Pioneer Life In Western Pennsylvania

Pioneer Life In Western Pennsylvania

$21.95

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$21.95

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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.
Pioneer Life in Western Pennsylvania was one of the original books sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh, the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania, and the Buhl Foundation to mark the founding of the University of Pittsburgh Press.  Authors Wright and Corbett describe the country the first settlers discovered, the homes and towns they built, the farm implements and household goods they used, the crops they grew and how their small, isolated communities laid the foundations for the cities and industries we know today
“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 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 . . .

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Dimensions 1 × 6 × 9 in