The following was written about the home life of the Henry Luis Wills family as recalled by my father, W. E. Wills. Henry was his grandfather.

Sometime in the early 1800's the Wills family moved into what is now Summers County, West Virginia. At that time it was prior to the Civil War and was still within the state of Virginia.

The family settled on the North Fork of Suck Creek. This stream was so named because it had many places where the water swirled next to rocks and logs creating water funnels, which were called suck holes. Leaves and small twigs dropped into these suck holes would pull them down and eject farther downstream.

The first Wills settler was Meredith Wills, and later the farm was owned and farmed by Leland and finally Henry.

Living on this rough hillside was very rough, especially with a large family to support. Crops were raised by first clearing the large trees from a portion of the land which was steep and rocky. This was done by girdling the trees with an axe. The bark was removed from a circle around the tree and it was left to die. Later it was cut down and the wood used for firewood.

Originally the family lived in a log house, which I believe had an upstairs, as I can remember the structure standing when I was a boy. It was in this log house that I was born. Sometime around 1930 or so, a frame house was built consisting of a kitchen, living room, and a "parlor" which was another bedroom. It was never used to my knowledge. A double fireplace faced into the living room and the parlor. The parlor was always dark and gloomy. There was a bed in there, and a couple of chairs, and an old trunk. The curtains were always pulled and the only lighting was from kerosene lamps.

Upstairs was a long single room with a window at both ends. The roof was of tin and was fastened to the rafters of the room so it was always extremely hot in the summer and cold in the winter. There was no heat source upstairs. A steep stairway led to the upstairs, and had a rough plank door downstairs. At the top of the steps there was a small door which led into an attic space which served as a sort of junk room. It lay over the kitchen.

The kitchen was fairly large. It contained a wood burning cook stove, a long table with a couple of benches on the back side with chairs along the other side and end. These chairs were homemade of hickory, and had hickory bark woven for the seats. They had been used so much that the bark was worn off and they were slick. The only other item that I can remember was the cupboard, which set against the back wall across from the stove. Leftover food, especially cornbread was placed in this until the next meal, or when wanted. After Dad got the cupboard, it still smelled of stale cornbread. David now has this and said he would refinish it, but never has.

The living room, the parlor, and upstairs room all contained beds, with two in the upstairs.

A porch ran across the front of the house with a door from the living room as an exit. There was also a small porch outside of the kitchen door, which was screened. A couple of steps led to the well outside. The water in this well was as good as any I have ever drunk. It was cool even on the hottest day of summer. Water was drawn from the well by lowering a galvanized well bucket, which is a cylinder about four feet long and five inches across. A flapper on the bottom allowed water to enter the bucket when lowered into the well, and the weight of the water trapped the contents when the bucket was lifted. Two posts sat on each side of the well with a piece of log fastened so a crank would turn the log. A rope was attached to the log and bucket, which allowed the bucket to be cranked up after filling. To lower, all that was necessary was to let the bucket go.

Behind the kitchen in a part of the yard Grandma planted her garden. She raised beans, some corn, tomatoes, rhubarb, and some herbs, especially sage, which she used for seasoning sausage. Seeds were kept from year to year and carefully stored for planting the next season. If it was summer, she strung beans, and apples on strings to dry for winter use. Beans were also pickled, as well as pickled corn. Excess produce that could not be eaten fresh was either dried or canned. Another item raised was the sugar snap peas that I now raise. She called them "sallet" peas. Onions were dried for future use, and cabbage and potatoes were "holed" by placing in a hole in the ground and covering with wood or tin, and dirt placed on top. They kept all winter in this way.

The main farming was planting and harvesting corn, oats, potatoes, and buckwheat. Sometimes sugar cane was raised to make sorghum molasses. Corn, wheat, and buckwheat were taken to a gristmill and ground into meal and flour for family use with the remainder used a stock food. Lots of breakfasts were of buckwheat cakes and molasses. I never cared for this, as Grandmas recipe was to keep a pot of batter going all the time like sourdough. They tasted sour to me. Honey was also used a lot as Grandpa kept bee "gums" around the yard. A gum was a hollow section of tree, usually a gum tree, with a top and bottom fastened on with a hole for the bees. He kept the black German bees, which were very productive, but also very aggressive and stung you just for the hell of it.

