Now Let Us Praise Famous Women

I have collected many photographs of people who live in Appalachia, and one day as I was looking through them, I was struck by how beautiful some of the older women were--the grandmothers. Here is a selection of photographs of such women. I would love to sit down on their porch and hear some of their stories. I know they have stories that tell of a world different from the one I grew up in and have lived in. As you can see, their bodies are lean from a lifetime of hard work without amenities and less than enough food.

I am interspersing the photographs with excerpts about an Appalachian grandmother from the novel River of Earth (1940) by Kentucky's poet laureate James Still (1906-2001), who lived most of his life in a log house on a creek in coal-producing Knott County, Kentucky. This is a beautiful novel that chronicles how coal mining lured men away from homesteading and into the mines. The story, as told by the son of a farmer turned miner, is remarkable for its detailing of all kinds of plants, planting, and seasons.

Mrs. Frank Henderson, taken by Doris Ulmann.

One morning Grandma said we could wait no longer for Uncle Luce. She took her grapevine walking stick and we went into the cornfield. We worked two days pulling corn from the small hoe-tended stalks. When all the runty ears were gathered, she measured them into pokes, pulling her bonnet down over her face to hide the rheumatic pain. There were sixteen bushels. 'We won't be needing the barn this time,' she said. 'We'll just sack the puny nubbins and put them in the shedroom.'
With the corn in, we waited a few days until Grandma's rheumatism had been doctored with herbs and bitter cherry-bark tea. Then there were the heavy-leaved cabbages, the cashews and sweet potatoes to be gathered. The potatoes had grown large that year. They were fat and big as squashes. Grandma crawled along the rows on her knees, digging in the baked earth with her hands. It was good to see such fine potatoes. 'When Jolly comes home he'll shore eat a bellyful,' she said. 

Mountain woman with grandchild, taken by Jeffrey Potter.

'Eighteen-sixty-eight it was,' Grandmas said, and her words were small against the spring winds bellowing in the chimney top. She spread her hands close to the oak-knot fire. They were blue-veined like a giant spider's web. 'That was the year the pigeons come to Upper Flat Creek, mighty nigh taking the country.... Them pigeon-birds were worse than a plague writ in the Book,' Grandmother said. "Hit was my first married year, and Boone and me had grubbed out a homeseat on Upper Flat, hoe-planting four acres o' corn. We'd got a garden patch put in, and four bee gums working before I turned puny, setting in wait for our first-born. I'd take a peck measure outside and set me down on it where I could see the garden crap growing, and the bees fotching sweetening. There was a powerful bloom that year, as I remember, and a sight of seasoning in the ground.'

 Ella Dunn, midwife and herbalist, who lived in the Ozarks and lived to be 104 years old. 

Emma Dupree, an herb doctor who received the North Carolina Folk Heritage Award in 1992 and lived to be 98 years old. 

Grandma wove her hands together on her knees. 'I been walking on these legs seventy-eight years,' she said. 'I'm figuring to walk a few more miles. I hain't going to set around and let rheumatiz tie 'em in a pinch knot. Hain't wear that breaks a door hinge, hit's rust.'

Two women on a porch, taken by Howard Greenberg.

'If I was stone-blind, I'd know a new season was coming,' Grandma said. ''This time o' year the rheumatiz strikes my hips. The pain sets deep and grinds. Five of my chaps was born in the spring and that might be the causing.' She took to bed for a spell, and Uncle Jolly cooked for us morning and evening.... It plagued her to lie abed, helpless. 'When spring opens,' Grandma said, 'I'll be up and doing. Three days' sun, and I'll be well enough to beat this feather tick and hang it to sweeten.'
One morning I saw a redbird sitting in a plum bush, its body as dark as a wound. 'Spring's a winding,' I told Grandma. 'Coming now for shore.'
'Even come spring,' Grandma said, 'we've got a passel of chills to endure: dogwood winter, redbud, service, foxgrape, blackberry.... There must be seven winters, by count. A chilly snap for every time of bloom.' 

You may also want to see:
Maude Callen (1898-1990)
The Trees by Conrad Richter
Lamb in His Bosom by Caroline Miller
Housekeeping in The Fields

Saint Sebastian and a First Responder

January 20 is the feast day of Saint Sebastian, who died in 288 at the hands of the anti-Christian Roman emperor, Diocletian. Saint Sebastian was a member of the Roman emperor's Praetorian Guard, but when it was discovered that he was a Christian, he was delivered for persecution to archers from Mauritania and was riddled with arrows, as shown in this painting by the great Italian Renaissance painter, Andrea Mantegna.

Saint Sebastian by Andrea Mantegna, 1480

When we see this painting of Saint Sebastian we assume that this is how he became a Christian martyr. But in fact he survived this torture, because Saint Irene, the widow of the Christian martyr Saint Castulus, rushed to his aid. 

Saint Irene Coming to the Aid of Saint Sebastian by Trophime Bigot (1579-1650)

Saint Sebastian Aided by Saint Irene by Georges de la Tour, 1650

Saint Sebastian did not die of the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune," because Saint Irene removed the arrows, took him home, and nursed him back to health. After he had recovered, Saint Sebastian openly confronted the Emperor Diocletian, calling upon him to stop his persecution of Christians. The emperor responded by ordering that Saint Sebastian be placed under immediate arrest and be bludgeoned to death. This time Diocletian succeeded. 

It is believed that Saint Sebastian is a protector against the plague, and he is the patron saint of athletes and soldiers. Saint Irene's feast day is March 30. 

The Remarkable Character of George Washington

George Washington with the Marquis de Lafayette (center) and Lt. Col. Tench Tilghman, Washington's aide-de-camp, at Yorktown, by Charles Willson Peale, 1784. Washington looked upon Lafayette as a son, and the French republican was instrumental in convincing Washington that slavery was an injustice that was inimical to the principles of the new American republic.  

For about four months in 2013, I read books about George Washington and also biographies of Martha Washington. Most notable was Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow. Based on the release of thousands of papers of Washington's, Chernow's book is a realistic and detailed portrait of the Commander of the Continental Army that led a rag-tag army to victory in the War of Independence and became our first President.

In his 2006 book Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different, historian Gordon S. Wood devotes an early chapter to Washington, titled "The Greatness of George Washington." Wood's assessment  is grounded on Washington's decision to resign from his army command at the end of the war--an action whose humility shocked the world. He also cites how Washington became increasingly repulsed by slavery and freed those slaves he owned upon his death, and praises Washington's ability to act as the first President with a vision of what he must bequeath to a future America, beyond the political demands of the moment.

