"Having resolved to write a short history of my life, as I remember it, and what I was told of myself before I could remember anything, first I will quote a part of an old hymn my mother used to sing ever since I can remember.         Am I a soldier of the Cross?  A follower of the Lamb?

        And should I fear to own His cause or blush to speak His name?

        Shall I be carried to the skies on flowery beds of ease,         While others fight to win the prize and sail through bloody seas.

     "I was born in Eddyville Armstrong County, Penna., Dec. 2nd, 1879 in a village by the Mahoning River where there was an eddy.  It was a good place to tie up timber rafts and there was an old up and down saw mill there which was run by water power.

     "The owner or operator would put a log on the carriage and go off to some other duties and return when he thought the board would be sawed off; perhaps hours later.  I did not learn how long it did take to saw through a log.  When I was there one time when I was 10 or 12 years old, my father and I passed that that way to fish for black bass.  Father would shoot the fish with a muzzle loading rifle and I would swim in and get the fish.

     "The first I can remember is the day my sister Carrie was born -- July 25, 1882.  I was two years, 6 months, and 23 days old.  We lived in a small house on Water or Front Street, Hawthorn, or West Millville, PA, as the town was called.

     "The stairway was built on the outside of the narrow house.  I remember going up stairs with my sister Lizzie who was two years and four months older than me.  Daddy told us to go upstairs and play.  All I remember was that upstairs there was a bushel or more of onions scattered over the floor to dry. Just as Lizzie went to go upstairs to play, the Doctor came in.  He carried a large hand satchel.

  After we had played, rolling onions, and romping over the floor for some time, perhaps an hour, Father called us down.  The Doctor had gone and Mother said, 'What do you suppose I have here in my bed?'  Daddy lifted me up to see what she had under the covers.  And to my surprise, I said 'Oh Daddy, where did you get it?'  Daddy said 'Didn't you see that large satchel the Doctor had?  Well, the Doctor brought her.'  Those words brought a question to sister Lizzie's mind and she said, 'Where did you get me Daddy.'  I do not remember what he told her.  But I do remember what he told me when I also asked, 'Where did you get me, Daddy?'  This is what he told me.  He said that he found me going down the Mahoning River on an Alligator's back.  Many, many times I pondered those words.

     "Just what can be expected of a fellow which started his life with the alligators?

     "Well, however, I do like water and in a year or two, I was always playing near or in the stream near where we lived.  I would catch little fishes, would turn over the stones and catch the crabs or tease them with a small stick. They would take hold of the stick with their large pincers.

     "I loved to gather keil.  It was soft red stone one could use to write on a slate or other hard surfaces.  As there were many logs in the streams in those days, I would gather sticks and float them down the stream pretending I was driving logs.  I would build dams and break them to cause brackets or floods to swell the stream to drive the logs, so called.  When I was a few years older, I learned to make water wheels such as the bull wheels used on drilling wells. I would set those wheels so the water falling over the dam would cause the wheel to roll and with a string attached to the drum, the turning of the wheel would cause the string to roll up on the drum and draw the stick up to the imaginary saw mill.

     "Other of my happy childhood days was when I could go to Grandpa's shoe shop.  He would let me have a knife and I would cut from small pieces of leather such as Grandpa allowed me to have pigs, horses, and chickens to stock my imaginary farm and then would play with them all alone for hours.

     "When I would go with him to his home, I would go with him to the barn to feed the cow and put new straw in her stall for bedding.  Grandma did the milking and feeding the chickens.  Grandpa loved to roast potatoes on the stove for me.  He would pare them and slice them and salt them and roast them. They were something like our potato chips of these modern times.  Sometimes he would roast chestnuts on the stove too and parch corn.  Grandma's cookie jar was seldom empty and I always got a nice share of them.

     "Two of the things at Grandma's home I will never forget.  First was a beautiful doll about twenty inches tall.  Grandma kept it in a tall box she had trimmed with lace with a glass over it.  And second, a wagon box in which she had a large cactus plant which she shoved from place to place in the living room.

