Letter XXXIX.An Excursion to the Water Gap.Easton, Penn.,October24, 1846.My yesterday's letter left me at Stroudsburg, about four miles west of the Delaware. It is a pleasant village, situated on the banks of the Pocano. From this stream the inhabitants have diverted a considerable portion of the water, bringing the current through this village in a canal, making it to dive under the road and rise again on the opposite side, after which it hastens to turn a cluster of mills. To the north is seen the summit of the Pocano mountain, where this stream has its springs, with woods stretching down its sides and covering the adjacent country. Here, about nine miles to the north of the village, deer haunt and are hunted. I heard of one man who had already killed nine of these animals within two or three weeks. A traveller from Wyoming county, whom I met at our inn, gave me some account of the winter life of the deer."They inhabit," he said, "the swamps of mountain-laurel thickets, through which a man would find it almost impossible to make his way. The laurel-bushes, and the hemlocks scattered among them, intercept the snow as it falls, and form a thick roof, under the shelter of which, near some pool or rivulet, the animals remain until spring opens, as snugly protected from the severity of the weather as sheep under the sheds of a farm-yard. Here they feed upon the leaves of the laurel and other evergreens. It is contrary to the law to kill them after the Christmas holidays, but sometimes their retreat is invaded, and a deer or two killed; their flesh, however, is not wholesome, on account of the laurel leaves on which they feed, and their skin is nearly worthless."I expressed my surprise that the leaves of the mountain laurel, thekalmia latifolia, which are so deadly to sheep, should be the winter food of the deer."It is because the deer has no gall," answered the man, "that the pison don't take effect. But their meat will not do to eat, except in a small quantity, and cooked with pork, which I think helps take the pison out of it.""The deer," he went on to say, "are now passing out of the blue into the gray. After the holidays, when their hair becomes long, and their winter coat is quite grown, their hide is soft and tender, and tears easily when dressed, and it would be folly to kill them, even if there were no law against it." He went on to find a parallel to the case of the deer-skins in the hides of neat-cattle, which, when brought from a hot country, like South America, are firmer and tougher than when obtained in a colder climate like ours.The Wyoming traveller gave a bad account of the health, just at present, of the beautiful valley in which he lived. "We have never before," said he, "known what it was to have the fever and ague among us, but now it is very common, as well as other fevers. The season has neither been uncommonly wet nor uncommonly dry, but it has been uncommonly hot." I heard the same account of various other districts in Pennsylvania. Mifflin county, for example, was sickly this season, as well as other parts of the state which, hitherto have been almost uniformly healthy. Here, however, in Stroudsburg and its neighborhood, they boasted that the fever and ague had never yet made its appearance.I was glad to hear a good account of the pecuniary circumstances of the Pennsylvania farmers. They got in debt like every body else during the prosperous years of 1835 and 1836, and have been ever since working themselves gradually out of it. "I have never," said an intelligent gentleman of Stroudsburg, "known the owners of the farms so free from debt, and so generally easy and prosperous in their condition, as at this moment." It is to be hoped that having been so successful in paying their private debts, they will now try what can be done with the debt of the state.We left Stroudsburg this morning—one of the finest mornings of this autumnal season—and soon climbed an eminence which looked down upon Cherry Hollow. This place reminded me, with the exception of its forests, of the valleys in the Peak of Derbyshire, the same rounded summits, the same green, basin-like hollows. But here, on the hill-sides, were tall groves of oak and chestnut, instead of the brown heath; and the large stone houses of the German householders were very unlike the Derbyshire cottages. The valley is four miles in length, and its eastern extremity is washed by the Delaware. Climbing out of this valley and passing for some miles through yellow woods and fields of springing corn, not Indian corn, we found ourselves at length travelling on the side of another long valley, which terminates at its southern extremity in the Wind Gap.The Wind Gap is an opening in the same mountain ridge which is cloven by the Water Gap, but, unlike that, it extends only about half-way down to the base. Through this opening, bordered on each side by large loose blocks of stone, the road passes. After you have reached the open country beyond, you look back and see the ridge stretching away eastward towards the Water Gap, and in the other direction towards the southwest till it sinks out of sight, a rocky wall of uniform height, with this opening in the midst, which looks as if part of the mountain had here fallen into an abyss below. Beyond the Wind Gap we came to the village of Windham, lying in the shelter of this mountain barrier, and here, about twelve o'clock, our driver stopped a moment at an inn to give water to his horses. The bar-room was full of fresh-colored young men in military uniforms, talking Pennsylvania German rather rapidly and vociferously. They surrounded a thick-set man, in a cap and shirt-sleeves, whom they called Tscho, or Joe, and insisted that he should give them a tune on his fiddle."Spiel, Tscho, spiel, spiel," was shouted on every side, and at last Tscho took the floor with a fiddle and began to play. About a dozen of the young men stood up on the floor, in couples, facing each other, and hammered out