“Them big meetings used to bring in everybody from all over. The preacher’d throw the camp in some nice grove, and folks would build a shed with a brush roof and make some seats out of slabs. That was the church. I’ve saw a bearskin used for a pulpit cover. If there was extra ministers on hand, sometimes they’d have rawhide-bottom chairs made for them. The mourner’s bench, it always had a good rawhide bottom too. There used to be plenty straw scattered around between the benches for the sake of them that got conviction right strong and begun to throw fits. What with horses and dogs and babies, there was quite a settlement to a good camp meeting, while it lasted. The men didn’t always have hats and the women couldn’t always afford calico, but I can’t see but what we got along all right.
“Them days a feller had to load a rifle at the front end exclusive—no Henry rifles then. It was perlite for to lean your shooting iron against a tree and hang your powder horn on it before you went in to get religion. My pap always taken a drink of corn licker afore he set in; but he always put down a gourdful of cold water on top of it, so it didn’t hurt him none, he told me.
“I recollect when we built the first log school in the valley. It was about ten foot square. But come to style, the courthouse up to Sherman, twenty years ago, it made a ree-cord. I was there when that house was built. It was twenty foot square. That and a few furrows of plowed ground was all there was to the county seat. We dedicated her with a barbecue; a barbecue was the only thing Texas could afford then. Huh! It’s the only thing she can afford now. We all sot under a brush shed and everybody felt right good. There was a barrel of whisky and a tin cup and a nigger with a fiddle. That’s the way to start a county seat right.
“There wasn’t a foot of railroad anywheres in them days. Yet in Texas we’ve got over a hunderd miles of railroad built already. The Lord knows what’ll happen next.
“You talking about shirts, Len! Enduring of the war, three or four years ago, all my folks had to make their own shirts. The women folks had to weave and spin the woolsey. First thing I can remember was helping to braid hide and horse-hair ropes. Everybody tanned their own leather with oak bark. We made our own saddle trees out of forks and rawhide, and we covered them with our own leather—_lastro_, _rosaderos_, taps and all. We didn’t have no wells; we drunk out’n the creeks. Some neighbor had to make all the shoes we got. We ground our corn meal in a hand mill and we made our own wagons and ox yokes. If we got a loom or spinning wheel we had to make that too. Folks used to make hats out of palmetto; they braided them theirselves. What we got done we had to do; there wasn’t no one to hire nor nothing to pay them with.