My Uncle Jake Swonger carved a little man out of wood and dressed it in a red flannel suit and fixed him up above the front gate on a lander pole and when the wind blew, he would turn with his face to the wind and his arms would go around and around as if he was running toward the wind.  Grandma had a bantam hen she called Lalley.

  She lent it to Charley Dailey to do slight of hand performances.  He had a little show and Grandpa took me to see it.  He did what seemed wonderful things to me.  Grandpa also took me to see the Punch and Judy puppet show.  Punch was the husband.  He had a wife and baby.  He had a fight with his wife and took the baby and threw it out, and the police came after him.  He grabbed a ball bat and knocked the police down, then the Devil came and Punch made the Devil double up the police and put him in a casket that was only half long enough to stretch him out in, so the Devil had to double him up and then Punch killed the Devil and an alligator came with his mouth open wide and caught old Punch in his mouth and went out with him.  As he went out, old Punch cried out, 'I am a gonner now.'

     "Father became a coal miner about this time.  The shoe making business was being shoved out because factory shoes were being made.  I was told that the U.S. Government was having prisoners make shoes in the Allegheny Penitentiary and other places.  Work was hard to get those days and father moved to Belview, Jefferson County, to work for a Mr. Joe Johns, mining coal.

     "While there, he spent quite a bit of time with a Mr. Dodson, a wagon maker, and between them, they invented the washing machine, and called it the Humbolt.  The machine was made of lumber, with a socker shaped tub with four legs and a rocker-shaped crate witha handle that crossed from one side to the other, and the operator pushed over and back, over and back, and so on until the clothes were washed.  That was the first thing ever put on the market called a washing machine.

     "My father helped to make up a wagon load [of the washing machines]. A man by the name of Adams owned an old plug team.  He took the wagon load and started out to sell them.  He returned home without any money and without any washing machines and that was the end of that company. However, someone else took up making the Humbolt washing machine and the country was full of washing machines made after the pattern of that machine that my father helped to invent and make the first one of, as far as I know.  Then came the water power hand Maytag machine made by the Maytag Company.  Then the electric Maytag, and from that time, washing machines have been a great competition.

     "We moved back to West Millville (Hawthorn).  I was five years old at about that time.  I well remember the time.  We moved to a house near the Presbyterian Church.  There was no water well on the place and Mother and Dad located a well.  My Mother and Father then moved away from the house by the run up on the hill to a new house and there was no water on that property.  Therefore, Daddy arranged to dig a water well.  Well do I remember Daddy and Mother having lots of fun testing for water with a two pronged peach limb.  The thing seemed to work better for Mother than it did for Dad.  I remember Mother saying the peach prong twisted so hard in her hands that it stripped the bark from the wood.  The well was located and dug where Mother located it, and my stout little Mother drawed most of the dirt out of it while Daddy dug the well.  While living at that place, I had my first tooth pulled by a doctor.  Dr. Addison Hepler, B.P. Hepler's Uncle, pulled it.  It was an exciting time for me.

     "From there we moved to a farm owned by Benjamin Cunselman, near Oak Ridge, PA.  I started to school while living here.  While on this farm, I think I spent the most joyous days of my life.  I played in the barn on the hay digging tunnels in the hay and helped in the harvesting by riding the old sorrel mare to the field, carring water for the hay harvesters.  Oh how hard it was for me to get through the low black berries and dew berries.  My little naked legs would bleed from the scratches. When the peaches, pears, apples, cherries, chestnuts were out, there was everything a boy could wish to eat.

  I went to Oakridge school to teacher Will Shelley, but the school was too crowded, so sister Lizzie and I had to go to Sugar-Valley school.  It was a long walk through the snow over the hill and as there were no school buses to carry us in those days, we got little schooling in the winter.

