“When I was a boy my father sent me to Redwood with ten pounds of butter to trade for a goose-neck hoe. It took all that butter to pay for the hoe, and the hoe was not as good as we buy today.

“Also when I was a boy a man by the name of Bauter lived n this town and he hitched his team to his sled, each horse to the front end of a runner, without an evener, or doubletree. He had rope tugs and rope halters. I thought it a strange way to hitch a team to a sleigh. When I was ten years old I went to see this sleigh again, but Mr. Bauter had changed it some. Mr. Bauter came into Alexandria from the Mohawk, towards Albany.

“I remember going into a blacksmith shop when I was a boy and watching the blacksmith pounding out horse-shoe nails and it was a slow task. But speaking about nails, when I was a young man doing carpenter work I took down a dwelling in the town of Hammond which was built of plank and the planks were all fastened on with wooden pins. Not a nail in the house. This house was owned by a man named Mr. Miller. I was told that a man by the name of Mr. Franklin built this house. He had a son, David Franklin, who became a carpenter. I worked with this son in after years building barns and houses. I took down that house in 1881.

“When I was a boy our boots were all made by hand. A shoemaker by the name of Lawrence used to come to our house to make up a year’s supply of boots and shoes. Father used to have the hides tanned, for there were three places in town that did tanning. The boots and shoes were made from one size last. There were no rights or lefts and we boys used to change our wearing of our boots each day from left to right foot, and back again, so as to keep the boots from running on one side.

“When mowing machines were talked about I remember they told that they would have a machine that a boy 18 years old could mow hay with do as much as four men. The farmers would not believe it and discounted the story until they saw the machine working.

“I can remember the first steel spring carriage that came into our place. Some of the women would not ride in it. The light wagons had wooden springs, or thorough-braces. And I can remember them. I recall when I went to school one morning seeing the stage from Theresa to Hammond stuck on Jewett flats. The passengers had to get out in the mud and walk so they could get the stage out.

“When I was a boy I remember going into Watertown and seeing a man in the printing office, printing newspapers. He stood up beside a high table and fed the white paper into the press, which only printed one side of the rather small sheet at a time. In the year 1914 I was in that same printing place and saw a press that printed all the paper at the same time, and folded them, taking the paper from a big roll.”