the tune with their feet, giving a tread or tap on the floor to correspond with every note of the instrument, and occasionally crossing from side to side. I have never seen dancing more diligently performed.When the player had drawn the final squeak from his violin, we got into our vehicle, and in somewhat more than an hour were entering the little village of Nazareth, pleasantly situated among fields the autumnal verdure of which indicated their fertility. Nazareth is a Moravian village, of four or five hundred inhabitants, looking prodigiously like a little town of the old world, except that it is more neatly kept. The houses are square and solid, of stone or brick, built immediately on the street; a pavement of broad flags runs under their windows, and between the flags and the carriage-way is a row of trees. In the centre of the village is a square with an arcade for a market, and a little aside from the main street, in a hollow covered with bright green grass, is another square, in the midst of which stands a large white church. Near it is an avenue, with two immense lime-trees growing at the gate, leading to the field in which they bury their dead. Looking upon this square is a large building, three or four stories high, where a school for boys is kept, to which pupils are sent from various parts of the country, and which enjoys a very good reputation. We entered the garden of this school, an inclosure thickly overshadowed with tall forest and exotic trees of various kinds, with shrubs below, and winding walks and summer-houses and benches. The boys of the school were amusing themselves under the trees, and the arched walks were ringing with their shrill voices.We visited also the burying place, which is situated on a little eminence, backed with a wood, and commands a view of the village. The Moravian grave is simple in its decorations; a small flat stone, of a square shape, lying in the midst, between the head and foot, is inscribed with the name of the dead, the time and place of his birth, and the time when, to use their own language, he "departed," and this is the sole epitaph. But innovations have been recently made on this simplicity; a rhyming couplet or quatrain is now sometimes added, or a word in praise of the dead. One recent grave was loaded with a thick tablet of white marble, which covered it entirely, and bore an inscription as voluminous as those in the burial places of other denominations. The graves, as in all Moravian burying grounds, are arranged in regular rows, with paths at right angles between them, and sometimes a rose-tree is planted at the head of the sleeper.As we were leaving Nazareth, the innkeeper came to us, and asked if we would allow a man who was travelling to Easton to take a seat in our carriage with the driver. We consented, and a respectable-looking, well-clad, middle-aged person, made his appearance. When we had proceeded a little way, we asked him some questions, to which he made no other reply than to shake his head, and we soon found that he understood no English. I tried him with German, which brought a ready reply in the same language. He was a native of Pennsylvania, he told me, born at Snow Hill, in Lehigh county, not very many miles from Nazareth. In turn, he asked me where I came from, and when I bid him guess, he assigned my birthplace to Germany, which showed at least that he was not very accurately instructed in the diversities with which his mother tongue is spoken.As we entered Easton, the yellow woods on the hills and peaks that surround the place, were lit up with a glowing autumnal sunset. Soon afterward we crossed the Lehigh, and took a walk along its bank in South Easton, where a little town has recently grown up; the sidewalks along its dusty streets were freshly swept for Saturday night. As it began to grow dark, we found ourselves strolling in front of a row of iron mills, with the canal on one side and the Lehigh on the other. One of these was a rolling mill, into which we could look from the bank where we stood, and observe the whole process of the manufacture, which is very striking.The whole interior of the building is lighted at night only by the mouths of several furnaces, which are kindled to a white heat. Out of one of these a thick bar of iron, about six feet in length and heated to a perfect whiteness, is drawn, and one end of it presented to the cylinders of the mill, which seize it and draw it through between them, rolled out to three or four times its original size. A sooty workman grasps the opposite end of the bar with pincers as soon as it is fairly through, and returns it again to the cylinders, which deliver it again on the opposite side. In this way it passes backward and forward till it is rolled into an enormous length, and shoots across the black floor with a twining motion like a serpent of fire. At last, when pressed to the proper thinness and length, it is coiled up into a circle by the help of a machine contrived for the purpose, which rolls it up as a shopkeeper rolls up a ribbon.We found a man near where we stood, begrimed by the soot of the furnaces, handling the clumsy masses of iron which bear the name of bloom. The rolling mill, he said, belonged to Rodenbough, Stewart & Co., who had very extensive contracts for furnishing iron to the nailmakers and wire manufacturers."Will they stop the mill for the new tariff?" said I."They will stop for nothing," replied the man. "The new tariff is a good tariff, if people would but think so. It costs the iron-masters fifteen dollars a ton to make their iron, and they sell it for forty dollars a ton. If the new tariff obliges them to sell it for considerable less they will still make money."So revolves the cycle of opinion. Twenty years ago a Pennsylvanian who questioned the policy of the protective system would have been looked upon as a sort of curiosity. Now the bloomers and stable-boys begin to talk free trade. What will they talk twenty years hence?