     "One day Brother Irvin and I were going to see Grandpa and Grandma Swonger about one and one-half miles away.  We were about to cross the bridge over the Redbank Crick at Oakridge, when a man rode up to us on a black mare and asked, 'Boys, do you know where I can sell this horse?'  We did not know, so he said, 'I'll give her to you.  Do you want her?'  Well, what boy living on a farm where there was a large barn full of hay would not want a horse.  So he gave us a boost and two proud boys rode the horse to Grandpa's home.  When we told him a man gave her to us, he said, 'You fellows are liable to be arrested.' We asked, 'Well why, Grandpa?'  'Because I'll bet that fellow stole that mare.' You can imagine I was scared.  Irvin was older and he did not show if he was scared.

     "Speaking of being scared, another time I went with my brother Irvin after Grandpa's cow over the Redbank Creek out on the hills over on what was the Houpt farm.  Brother picked up something and told me it was a bird, and asked me to take off my cap and hold it so he could drop the bird in, and for me to hold the cap tight shut.  I did as he told me and pretty soon the water began to drop out of my cap and I thought it must be a strange bird, so I peeped and to my horrow, he had put a toad in my silk-lined hat that was the most idealized thing I possessed at that time.  It was getting to dusk and to add to my suffering that brother was causing, he started to run away from me.  He ran around a sharp curve in the road and hid behind a large stump that stood by the side of the road.  As I stopped close to the stump to see where he had disappeared to so quickly, he jumped out at me, made a growling noise, and I thought a bear had caught me.  I dropped onto the road, scared almost to death. He picked me up and scolded me for being so big a baby.

     "Daddy would go off on a spree about once a month, as he only got payed once a month in those days in the coal mines.  So one evening, he rode our black mare away and when he came home, he had a little buckskin pony that we were afraid of and he told us children to stay far enough away from it that it could not kick us.  After some weeks -- I think about the next pay day -- he took the buckskin pony and never did bring it back.  Brother said he supposed he traded it for a pocket knife.

     "There was an old coal bank open on this old farm and Brother and I would go in there sometimes and dig a little coal for house use.  One day, Brother had a plug of tobacco and he gave me a chew.  It was sweet and mild and it did not make me sick  That was the first time I remember chewing tobacco, but I had smoked tobacco before that.  I remember going to Aunt Rose Anna Shuey's home.

  She was father's sister, and she had a boy named Jim and he wore dresses yet, and she would fill 3 pipes (stone pipes) and lite them and we would sit down and have a party smoke -- and I was not yet 6 years old.

     "I remember the first time I whistled.  I was just about 3 or 4 years old. I was playing on the stairway, crawling up or down and I was unconsciously blowing in and out.  All of a sudden, I produced a whistling sound and I became quite a whistler of my day.  It was about at this time when my dear and precious Mother would have me kneel at her knees and follow her in prayer.  And when my bedtime came, she would kneel with me and lead me in prayer before tucking me in my bed.

     "I was frightened one evening when one of the Johns boys came in the room where I was playing on the floor of a large room.  He had a false face on.

  I had never seen one before and he came in and somehow my attention was drawn to him suddenly and I shall never forget that awful scare that happened at what we called Belview, now Stanton, PA.

     "It was there that I was going to pick up a little lamb and the old mother sheep stamped her feet at me and I ran down the hill to the house.  It was almost a miracle how I kept my feet and I imagined the old sheep was just behind me, about to bump me.

     "One day, I was playing in Bill Mahney's blacksmith shop and I took 2 or 3 washers out of his drawers and took them home.  Daddy saw me playing with them and asked me where I got them, and I told him.  He said, 'You stole them', and marched me right over to Bill and said, 'Here, Bill, did you give this fellow these washers?'  He said, 'No, but let him have them.' Daddy said no and made me put them back where I got them, and tell Mr.

Mohney I stole them, and threatened me and sent me home empty-handed.

     "A lady by the name of Kate Adams used to let me look through her spy glass (telescope).  And I well remember when her father's old grey horse died and he left it laying down in the woods.  There were no laws in those days to make a man bury such critters.  They would stink -- Oh Phew! Happy were the crows in those days.

