have had one long holiday with no thought of school or school work." There you are mistaken, for scarcely had the first women and children come to Harrodstown when Mrs. William Coomes taught in the fort, in 1776, the first school in Kentucky. In 1777, John May taught at McAfee's Station, and two years later Joseph Doniphan was teaching at Boonesborough.
"There were excursions for nuts and berries."