Before Grandfather Wherry married and settled down to farming, he was a stone mason and built bridges, dams and canals in the days before the era of railroads. He built either a dam or a bridge at Harper's Ferry and had quite an experience. In those days they had to use horses for all their work. Once a man came to him with a nice looking team of horses and he bought them. They proved to have Glanders ( an incurable disease of horses) and polluted the other horses he had bought or hired, I think 12 teams in all. He had to shoot all the horses, burn the harness and barns. He would have been broke, but for a planter that loaned him his horses and slaves to finish the contract, for which he was ever grateful. In later years he went into Pittsburgh and was shaved by one of these freed slaves. He also built the toe path at Tunnelton, and there he met his future wife, Sarah Nesbit. A "toe path" ran along the side of a canal for the horses to walk on and pull the boats in the canal. When we asked Grandmother if she wasn't afraid he would forget her, as they were engaged ten years, she said, "Well, my patience, we had to wait until we had a house to live in." There were several log cabins on the three hundred acres he eventually bought, but he didn't marry until he had built himself an eight-room brick house. The bricks for his house and the one he built twenty years later that we lived in were burnt below our barn. There was clay suitable on the farm. Grandmother lived at our house from the time she was 83 until she died at 93. Helen and I were pretty small, and we loved to tease her. I would pretend that I was slapping Helen, and she would get up out of her chair and take after me, saying, "You mustn't hurt little Ailene," and this was quite a lark for us. She would sit and look at a fashion book by the hour. Then she would say, "I see by the fashions they are wearing such and such styles." Once she sewed a number of ribbon bows on her plain black silk "Sunday" dress, but the family wouldn't let her go to church with them on. She was about fifty years ahead of her generation as far as styles were concerned. However, the custom of her generation was very fixed on apparel. None of her children could remember when she didn't wear a white cap, so perhaps she had to don it when she married. I remember seeing pictures of Martha Washington with a cap on. After she was a widow, the caps were black. They were fashioned like a baby's bonnet and covered with black net and lace gathered onto the foundation. A milliner in Indiana made them. They tied under her chin, and she never appeared without her cap on.