My yesterday's letter left me at Stroudsburg, about four miles west of the Delaware. It is a pleasant village, situated on the banks of the Pocano. From this stream the inhabitants have diverted a considerable portion of the water, bringing the current through this village in a canal, making it to dive under the road and rise again on the opposite side, after which it hastens to turn a cluster of mills. To the north is seen the summit of the Pocano mountain, where this stream has its springs, with woods stretching down its sides and covering the adjacent country. Here, about nine miles to the north of the village, deer haunt and are hunted. I heard of one man who had already killed nine of these animals within two or three weeks. A traveller from Wyoming county, whom I met at our inn, gave me some account of the winter life of the deer.
"They inhabit," he said, "the swamps of mountain-laurel thickets, through which a man would find it almost impossible to make his way. The laurel-bushes, and the hemlocks scattered among them, intercept the snow as it falls, and form a thick roof, under the shelter of which, near some pool or rivulet, the animals remain until spring opens, as snugly protected from the severity of the weather as sheep under the sheds of a farm-yard. Here they feed upon the leaves of the laurel and other evergreens. It is contrary to the law to kill them after the Christmas holidays, but sometimes their retreat is invaded, and a deer or two killed; their flesh, however, is not wholesome, on account of the laurel leaves on which they feed, and their skin is nearly worthless."
I expressed my surprise that the leaves of the mountain laurel, thekalmia latifolia, which are so deadly to sheep, should be the winter food of the deer.
"It is because the deer has no gall," answered the man, "that the pison don't take effect. But their meat will not do to eat, except in a small quantity, and cooked with pork, which I think helps take the pison out of it."
"The deer," he went on to say, "are now passing out of the blue into the gray. After the holidays, when their hair becomes long, and their winter coat is quite grown, their hide is soft and tender, and tears easily when dressed, and it would be folly to kill them, even if there were no law against it." He went on to find a parallel to the case of the deer-skins in the hides of neat-cattle, which, when brought from a hot country, like South America, are firmer and tougher than when obtained in a colder climate like ours.
The Wyoming traveller gave a bad account of the health, just at present, of the beautiful valley in which he lived. "We have never before," said he, "known what it was to have the fever and ague among us, but now it is very common, as well as other fevers. The season has neither been uncommonly wet nor uncommonly dry, but it has been uncommonly hot." I heard the same account of various other districts in Pennsylvania. Mifflin county, for example, was sickly this season, as well as other parts of the state which, hitherto have been almost uniformly healthy. Here, however, in Stroudsburg and its neighborhood, they boasted that the fever and ague had never yet made its appearance.
I was glad to hear a good account of the pecuniary circumstances of the Pennsylvania farmers. They got in debt like every body else during the prosperous years of 1835 and 1836, and have been ever since working themselves gradually out of it. "I have never," said an intelligent gentleman of Stroudsburg, "known the owners of the farms so free from debt, and so generally easy and prosperous in their condition, as at this moment." It is to be hoped that having been so successful in paying their private debts, they will now try what can be done with the debt of the state.
We left Stroudsburg this morning—one of the finest mornings of this autumnal season—and soon climbed an eminence which looked down upon Cherry Hollow. This place reminded me, with the exception of its forests, of the valleys in the Peak of Derbyshire, the same rounded summits, the same green, basin-like hollows. But here, on the hill-sides, were tall groves of oak and chestnut, instead of the brown heath; and the large stone houses of the German householders were very unlike the Derbyshire cottages. The valley is four miles in length, and its eastern extremity is washed by the Delaware. Climbing out of this valley and passing for some miles through yellow woods and fields of springing corn, not Indian corn, we found ourselves at length travelling on the side of another long valley, which terminates at its southern extremity in the Wind Gap.
The Wind Gap is an opening in the same mountain ridge which is cloven by the Water Gap, but, unlike that, it extends only about half-way down to the base. Through this opening, bordered on each side by large loose blocks of stone, the road passes. After you have reached the open country beyond, you look back and see the ridge stretching away eastward towards the Water Gap, and in the other direction towards the southwest till it sinks out of sight, a rocky wall of uniform height, with this opening in the midst, which looks as if part of the mountain had here fallen into an abyss below. Beyond the Wind Gap we came to the village of Windham, lying in the shelter of this mountain barrier, and here, about twelve o'clock, our driver stopped a moment at an inn to give water to his horses. The bar-room was full of fresh-colored young men in military uniforms, talking Pennsylvania German rather rapidly and vociferously. They surrounded a thick-set man, in a cap and shirt-sleeves, whom they called Tscho, or Joe, and insisted that he should give them a tune on his fiddle.