Underlying the actions and vision, however, is a monumental strength of character that explains how he became the natural choice of his contemporaries to lead the Continental Army and to become the new republic's first President. As presented in the books that I read, Washington's character had these traits:

1. Extreme courage under fire. In battle he always acted without regard for his own personal safety.

2.  Extreme devotion to duty. In the course of the Revolutionary War, Washington wrote 140,000 letters and documents. Spending hour upon hour at his desk each day, he sent communications to Congress begging for supplies, wrote orders to his men and exhortations to his army, and maintained a vast correspondence with the leading supporters of the American fight for independence. His desk was the central command post for the war.

3. Consistent compassion in victory to those defeated.

4.  Discernment of the correct military strategy and adherence to the strategy against all odds. Washington led the Americans to victory against the world's most powerful military power with barely an army--a band of ill-clad, ill-fed men that was always in flux and leaving for lack of pay. His greatness and the greatness that he inspired in his generals is measured by their achievement with such meagerness of resources.

5. Willingness to change his ideas in light of new evidence. Although Washington was determined to retake New York City, when the opportunity to defeat the British in Yorktown, Virginia, emerged instead, he seized it with alacrity and redeployed his forces to seize the opening.

6. Ability and willingness to suffer personal hardship--a trait that rallied his men time and time again to stay in the army despite hardship and to wage hard-fought battles.

7. Extreme courtesy and respect toward all, but strength to exact punishment on deviants in the army that jeopardized discipline and army unity.

8. Devotion to family and love of his wife.

9.  Belief in a vision of America stretching across the continent. His dedication to this vision of America's future--the British had prohibited further western development--was the foundation of determination to win the war.

10.  Extreme determination, that brought out the same in his generals, most of whom had never had military training and acquired their military expertise by reading history and military manuals.

11. Consistent charity to the poor, indigent, and orphans. No one who came to Mount Vernon needing food or sustenance was ever turned away. Washington also took in, supported, and paid for the education of orphans in his and Martha Washington's extended family. He considered his stepchildren as his own. After he was President, anyone who showed up at the door of Mount Vernon--and everyone who was traveling in the vicinity did show up--received hospitality. The Washingtons entertained a total roster of 2,000 guests at their home, in their 13 years of married life before he became the Commander of the Continental Army.

12. Extreme sense of responsibility by which he always gave credit to others for victories and successful actions while taking responsibility himself for defeats and errors. The buck stopped with him.

13. Faith in God, a belief in Providence into whose hands he had trusted his life; this faith was the source of his courage.

14. His wariness of power, an ever-present fear that he might appear to desire power, combined with a deep humility and recognition of his own deficits.

Washington said that all he was came from his mother, a woman whom his boyhood friends said terrified them (she was tall and forbidding), even though "she was very kind."

This is not to say that George Washington did not have faults--he relied on his wife, his family, and those he trusted such as General Henry Knox, General Nathanael Greene, and his adjutant Alexander Hamilton, and within his trusted circle, he could be angry and impatient and take their devotion for granted. Although he lacked the eloquence of Jefferson, the lightning intelligence of Alexander Hamilton, the erudition and thoughtfulness of John Adams, the creativity and knowledge of Benjamin Franklin, and the rousing rhetoric of Thomas Paine, he stood physically and spiritually heads and shoulders above his countrymen. He engendered trust, he held that trust, he acted to live up to that trust at all times. He never let anyone down. For these reasons he was--as his eulogist Lightfoot Harry Lee, father of General Robert E. Lee, said--"first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countryman."

All Americans, especially the young, need to acquaint themselves with this man and learn from him.

How Peony Will Travel

 

Before I read The Able McLaughlins, I never knew the tremendous efforts of women who pioneered the west to bring with them precious flowering bushes and plants to grow in their new homesteads on the prairie.

I learned about it through a story of one of my favorite characters in The Able McLaughlins, Barbara McNair, the second wife of a homesteading Scot. Mr. McNair had left his first wife and children to return to Scotland to settle a land dispute, but his wife, wrung out with frontier life, died before he could return. Learning of her death, he wedded a woman in Scotland and brought her back to the Iowa prairie with him. She was bitterly disappointed to see her new abode, as it seems Mr. McNair may have been guilty of false advertising. One day, she accompanied her husband to town, and while he was buying supplies, she stalked up and down the streets until she finally found a house with a garden. She asked the owner where she had gotten the flowers, and the owner took her to an older home in town. The lady of this house came out to greet them in her garden and then fetched her spade to give Mrs. McNair a peony plant to grow at the McNair homestead out on the prairie.

Mrs. McNair asked the women where she had gotten the peony, and here is the answer:

"The peony her mother had brought from eastern to western Ohio many years ago, and when she had died, her daughter had chosen the peony for her share of the estate. Her mother had got it from her mother, who came a bride to Ohio from western New York, clasping it against her noisy heart, out of the way of the high waters her husband had led her horse through, across unbridged streams, cherishing it more resolutely than the household stuffs which had to be abandoned in pathless woods. Her great-grandfather had brought it west in New York in his saddle bag, soon after Washington's inauguration as he returned from New York City. She supposed before that the Dutch had maybe brought it from Holland to Long Island. There had been tulips, too, but the pigs had eaten them in Ohio. She had wondered sometimes if it was the fate of the peony to be carried clear to the Pacific by lonely women. At least, if she gave a bit of it to Mrs. McNair, it would be that much farther west on its way to its destination, which she, for one, hoped it might soon reach, so that there would be some rest for women."

An Old (and Successful) Method Comes Back Around

The Kidder Family, profiled in the Wall Street Journal for its use of workplace methods to make their family life happier and still productive. 

 

Parents are borrowing methods from the workplace to help run their households and raise their children, the Wall Street Journal reported in a feature article February 9. The large spread featured a fun graphic with photo mugs of a family of five with their family-company titles, plus the cat (Rodent Removal Engineer) and the dog (Security Officer).

The author is Bruce Feiler, whose new book The Secrets of Happy Families: Improve Your Marriage, Rethink Family Dinner, Fight Smarter, Go Out and Play, and Much More is being released this month. Mr. Feiler reports that families are starting to take some pages from the workplace to manage their hectic family lives: weekly family meetings, accountability sheets in the kitchen for daily and weekly chores, a family mission statement, and much freer back and forth between children and parents (borrowed from agile development methods), all in the interests of building the enterprise--a happy and productive family.

