Looking Back
Taming the Wild Lands
By Joyce M. Tice

The earliest homesteads by American Europeans in our Northern Pennsylvania area were established after the Revolutionary War. While Native Americans had engaged in agriculture in the river valleys, the hills remained fully wooded. Many acres of the wilderness in this area had been bought up by land speculators such as William Bingham who owned millions of acres in New York, Pennsylvania and Maine. Henry Drinker was another large landholder in this area. Our early settlers often purchased land from the Bingham Estate, the Drinker Estate or other large land holdings through land agents employed by the owners.

One of the most frequent questions people ask about their migrating ancestors is, ”Why?” Land in New England was getting worn out, scarce, and expensive. People had large families then, and farming was what almost everyone did. Many of the young people and some of the middle aged moved into the newly opened wilderness to establish their own lives. They migrated to an area over several years in extended family or neighborhood groups, so they were often already an established community when they moved. One family story that has come down tells of a Connecticut family that had been persuaded that the hills of Pennsylvania were soil rich and stone free.

One child, walking along beside the wagon and throwing stones was told, “You better throw all the stones you can now, because there won’t be any when we get to Pennsylvania.”

Our first settlers, primarily from New England, New York, and Vermont literally cut their way through the forest, built a rough lean-to shelter and started cutting down as many trees as they could as fast as they could. Typically, the farmstead family could clear and make productive about an acre a year. The well-to-do among them might have one cow, a pair of oxen, chickens, and raise a pig and later some sheep. Less than a third had one or two horses. By 1832, a decade after the settlement of this area started in earnest, the Sullivan Township tax records show that the average property holding was 77 acres, 9 of which were “improved” with the reminder as “wild lands.”
Horses and oxen were for transportation and fieldwork, and both were rented out to those who did not have their own “beasts of burden.”  The family cow, the chickens, and the pigs, along with the vegetable garden fed the family. Grain had to be planted and hay harvested to feed the animals. The sheep and flax crops provided fiber for handmade textiles. Pots and pans and farm tools were cherished items and were mended when they wore out.

Late nineteenth century obituaries of the early pioneers tell of carrying corn for fifty miles to be ground at the nearest gristmill. Stories pass down of encounters with panthers and bears. One tells of the old woman who chased a bear that had taken a piglet. She chased the bear with a hot poker from the hearth and got her pig back. It sounds amusing, but it tells us that in this act of desperation, that pig was as valuable to her as her life.

With a newly migrated young population and a high birth rate, the demographics were very different from our own. In Sullivan Township in Tioga County, my test case again, the average age of the population was 15 years old. With a total population of 1357, only 100 were past the age of 50. Two hundred fifty-six were under five years of age, the highest number in any age group.

Our pioneer farm families were resourceful and determined. The level of self-sufficiency by which they lived is almost beyond our imaginations.

Joyce M. Tice, creator of the Tri-Counties Genealogy and History, can be reached at lookingback@mountainhomemag.com. Her Web site is www.joycetice.com/jmtindex.htm.