Continued from Part 1 MAKING A FLAIL. This was made by taking two sticks of wood about the size of a fork handle. One four or five feet and the other two or three feet, making a knob on the end of the longer one and boring a hole in the shorter one, the two were tied together with a flexible rope or rawhide. Thus the loop on the long piece will turn around when swinging the shorter stick. An inexperienced person, if not careful in using the flail, [could sometimes be struck on the head by the short piece and] need not be surprised. SORGHUM MOLASSES. During the Civil War from 1860 to 1865, no sugar could be had from the southern states. To have a substitute, many farmers in the northern states grew sorghum cane and made molasses. I remember that it had been told that Lewis NAYLOR, a Friend of Sandy Ridge, had made as much as five-thousand gallons in one season. The most cane Father ever raised in any one season was six acres -- a colored man and his girls stripping and cutting and getting it ready to be hauled to the mill located in the basement of the barn. The cane was crushed by a sweep mill containing three upright rollers two feet in length and one foot in diameter, the juice being conveyed by gravity in an open spout to the boiling shed one-hundred or more feet below. From the storage box, the juice was drawn into the first pan for boiling, made by nailing sheet iron to wooden sides. It was allowed to boil only a little in one end so that the green scum could be taken off. It was necessary to feed this to the hogs before it fermented or it would make them drunk. The juice was drawn from the first pan into a settling box and then on to the finishing pan, made of solid cast iron ten feet long, three feet wide, with flaring sides one foot high and an opening in one end two by six inches to draw the molasses into the collecting box. This was done with a board six inches in width to fit the pan, which shoved the molasses to the end, being careful to have a vessel with juice to follow up the board. This to keep the pan from burning. One year when we had a large surplus, it was sold in Wheeling, West Virginia for $1.25 a gallon. A day s work was about seventy gallons of molasses. The management at the shed was generally by the women. Our cousin, Ruth BAILEY, was a very good helper. On the return trip from Wheeling, we met some men on horseback who had just crossed Wheeling Creek and reported the water so high that it would not be safe to cross. Father thought with his strong team, he would try it. So when we came to the stream, I tied the pony I had rode twenty-five miles bareback, to the wagon. We got safely across, though the water was deep enough to swim the pony and [it even] came into the wagon bed. This being the time of the Civil War, when Friends refused to pay the tax, the sheriff told Father he was going to take one of his horses the next morning when he started back. (This was the plan taken at that time, to take stock and sell it to get money for the tax.) Father was very much worried as [to] what to do, as we were taking a flock of sheep to the[ir] new home. He decided to go another way and so did not lose the horse. THE PRIMARY BRICK SCHOOL HOUSE. This was built in 1835 and was in use sixty-three years. The brick used in building this school was made on the Benjamin HOYLE farm, now the L. J. TABER farm [as of the early 1940s]. The plans were made by William GREEN, whose early life was spent in England. Thus, there was a similarity to the English buildings as there were three rows of seats on each side of the room, each row being up one step from the one below. However, these were removed not long after we first went to school in 1866, and new desks were put in. James STEER and Sinclair SMITH were the donors. After this change was made, it left the windows so high that we could only see out at one end. There seems to have been a time, before 1866, that no school was kept [at least in this building], Peter SEARS, the grandfather of William H. SEARS, having lived and died in the house. The early teachers we know were Isaac N. VAIL, Thompson FRAME, Lindley B. STEER and Lydia MILLHOUSE, Mary Caleb BUNDY, and Elizabeth Smith LIVEZEY. The building was in good repair when taken down to give place to a more modern one in 1898. Continued in Part 3 !^NavFont02F0DA4000ENGHHGZNT95HTA53DFF Maggie's World of Courthouse Dust & Genealogy Fever http://www.infinet.com/~dzimmerm/mindex.html *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* God Put Me On Earth to Accomplish a Certain Number of Things. Right Now I am so far behind, I will never die. --- Unknown *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Wishing you and your family a very Merry Christmas and a New Year filled with good health, good friends, and more than enough good luck. *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*