“MECHANIC ARTS.—­In giving the history of the state of the mechanic arts as they were exercised at an early period of the settlement of this country, I shall present a people, driven by necessity to perform works of mechanical skill, far beyond what a person enjoying all the advantages of civilization would expect from a population placed in such destitute circumstances.

“My reader will naturally ask, where were their mills for grinding grain?  Where their tanners for making leather?  Where their smiths’ shops for making and repairing their farming utensils?  Who were their carpenters, tailors, cabinet-workmen, shoemakers, and weavers?  The answer is, those manufacturers did not exist; nor had they any tradesmen, who were professedly such.  Every family were under the necessity of doing every thing for themselves as well as they could.  The hominy block and hand-mills were in use in most of our houses.  The first was made of a large block of wood about three feet long, with an excavation burned in one end, wide at the top and narrow at the bottom, so that the action of the pestle on the bottom threw the corn up to the sides toward the top of it, from whence it continually fell down into the centre.

“In consequence of this movement, the whole mass of the grain was pretty equally subjected to the strokes of the pestle.  In the fall of the year, while the Indian corn was soft, the block and pestle did very well for making meal for johnny-cake and mush; but were rather slow when the corn became hard.

“The sweep was sometimes used to lessen the toil of pounding grain into meal.  This was a pole of some springy, elastic wood, thirty feet long or more; the butt end was placed under the side of a house, or a large stump; this pole was supported by two forks, placed about one-third of its length from the butt end, so as to elevate the small end about fifteen feet from the ground; to this was attached, by a large mortise a piece of sapling about five or six inches in diameter, and eight or ten feet long.  The lower end of this was shaped so as to answer for a pestle.  A pin of wood was put through it, at a proper height, so that two persons could work at the sweep at once.  This simple machine very much lessened the labor and expedited the work.

“I remember that when a boy I put up an excellent sweep at my father’s.  It was made of a sugar-tree sapling.  It was kept going almost constantly from morning till night by our neighbors for a period of several weeks.”

In the Greenbriar country, where they had a number of saltpeter caves, the first settlers made plenty of excellent gunpowder by the means of those sweeps and mortars.

“A machine, still more simple than the mortar and pestle, was used for making meal while the corn was too soft to be beaten.  It was called a grater.  This was a half-circular piece of tin, perforated with a punch from the concave side, and nailed by its edges to a block of wood.  The ears of corn were rubbed on the rough edge of the holes, while the meal fell through them on the board or block, to which the grater was nailed, which, being in a slanting direction, discharged the meal into a cloth or bowl placed for its reception.  This, to be sure, was a slow way of making meal; but necessity has no law.