To the Editor of the Glasgow Republican
What a change has been in the last 65 years. Whan I was a 10 year old boy, this country was independant, it did not use any goods, only home manufactured. The most of the farmers had a large flock of sheep, the wool was carded into rolls, by Merideth Reynolds, and Anderson Wooten, every woman had a spinning wheel, and a loom, and we could hear the wheels whizing all over the counrty and in the fall you could hear the sound of the loom batorang, batorang, by the first of December. The new suit of jeans homemade from wool, sewed with needle and thimble, and the young ladies and the older ones would come out with their new lincey dresses on. The men's pants were of many colors, blue, pail blue, brown, gray, and blue mixed and brown mixed and red and many other colors. Shoes and boots for men women and children were made at home. The beef hides was worked out by the people. There were three tanyards, one at Glasgow, James Geffers, one at Roseville, Gerry Vaughn, one at nobob, Thomas Bell. We lived independent of the manufacturers, we had plenty to ear, fat beef, hogs killed out of the woods, deer, turkey and squirrels, good corn bread and wheat bread Sunday morning, and light bread for the quality. There are not any fresh buyers nor roller mills to make our flour as in those days of the passed.
The farmers raised flax and cotton, we raised and we pulled it, we beat the seed off and spread it and when it got rotted enough we would tie it up in bundles then brake it and then swingle it and then hackel it and then spin it and then weave it into cloth, then we could have new tow pants and flax and cotton shirts for spring and summer use, lay off the brown jeans.
Now when did any of the readers see a suit of jeans on a man or a suit of lincey on a lady, now all the wool is shipped to the manufacturers, they make cloth of wool and then send it back to you, and then you buy it and wear it. It costs you something. I have paid then dollars a yard for cloth, how foolish to patronize the manufacturers, ten dollars would buy 10 yards of home-made jeans, the finest grand. Many pretty girls of Ky. never seen a lincy dress, many aged women never wore a striped lincy dress, proud Kentuckians be wise.
"There was a woman in our town, whe was wondrous, she jumped into a briar bush and scratched out both her eyes and when she saw her eyes were out with all her might and main, she jumped into another bush and scratched them in again."
The year James K. Polk, and Henry Clay, made the race for president of the United States, I was a boy. Some of the voters sang a song that Polk Stalk would not grow in Clay.
First class whiskey was 10 cents per quart or 25 cents per gallon, one cushell of corn for one gallon of whiskey not as much drunkenness then as now, see what a change in sixty five years. Oh what a change will be in the next sixty five years.
S. C. Stout