This is not a new idea. As many of us have known since we enjoyed Cheaper by the Dozen as children, Mr. and Mrs. Frank Gilbreth applied their efficiency methods--in-depth studies on how to reduce fatigue and increase productivity--to the daily lives of their house full of children. Unlike their contemporary and rival efficiency expert Frederick Taylor, the Gilbreths believed that people who enjoyed their work were far more productive than those who didn't, and so were keenly interested in all the subjective aspects of creating a human and productive workplace. For instance, they studied the causes of stress (in which  they included clutter) and how to remove them.

 

Mrs. Lillian Gilbreth

Nevertheless, one might well ponder how Mr. and Mrs. Gilbreth, both of whom worked full time professionally, albeit at home, were able to maintain their large family of 12 youngsters with the help of one cook and one adored but feckless handyman, and then after Frank Gilbreth died, without a father and without the cook. Family councils, where chores were assigned with much back and forth on skill levels by age and likes and dislikes, routines, family meals, fun outings, a stripped down and lean vacation home to go to each summer, were among the ways the Gilbreths kept their children happy and productive in their endeavors, while as mother and father blazed new trails in the industrialized workplace.

Underlying their success, I believe, were two secret ingredients. First, the marriage between the Gilbreths was a partnership in every sense of the word. Although Mrs. Gilbreth                        
was willing to take a second place next to her husband, she held nothing back in bringing her excellent education, intelligence and thoughtfulness, self-discipline, and energy for the use of her husband and her family--and found great joy in doing so. Second, radiating from their mutual respect for each other, the Gilbreths showed great respect for their children. "Each member of the home must not only be able to express himself but be urged to do so and given not only the opportunity but the rewards of expression," she wrote in her 1928 book, Living with Children.

Expectations and standards were high. Children were not harshly disciplined nor were they coddled:

"It is better, too, for children to enter the family life as sharing rather than receiving members. They should not be allowed needlessly to change the entire method of living or to feel that they are to be the center of interest and the real reason for the existence of the family. This is no kindness to them. All their lives long they will have to learn to adjust themselves to the needs of others; the family may not continue to make them the most important members of the household, and even if it does, the world will not follow its example.... It may be beneficial for parents and family 'to give up everything for the baby,' but it is most undesirable for the baby....

"If a satisfying life is one full of experiences, then it is our job to expose the child to experiences, not to shield him from them; to help him overcome difficulties, not move them out of his way; to teach him to achieve successes, not hand him the results of successes we have achieved for him....
As often and as early as possible, he should become an active participant in every home problem in order to derive creative experience from it....

"Nothing better generates self-confidence than being effective. While the child in a home consciously governed by laws which hold good everywhere may have a little harder time learning to be effective, he has a much better chance to be so when he later steps out in the world than if he had to learn a new technique of handling situations when faced with the difficulties of a more complex life."

The Gilbreth family on the see-saw outside their vacation home.

By the same reasoning, "as a part of his effectiveness in the world, we want the child to learn to make his own decisions wisely and quickly and having made them, to be satisfied with the results. We may start with letting him decide on the color, design, and cut of his clothes. This is a personal problem that is sure to interest him and on which he will have opinions at a very early age. I have known youngsters to point out in a very decided manner which dress they wanted to wear before they were old enough to ask for the dress or discuss the matter."

I found Mr. Feiler's article right in the spirit of Mrs. Gilbreth's child-raising philosophy. In Living with Children, Mrs. Gilbreth opined that it is far more difficult to raise one child than many. I have seen articles recently in which women have spent so much energy on being mothers that there is little time for anything else, so great is their obsession with their youngster and doing everything "right." I think Mrs. Gilbreth would laugh at such an attitude. I hope that Mr. Feiler's book helps demystify some of the current views of raising children.

Conrad Richter's Early Americana

A wagon train wends its way west along the Santa Fe Trail.

In 1928 the American author Conrad Richter and his family pulled up stakes and moved from eastern Pennsylvania to New Mexico in the hopes of improving his wife's health. Transplanted to totally unfamiliar territory, he set about to unearth the stories of the families who had settled there, digested old diaries and letters, and gleaned all he could from the local library on the history of the region and how the lives of its settlers and their descendants had changed over time. The most famous result of this work is his Sea of Grass, published in 1937, which centers on the conflict between cattle ranchers and homesteaders and the characters of both. But his first output from his yarn gathering was his collection of nine short stories, Early Americana.

Many of these stories revolve around the coming together of a young man and woman in marriage carve their place in the vast prairies west of Saint Louis, but the romance is always understated, if made explicit at all. Lives travel tracks that bring them together and the rest is assumed--except that the land and the difficulties of settling it present nearly insurmountable obstacles that are unimaginable today but that come to life under Richter's pen: gunfights on a betrothal night, drought that kills the cattle herd a young man had built up so he could marry, Indian attacks that destroy a young man's family.


Cowboy in 1888. Mutual respect and partnership in hard work were the basis of a marriage, rather than romance.

So in "New Home" we wait with a young wife while her husband goes off to settle the ownership of the land and is gone far longer than either had anticipated. Her waiting is palpable, and we are in pain with our sympathy for her, hoping against hope that he returns. In "Frontier Woman," a Southern belle makes the arduous journey west after the Civil War to lead a new life, where her nearest neighbor will be 80 miles off, and contemplates her future:

Farther, much farther back, she felt the ravaged gardens of the South, the Confederate exodus through the piny woods, the vast watery fissure of the Mississippi, and the black trail across the illimitable prairie. And now in a kind of mirage she saw herself out on the desolate cap rock,...giving birth to Craig Weatherill's children, herself their teacher in a rambling adobe ranch house, nursing them without hope of a doctor, keeping lonely vigils, helping in times of attack to load the guns for the men, trying to teach indifferent hands some of the declicate recipes of the South, inevitably homesick, never entirely forgiving the hard land of her husband--a frontier woman.

In one of the most dramatic stories, "Smoke on the Prairie," Richter explores both the upheaval that came with the railroad and its replacement of the long wagon trains that has first brought people from the east along the Santa Fe Trail.

As always, Richter shows his deep respect for women and their work. Women waiting for their husbands to return from a haul to the market or from a sojourn to find a lost cow kept themselves busy as a way of stopping up their floodtide of anxiety.

Her hands kept eternally busy. She washed and ironed, heating the heavy smoothing iron by setting it upright on the hearth before the coals. She sat daily over winter socks for Pleas and the baby, one foot moving the cradle as she knitted. Morning or afternoon she let the sheep from the high corral and followed on foot over the range, resting with her baby on the grass in cedar shade.

