of the month, in Licking River, at Cynthiana, by Rev. Joseph R. Barbee, being the first Baptist ever baptised there. On Jan. 24, 1854, when only two days over nineteen years old, I married Miss Margaret Hawkins, in Bourbon Co, Ky., near the old home of my father, and the same year I sold my fifty acres of land for seventy dollars per acre and bought of William Chinn seventy-two acres at seventy dollars per acre, and went to keeping house; this was a good piece of land, but high-priced (and adjoining Mrs. Hawkins' place), as the improvements were very poor; the house was quite old, one and one-half stories high, two rooms below and two above, built of hewn logs, neither plastered nor weatherboarded. Early in Jan. 1856, and before I was twenty-one years old, I sold this farm for seventy dollars per acre and bought one almost adjoining on Silas Creek, of two hundred and fifteen acres, for the same price per acre, assuming a heavy debt. This, also, was a good farm, with more extensive improvements and some better quality; here I lived and farmed for four years successfully, making a full hand all the time at all kinds of work. My negro man, Alfred, and boy, Sanford, whom I inherited, and a negro woman, Ann, with two small children and a girl, Mary, given my wife by her mother, were all the help we had. The usual crop annually was about one hundred to one hundred and twenty-five acres of corn, wheat, and oats, with meadow to make sufficient hay for the stock, and about forty acres of cultivating land was rented at four dollars per acre. Our income was chiefly from the sale of the wheat crop, the yield of which was from fifteen to thirty bushels per acre, and sold at from seventy-five cents to one dollar per bushel; the corn crop was mostly fed to hogs, and they sold about Nov. 20, at prices ranging from three to five dollars per hundredweight, the hogs averaging usually about three hundred pounds; there was also something realized from the sale of the mule colts raised from the work mares, as well as a few surplus cattle raised from the milch cows, which were Short-horn Durhams, and the product from a flock of thirty-five Cotswold sheep. In addition to the farm products, were added the wife's help in a few garden and orchard products, surplus fowls, butter, eggs, and jeans, linsey, socks, stockings, etc., which were no small item. The family all rode horseback to church and everywhere until 1858, when I bought my first buggy, paying two hundred and fifty dollars for it. In the spring of 1860 I sold my farm for

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Thanks to Catherine Bradford for transcribing this page.