Two horses were kept for working the farm, a few head of cattle, some sheep, hogs, chicken and geese. The cattle provided milk, which was soured and churned into butter and the excess sold. Eggs were not eaten except on rare occasions, and they too were sold. Hogs that were butchered had the hams sold after smoking with hickory wood in a log smokehouse outside the yard. When I was a boy I used to love going in there. There was a smoke glaze over all the logs and it really smelled good. The poorer parts of the hog were ground with a hand cranked sausage grinder and made into sausage balls which were fried and then packed in a stone crock and covered with grease. This method kept the sausage as fresh as if it had been pressure packed.

Chickens were sometimes sold, if there was a good hatching of eggs. Sheep were sheared and the wool sold, and sometimes a sheep or two. Geese were plucked for their feathers and either sold or stuffed into feather ticks-mattresses covered with striped bed-ticking material and filled with feathers. These were placed on leather thongs fastened to the bed frame in place of springs.

Whatever could be grown and sold was sold.

Dried beans were called leather britchest and were excellent eating when seasoned with pork. Dried apples were cooked into applesauce and called "fruit". Dad always called applesauce fruit.

Farming was hard back breaking work. After the trees had been killed and felled, it was a "new ground"". To plant a new ground required the use of hoe and mattock. Harvesting oats, wheat, and buckwheat was done with a cradle, which is a scythe with four wooden fingers attached above the blade. When the blade was swung, the grain was cut and the stalks held by the fingers with all the heads pointing in the same direction which allowed the grain to be made into sheaves. The cut grain was raked into a bundle and a few stalks of the grain was wrapped around it and tied. It was now a sheaf. Sheaves were dozened. Ten were set in a circle upright on the ground and two were broken (bent) in the middle and placed on top to protect against rain. A hard worker could only cradle about an acre of grain a day. After drying out the grain was separated from the straw by using a flail, a long stick with a short stick attached by a piece of leather used to beat the grain and separate the heads.

Corn was cut with a corn cutter or knife. Generally four stalks of corn in two rows would be tied together at the top with a cornstalk. Then cornstalks would be held in the crook of the arm and cut off with the cutter and stood upright against the four uncut stalks. When sufficient corn had been leaned up it was now a fodder shock, and cornstalks would be wrapped around the top to hold it together. After the corn had dried and the weather was cool or cold, the corn was shucked. Husking is the proper word for this operation. The four stalks holding the shock upright would be cut and the shock laid on the ground and untied. The ears were removed and a shucking peg used to remove the dried husks from the corn. A shucking peg was a wooden peg sharpened on one end with a flat leather strap attached to fit around the middle finger. The ears of corn were placed in a pile, and the stalks were place against a long pole placed between two trees, and another shock selected for shucking. The stalks were now fodder and used for animal food during the winter. The ears were either ground into meal or used as animal food.

Hay was also used for animal food. Hay making was hot, hard, and dusty. Hay was cut with either a horse drawn hay machine, or by hand with a scythe and left in rows. The hotter the day, the better it was for making hay. When the grass had wilted, it was raked into rows. When sufficient drying had taken place the rows were placed in piles called haycocks. A rope was passed over the cock and dragged to a spot where a pole was set in the ground and spread around the pole. This was repeated until the hay could not be thrown any higher on the haystack. One person moved the hay and threw it up on the stack, and a second person tramped it down as much as possible. As the stack grew higher, longer pitchforks were used. Fourteen feet was about all that a man could toss a fork of hay in the air. Fence rails were placed around the stack to keep the stock out until snow and bad weather had arrived.

Sheep were kept and at one time they were sheared, the wool carded and spun into yarn on spinning wheels. Andrea Apostolon has the old Wills spinning wheel. Walnut hulls and other natural materials were used for dye for the wool. Brenda has a coverlet from wool raised, sheared, dyed, and spun on this farm. I think it must have been made around 1820 or so. It was made by Grandma Buckland.

All work was by either human or horse power, but at one time Grandpa had a team of black oxen with the ends of their horns sawed off and brass knobs attached according to Dad. Plowing was necessary in all but the new grounds to produce any sort of a crop from the shallow soil, which was not very fertile. Fertilizer was manure from the farm animals. No manure spreader was available so the manure was loaded on a sled with a pitchfork and dragged to the field and unloaded with the pitchfork.

Native trees were used extensively They provided logs for the log houses like the one I was born in, as well as firewood to fuel the stone fireplaces. Hickory made the hickory splint ladder back chairs and rockers, as well as the runners for the sleds. Bark was stripped and soaked then woven into chair seats. The hickory nut was gathered and used to flavor cakes or make hickory nut pies, or cracked and eaten. Brooms were made by shaving a straight grained hickory stick and binding the shavings together.

