Our shoes or boots were made by Wagoner, who lived in an old log house on the back of the farm. His son afterwards preached in the Reformed Church at South Bend. The clothing was mostly homemade. I recall scutching the flax, and the women helped prepare it ready for tow. The break was the first thing. We broke the raw flax, the wood part fell out, and the flax part was gathered up and we had to flail that with a "scutcher." We had something that stood up almost straight and we whipped the flax against it. That was called "scotching." We whipped that with a thing made of wood with a sharp edge something like a paddle. We knocked the extra wood off the flax and made it ready for the heckle. It was then pulled through the heckle, which had many sharp points, and it made it ready for the spinning wheel, and then it was ready for spinning into yarn. Mother was a great spinner. She spun the flax into balls of linen thread, which was taken to the weavers. M! other made many quilts. We used candles made out of tallow. We had a candle mold and poured tallow into them. When oil was discovered in Butler County it was first used in and around our section. For amusement we had log-rollings, barn raisings, apple parings, and sausage-cuttings. To cut the sausage we used two choppers and cut it on a table. A coal bank was opened on the lower farm, and coal was taken out almost every winter. One winter we took it out of the run next to the Thompson line. Squire Wherry's boys, my brother Elwood and I used to go swimming a couple times a week through the summer at "Hickory Hole." Not many people owned buggies when I was a young man. They cost from $200 to $250. Father bought a two-seated surrey from Hale Clark of Saltsburg.

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