Its nuts fed his hogs. Before he raised stock,
the unripe hickory nuts, crushed for their white liquid, supplied
him with butter for his corn bread and helped out his store of
bear's fat. Both the name and the knowledge of the uses of this
tree came to the earliest pioneers through contact with the red
man, whose hunting bow and fishing spear and the hobbles for his
horses were fashioned of the "pohickory" tree. The Indian women
first made pohickory butter, and the wise old men of the Cherokee
towns, so we are told, first applied the pohickory rod to the
vanity of youth!
A glance at the interior of a log cabin in the Back Country of
Virginia or North Carolina would show, in primitive design, what
is, perhaps, after all the perfect home--a place where the
personal life and the work life are united and where nothing
futile finds space. Every object in the cabin was practical and
had been made by hand on the spot to answer a need. Besides the
chairs hewn from hickory blocks, there were others made of slabs
set on three legs. A large slab or two with four legs served as a
movable table; the permanent table was built against the wall,
its outer edge held up by two sticks. The low bed was built into
the wall in the same way and softened for slumber by a mattress
of pine needles, chaff, or dried moss.
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