Actually, the Hartford, VT deed said that Rowland Powell was a "cordwinder," but you must know how literate the Windsor Co., VT town clerks were -- NOT! Show me a Vermont town clerk who can write and spell, and I'll show you a miracle. I assume "cordwainer" was meant. I.e., a shoemaker. The story I'm trying to bring back to memory had something to do with General George Washington recruiting shoemakers for his army, maybe paying bounties for them to bounty hunters, or something like that. There was money involved in the story somehow. Did General Washington pay bounty hunters so many shillings per head for shoemakers? Did he argue with the budget makers in Congress about this? The story I heard a year or so ago had something to do with that sort of thing. But, what was that story? I was heading out to the library today to try to find an answer, when my pants suddenly disintegrated. My last pair of pants too. So, instead, I had to put on a very long overcoat and go stand in a very long line at a clothing store (our ancestors would have said "traffick with the draper"). Once back home and ensconced into my new pants, with the library closed by then, I looked up "shoe" in the index to my "Everyday Life..." books for early America and found that shoes were rarer back then, in the 1700s, than I had thought. A lot of folks just went barefoot, except in the winter. Thus, maybe, an ancestral shoemaker may have been a classy guy to have around. OK. But, what was General Washington's quest for shoes all about? And how did he do it? Lester Powers lesterps@juno.com ________________________________________________________________ GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/tagj.

----- Original Message ----- From: "Lester M Powers" <lesterps@juno.com> To: <CT-RIVER-VALLEY-L@rootsweb.com> Sent: Friday, December 01, 2000 10:32 PM Subject: Re: [CRV] Shoe makers in Am. Revolution > Actually, the Hartford, VT deed said that Rowland Powell > was a "cordwinder," but you must know how literate the > Windsor Co., VT town clerks were -- NOT! It depends on how they pronounced it. Some modern-day English would say "cord-whiner" and that may also have been the pronunciation back then in Windsor Co. The clerk, not having a spell-checker, probably wrote it as he heard it. Yrs aye, Warren