In respect to the other attendants of air, water and exercise which have heretofore been mentioned, this generation enjoyed all these in the same manner as the first, but, these had superior dwellings which were comfortable stone houses which every farmer, with very few exceptions, in this town possessed before the Revolutionary War commenced. These were closer than the first dwellings erected here, but still not very tight houses. Each room generally had an outside door, and all the rooms generally were on the lower floor; the chamber above these was used for granaries, flour barrels, and to store many different articles. The cellars were used for their milk and dairy articles, meat casks, cider barrels, winter apples, potatoes, turnips, and other vegetables. These cellar articles were not salable in former times, but were generally used by the families who produced them. The table furniture generally consisted of ordinary table knives and forks, pewter plates, pewter basins and platters of different sizes, pewter spoons, and a pewter mug which would contain about two quarts of cider, on which was a cover to open and close by means of a hinge, which last article was generally brought on the table for drink when the meal consisted of meat and hearty victuals but was not used with their milk diets. In the time of the war many of those articles were destroyed, and wooden plates, wooden bowls and dishes of different sizes were manufactured with a turning lathe and used for table furniture. Now, although our parents lived in this plain and simple style, yet our mothers were as neat and clean housekeepers as their circumstances and business concerns would admit. They generally cleaned house every spring and fall, in which they scrubbed and washed with soap-suds the under part of the upper floor and beams, and whitewashed the walls, and every Saturday scrubbed and wiped the floors of their sitting rooms and kitchens. Floor carpets were not used in their time. The linen shirts, trowsers and frocks of the men and boys, and the linen clothes of the women worn during one week, were in the next boiled in a pot or kettle of lye, and, after a proper time, the pot was carried out to a pounding block, where, while hot, the clothes were taken out by pieces and battled on the block with a battle, and then put in a tub of soapsuds, made of soft home-made soap, in which the same was washed and thereafter rinsed in clean water and dried. Our fathers, their sons and slaves, labored hard in the hot season of the year and often wet their shirts and trowsers with the sweat of their bodies, and this manner of boiling, battling and washing those linen clothes was very effectual to clean the same.