     "I must tell you of my first swim.  I went with my brother to watch the boys swim and it looked so easy.  I told my brother I could swim.  He said, 'No you cannot.'  I insisted, 'Oh yes I can' and he said 'Well, I will take you down to the creek and see if you can swim.'  So in a few days, we went to the swimming place and we both undressed and he said, 'Now I want to see you swim.'  I walked into the water and when I got in about waist deep, I made a plunge and I got a mouthful of water.  I began choaking and going right on into the deep water.  And it was all Irvin could do to rescue me.  When he got me out he said, 'Now if you tell me again you can swim, I'll give you a booting.'

     "I knew what that meant and I guess you do too.  It was a few years later in the Sandy Lick Stream in Jefferson County near Reynoldsville, PA, when I was stronger and more able to take care of myself, that I went with other fellows ranging in age from 9 years, which was my age then, up to young men as old as 20 or 25 years of age.  One of the older boys told me to get a juggle and lay my hands on it and lay down on the water and kick up and down the stream as it was stillwater or almost stillwater above the timber dam (a sorting boom a mile or so downstream).

  I soon learned to keep myself up and with a stroke they called dog fashion, I was swimming. And I went to the young man who had told me how to learn, and I told him I believed I could swim across the creek.  It was about 9 feet deep and he swam with me and when I swam across he said, 'Sure you can swim right back and I did and from that time on I swam with the big boys and men.

     "I soon became an expert diver as a boy, and although I was very small, I was known as the best kid diver on the Redbank Creek.  A large man by the name of Jake Whited, from down on the Allegheny River heard of me and came to our swimming hold at West Millville, now Hawthorn, and he wanted to test my ability to stay under water, and asked me if I would get on his back and he would dive with me and he said when you can't stay with me any longer, you may let loose and go up.  And I said, 'I would like that,' so I got on his back and he dove under the water at a depth about at his waist and I was on his back when he crawled out of the water on the east side of the crick and I was wishing the creek was wider because I would like to have outdone him.  He said, 'Young fellow, you have good wind for a boy of your age.'  I had an advantage over him because I did not have to do any work, as he did, to swim the creek.

     "Now that I have been talking of swimming, I will tell you a story of my life. I was about 13 years old, I may have been more.  Billie McDivit, a boy about 15 or 16 years old said to me, 'Ammon, let's go swimming.' It was a warm day, the sun was shining bright, the creek (Redbank Creek) was running bank full and some ice was still on the water, as the main ice had just gone out.  I was not a boy to be backed down, so I said, 'Come on.'

     "We went down to the bank of the river, for it was a river that day, running wild with muddy water and pieces of ice.  I said, 'Well, Bill, pull off your clothes, and he did.  He stripped naked and so did I.  We could not get up to the old swimming hole for the water was at least four feet higher than usual.   'Well, Bill, are you not going in, I asked, as he hesitated.  'No, he replied.'  'So you backed out, eh?'  Well, I didn't and so saying, I jumped from the bank of the stream into that ice cold water. Cam you imagine how that cold water affected me?  I doubt if you can.

But I will never forget it.  It was as though some great icy force grabbed me and froze me stiff, and with all the strength I had, I managed to reach the willows that grew on the banks where I had jumped into the water. Stiff as an old helpless man, I managed to pull myself from that stream of death. 

In a few minutes, I was dressed again and when my blood got to circulating again, I felt fine.  I was both a victor and a fool. 

Thank God that was one lesson of a lifetime.

     "At about the time of my first swim with Irvin, I smoked my first cigar, when I was 4 or 5 years old.  Bill Mohney came to visit my parents and Bill had a cigar which he had about half smoked and he lait it on the window sill.  I got it and smoked it.  I got awfully sick and I was put to bed and I began to vomit.  Mother came to my aid.  I was watching a little Brahma chick trying to get up from the porch over the door-step, and he could not make it.  I said to Mother, 'Mother, Boots can't get up!' Mother told others of the family and they would tease me and say, 'Boots can't get up!'

