What a Pioneer Household Held, and How to Write It Down

Rosella Rice had a habit, when a story slowed, of stopping to look around the room. The result is that her sketches contain some of the most complete inventories of an Ohio cabin interior that exist for the 1810s and 1820s: not a historian's list but a daughter's, with the dye tub by the jamb and a hen sitting under the bed. This piece gathers what those rooms held, as she recorded it, and then turns to the problem that faces students, local historians and anyone writing up a family's past: how to take a set of objects and a remembered room and make a reader see them.

One room, everything in it

The starting fact is that there was one room. In Rich in Dogs Rice says the backwoods families "lived, and ate, and spun, and wove, and carded wool and tow, and cooked, and visited, and slept, all in the same room." Her father, remembering the winter of 1811 in Coming to Ohio, goes further: the cabin that held eighteen people had no window, no chair, no candle and no lamp. Light came down the wide stone chimney and in over the top of a door made in two halves. Beds were made all over the floor at night and piled onto the one bedstead by day. Anyone who wanted to thread a needle went to the hearth to do it. The family had brought almost nothing on the wagon from New York: a churn packed full of things, the tea-kettle, a few dishes, and a big dinner-pot bought at an iron foundry eight miles above Zanesville.

Within a few years the same kind of room filled up, and Rice's lists get long. Around the fireplace: the swinging iron crane with its trammels and hooks, pots and kettles hung from it, a clean shingle tilted before the fire with a flat-iron behind it to bake a corn cake. On the mantel: a dinner-horn, a cow-bell, the wagon-whip, and a switch kept on two pegs that one school director used to dust himself off before a school meeting. Above it, the rifle in hooks on a joist, or the old Revolutionary shot pouch. Overhead, poles hung from the joists on leather thongs carrying socks, dried pumpkins, seed corn, and wallets of dried plums and cherries; strings of dried fruit, rows of herbs, sacks of seeds, gourds, almanacs and home-made hats hung on the walls where pictures would later go. A ladder stood in one corner leading to the loft. In another stood the dresser.

The things that were for show

Rice is at her sharpest about what a family did with the few objects it was proud of. The dresser held the delf, and one whole shelf went to the cups and saucers, each cup stood on the upturned bottom of a saucer so that a single set filled the shelf and made the most show. The little mirror, she says in A Pioneer Talk, was the one nice thing in the house: a string of bird egg shells wound across its top, a spray of asparagus drooping over it, and beneath it a white towel ironed into diamonds and octagons with a precise pin cushion hung over that. Towels were stitched with a black cat and nine kittens and hung in the most conspicuous place. Before a suitor came on Saturday evening the floor was scoured with sand, the tinware polished with rushes from the lily pond, the ironware blacked and stood in a row outside the door, and the bedclothes heaped on a stool so they would look abundant.

Then there were the working objects that doubled as furniture. The tub of blue dye in the corner had a loose lid and, Rice writes, in every well-to-do family was used to sit on like a chair; a bashful caller once dyed the skirts of his drab coat in it. The big wheel stood against the wall, its turned post with a head on the end that a hat could be hung on and, by a mischievous sister, tied to. The little wheel for flax had a horn of water by the flyers to wet the thread, and a distaff cut from the top of a young dogwood. A flax-break, she notes in Tom and Bessie, held a post of honor in a barn as high as a piano did later in a parlor. Candles were tallow dips made on hazel rods, and a girl who wanted the house to look thrifty hung a dozen of them from a knotty branch under a joist; when tin candle-molds were invented, Rice says, the humble dip hung its head.

What a bride brought

The fullest single inventory is Bessie Carnahan's outfit in Tom and Bessie: a fifteen-pound feather bed of her own picking in a home-made tick starched on the wrong side, pillows in snow-white linen, upper sheets of pure flax and lower sheets half tow, three quilts, one pieced from bought cloth in the pattern called Washington's March and two from the flaps of worn-out linen shirts, a straw tick, half a dozen tablecloths and towels, a needle-cushion made from bits of her grandmother's, aunt's and cousin's gowns, and three pairs of worn-out linen trousers tied at the bottoms and stuffed with dried pumpkin, dried squash and hazelnuts, set astride a pole in the corner like headless horsemen. In Log Cabin Life of Long Ago another bride's "settin' out" is bragged about down to the item: a stew-kettle, a hackle, two splint-bottom chairs and a pair of candle-molds. These are the lists a family historian hopes to find and almost never does.

Turning objects into writing

Rice's rooms work on the page for reasons a writer can copy. She names things exactly: not dishes but delf, not a chair but a splint-bottomed chair or a heavy little bench. She tells you where each thing stood and what it was next to, so the reader builds the room in order, fireplace to mantel to joists to corner. She gives objects a use and a sound, the crane swinging, the old chair that creaked weake-wock, the latch that clattered. And she lets the objects carry feeling without announcing it. The saucers turned up to fill a shelf say more about a poor family's pride than any sentence about pride would. If you have inherited a single such object, a wheel or a quilt or a tin candle-mold, the method is the same: place it, name it precisely, say what it did, and let the reader draw the conclusion. The techniques set out in a plain guide to writing descriptive essays, a dominant impression, sensory detail, spatial order, are the ones she was using in 1875 without the vocabulary.

The harder problem is organization, because an inventory is not a piece of writing. Rice solved it by walking the reader through the room along a path, or by hanging the list on an occasion: the night before a suitor's visit, a bride's outfit laid out for inspection, the dinner where guests ate custard with a knife and fork because there were no teaspoons. A long descriptive piece about a family's things needs a similar spine before the first draft. One way is to sort every object you have into three or four groups, by where it stood, by who used it, or by the hour of the day, and decide the order of the groups before writing a sentence; an outline builder for longer essays does nothing more than force that decision early, which is when it is cheap to change.

A working method

For a student or a local historian who wants to write a piece of this kind from Rice, or from a grandmother's house, the steps are short.

1. Read the sketches with a pencil and list every object named, with the page it comes from. Rich in Dogs, A Pioneer Talk, Tom and Bessie, Coming to Ohio and Log Cabin Life will give you most of a cabin between them.
2. Sort the list by place in the room, then by use. Note which items are working tools and which are for show; Rice makes that distinction constantly and it is the one that gives the piece its meaning.
3. Choose the occasion or the path that will carry the reader through, and set it down as an outline with one group of objects under each heading.
4. Write each object with its exact name, its position, its use and, where you have it, a sound or texture. Keep Rice's words in quotation marks when you use them; the dialect is hers, not yours.
5. Check anything with a date or a price against the notes under each story on this site, and say in the text where a detail is remembered rather than documented.

The last step matters because Rice was writing fifty years after the fact, and some of her rooms are composites. The cabin in Rich in Dogs belongs to a courting story of the kind the editors of this archive could not trace; the cabin of 1811 belongs to her father's memory. Both are good evidence for what a room held, and only one is evidence for a particular family. The series introduction to Cabins of the West calls the twelve numbers an inventory of early Ohio, and read for the objects, that is what they are.