Pleas had set up a hopper for the oak ash. In the big copper kettle brought from Arkansas she boiled wood ashes. When the lye dissolved the end of a feather, she added accumulated greases and tallow and boiled a small batch of soap, cut the cooling mixture into yellow-gray bars and piled them on the mantel to dry. She soaked a flint-dry deerskin in strong suds of lye soap, water, and a spoonful of lard; scraped off the hair with an old corn knife; let it remain by the warm hearth all night; wrung, pulled, and stretched it next day until perfectly dry, when it becomes soft and pliable as cloth and waited only her shears and thread for gloves or clothes.

Richter never lets us forget for a second the land that his characters inhabit. We imbibe it through their eyes and his lyrical voice:

They rode slowly on, while the luminous purple began to appear like violet mist on the hills. It spread to the plains, bathing them in color. The home ranch in the wide mouth of Monica Canyon ahead became an island of buildings, corrals, and windmill swimming in a bright velvet sea. The color seemed to float in the air about them. They breathed it, road through it.

Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton

"We must pray literally without ceasing—without ceasing—in every occurrence and employment of our lives . . . that prayer of the heart which is independent of place or situation, or which is rather a habit of lifting up the heart to God as in a constant communication with Him."--Elizabeth Ann Seton

Today is the feast day for Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton (1774-1821), the first person born in the United States to be canonized by the Catholic Church (1975). She is the patron saint of Catholic schools.

Born in New York to a prominent Episcopalian family, Elizabeth Ann Seton was left motherless at the age of three. Even as a child, she was dedicated to Christianity, wearing a small crucifix around her neck and taking delight in reading the Psalms. Psalm 23 remained her favorite prayer throughout her life. When she was 19 years old, Elizabeth married a New York businessman, to whom she was devoted. The couple had five children. Despite her many household duties, she found time to organize prominent women in New York City to visit the sick poor in their homes and bring them and their families sustenance. Inspired by the work of Saint Vincent de Paul, the group was called informally the "Ladies of Charity."

In December 1803, Elizabeth Ann Seton was widowed and lived for a period of time in Rome with the Italian family of her husband's business partner. Here she was introduced to the Catholic faith, and in March 1805 was received into the church, amid the protests of her family and friends. Faced with the necessity to support her children, Mrs. Seton sought teaching positions. In 1809, after several difficult years, she accepted the invitation of the Sulpicians Order to teach in Emmitsburg, Maryland. Here she founded the Saint Joseph's Academy and Free School for the education of Catholic girls, the first such school in the United States. She also established a religious community in Emmitsburg dedicated to the care of the children of the poor. She died at the age of 46 of tuberulosis, having already buried two of her daughters.

You can get a glimpse of the soul of this saint in the book Elizabeth Seton: Selected Writings edited by Ellin Kelly and Annabelle Melville. Here is a benediction that she wrote toward the end of her life:

Mary Queen and Virgin pure!--as poor unfledged Birds uncovered in our cold and hard nests on this Earth we cry to her for her sheltering outspread wings--little hearts not yet knowing sorrow--but poor tired and older ones pressed with pains and cares seek peace and rest--O our Mother! and find it in thee.--

Saint Genevieve of Paris

Saint Genevieve by Hugo van der Goes, 1479

Women saints are exemplars of faith whose charitable work often resulted in the creation of new institutions and new precedents that changed the course of history. Saint Genevieve (420-502), the Patron Saint of Paris, was one of these saints, and January 3 is her feast day.

This faith-fueled woman is a saint for our time, especially because she appears to have been mentored by Saint Germanus (378-448), Bishop of Auxerre, who led the Church's fight against the Pelagian heresy in Britain at the behest of Pope Saint Celestine I. Pelagius (354-420) believed that man can be sinless and good all on his own and has no need of God's grace. The story goes that on his way to Britain in 429, Germanus stopped in Nanterre, France, where Genevieve, a young girl born of well-to-do parents, confided to him that she wanted to live only for God. Germanus encouraged her and sent her the veil of a dedicated virgin. When Genevieve's parents died when she was 15, she went to live with her godmother in Paris, where she devoted her days to prayer and charity and was reportedly visited again by Germanus.

Her life of devout piety though is not why Genevieve is the patron saint of Paris. In a foreshadowing of the peasant military heroine, Saint Joan, Saint Genevieve is credited with averting the destruction of Paris--twice. The first time was in 451, when the ferocious Attila the Hun was on a course straight for Paris. Genevieve told the terrified Parisians not to flee the city but to remain in their homes, fast, and pray, and she organized a prayer marathon. Abruptly Attila changed course, leaving Paris intact. The second time was when invading Franks had blockaded the city in 464. Genevieve ran the blockade to bring food to the starving Parisians. Later she pleaded successfully for Parisian prisoners of war to the Frankish King Childeric, and King Clovis liberated captives at her urging.

Hugo van der Goes painted Saint Genevieve on the outer panel for a diptych that depicted the Fall of Man on one side and the Redemption (the Lamentation of Christ) on the other, indicating the high esteem either he or his patrons (or both) had for Saint Genevieve 1,000 years later. She is also considered a patron saint of young girls.

Creating Beauty in the Frontier Home

Inside of a Nebraska sod house

I am always moved when I read about the efforts of women to make their frontier homes comfortable and beautiful--with barely any materials to do so. From this effort comes the American tradition of scrap quilting, for instance. Here, Mrs. Grace Snyder describes how, as a new wife, she worked to make her house livable for herself and her cowboy husband:

All the time I was growing up, on the homestead and the other places we had lived, Mama had "made do" with the little or nothing she had on hand to fix up her homes. Now I found I could do the same. We didn't have a table for the living room, so I made one by driving two old broomsticks into the sod wall and laying a wide board across them. I covered the shelf with a pretty scarf and put the parlor lamp and the Bible on it and set my rocking chair beside it. With old blankets for padding and one of my quilts for a cover, I turned the old wire cot into a decent front-room couch.

For a spare bed in the empty middle room, I propped an old bedspring from the Squaw Creek shack on canned goods boxes, and covered the bed and boxes with the pretty quilt I had made that long, lonesome winter at Aufdengartens (a family she worked for earlier). There wasn't a closet or a chest of drawers in teh whole big house, but I made out with stacks of boxes, covered with pretty calico curtains. And when I had hemmed and hung curtains at all the deep windows, the house looked really nice.

Birdcage outside of a sod home. Many frontier women, including Grace Snyder's mother, had canaries or other birds in cages inside or right outside the home.