     "The Sandy Lick Stream at Reynoldsville, Jefferson County, PA was full of saw logs in the period around 1888, as there was a saw mill about a mile or more down the stream, and there was a boom log just above the mill to hold the logs until they were taken into the mill to be sawed into lumber.  When the logs would jam together, it would sometimes cause a gorge.  I remember one day I was all alone and there was a log gorge and an opening almost one-half mile on the stream.  I got a piece of a board and punched around until I got the logs starting to move and I set down on one that had been cut low and part of the trunk or stump was still on it.  It made a nice place to ride and I rode it down to where there was more logs gorged and when it hit the other logs, I ran off over the logs onto shore.  I was not 10 years old at the time.

     "Almost one year before this time, I saw one of the most pitiful sights a boy could have looked upon.  There was a low piece of land along the stream called 'Poverty Flat.'  Poor people lived there and two children were playing on the logs and the little boy fell in and drowned under the logs.  The sawmill men fished him out with their pike hooks and when we kids heard about what happened, I went with another boy or two.  The little fellow had been laid out on a board which was laying across two chairs.  He was blue in the face and the body lice could be seen crawling as though they were trying to get away, off of the dead body.  The poor mother sat there, sorrowing.  There was nothing in their hour that looked much like furnishings and although I came from a poor family, I wondered if it was not God's Blessing instead of something to be sorry for, that that boy was called to God.

     "One day about that time I was in a store.  I had gone there to buy something.  A boy about 10 years old came in.  There was an english walnut laying on the floor near the scales where the store clerk had been weighing walnuts.  The boy looked around and thought he was not watched, placed his toes over the nut and walked out of the store with the nut between his toes.  What a coward, I thought.  If I would have wanted it, I would have picked it up and asked the man for it, or would just have kept it, for who would care about a walnut?

     "About that time, just before Christmas, I went up town in Reynoldsville with my parents.  They were buying some Christmas toys and while they were busy, I was looking at the toys, and there was a nail keg full of little negro dollies, sitting there, and I put one in my pocket and took it home. And when I got it out of my pocket to play with it, Daddy saw it, and since he knew he had not bought it for me, he asked me, 'Where did you get that doll?'

     "I said, 'I got it out of a nail keg up in that store.'

     "'Did you pay for it?', he asked me.

     "'No', I said.

     "'Why?'

     "'I didn't have a nickel'

     "'Well,' he said, 'I'll take you back up there and you must tell the man you stole it.'

     "I well remembered the blacksmith's washers, and I begged Daddy not to take me up there and make me confess I stole it.  He had me promise I would never steal another thing, and he let me have the doll.

     "That summer a neighbor boy by the name of Frank Mullan came and asked if I might go along to gather berries, so we went up the hill road out of West Reynoldsville, and then turned to the left and went through the bushes and down the hill.  Bearing to the left, we came to the creek and we were lost.  Where we had started from, the railroad was on the same side of the stream, but now it was on the opposite side from where we were, and our problem was how had we got across the creek, for over on the other side we could see the railroad.  My friend wanted me to walk across the stream on the logs, for the large mill dam was full of saw logs, and, I learned later, there was eleven or more feet of water there.  I was afraid to try to cross the stream on the logs, so we started up stream through the brush, and came out not far from my friend's home.  The railroad had crossed the stream by a bridge between where we came to the stream and our homes.

     "I had a great Uncle by the name of Martin Hetrick out toward Hornville somewhere, not so very far from Demers Crossroads, a few miles east of Emrickville, Pa., in Jefferson County.  Martin Hetrick had a timber job and he had teams and wagons hauling bark to the tannery in west Reynoldsville.

They would make two trips each day and I would go along with the teamsters out to the job.  When the cousins, who were the cooks, learned I was cousin Sarah's boy, they fussed over me and set me up to the table and almost stuffed the food into me.  And was it fun to ride back home on the big high load of bark behind a big team of slick groomed horses.  And, I may add, I was allowed to visit through the tannery, where they were placing hides in the vats of liquor to soak them, and skive them, then place them in the tan bark liquor to cure them.  I followed the whole process through until the leather was placed in the loft to dry.

