My Father’s Story of His Grandfather

 

Taken down by Mary Kathleen Fluke Blackmar

 

My grandfather, Philip Fluke, came out from Pennsylvania in 1816, driving a Conestoga wagon, in which rode my father, then five years old, along with a load of seed grain, a variety of tools, and some pieces of household furniture. Behind the wagon rode grandmother on horseback, carrying a baby in her arms, and beside her walked two good cows.

When they got to Ohio, they came into a forest so thick they couldn’t drive the wagon between the trees, but Grandfather had his axe and his frow with him, and went to work. A frow is a sort of tool like a combination of axe, wedge, and pry, with a thick straight solid blade a little like a scythe with a hole in the end, having a short upright post or handle fitted in. He could take his maul and drive this tool into a log, then pry with the handle and split off a shingle three feet long, sometimes called a clapboard. Right away he made a shaving horse, then went to work to cut down trees and make hewn logs and puncheons or slabs for floors and benches and the like. Soon he had a house built with hewn log walls, a puncheon floor and a clapboard roof. Later, as winter came down, he made my father a sled with good runners thirty inches long. To make corn meal he cut down a good tree to make a nice stump, brought coals and burned out a “bird’s nest” in the top, then bent down a long limber sapling and tied a pestle to it. Placing corn in the birds nest, he, or whoever could best be spared from heavy work, kept pounding till the corn was ground to meal.

By the time my father was grown, Grandfather had 1100 acres of good land with well cleared fields, red and white cat­tle good for both milk and beef, and a red bull named Marshall Ney. The Yankees from the Western Reserve, who lived on salt pork and not much else in the opinion of our well fed “Dutch” came down into our country selling rat traps and the like, and my Grandpa sold them all sorts of good farm produce and got rich doing it. Some of our Pennsylvania Dutch girls went up at times to work at Huntington and other Yankee towns, and near­ly starved to death, for among us good food was a habit and we always lived on the fat of the land.

I remember riding up into that country on loads of wheat my Grandpa had sold to different ones who couldn’t raise much on their own land but sheep. It was on one of these trips when we were taking a load of grain to Wellington that I first saw a train. A very strange noise was heard, and my Uncle John said, “That’s the railroad! The train is coming!” We ran like anything and saw it rattle past us, an astonishing sight. The engineer sat up all proud, holding the throttle of the tiny engine. Several little coaches drew far apart with their link and pin couplings; the gaps between the coaches were bridged by boards. I went right over to the bookstore and tried to buy a book about railroads, but the store man told me no such book was printed.

Indians often stopped at Grandpa’s and wanted food. He treated them well and they all liked him. Grandma spun and wove. I have seen the spinning wheels going and the looms at work. There were wild pigs in the woods, and sometimes the deer would come an. nibble at the fallen trees while the men were working in the timber. My father remembered things like that, and the wild turkeys roosting in the trees, and the panthers, they slunk along in the edge of the timber after people walking or riding in the trails, whining like hungry children. When I was little my head was full of tales about wild ani­mals and even familiar places held a feel of danger. Once when I was walking along the creek in the early dusk, something rushed by my shoulder with a terrifying roar, but it turned out to be only our old dog, frolicking. We boys found bee-trees in the woods, and once I found a dug-out and sailed it in the “crick” where there was open water. All the boys learned very early to handle firearms. One of my early occupations was to shoot woodpeckers out of the orchard with a rifle or pistol, I did not like a shotgun. After I had left home and gone out west, I came back once and one day a crowd of fellows treed a squirrel. “Wait till I get my revolver”, I said, and I shot it from where I stood, right through the head By the time I could handle a gun, Grandma had all kinds of fruit trees planted and come to bearing age, —many kinds of apples, peaches, cher­ries and plums.

By this time too the first log house had given place to a big new brick one built on a high hill. Grandfather made the bricks from clay he found on his own land, and baked them in his own kiln, the remains of which may still be seen in an out-of-the-way corner of the old farm. It was a very good house. The front door was beautiful with side lights and transom, and a vine carved in the wood. The hall ran right through the middle of the house to a big back porch that led to, and was really a part of, the kitchen. The hall had a wind­ing stair with a bannister and fine dark spindles. A very tall clock with brass pinnacles stood in the angle of the first landing. On one side of the hall was a parlor with a big fireplace and a mantle, painted a dark bluish green and carved to simu­late books. In the fireplace were brass dog—irons with big round tops, a crane, a long poker, a shovel and big brass tongs. Across the hall was the best parlor, with all kinds of nice furniture, and another fire-place (which I do not remember quite so well) and a dulcimer that Uncle John played on. Upstairs were four or five bedrooms. In the kitchen all the cooking was done on the fireplace. Always, as soon as I arrived for a visit from my father^’s place, about a mile away, Grandma would come in with a little basket holding cookies, plums or other knick-knacks, and say, “Here is a little something for you, Enie”. She was a nice woman.