"Spiel, Tscho, spiel, spiel," was shouted on every side, and at last Tscho took the floor with a fiddle and began to play. About a dozen of the young men stood up on the floor, in couples, facing each other, and hammered out the tune with their feet, giving a tread or tap on the floor to correspond with every note of the instrument, and occasionally crossing from side to side. I have never seen dancing more diligently performed.
When the player had drawn the final squeak from his violin, we got into our vehicle, and in somewhat more than an hour were entering the little village of Nazareth, pleasantly situated among fields the autumnal verdure of which indicated their fertility. Nazareth is a Moravian village, of four or five hundred inhabitants, looking prodigiously like a little town of the old world, except that it is more neatly kept. The houses are square and solid, of stone or brick, built immediately on the street; a pavement of broad flags runs under their windows, and between the flags and the carriage-way is a row of trees. In the centre of the village is a square with an arcade for a market, and a little aside from the main street, in a hollow covered with bright green grass, is another square, in the midst of which stands a large white church. Near it is an avenue, with two immense lime-trees growing at the gate, leading to the field in which they bury their dead. Looking upon this square is a large building, three or four stories high, where a school for boys is kept, to which pupils are sent from various parts of the country, and which enjoys a very good reputation. We entered the garden of this school, an inclosure thickly overshadowed with tall forest and exotic trees of various kinds, with shrubs below, and winding walks and summer-houses and benches. The boys of the school were amusing themselves under the trees, and the arched walks were ringing with their shrill voices.
We visited also the burying place, which is situated on a little eminence, backed with a wood, and commands a view of the village. The Moravian grave is simple in its decorations; a small flat stone, of a square shape, lying in the midst, between the head and foot, is inscribed with the name of the dead, the time and place of his birth, and the time when, to use their own language, he "departed," and this is the sole epitaph. But innovations have been recently made on this simplicity; a rhyming couplet or quatrain is now sometimes added, or a word in praise of the dead. One recent grave was loaded with a thick tablet of white marble, which covered it entirely, and bore an inscription as voluminous as those in the burial places of other denominations. The graves, as in all Moravian burying grounds, are arranged in regular rows, with paths at right angles between them, and sometimes a rose-tree is planted at the head of the sleeper.
As we were leaving Nazareth, the innkeeper came to us, and asked if we would allow a man who was travelling to Easton to take a seat in our carriage with the driver. We consented, and a respectable-looking, well-clad, middle-aged person, made his appearance. When we had proceeded a little way, we asked him some questions, to which he made no other reply than to shake his head, and we soon found that he understood no English. I tried him with German, which brought a ready reply in the same language. He was a native of Pennsylvania, he told me, born at Snow Hill, in Lehigh county, not very many miles from Nazareth. In turn, he asked me where I came from, and when I bid him guess, he assigned my birthplace to Germany, which showed at least that he was not very accurately instructed in the diversities with which his mother tongue is spoken.
As we entered Easton, the yellow woods on the hills and peaks that surround the place, were lit up with a glowing autumnal sunset. Soon afterward we crossed the Lehigh, and took a walk along its bank in South Easton, where a little town has recently grown up; the sidewalks along its dusty streets were freshly swept for Saturday night. As it began to grow dark, we found ourselves strolling in front of a row of iron mills, with the canal on one side and the Lehigh on the other. One of these was a rolling mill, into which we could look from the bank where we stood, and observe the whole process of the manufacture, which is very striking.
The whole interior of the building is lighted at night only by the mouths of several furnaces, which are kindled to a white heat. Out of one of these a thick bar of iron, about six feet in length and heated to a perfect whiteness, is drawn, and one end of it presented to the cylinders of the mill, which seize it and draw it through between them, rolled out to three or four times its original size. A sooty workman grasps the opposite end of the bar with pincers as soon as it is fairly through, and returns it again to the cylinders, which deliver it again on the opposite side. In this way it passes backward and forward till it is rolled into an enormous length, and shoots across the black floor with a twining motion like a serpent of fire. At last, when pressed to the proper thinness and length, it is coiled up into a circle by the help of a machine contrived for the purpose, which rolls it up as a shopkeeper rolls up a ribbon.
We found a man near where we stood, begrimed by the soot of the furnaces, handling the clumsy masses of iron which bear the name of bloom. The rolling mill, he said, belonged to Rodenbough, Stewart & Co., who had very extensive contracts for furnishing iron to the nailmakers and wire manufacturers.
"Will they stop the mill for the new tariff?" said I.
"They will stop for nothing," replied the man. "The new tariff is a good tariff, if people would but think so. It costs the iron-masters fifteen dollars a ton to make their iron, and they sell it for forty dollars a ton. If the new tariff obliges them to sell it for considerable less they will still make money."
So revolves the cycle of opinion. Twenty years ago a Pennsylvanian who questioned the policy of the protective system would have been looked upon as a sort of curiosity. Now the bloomers and stable-boys begin to talk free trade. What will they talk twenty years hence?