The skillet and the Dutch oven were used instead of the cook stove to bake the pone or johnny cake, to parch the corn, or to fry the venison which was then obtainable in the wilds of Ohio.
A curtain at the farther end of the cabin marked the confines of a bedchamber for the "old folks." The older children climbed the ladder nailed to the wall to get to the loft floored with loose clapboards that rattled when trodden upon. The straw beds were so near the roof that the patter of the rain made music to the ear, and the spray of the falling water would often baptize the "tow-heads" left uncovered.
Our diet was simple, and the mush pot was a great factor in our home life. A large, heavy iron pot was hung on the crane in the chimney corner, where the mush would slowly bubble and sputter over or near a bed of oak coals for half the afternoon. And such mush!--always made from yellow corn meal and cooked three hours or more. This, eaten with plenty of fresh, rich milk, furnished the supper for the children. Tea? Not to be thought of. Sugar? It was too expensive--cost fifteen to eighteen cents a pound, and at a time when it took a week's labor to earn as much money as a day's labor would earn now. Cheap molasses we had sometimes, but not often, meat not more than once a day, but eggs in abundance.
Everything father had to sell was low-priced, while everything mother must buy at the store was high. Wheat brought twenty-five cents a bushel; corn, fifteen cents; pork, two and two and a half cents a pound, with bacon sometimes used as fuel by reckless, racing steamboat captains of the Ohio and Mississippi.
My earliest recollection, curiously enough, is of my schoolboy days, although I had so few. I was certainly not five years old when a drunken, brutal teacher undertook to spank me because I did not speak a word plainly. That is the first fight of which I have any recollection. I could hardly remember that but for the witnesses, one of them my oldest brother, who saw the struggle. My teeth, he said, did excellent work and drew blood quite freely.
What a spectacle--a half-drunken teacher maltreating his pupils! But then, that was the time before a free school system. It was the time when even the parson would not hesitate to take a "wee drop," and when, if the decanter was not on the sideboard, the jug and gourd served as well in the field or in the house. In our neighborhood, to harvest without whisky in the field was not to be thought of; nobody ever heard of a log-rolling or barn-raising without whisky. Be it said to the everlasting honor of my father, that he set himself firmly against the practice. He said his grain should rot in the field before he would supply whisky to his harvest hands. I have only one recollection of ever tasting any alcoholic liquor in my boyhood days.