Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

As I sit here and write my column this morning, I am drinking my coffee. I am about six feet from the refrigerator, which is loaded with things I could eat, if I felt like it. I’ve got eggs, sausages, potatoes, and leftovers from three or four days running. (I don’t feel like cooking any of it, but that’s a separate issue.) If I felt like leaving the house, I am within blocks of places that will be happy to sell me food. In no way am I about to go hungry, is what I’m saying.

The earliest settlers of Clinton County weren’t going hungry, either, but the situation was a bit different for them. There was more work involved, and a certain amount of creativity. Much of this is detailed in an old article I found from 1976, entitled, ”Early Clinton Settlers Had Good Food Supply.”

When the early settlers arrived and built cabins and forts along the Susquehanna, food was a concern. Obviously, people need to eat, and it’s not the sort of problem you can put off solving. It wasn’t, in those days, as if you could just pop down to Wal-Mart, which didn’t begin spontaneously generating until 1962. Fortunately, there was a certain amount of food already available.

Now, credit where credit is due: Much of this was due to the Susquehannock tribe that already lived in the area. When European settlers first arrived, they looked around, amazed at how abundant edible plants were. It never occurred to them that the Native American tribes had spent generations working on that and making sure that the food was abundant.

For starters, there were berries and fruit growing everywhere. The Susquehanna supplied fish. And the land was usable, enabling the settlers to plant potatoes, corn, wheat, and rye. They also brought along a certain amount of farm animals, so cattle had room to graze on the grass. Hogs were fed acorns, chestnuts, beech nuts, and hazelnuts. In turn, then, those animals would supply meat, milk, and butter. (In general, the cows were getting kind of a better deal here.)

Flour could be ground, but it wasn’t as if there was a grist mill available to grind it, the first of those being built in Mill Hall in 1804. So the settlers improvised solutions. They ground their own flour in tubs, which was coarse but usable. The 1976 article says,”The ‘tub-mill’ came into wide use. Small mills with a single grinding stone were operated by water power.”

With a store available, the settlers could use lard. Without one, they had to settle for the fat of bears and raccoons. Coffee, which I find to be a necessity, was replaced by chicory or browned wheat. (You will never see quality columns from me if I have to drink browned wheat.) Instead of tea, the settlers would substitute sage, thyme, spearmint, or sweet ferns. In the area that later became Clinton County, the most common tea substitute was wild mint, which you can still find growing in some of the more foresty areas.

And sugar maples were growing in the forest, which helped considerably. In fact, Sugar Valley was named for them, because they were especially abundant down there. The families could tap the maple trees, draw out the sap, and make syrup and sugar from it. This would give them something to put on the pancakes made with flour, and the boiled wheat they were drinking instead of coffee.

You couldn’t just buy food at the store back then, so it took more work and effort to get it. But those early settlers managed in some pretty impressive ways. Me? I’m going to finish my coffee.