Pioneer Life In Western Pennsylvania

by Wright J E

Overview

A fascinating look at life during pioneer times in western Pennsylvania. Describes the hardship, danger and drudgery of day-to-day life on the frontier. Topics include cabin raising, crop harvests, tanning, weaving, disease, religion, and superstition. Also follows the progression from pioneer life to industrial society.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822960447
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	06/30/1968
Series:	Regional , #41
Edition description:	1
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	13 - 17 Years

Read an Excerpt

From a sky as blue as the chicory in the grass, sunlight fell across a clearing and reached golden fingers back among the trees. The clearing itself, its leaf-molded surface, was marked with fresh-cut stumps and littered with yellow flakes and chips that the ax had cut from the trunks piled roughly to one side—trunks not yet trimmed of their branches and freshly pointed from the blows of the ax.

On one of the stumps in the clearing sat a man and his wife. The sleeve of his linsey hunting shirt was ripped, his brown leggings were half hidden by the blue folds of her full, rough skirt, and his feet in their scuffed shoepacks braced the ground for support as if he was ready to spring erect at a sound. His hunting shirt, held close about his waist by a belt and lapping over double in front, hung with its red fringe almost to his knees. At his elbow stood his rifle. His other hand steadied the ax, and from the polished edge of its blade the sun struck light.

Such figures were part of the everyday picture of pioneer life in western Pennsylvania. The settler and the woman who made his cabin a home must often have paused, in many a clearing in the forests that covered the western end of the state, to look . . .

Editorial Reviews

For the student of Pennsylvania as well as aficionados of pioneer lore, fascinating.

Kliatt

For the student of Pennsylvania as well as aficionados of pioneer lore…, fascinating.”
—Kliatt


"A gem of a book!...written glowingly and imaginatively."—Pittsburgh Press


"People live without underwear, get the 'ager,' are treated with yarbs (herbs), are bled, use charms for cures, and die. On church days the leaders 'line out' hymns, on court days culprits are flogged." —Mississippi Valley Historical Review

From the Publisher