Haute Couture Has Nothing Over Mrs. Grace Snyder

Flower Basket Petit Point Quilt by Grace Snyder, 1940

Grace McCance Snyder, the Nebraskan pioneer, started piecing quilts when she was only seven. Charged by her father with watching the cattle in the fields, she would lie or sit on the back of her favorite and sew all day. Through the next decades of her life, Mrs. Snyder made tens of quilts for her family and later in her life for exhibition. She became Nebraska's most famous quilter and was inducted into the Quilters' Hall of Fame in 1980 at the age of 98. Two of her quilts are on the list of the Twentieth Century's 100 Best American Quilts.


Section of the Petit Point quilt showing the needlepoint effect of the piecing.

Mrs. Snyder accomplished the Flower Basket Petit Point quilt in 16 months, basing her design on the pattern of a china plate produced by the Salem China Company of Ohio. In her design, she used a triangle for each stitch of the petit point to achieve a pointellist impression on the quilt's surface. It took Mrs. Snyder 87,875 tiny triangles, no bigger than a fingernail, and 5 miles of thread to sew to create the Petit-Point quilt!

Here are other samples of Mrs. Snyder's quilting.







A documentary segment has been produced about Mrs. Snyder's quilting, and her work and life were featured in the International Quilt Study Study Center and Museum of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

You may also want to see: Fashion and Quilting: Two Roads

Victorian Husbands and Wives

See the entire set at Retronaut compliments of Lisby.

I feel inspired to write a story for each couple, don't you?

Grace Snyder's No Time on My Hands

Grace McCance Snyder's autobiography, No Time on My Hands, written with her daughter, Nellie Snyder Yost, is the account of her pioneer life from 1885--when Grace is three years old and her family moves to Nebraska from settled Missouri--until 1962, a full 20 years before Grace Snyder died at the age of 100. I have read all of Laura Wilder's books of life on the prairie and other fictional and non-fictional accounts of pioneering women, but No Time on My Hands makes these accounts even more vivid and awe-inspiring because of the great detail that Grace shares about the work that she and her mother and sisters did at their sod homestead on the plains of Nebraska.

The book's title comes from Grace's paternal grandmother, Mrs. McCance, who was heard to say that "if there's one thing more'n another I simply can't abide, it's time on my hands." The elderly Mrs. McCance, as Grace's mother and Grace herself, were in a state of perpetual motion tending to the work on their farms and ranches. Grace and her grandmother thrived on work of all kinds; Grace's mother, of more fragile health, had long bouts of illness and a perpetual cough and her thin body seemed nearly crushed by the weight of her daily burdens. Nevertheless, she too lived to raise all of her children and see her great-grandchildren thrive.


The McCance Family. Grace's parents, Mr. and Mrs. McCance are standing together on the right. The six McCance children (there were eventually nine) are seated, with Grace third from the left. Grace's older sister Florry (second from left seated) died in childbirth.

As I read this 541-page book, I jotted down the different activities that these women routinely performed. Given that many of these tasks must be repeated daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly and also that calamities--primarily caused by extreme weather--posed constant disruptions to any routine, it is difficult to imagine how a woman would plan such a whirlwind of work as that performed in a well-managed homestead. Here is my list:

Creating and tending a vegetable garden (be prepared for heartbreak caused by hail or loose animals pummeling the garden to pulp)
Gathering cow chips for fuel
Berry gathering
Making jam
Drying corn Grinding corn for cornmeal
Churning butter
Curing meat
Making cheese
Preparing meals
Washing up the dishes and pots and pans after meals
Making yeast (boiling cornmeal and hop leaves to a thick mush and drying it in hard cakes, out of doors under cheesecloth in the summer and in the oven in winter) Baking bread
Making desserts with fruit and baking custards
Putting up (canning) fruits and vegetables for the winter and spring

Washing clothes
Making starch (smearing potato starch on a large piece of canvas and letting it dry, then peeling it off, and storing for use)
Hanging and gathering in clothes
Mending clothes--(a major activity, for example: During broomcorn harvesting, "each day the sharp stalks ripped their jacket sleeves to ravlings, and every evening Mama basted the backs of old overall legs to the sleeves, replacing the shredded patches she'd sewed on the night before.")
Making clothes--without patterns
Making quilts--Grace became a nationally known quilter--more on that later

Keeping a sod house clean (no mean feat)
Home decorating (curtains, etc.)

Breastfeeding babies
Watching young children
Homeschooling children

Feeding hens and chickens, goats, and cows, all of which contribute to putting food on the table
Milking the cows and/or goats

Killing snakes--one day a rattler got into the house and was sitting on the same blanket Grace's baby brother was on. Grace's mother killed the snake and then sought and found the den where it had come from and killed all 22 rattlesnakes therein.

Nursing the sick (Grace describes being at the bedside of a seriously ill person for days on end and also night and day)
Tending to and healing wounded or sick animals
Laying out the dead
Helping afflicted families

Even with this workload, Grace's mother found time to make delectable picnic food when the family went to town for the annual Fourth of July celebration, which, next to Christmas, was the biggest holiday. "Under the seats we carried a bag of grain for the mules and a tubful of picnic lunch--including

one of Mama's five-layer cakes, three white and two yellow, with custard filling between the layers and whipped cream, shredded coconut, and black walnut meats on the tops and sides.

Hands of a Farmwoman, photo by Russell Lee, 1936. "Grandma's hands were thin and brown and spotted, their soft, paper-dry skin crisscrossed with high, dark veins, and the fingers twisted and knotty, but she would look at them with grim satisfaction--anyone could see she'd never had any time on her hands."

Janet Lewis: Novelist and Poet, Wife and Mother

Janet Loxley Lewis

I am enjoying The Wife of Martin Guerre by Janet Lewis (1899-1998), a novel based on a true story that shook the French village of Artigues in the middle of the 16th century.

The wife of the poet, professor, and poetic critic Yvor Winters, Janet Lewis was an author in her own right--writing poems and novels over the course of decades in a crystalline clear style. A native of Chicago and daughter of an English professor, Lewis started writing at an early age--"I don't pay as much attention, when I'm not writing, to living in general," she said in an interview--and contributed to the same high school magazine in Oak Park, Illinois, as her contemporary Ernest Hemingway. Later, studying at the University of Chicago, she met Yvor Winters. Throughout first his and then her own convalescence from tuberculosis, the two carried on a literary and romantic correspondence that culminated in their marriage in 1926.

