Caudebec in America : $b A record of the descendants of Jacques Caudebec, 1700 to 1920 — John Shaqi
Caudebec in America : $b A record of the descendants of Jacques Caudebec, 1700 to 1920Cuddeback, William Louis
History
Caudebec in America : $b A record of the descendants of Jacques Caudebec, 1700 to 1920
Cuddeback, William Louis
Caudebec, Jacques, 1664-approximately 1764; Caudebec-en-Caux (France); Cuddeback family
These stone houses, generally irregularly rectangular, were most
substantially built. Entrance was usually through a large double
door, horizontally divided, opening into a large "fire room" at one
end, while at the other end of the house was a smaller room, used as
a dining room or a "state bed room," where a "Slawbank" or a "half
headed bed" was ever ready for the visitor.
[Illustration: Cuddeback Stone House and Nearby Log House.]
The large heavy "lug pole" was replaced later by the light moveable
iron crane with its iron hooks, pots and kettles in the great broad
fireplace. Andirons and creepers were later added to the household
equipment. The ceilings showed great logs and rafters rough hewn and
supporting a board floor or roof with its heavy bark covering.
The attic, beside providing sleeping apartments, had near the
chimney, a room with an opening to chimney and place to smoke bacon,
ham and beef; also a room for grains, storage, etc.
The large deep cellars contained bins for potatoes, apples, turnips,
beets, etc., barrels for salted beef, pork, game and fish--tubs of
sausage, headcheese, etc., and firkins of butter, eggs--shelves
filled with fruit, etc., barrels for cider, vinegar, etc.
In the earlier years, the tables were of boards and the dishes,
platters, etc., were mostly of wood, so were the trenches, the
borols, the tankards, the spoons of laurel wood and the plates of
birch bark. Bottles and drinking cups and noggins of leather and
sometimes of the thin hard shell of the gourd of horn. Later pewter
dishes were substituted. Food was plentiful. Wild native fruits were
in abundance, as huckleberries, strawberries, blackberries, grapes
and cranberries. Wild turkey abounded in flocks. Wild geese and ducks
by the thousands, and pigeons in flocks to obscure the light, and
here were also pheasants, partridge, quail, snipe. These, with the
products of the soil made life worth living, and secured the settlers
comfort and prosperity.
The Indians, friendly and helpful, taught the planting and the
raising of Indian corn, their "gunney wheat" or "turkey wheat"--a
native American food--the grinding and the cooking of it and the
preparation of many kinds of most nutritious foods from it, samp
porridge, suppawn, new samp, succotash, using their handmade mills,
their stump and sapling mortar also. They had great fear however of
windmills. They were also most helpful in killing, securing and
preserving game and fish for winter use. In turn, they learned to
secure wild honey. With wonder they called the bees "English flies";
called the maples "sugar trees" as they boiled the sap and gathered
the sugar.
They joined in the winter sports and pastimes as fox hunting,
squirrel killing, bear bayting, and for a generation lived most
peaceably with the settlers.
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