parsonages, and preachers moving through to their
circuits stayed over night, and often over Sunday, with their hired team
and all. This, too, at a period when in addition to the duties of
housewifery as now understood, spinning, and weaving, and knitting, and
making, and milking, and churning constituted no small item of domestic
affairs, and usually without the intervention of the modern appliance
called "help." To these were to be added a quarterly meeting once a year
for a circuit that embraced nearly half of the present Connersville
district, when for years no other door was opened to entertain a single
one of those who came from all parts of the circuit, and a camp-meeting
once a year, with all the burdens that old-fashioned camp-meetings
fastened upon tent-holders. But this was not all--it was hardly half.
For a decade or more after the opening of the "New Purchase," not a week
passed that some one, purporting to be a Methodist preacher, did not
claim the rites of hospitality as he was going from Ohio or Kentucky to
the "New Purchase" to enter land or to see the country. These, with an
eye to economy, always inquired for the next "Methodist tavern," and
they never failed to avail themselves of the information obtained. In
many respects these were sometimes burdensome. They were not only
strangers, but they were traveling on business purely secular, and they
were often irregular and called at unseasonable hours. One of these
calls I had occasion to remember. It was in the summer of 1825, and
before the days of lucifer matches. If the fire died out, there was no
starting another without getting a live coal from some neighbor. Such a
calamity had occurred at our house, and I was dispatched to the nearest
neighbor's for a coal, only to return with the intelligence that her
fire was out, too. "But why did you not go to the next neighbor?" asked
my mother. "Go, and keep on going, till you get what you go for," was
the command, and I went. The next day was wash day, and the family
dinner had been served, and the dishes put away, and the wash tub
resumed, when two strange preachers rode up and asked for dinner. What
was to be done? In addition to the hindrance in washing, there was not a
crust of bread in the house, and even if the travelers had time to wait,
there was no time to spare from washing to bake bread. In the emergency
I was dispatched to the nearest neighbor to borrow a loaf, but her
cupboard was bare, too. Rem