The two shared a passion for poetry and writing and founded and co-produced the literary magazine The Gyroscope from 1929 to 1931. When Winters died in 1968, she kept his writing shed as is and his name on the mailbox of their home in Los Altos, California, where they made their home upon their marriage and where Lewis lived a total of 62 years. Many of her husband's students and literary friends came to visit the Winters, including famous writers, as her obituary in the New York Times reports: "You may have to close your eyes to conjure up the sight, but there they are forever, two 1899 contemporaries standing side by side at the kitchen sink, Janet Lewis washing, Vladimir Nabokov drying."

Her Times obituary also notes that

over the course of a a career in which she wrote hundreds of poems, a single collection of short stories, a couple of children's books, a handful of novels, the words to five operas and one acclaimed masterpiece, Miss Lewis pursued a literary life in which the focus was on the life and the life was one of such placid equilibrium and domestic bliss that she had to reach deep down in her psyche -- and far back in the annals of criminal law -- to find the wellspring of tension that produced some of the 20th century's most vividly imagined and finely wrought literature.

She also had to find the time.

As she once observed, women of prodigious literary output, like Willa Cather and Edith Wharton, tended not to have children. As the mother of two, Miss Lewis willingly put her work aside when her children were young and cheerfully accepted other duties as well. ''It's a question of what you want to do with your life,'' she once said. ''You might also want to take care of your husband.''

In an interview in Women Writers of the West Coast: Speaking of Their Lives and Careers, Lewis herself stated her priorities: "Being a writer has meant nearly everything to me beyond my marriage and children."

Lewis had a life-long interest in American Indians and her first book of poetry was Indians in the Woods. Indians also feature prominently in her novel, The Invasion, A Narrative of Events Concerning the Johnston Family of St. Mary's, about a pioneering Scots-Irish family in 18th-century Michigan. She and her husband were also active in the civil rights movement.

Here are two of Lewis' poems.

Girl Help

Mild and slow and young,
She moves about the room,
And stirs the summer dust
With her wide broom.
In the warm, lofted air,
Soft lips together pressed,
Soft wispy hair,
She stops to rest,
And stops to breathe,
Amid the summer hum,
The great white lilac bloom
Scented with days to come.

A Lullaby

Lulle, lullay
I could not love thee more
If thou wast Christ the King.
Now tell me, how did Mary know
That in her womb should sleep and grow
The Lord of everything?

Lullee, lullay
An angel stood with her
Who said: "That which doth stir
Like summer in thy side
Shall save the world from sin
Then stable, hall, and inn
Shall cherish Christmas-tide."

Lullee, lullay
And so it was that Day.
And did she love Him more
Because an angel came
To prophesy His name?
Ah no, not so,
She could not love Him more,
But loved Him just the same.

Housekeeping in Lamb in His Bosom 2

Here are more quotes from Caroline Miller's Lamb in His Bosom that give an idea of the work of women in non-slaveowning families of southern Georgia in the two decades before the Civil War.

Weaving and Spinning

Ma was happy at her loom, or when she was spinning, the long hum of the wheel filling the house, or when she was dyeing, mixing her likkers of indigo with maple bark or poplar, or this or that or the other root she had to see what color it would make. She would souse the hanks of cotton or worsted yarn into the pot, pushing them gently under the bubbling, swirling surface. She would take them out, and dry them on a leaning bush, and the colors would be softly blent through the threads, set with the lye of the green-oak ashes. She used the juice of the poke-berries for short lengths of red for bright bibs and tuckers. But that color would run in the washing, and it was a pity.

Spinning wheel, an ancient tool for making thread from fibers.

Cean would try new dyes herself when she made cloth. Lonzo would set her up a loom when the cotton was in. He was working at her spinning wheel now by the firelight of nights. The wood squeaked softly under the blade of his knife where he rounded off a corner or settled a spoke into place. Cean would make all her frocks straight blue or yaller, or block her colors together as she wove then. She would have frock of blue with flounces of yaller across the bottom.

Pokeberries used for dyeing.

Making Soap

Tomorrow Cean would make soap-grease out of the scraps [of the butchered pig], when her lard was cold in the kegs, and her sausages were all strung up in greasy links in the smokehouse. Not every woman knows how to make good strong soap that will not shrink away to nothing when you lay it out in hunks on the smokehouse shelf. But Cean knew how, for her mother had taught her when Cean was not knee-high to a duck. Like meat-curing, there is no quick way to make good soap. Wait till the dark of the moon to cook up your soap-grease and pot-ashes, and while the mixture is boiling stir it from left to right with a sassafras puddle; when it is thick and ready, let the fire die under the pot. Next morning you will find the soap shrunk a little from the sides of the pot, and a little wet-like dew will be gathered upon it; then you can slice it in hunks and lay it away, sure of fine, strong soap for another year.


Washpot, used for making soap, doing the wash, and making big stews for large gatherings.

Doing the Laundry

Four times she had soaked his and her clothes in the wash-trough, had battled them free of dirt on the block, had boiled them white and rinsed them through the spring water, had hung them out on the elder bushes to dry. Together, in the water, she had washed their clothes—his long, sweaty shirts and britches, her short shimmies and full-skirted homespun dresses of pale natural color, and of the soft blue of indigo, and of mingled colors patterned on the loom.

Butchering the Calf

And now Lonzo would butcher him and they’d eat him. Cean would beat the tender pieces and fry them on the fireplace; she would try out the yellow tallow for candles, and boil the tough pieces, and she and Lonzo would carry Ma a half of beef. Lonzo would stretch the hide to the back side of the house, and the sun would dry it. Then Lonzo would tan it, and rub it down till it was soft and giving, and then he’d make shoes for them on the shoe-last that lay under the bed.

Making and Preparing Food

For Cean and Lonzo had aplenty and to spare. Out in the smokehouse there were kegs of lard and sides of meat, sweet brown hams and shoulders, and sausages fried and buried in lard; piled back in the corner were pumpkins, pale-colored in the half-light; behind the corncrib were mounds of dirt and pine straw covering banks of potatoes—all Cean had to do was go and grabble out as many as she needed; in the loft were dried peas aplenty; in stone crocks Cean had preserved all manner of things in thick sweetness—mayhall jelly, blackberries, huckleberries, watermelon rind, wild plums. Like her mother, Cean set a good table. With corn aplenty for meal and hominy, with potatoes to fry, with syrup to be sopped up with a hot biscuit, and preserves to be had for the asking, it was no wonder that Cean had only a coming war to worry her. When her table was set, neat and tidy with its crockery plates and bone-handled knives and forks and pewter spoons, it was a pretty sight to see. Maggie and Kissie would rake the coals from the top of the oven, would push the coals from under the pots and skillets, would lift the pot lids and let the food cool a little. Rich simmering would mingle with the floury, fresh odor of buttermilk biscuits and varied scents of boiled beans, stewed pork, and such like—all fitten to stir the hunger of a stone man. The roasted potatoes would come out of the hot ashes to be peeled and buttered. “Fine rations,” Lonzo would say as he sat down to eat… And for the next meal she might stir up a sugar-cake to please him and make him eat the heartier.