    "I attended Sunday School in the Methodist Church in Reynoldsville.

And my teacher was a Christian who worked in the tannery -- a Godly man.  From there, we moved to Pleasant Avenue, on the South Side, and I had to fight my way in the first day that I ever saw the place.  I had to put the hammer on three of the boys before they would recognise me as one of the Pleasant Avenue Gang.  And gang it was.  I learned to fight, swim, fish, father berries, and games of all sorts, to smoke and chew tobacco, and swear like an ox-driver.

     "Mr. Shultz and Mr. Dunhiser had a slaughter house just out of town.

I made friends of these men and they appreciated me, for I soon became a good help in skinning the head and a little later they let me skin the legs as well.

     "One day we pulled a steer in until he had to come to the bull ring.  He wheeled and kicked at Shultz and he jumped back to get away from the steer and fell into a large watering trough in the corner of the slaughter room.

     "We moved from Reynoldsville that fall and I missed my little buddies. I got so lonesome, I thought I could not stand to stay away from them.  That same winter, my boy friends were playing on the ice.  The ice broke and James Farl fell in the water and Frank Martin fell in while trying to get him out.   And Joe Donahoo tried to get them out and came near to drowning with the other two.  Frank and James drowned and Joe almost as I got the story.  I wonder where I would have been had I not moved away from there that fall?

     "After starting to school that fall, I, like many other boys and girls, had to adjust myself to new associates.  Being a good mixer, I was soon in the ball games -- football, shinney, foot-and-a-half, smuggle the gag, hi spy, kick the stick, duck on the rock, hiking in the fields and woodlands, gathering nuts, trapping rabbits.  One Sunday, my father walked out of the house and said to me, 'You stay around home today.'  I forgot what Daddy had said when some of my boy friends came along and called to me, 'Come on, Ammon, go along.'

     "'Where are you going?', I asked.      "'We are just going out over the fields, perhaps go gather some nuts.'

     "I gave the matter no further thought.  I sprang up with a bound.  It was a beautiful fall day.  The boys were Harve Winkleman, Harry Winkleman, John Lantz, and Turney Doverspike, my cousin.  We walked more than a half mile when we came to a hickory tree.  We gathered a few nuts that had fallen and Harve said to Pert (his brother Harry), "You climb the tree and shake 'em down, Pert.'

     "Pert said, 'No.'

     "I said, 'I'll crawl it.'  And up I started.

     "I was not aware how brash a hickory limb got when it was dead.  And there was a dried dead limb about eight feet or ten from the ground.  I grabbed hold of that limb and threw my weight on it and it snapped like it was glass.  And I fell head first with my face on a rock that was leaning against the root of the tree.  It had two sharp points on it, my nose struck one, and the other my eye brow, cutting through the flesh on my eyebrow until it struck the bone.  (I have that mark yet today, about 58 years since.) Also, it broke my nose bone and cut me bad.

     "The boys carried water in Harry's hat from the run and they saturated a red bandana handkerchief and tied it around my head to keep my head cool and my wounds from bleeding.  Turney Doverspike said, 'I'm going home, boys.'  I told him to tell no one about me getting hurt and I can picture him running out over the hill as far as he was in sight.

     "One of the boys had seen a red squirrel or a chipmunk run into a hole nearby and they ran to the little run for more water to drown out the squirrel. After a while, we were tired of playing and started for home.  On arriving home, I went to the well and pumped some water to wash the blood from my face.  My father came out of the house and took the handkerchief from my forehead and looked at my wounds.  Then he said, 'That's what you get for disobeying what I told you this morning.'

     "Yes, it was true, for just the moment I rolled over after striking the stone, the first of my thoughts were, 'Daddy told me not to leave the home that day.' When I went into the house, my Aunt Mary and Uncle Rubin Doverspike and Mr. and Mrs. John Guyer were there to see the boy who was so badly hurt., That night I was delirious.  My mother sat by my bedside all night bathing my feverish brow.

