Researching Forebears and Descendants of William Knipe, born September 28, 1827 in Wayne County, Indiana. He married Lucy Ann Branham, born, April 30, 1830, in Cloverdale, Indiana.
Researching Forebears and Decendants of George Wood, born September 10, 1841, probably in Arkansas. He married Nancy Jane Robinson, born May 16, 1853, also probably in Arkansas.
Excerpt from:
WILLIAM AND LUCY ANN BRANHAM KNIPE
THEIR FOREBEARS AND DESCENDANTS
BY LAWRENCE K. HALL
Our first log house was a one-room cabin with a loose board floor overhead. The room was about 18 feet square with one window and one door on the south. In the west side near the middle was a big fireplace built on the outside with stone. On its mantel we always kept the Bible. There was a door on the north.
Two cherry-wood beds (having high posts that were cut off) stood end to end across one side. The foot ends were about 2 feet apart. Just over this two-foot space and against the wall a hole was sawed into the loft through which we girls could climb upstairs by first stepping on the bed rail, then on another rail of the bed, then on the top of the bed post, then onto a wooden pin in a log.
Our beds consisted of bed ticks filled with prairie grass, placed on the floor. It was just fine to sleep up there with cracks in the floor through which the light from the fireplace or candles would shine.
Mother made all her candles. The candle mold would make six on a side. During the summer months tallow candles were the only light. A lantern with a short piece of candle was the light to carry to the barn or the chicken house. She made lye and soap, too. All the ashes from the fireplace were saved in ash hoppers. It would take lots of water to saturate the hopper of ashes. It took several days to start the lye running out through the trough. It would drip slowly at first, then there would be a little stream that would fall into a container placed under the lower end of the trough. Mother tested the strength of the lye by dropping an egg into it. As long as the lye floated the egg, she kept water in the ashes. But when the egg went to the bottom or nearly to the bottom, the lye was nearly all out of the ashes. This lye she would pour into the big iron kettle. It must all float an egg before soap making began. If it wouldn't float an egg, she would boil the lye down till it would. Then she would put in the grease--cracklings from rendering lard, meat, skins, or any kind of grease, making a big kettle full of soft soap. This she dipped into a keg which she would set away some place where we could fill our gourd and do the washing.
Big Soldier Creek was only about 1/8 of a mile from the house. We had a big iron kettle under which we made a fire and filled it with water from the creek and soon had hot water. There were two wooden tubs, two wash boards, and soon the washings were on the line.
We lived in the little one-room house till the children got to be pretty good-sized and we needed more room. Father then built a new log house about 10 or 12 feet from the first cabin, and boarding up between, thus making a room for a kitchen. Then we expanded. We had a good upstairs, a board floor nailed down, no cracks between. There were stair steps made of rough lumber, but they beat climbing up the wall. And we had homemade bed steads upstairs, too. That beat sleeping on the floor--though snow often drifted through under the clapboard roof and covered our beds with a blanket of snow.
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