Berries of the mayhall bush, found in southern Georgia. You can buy it from Southern Grace Farms here.

Fixing Wounds

She washed the gashes that tapered to scratches down her arm, and caked the open places with tallow melted with clear turpentine. The hot liquid seared with its heat and sting, but she must do this or have blood-poison or proud flesh, and high fevers, and be dead, maybe, before ever Lonzo found her.

Tallow, rendered from animal fat, usually beef, which was used for making soap and candles.

Laying Out the Dead

Seen washed her new dead while dawn was breaking. Margot helped her. The two women were steeled to the emergency…. They washed his naked, wasted, sore-eaten body. Once the breath was gone, here was an unclean body to be prepared for its burial in the clean earth…. She raised the limp body, and Margot helped her clothe him in clean clothing. She set her hand under his chin to see that the jaws were set together properly. She brushed his hair down with a bristle-brush; it was docile under her hand as he been docile since he was sick, but never before. Margot shook out a clean sheet….

Family cemetery from the mid-19th century. The Carver-Smith family buried their dead on their own land.

Praying

Cean, back home on a low slope bounded by swaying stretches of broom straw and tilled fields, sheltered by lofty pines and the blazing bright dome of heaven, prayed God-almighty that she would never have just cause to leave Lonzo; but over and above any other thing, each day raising her heart to an altar, she prayed for patience—patience to listen to a child’s fretting; patience to endure a man’s hard displeasure over bad weather or the death of a hog; patience to love God as she ought, this being hard to do since never might she see His face until she died.

Along a path from the Cean's house to the road her husband planted a row of crape myrtle, that exuberant bush-tree that blooms in the summer in the southern states.

Housekeeping in Lamb in His Bosom 1

Here are some quotes from Lamb in His Bosom by Caroline Miller that give an idea of the work of women of non-slaveholding farming families in Georgia in the two decades before the Civil War.

Thoughts on Setting Up Her House

Now she was a woman and would churn her own butter, scald her own milk-crocks and set them in the sun to make them smell sweet and clean; now she would own and tend her little patches of herbs and melons, drop corn behind her own man, and watch it grow, and hoe the grass out from around the sharp, clean blades cutting through the earth.

Typical milk crock

Creating the Bed

She went into the house where the floor of split logs had never been scrubbed and yet was clean, where Lonzo had set the bedplace in the corner with its depth of dry cornshucks soaked and softened in water, and dried again in recent suns. Over these shucks, that would rustle softly with the turn of their bodies, was spread a thick mattress of soft new cotton, caught between its homespun ticking with strong thread in the hands of Cean’s mother. Atop the cotton mattress lay Cean’s feather bed, the feathers saved from every goose for years gone. Atop this were homespun sheets and Cean’s quilts, one of them the bright and dark scraps of the Widow’s Trouble pattern, sewn by Cean’s fingers through her girlhood. She had two other quilts—Star of the East, and Maiden’s Tear—that she had pieced herself. That would be more than enough cover for these bright, cool nights, and before winter came again she would make other quilts. Lonzo’s mother had promised wool for two comforts when the sheep should be sheared in April.

Widow's Pane Quilt Pattern from Carolina Patchworks (Is Widow's Trouble the origin of this pattern?)

Making the Broom

Cean gathered the bushes of the gall berries for brush brooms and laid them on top of her wash-shed to dry. The brittle stems, beaten free of leaves, would keep the dooryard clean of trash. Each morning as she swept the yard the twigs of the brush broom left their little wavy marks on the thin sand about her doorstep.

Gallberry bush

Cean’s House

When they needed more room Lonzo would ceil the room and make a loft for another room. Now there was room aplenty; and truth to tell, Cean liked the dim space overhead where the corners were veiled with dusty cobwebs that the little gray spiders had woven, bringing good luck to this house. She loved her house; from the beams of it hung her bronze-red pods of pepper drying for sausage seasoning, her beans strung to dry for winter use, her seeds gathered fresh, season by season, and tied in clean rags to hang safe from the rats’ greedy teeth….

Yonder on the wall hung the little looking-glass that Lonzo had brought from the Coast so she could see to comb her hair; on the narrow shelf below the looking-glass lay the fine bone-backed bomb and the bristle hair-brush, and the little pipkin of ointment compounded of witch-hazel tea and rose leaves, to soothe her lips and hands from winter chapping. On her floor were yellow shuck rugs of her own plaiting and sewing, and deep bearskin rugs from the backs of the honey-robbing, lamb-stealing beasts that Lias, dare-devil! had killed in the swamp. Far in the corner was her bed, and close beside it was the cradle where the babies would sleep, each in its time.

Witch-Hazel

You may also enjoy:
Housekeeping in Great Forest: The Trees 2
Housekeeping in The Fields

Lamb in His Bosom by Caroline Miller

Lamb in His Bosom is about a poor white farming family living in the wiregrass country of south- central Georgia in the two decades before the Civil War. It's about the life and extended family of Cean Carver Smith, beginning with her marriage to Lonzo Smith and their setting up housekeeping in their newly built tree-chiseled home among the pines, six miles west of her parents' farm.

Miller won the Pulitzer Prize for Lamb in His Bosom in 1934. The book was a bestseller, as readers could see, in the story of how the Carver-Smith family endured the harsh difficulties of life in antebellum Georgia, a mirror of their own struggles to survive in the Great Depression's meanest years. I would not be surprised if John Steinbeck drew on Lamb in His Bosom for his 1939 Grapes of Wrath.

Conrad Richter said his novel, The Trees, was heavily influenced by Lamb in His Bosom, which is one of the reasons I made an immediate beeline for it. Miller's novel is historically authentic, writes historian Elizabeth Fox-Genovese in the book's afterword. How the farmers and their families did everything -- from building a house to making dinner to sowing their crops to butchering a pig -- is authentic, along with the characters' dialect and reliance on the Protestant religion. Fox-Genovese notes:

Miller understood the context of the lives of those she was writing about. Her accounts of the business of everyday life ... conform in extraordinary detail to what we know about the Old South from a myriad of sources. It is difficult to think of a single other text that could give students of antebellum history as complete or accurate an account of the lives of nonslaveholding whites.

