Ancestors Read Online Free Page B

impoverishing himself. Henry Maxwell was eleven or twelve years old when he left Ireland, and I like very much the idea of an erudite boy arriving in America with a trunk full of pound notes. Unfortunately it isn’t true. It can’t be. By 1741 Walter Carsonwas already living in what was then Lancaster County and is now York County, Pennsylvania, and the first issue of Continental money was made in 1775. Possibly two different stories got crossed in the old woman’s mind. If that boy wasn’t rich, at least he could read and write, for Scotland, unlike England, had had free public schools since the 16th century.
    The known facts about him are: He married his cousin, Agnes Carson, and worked at the weaver’s trade. He had seven sons and no daughters. He fought in the American Revolution; he was a private in the Fifth Regiment of the Pennsylvania Line. He is listed in the tax rolls of 1783 as owning one horse and two horned cattle, for which he paid a tax of five shillings, seven pence; and in the 1790 census, under the name of Harry Maxwell—unless Harry Maxwell is another man, living in the same township, which is unlikely. And he died sometime before January 19, 1792, when his estate was administered.
    If Henry Maxwell owned any land, no documentary evidence of this fact has ever been uncovered by any of the family antiquarians. But the land was there, not being used by anybody, and he may just not have bothered about taking title to it. In 1741 Walter Carson acquired from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania one hundred acres on Big Bottom, near Conewago Creek, on the east side of the Susquehanna. In 1743, a hundred and fifty acres at Three Springs. In 1744 two hundred acres on Great Conewago. And that same year he and his wife, Agnes, bought two hundred acres more, on Conewago Creek, from John Steel. This was all cheap land, beyond the Quaker farms that ringed Philadelphia, and his neighbors were mostly Germans from the Palatinate and illiterate but resourceful Scotch-Irish who had given up farming as a bad job and turned to hunting and trapping. With that much land to be dealt with in one way or another, one can say—it is not a question ofhaving to imagine—that Henry Maxwell as a boy had to clear brush and cut timber, was set to pulling stumps, rounded up the cows and milked them. The look of the sky, which was so very different from the sky at home or in Ireland, and the direction of the wind told him what the next day’s weather would be like. A halo round the moon meant a lengthy slow rain inside of eight hours. Smoke that did not rise meant that a storm was on the way. A heavy dew at night meant a fair day for drying hay. Sometimes he and his uncle went haying at night, by the light of the moon or the stars, because it was cooler. Bats and swallows flying near the ground meant rain, and so did the increased odor of swamps and ditches.
    The sound of a bell coming over the woods and fields meant a church service, a funeral, or an Indian attack. In the fall of the year his hands were stained from husking black walnuts. In winter, so they would be warm when he put them on in the morning, he pushed his clothes down to the bottom of the bed with his bare feet, and slept with his head under the covers. While he was waiting his turn at the mill he got into a fight with a boy who was a head taller than he was, and afterward they were friends. They fished and set snares together, and rode one behind the other, bareback, on the same old white horse. Compared with all this, what is a trunk full of pound notes? What, even, is erudition?
    It is possible that his uncle asked him to keep the accounts. To make brown ink you boiled walnut shells, vinegar, and salt. For black ink you added indigo or lamp black.
    As his uncle had been strict with him, so he was strict with his sons, and taught them how to read and write, how to use a gun, how to set up the loom for him. He inculcated in them (by knocking their heads together if