At one time the chestnut was the most valuable tree found in the area. The burr covered nuts were a favorite food of many forest animals that were hunted for food. Deer, turkey, squirrel, and other animals and birds feasted on the nuts. Man also gathered the nuts for food, and turned his hogs out in the woods to fatten on the acorns and chestnuts which were supposed to give the flesh a superior flavor. Dad told me of going with his father to Hinton to sell a load of chestnuts. They took a wagon and crossed the New River at Hinton on a ferry, sold the nuts, and spent the night with an aunt, and returned the next day. Chestnut wood is light and straight grained and was used for fence rails, barns, sheds, or homes. The wood is easy to split and when I was a boy I gathered chestnut wood for kindling to feed the Home Comfort kitchen cook stove at home.

About 1920 blight struck the chestnuts in the United States. Dad said you could watch the trees on the hills turn brown as the blight progressed. The American chestnut has never recovered even though sprouts and small trees spring from old long dead and rotting stumps. This new growth never bears nuts because there is a virus underneath the bark that causes the tree to soon die. I gathered chestnuts once when I was quite young at my grandfather's farm. We took the horse and several feed sacks to a huge chestnut that was growing in the pasture. Part of the tree was still alive and producing nuts. When we separated enough nuts from the spiny burrs that had fallen or we knocked down, the sacks were filled and I was placed on top of the sacks and rode the horse back to the house. Other trees of use were the oaks used for furniture and firewood, the locust which was used for fence posts if rails were not used, the walnuts, both black and white, or butternuts were used as flavorings for cakes and candies.

Homespun clothing of earlier days was died with the hull of the butternut into the butternut brown color which was still used during the Civil War. Maples grew in the area, but I do not know that they were ever tapped for syrup. Pines grew in abundance. They were a nuisance tree since the wood was soft, and was unfit for fuel. They were not even used for Christmas trees because such things were frivolous and took time away from more important things. Service trees, called SARvice by the local people provide fruit for birds as well as gathered for use in pies; dried or canned. Wild plums called damsons were gathered and made into damson butter that was a great favorite. Lest I neglect, the blackberry was gathered and canned.

In the earlier days game must have been plentiful and of a different type than what is and has been present in my lifetime. A rock cave was known as the "bear den", and one of the prominent mountain peaks is known as "panther knob" so I assume that bears and panthers were present when the Wills first settled there. When sheep were introduced into the country, the innocence of the bear and panther came to an end and they were hunted to extinction. Deer were fairly common and served as a food source whenever they could be killed.

Raccoons were hunted with dogs and trapped, and their flesh eaten, the pelts dried and sold as well as the pelts of opossums and skunks. Foxes were trapped for their pelts. Dad told me that his father, Henry, would bait a fox for weeks before placing a trap. Groundhogs were shot, trapped, or killed with dogs, and the groundhog eaten. The pelt was tanned by soaking the hide in a strong solution of wood ashes and used for making leather lacing for shoelaces and repairing horse harnesses etc. An interesting fact was they used to make a long leather lace was to trim the skin to a circle and using a sharp knife and a nail driven into a board, the circle of skin could be drawn around with the nail acting as a guide for the knife blade to cut. Sometimes a 20-foot piece could be had from a single skin.

Rabbits and squirrels were eaten. Squirrel's heads were cleaned along with the legs and backs. I can still remember the first time I dipped into a bowl of squirrel gravy and saw a squirrel head with empty eye sockets and large yellow teeth.

Minks and weasels were less common and were trapped for their fur. Turkeys were plentiful. My grandfather's favorite way of turkey hunting was to see where they went to roost at night and if the moon was full, go to the tree and shoot them out. Not a sporting way, but he was hunting for food. Nothing was wasted. The large red headed pleated woodpeckers were called wood hens and they were shot and eaten as quickly as a grouse. I have eaten them, the taste is not bad, but the flesh is a bluish or purple color. Carcasses of animals not eaten were boiled to extract the grease, which was used to make into homemade soap. Grease and lye boiled together make soap, but lye costs money of which there was little or none. However, lye can be made by using a hollow log with a wad of grass or something for a filter at the bottom, filling the log with wood ashes and pouring water in. This leaches the lye from the ashes. This is how Grandma made her soap.