I thought the main character, Cean Carver Smith, was fully drawn, and I felt close to her most of the time. We see the anguished work of her soul as she struggles to physically and emotionally survive one catastrophe after another. None of the stories seems implausible, but only too painfully true of the difficulties American frontiersmen and women faced and persevered against.

Miller may in part be indebted to Sigrid Undset for the richness of her portrayal of Cean and other characters; she told an interviewer for the Atlanta-Constitution in 1933 that she liked Sigrid Undset "better than a dozen others all rolled together." In comparison with the female heroine of Richter's Awakening Land trilogy, Cean Carver Smith is a real woman. However, most characters in the book do not fundamentally change over time, including the heroine, so I do not come away with the same sense of closure I felt upon leaving Undset's Kristin Lavransdattar. The book's momentum derives from the unfolding lives of the family and the challenges they overcome, or, in some cases, as in any family, are unable to overcome, and their deep faith in God and His love for and tutoring of their souls.


Lamb in His Bosom was Miller's first novel, published when she was 30 years old. She never went to college but was mentored in literature by her high school English teacher, whom she married and with whom she bore three sons, who were collectively nicknamed "the three twins," her niece reports. Her impetus for writing Lamb in His Bosom was the hard time she was having keeping house and minding her children! As she told an interviewer:

When my twins were two years old (and Billy was four) I thought I would break under the strain of trying to take care of them and do the hundreds of other little things any normal wife and mother is called upon to do. But one day it suddenly occurred to me that I was not half so weighted down with duties as the pioneer women used to be. Even my mother and grandmother, who had such large families, seemed to get through with much less effort and energy than I was expending. I couldn’t help wondering why. They had something, something very real, very tangible, yet almost indefinable, that anchored them and gave them faith and courage, and I needed that something so much.

From that day I turned to the examples set by the pioneer women of Georgia. I gathered my material around Baxley and in the surrounding country, and it has been a wonderful help to me. Needless to say, I feel that I have derived more benefit from writing the book than my readers could ever obtain through reading it.

Miller began collecting stories and information from her family. Her own parents had buried six infants, including two sets of stillborn twins, and two toddlers. A preacher in the book is modeled on her great-grandfather who built a New Light church in the area. With her children in tow, she visited people beyond her town of Baxley, in the Georgia countryside:

I’d get in the Ford and ride about the country and talk to the people. I’d buy chickens and vegetables from them, and they’d tell me about their lives, in the language which even today preserves many of the picturesque and graphic figures of speech which their ancestors used. These people are obscure, but they are an important part of our history. Their forbears fought in the Revolution, and in the Confederate army. They are loyal Americans, patriotic citizens, and people of high moral character.

And while I found my book among these people, I also found something which helped me. I discovered the fine spirit in which they met the hardships and tragedies. What they suffered and their nobility in the midst of desperate conditions made my own problems less difficult. I hope that I have captured something of their patience and courage and faith, not only in my book, but also for myself.

In its liveliness of speech and description, its authenticity, and its story, Lamb in His Bosom, listed by Abebooks as a "lost Pulitzer," is ripe for revival.

Housekeeping in The Fields

Pennyroyal (mentha pulegium), which was used as an ant and flea repellant

I devoured in a day Conrad Richter's The Fields, sequel to The Trees. The feeling of this book is different. In The Trees, the drama overshadowing the characters is the problem of physical survival in the face of extreme isolation, lack of necessities and amenities, and a very formidable natural setting. Far more than the pioneers, I suspect, this reader was shivering in her timbers with fear for the characters.

In The Fields, the drama has shifted to the intricate relations among people, since now there are a lot more of them where the Luckett family first plunked down its two kettles, quilts, and hunting and trapping gear. Clearing the forest to make a field and planting a crop is a cruel struggle. We see Sayward Luckett Wheeler's efforts not only to "defeat the trees" as she put it, but also to corral her children to the ways of civilization.

Here are quotes from The Fields that give an idea of Sayward's work.

Even her cabin looked small and pitiful aside of the big timber. But it had a tight roof against the rain, stout walls against the beasts and the winter, a bed to sleep in, a fireplace to cook by and gourds on clapboard shelves spilling over with what grew in woods and patches. Hanging from her rafters she had dittany tea, herbs for complaints, a jug of whiskey if you needed it, sacks of meal and grain. With these she reckoned they could make out.

A piggin

The river was her boundary. Down here was a place to get gourds in the late summer. You sliced off the tops for lids, pulled out the guts and had all the piggins and pipkins [small earthenware pot with a horizontal handle] for your shelf boards you wanted....

Her and Portius’ bed was the only one left down the ladder. This bed Sayward had made new in the fall. First she littered fresh fallen leaves on the bark she had spread on tamped dirt floor. Then she laid ticking [strong ticking fabric] she had sewed up herself and stuffed with corn shucks and wheat straw. Between the yarn blankets on top of this Sayward from time to time took her ease....

My, but the cabin smelled good with its joists hanging with curing dittany and pennyroyal. They had to gather linn [jute] for rope and hickory bark for light wood when candles ran low.

Shellbark hickory (carya laciniosa).

First she stood a slab bench with a gourd of soft soap by the run, and all had to scrub their heads and hands like they were pewter plates. Then she hung up a [black] haw comb, and every time before you came to eat, you had to hackle your hair with it. Oh, she was bound you’d be somebody around here. She put those puncheons [planking] down in the cabin just so she’d had a floor to scour, he believed. Now she talked of getting lime from Maytown and making her boys whitewash the logs…. Her ways were so “cam” you figured she was easy-going, but that’s where she fooled you. The day wasn’t long enough for the things she studied out to do to get you along in the world. She was having a loom built and said she knew where she could get her hands on two more ewes.

Blackhaw (viburnum prunifolium)

Wheat was coloring up fast. It would have to be reaped, bound, shocked, flailed, and the chaff fanned out. Then her flax had to be taken care of, pulled, spread, turned, ripped for the seeds, and that was only a start of the long “tejus” work before it could be spun. All the time corn and potatoes would have to be hoed and sprouts and weeds fought. And meanwhile the hay had be made and put away. It was all coming in a pile. You couldn’t put off a crop once it was ready.

Mayapple

She smelled just the same, that good, clean smell of soap and wood smoke and something broad, sweet and healthy that was just her. He reckoned a part of it came from May apples. She always dried May apples, he recollected, and laid them among her clothes in the chest.