" If it was a home or a crib to be built, it was a
"log-raising," and everyone worked and made fun from it.
The steeple of a church arose in the valley. It was built by those of
the Methodist faith. But before that and even afterward they held
"camp-meetings" and "basket-meetings" where a community lunch was
served under the trees and where the service lasted through the daylight
hours, allowing for a mountain journey home. And the religious fervor
was so sincere and intense at these meetings that they were called
"melting sessions."
Up the mountainside above the York spring, a space was cleared for
shooting matches, where the prizes were beeves and turkeys, and where
the men shot so accurately that the slender crossing of two knifeblade
marks was the bull's-eye of the target. And everyone went on hunts, long
hunts when crops were laid by or winter had checked farm work. And as
human nature is the same the world over, there was many an upright
resident of the "Valley of the Three Forks o' the Wolf" who left the
plow standing in the furrow because the yelp and baying of the hounds
grew warm upon the mountainside.
The families of mountain men are usually large in number, and the estate
of Old Coonrod has passed through a long division. He had eight
children, and his son Elijah Pile, the branch of the family to which
Sergeant York belongs, had eleven children.
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