The soil in the early days contained all the elements necessary for growing crops, but as years of use depleted the lime content, the farmers burned their own lime. This was quite a complicated task and required some hard work. We were lucky to have lime about two miles from our home in abundance. My father and I would go down to the creek at Coleman's where the water had bared the rock along the bank often ten feet thick. We would drill holes and shoot the rock loose with dynamite, and then with drag sled haul it up the bank to be hauled home in winter sledding. Then came the building of the kiln. First you would assemble logs for the sides and pace them about fifteen feet apart and make the kiln about thirty feet long. Between these logs you would place old rails or any old timber. Then this was covered with straw and two chimneys were built. After this you covered the straw with slack coal and then a layer of limestone and then a layer of slack, always keeping the small pieces for the outside and throwing the larger ones into the middle. The sides were slanted up until it became narrow at the top. Then you dropped fire down the chimneys to ignite the wood at the bottom. A kiln would burn for ten to fifteen days, and what an odor it made. You always had to throw ground on to keep the heat in, and at last it looked like an oven. When the rains came, the lime would slake, and a thousand bushel kiln would make about 2,500 bushels of lime. The farmer hauled this out on the fields with a wagon and scattered it with a shovel. Putting it on this heavy you could see the difference for years. Near our home, at Girty, they had a wonderful clay deposit, and Mr. McNeese and George Anderson had a pottery. They furnished the canning jars, jugs, and made water tile for wells and drainage. We have some of these to this day. Another small industry was at Barrel Valley, a settlement to which it gave its name. They made barrels and sold them al over the country. I cannot describe this as I never saw them make them. They had some real characters in this valley. One was Jack Painter, and he was a character. People would report about seeing a ghost traveling through the woods. It became as famous in this country as Ichabod Crane's headless horseman. It turned out to be Jack Painter scaring the people with a sheet over him. He was protecting his bee tree that he wanted to cut to get the honey. The bees would swarm in a hollow tree and store up honey. Jack Painter was telling a school teacher that stayed there that he never hit his wife but once. He said, "I was catechising (chastising) the children and she interfered, and I hit her a hell of a lick." Another old person in the valley was old Mrs. Houston, who bought her casket and had it under her bed. She thought it was a waste to not have it useful, so she kept her dried apples, or "snits," in the coffin. In another place an old fellow died, and in those days they had wakes, when neighbors came and sat up with the corpse. Several men came in to take their turn and had whiskey with them. In the night they got well lubricated and took the corpse out of the coffin and stood it in the corner. They said, "Andy, will you trade shoes?" Of course, they didn't get an answer, so they said, "Silence gives consent," and exchanged shoes. When the people got up in the morning they found Andy standing in the corner with the old shoes on his feet. My grandfather Wherry was boarding at a place where the old lady was terribly crippled up with arthritis and her legs were drawn up. When she died they weighted her legs down with large stones. During the wake a fist fight developed, the coffin was jarred, and the corpse sat up suddenly when the stones fell off. The fellows were so badly scared, they ran out of the house, and being somewhat drunk they fell into a pond, and Grandfather and the old lady's son had to fish them out.