     "My father bought a small house and lot shortly after that and he always kept a pig, if we were living where he could keep one.  I was getting big enough by that time to do the chores.  So it was my job to get the kindling and coal in to build the fire in the morning and at this time I had the feeding of the pig.

     "That fall, we had a big pig.  It dressed 500 pounds when we killed it.  One day after the weather had got cold, and I mean COLD, each time the pig would leave some of the feed and water in the trough, it would freeze, and there was quite a lot of ice frozen in the trough.  I was told to heat the water for the pigs feed when it was so cold weather.  That night, I got it too hot, scalding hot, and I thought, well, that would be a good way to get the ice melted out of the trough.  So I got a broom handle and decided it would have time to cool.  I pored the hot swill into the trough and began swing my club, but the pig did not seem to care about my club.  She came up to the trough and ran her snout into that scalding slop!  'Whewe!', she said, and fell back on her hunkers, and jumped up again and came back at it again, did the same thing over again, and by the time she came back the third time, it had cooled enough and she stayed and gulped it down.  I sure was excited. The pig had scalded her mouth so badly that the skin hung off of it in strings. I don't remember of eve telling Daddy about it and I am quite sure he never discovered how badly she was scalded.

     "Uncle Billy Doverspike, my father's Uncle, was living then yet and working his own farm, the first farm on the leftside of the road after crossing the Redbank Creek bridge from Hawthorn.  Billy was getting quite old and he sent word for sister Lizzie and I to come over and hoe corn for him, so we did.  We each received a fifty cent piece and our dinners.  We worked on the top of the highest hill on the farm.  There were no gasoline engines, no tractors, all plowing was done by horses, and once in a long while you would see a team of oxen plowing or drawing a wagon.

     "Just a few years before this time, 1888, I remember a nice yoke of oxen hauling a pair of bobsleds with a double wagon box full of coal.  They had, I judge, 2 and a half tons of coal on the sleds.  And what was so odd about that team of oxen, they had no yoke on them.  They had horse collars on them, upside down.  About that following summer, Mr. O'Brien over on the south side of Reynoldsville used a nice big yoke of brindle steers to clear the land on the hill where the large cemetery lies on the lefthand side of the road going out of Reynoldsville toward Punxsutawney.

     "The corn ground was plowed with horses and a walking plow.  No riding. Then the plowed ground was harrowed with a spike tooth harrow.  Later with a spring tooth, then still later discs were used.  The ground was marked with a four-legged marker with a pair of shaves to hitch one horse in.  The legs were about 3 and a half feet apart and the field was marked both ways, making squares like a checker board and a hill of corn was planted at each corner -- 3-5 grains at each hill.  Then the field was cultivated both ways with a cultivator which had six shovel plows on it to scrape the dirt loose and throw it toward the stalk.  What grass and weeds were not taken out this way was then followed up with the hand hoes, and cleaned quite thorough.  I remember as much as six cradlers would work in a grain field, cradeling wheat, oats, or rye, and several others, men or women, would follow with rakes and rake the straw together in shaves so the one which did the tying could pick up the bundles and tie them into sheaves.

     "About that time, the McCormic and Deering machines were being used by those who could afford them.  The mowing machine, then the reaper, then that wonderful machine they called the binder.  The binder cut the grain, packed it into bundles, then tied it with binder's twine and threw it off into the field again.  First they were shocked and let cure for a week or two, then they were loaded on wagons and taken to the barns to thrash, either by flailing or by some more modern threshing machine.

     "The oldest power method that I can remember was a large cog wheel with cogs on the under side and it was set on a stud shaft and had a long pole fastened to it and underneath this large cog or bull wheel was a shaft which ran underneath the large wheel and it had a smaller cog wheel on it, or what was called a pinion, fastened to the shaft.  And a horse was hitched to the long pole and walked in a circle around the wheel.  This caused the shaft to turn, which in return ran the wind mill, which blew the chaff out of the wheat which had been knocked out of the straw by pounding it with flails of clubs with handles on them fastened with a piece of rawhide leather.