Food eaten was simple, but plentiful. To my knowledge the only food items that were ever on the table that had been purchased were salt, coffee, and sugar, but generally honey or molasses was used in place of sugar. There was no pepper on the table it cost money and the family learned to do without it. Dad always said he did not like pepper, and I am sure it was from something he remembered from his childhood.

Coffee was made in a big red enamel coffeepot without a basket. Eggshells were added for some unknown reason. The brand of coffee was either Arbuckles, but mostly Pilot Knob which came in a yellow tin bucket with the picture of a flat topped mesa out west with a two-winged biplane sitting on top. The pilot stood nearby wearing boots, jacket, scarf, and of course, goggles. This pot held about two gallons, and coffee was added sparingly and boiled. For days no coffee was added, but water was added so long as the resulting brew showed the least hint of a brown color.

Sausage was often served as the meat course with meal, and it the best I have ever eaten. To show off, I ate a lot after being warned it would make me sick, but Grandma said, "Let the boy eat all he wants", which I did and it did. I didn't eat sausage for a long time afterward.

The toilet was some place. It was about 50 yards from the house. It is the only toilet that I ever saw that did not have a pit under it. It was a two-holer though. No Charmin bath tissue here. Only old catalogs and corncobs were provided. I always held off as long as I could before going to the toilet and then made a mad dash through the yard, out the yard gate and on to the toilet. Going to pee was hazardous to your health. If the bees didn't sting you in the yard, the geese would pinch you after you got through the gate. Then if you made it, slammed the door, did your thing, there was the return trip which was just as dangerous.

Two or three apple trees stood outside the front gate and were of a variety called pearmane which was an old variety and is probably extinct everywhere. These apples were small, red and very tart. They kept well without any special care and were still good even after being covered with snow all winter. On cold winter days a basket holding about a peck would be brought into the living room and the family would sit around the fire peeling and eating apples. The fireplace would roast you on one side and freeze you on the other. Sometimes a kerosene lamp would be lit, but mainly it was by the light from the fire only.

Every year or so a family reunion would be held and a sheep would be killed and roasted over an outside fire. Mutton is greasy and grease falling on the fire smelled like wool burning so I never ate it.

Burl was the only one of the Wills children living at home when I was growing up. He always smelled of polecat. He was a great hunter and a dead shot. Ammunition was expensive and was never wasted. Dad would hardly ever shoot at a target with us boys because ammunition was expensive and wasted it.

About once a year we would pick up Burl and a couple of sacks of furs and skins accumulated during the year and he would ship them to Sears Roebuck with instructions that so much of the proceeds was to be in .22 rifle shells and shotgun shells. Burl had skinned so many skunks that he constantly smelled of one.

Grandma was a very stern person. She was hard working, and there was no fun or play about her. It was as if rearing a large family and the backbreaking work of trying to exist on a rocky hillside farm had burned all of the joy out of her life. She only knew work. She wore brogan shoes and a faded dress. Around her you had to be busy with something. Pull weeds for the pigs, pull grass for the chickens, but first cut it up with scissors, take the old broken bottles and canning jars and break them up for grit for the chickens, gather leaves for the pig pen. Anything to occupy time with work. She led a hard life and never had any fun. She stayed on the farm and worked from daylight to dark as hard as any man until the day the farm was sold. She hardly ever left the farm, and this must have been a traumatic experience for her. I never remember seeing her smile. There was just no laughter in her life.

Every sentence she started was with "Er" as in "Er Teddy", or "Er Burley" when she was addressing someone. For all her sternness and work, she was my grandmother, and her devotion to family and home are to be commended. We could have had worse ancestors.

Grandpa Wills was a hard worker also, but he had a sense of humor and liked to kid around. Once we drove to Barboursville and I had a change purse with about 15› in it and he kept stealing it from me and laughing about it. He was quite a handsome man. He occasionally grew a mustache, then shaved it off, and then grew it again. He kept his money in a snap fastener purse. Whenever he found a well-worn nickel, these were the old Barber or "V" nickels, he would keep these and rub them together until they were worn completely smooth. He called these his slick nickels, and I have one of them.

As he grew older he was bothered with urinary problems due to enlargement of the prostate and could not urinate. He would come to our house and Dad would take him to Dr. Stokes who would use a catheter to drain his bladder. I can remember him getting up at night and walking the floor in pain for as long as he could stand it until we would have to take him to the doctor. I believe that he had prostate cancer and that is what finally killed him.

Written by W. E. Wills June 1997.