Preface
 

                It is not my intention to write a comprehensive history of the area, others have done that more ably than I could.  When I was going through graveyards and census documents certain things seemed to jump out at me, things that I had not seen recorded in other places.  I decided to jot down a few of these.

                I was born in the era before television was popular and people used to gather and actually talk to one another.  The area where I was born was remote and cut off for most of the year so there weren't a lot of new stories or traditions that were influenced by outside elements.  The older people had a fixed set of stories which they told and retold and questioned one another about.  It was sort of a form of oral history.  I remember listening to some of this but I was young and I thought it would last forever and didn't pay a lot of attention.  With the coming of television these gathering ceased to occur and the area was invaded by an outside culture and the old ways disappeared.  I'm not sure I would like to return to the old ways of outhouses, one room schools and the constant threat of starvation but I do wish the stories would have been recorded more faithfully.

                When I saw the television documentary "The History of Baseball" by Ken Folet I was dumbstruck.  They gave the rules that the early colonial settlers used in playing a precursor of baseball that was then called rounders.  These rules were almost exactly the same as the rules we used in the one room school I attended.  This started me thinking that if we had preserved the rules of a game so faithfully maybe there was some authenticity to other traditions.