Flowering of the Cumberland

10. Industry

219 CHAPTER 10 Industry There were ten of the young Masons when they settled down on Richland Creek in late 1790,1 and we can be certain that at least eight of them helped in the building of the new home—even a toddler could carry the chunks of heartwood that went between the hewed logs of the walls before plastering was put on. Yet, if one had remarked to any of the children , even Philip the oldest, and of an age to help in the hewing, that he was engaged in the building industry, he might have stared in wonder, thinking possibly the speaker meant to say, “He was showing great industry.” The word industry as commonly used today was not part of the average pioneer’s vocabulary, for industry was not as a rule a separate way of life. Rooted for the most part in agriculture or readily available natural resources such as the trees that went into the Masons’ home, industry of most kinds was ordinarily a part of family life, though building like other industries defies any classification. Centuries before the settlement of the Cumberland , other families had built whole villages of what must have been quite comfortable homes, made stone-lined graves, manufactured pottery, and many articles of shell, stone, wood, and bone. In time came the Chickasaw to build a temporary forted town near the old French Landing, and after these had come the hunters to build open-faced camps or small storage houses such as that put up by De Monbruen. The building industry was thus old on the Cumberland when the white men settled, and as the Indian menace made building and fortification a necessity, it was also the first and most important industry of pioneer days.2 Yet, because of the great increase in immigration, “two or three hundred a day in 1796,”3 building continued important. Many settlers, once the fort pickets could come down, built elsewhere, or like James Robertson replaced the smaller home with a larger one, though Daniel Smith did not wait, for his stone home was finished around 1794.4 220| Chapter 10 Daniel Smith’s home, no more than Cragfont, also built of stone, was a typical pioneer home. Most were made of logs or somewhat later, framed, save in Nashville where by 1812, brick, because of the fire hazard, was mandatory ; and few homes were built entirely by skilled workmen as was Daniel Smith’s. As a rule the farmer and his help did much of the work themselves . However, one should avoid the other extreme—that picture too often painted of the pioneer family doing everything for itself. Dr. Doddridge, for example, grew up during the Revolution on a western Virginia frontier with much less wealth than Middle Tennessee. House raisings were common, but skilled help was called in for chimneys, windows, and other details. I found no pioneer family a self-sufficient unit, either in services or in goods. The John Smith family in Stockton’s Valley was one of the poorest; the only one found where deerskin trousers were made in the home. They may have done all the building themselves, yet when the corn crop was in, they went to mill, though it meant a trip of more than a hundred miles. All family inventories yielded many items—books to spectacles—and of course kitchenware and dinnerware, produced elsewhere, sometimes in another country. Many of their possessions of materials native to the region—cherry press or loom—were made by skilled workmen. Still, the pioneer family unit was much more self-sufficient than the Tidewater colonials who had imported even their woodenware, but never completely so. There is a tendency to identify the pioneers of the late eighteenth century with rural families in the Kentucky hills and other remote regions as seen by visitors in the latter half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many families in out-of-the-way places supplied more of their own needs than did their ancestors on the same land a hundred years before. The main reason for this was poverty; no early traveler mentioned poverty in Wayne or Pulaski counties of Kentucky or in East Tennessee. The erosion of land and increase of population helped impoverish the region. Still more was caused by The War that in some counties such as Cumberland County, Tennessee, not only took all the livestock that could not be successfully hidden, but cut off many commodities such...