 

Near the house was a great paled garden where every­thing grew, all kinds of vegetables, berries and herbs. P₀le beans grew on the corn, honey and maple molasses were made, and some­times sorghum flocks of chickens produced the eggs that could be traded at the store for almost any needed groceries, so very little food was bought. The big brick smoke house stood near at hand. Butchering took place before Christmas, and then we reveled in homemade sausage, headcheese, scrapple, and spareribs.

Lard was made in enormous kettles out of doors, and all the scraps of fat, including the cracklings, went into the soapfat barrel. In the smoke house a fire of carefully chosen wood was built on the floor, and up above it hung the hams and shoulders and sides of pork, and sometimes pieces of beef and sausage, until they reached the perfection of sweet smokiness in flavor. A big hogshead of  “mess-pork” always stood on the floor of the smokehouse.

Soapmaking was another piece of outdoor work. The wood ashes from the fireplaces were kept in a hopper and leach­ed into lye. The lye was mixed with all the bits of waste fat, and boiled hard in great kettles out of doors. When boiling was done, slabs of solid brown soap could be cut from the top, and underneath was the “soft soap” , dark and gluey, to be stored away in tubs and kept for the coarser uses. The good beef tallow was saved for candles, which were run in moulds.

The women spent a lot of time preserving the win­ter supply of food. Grandma dried apples and peaches and ber­ries from the garden and from the woods. She parboiled sweet-corn, cut it from the cob, and spread it out to dry in the sun, on the top of the woodshed out of the reach of chickens, dog, or cats. (Germs didn’t bother them much, those days). The use of ice was uncommon , so was canning. I doubt if Grandmother canned anything. My mother put up a few things in earthen jars, tying cloths over the jars and pouring melted sealing wax over the cloths. Later she had a few jars with tin lids which fitted into a groove, the groove to be filled with wax.. Every one made sauerkraut. All the family took part in slicing the cabbage, and stamping it down in the kegs. We boys ate cores until our throats felt full of the sharpest knives.

Making the winter supply of apple butter was a kind of festival. First an “apple paring” was held, a sort of neighborhood party with lots of fun and a big supper. While the apples were paring, a barrel of cider would be boiling down in an enormous copper kettle, usually owned in partnership by sev­eral neighbor families. When the cider was half boiled away, the quartered apples were thrown in,  —and some one was appointed to the tedious task of stirring. Stirring the kettle was not an easy task, it went on for hours, so the guests took it in turn while the others frolicked, danced, made love, or told each others’ fortunes with the apple seeds and skins. The stirrer held a special tool, a perforated board with a long handle fit­ted to it at right angles. This scraped the bottom of the ket­tle arid let the sauce run through , and also let the stirrer stand at a comfortable distance from the hotly burning logs. Not until the “butter” was a rich deep brown, thick and pulpy, with no trace of clear cider showing at the edge of the lifted ladle’s rim, was it called done, and the fire allowed to die.

People needed to go to town but seldom, even in my father’s time. Big pedler’s wagons, loaded with tin and hard­ware and many small household tools, called at the farms from time to time, driven by enterprising Yankees, whose twangy voices and close trading ways seemed funny to our folks.

 

My grandfather raised a family of eleven children, of whom my father was the eldest, and Uncle John, my favorite uncle, was the youngest,—a fine looking, elegant, companionable man, most like his father of any of the brothers. Grandpa could do any kind of hard work with an axe or other heavy tool, then go to church or sit in his own parlor looking like a prince. He had no set doctrines or forms of religion, but went to meeting at the German Reformed church and entertained the ministers. Sometimes he would go to “Camp Meeting” or revivals, where religious talk was loud and turbulent , and afterwards would say it moved him not at all. He never got mad, or did anything amiss, but lived like a gentleman at all times whether among the Indians, his neighbors, or his animals. He gave to each of his sons 100 acres of land (or perhaps it would be truer to say he made them buy it, for he aimed that all his boys should learn to work), and to each of his daughters a thousand dollars in cash. One son, who in his childish capering had run too near his father’ s axe, he gave money instead of land. That son took his portion and went to the far West. He was the only one who ventured out or ever grew rich.

Uncle John married and lived on in his father’s house and his father’s ways. But his wife was delicate and went into consumption. She took a fancy that the brick walls of the old house were damp and would be deadly to her. So Uncle John, fine gentleman and lover, tore down his father’s proud old house and put up in its place on the hill a tall, dry glassy dwelling, with high windows and white wood. But his wife died, after all.

[Mary K. Fluke Blackmar – as taken down on my father’s 90^th birthday, June 17, 1935, at Walker, Minn.]