Her second child, my mother's Aunt Mary (Polly), married Benjamin Hopkins, whose death left her with four children in indigent circumstances. With her two daughters, Betty and Lydia, she lived in a small cabin almost in sight of my mother's house. Later these two girls came to live with my mother, picking, carding, spinning and weaving wool into Kentucky jeans and linsey-woolsey, which they made into garments for the family. My first useful labor, when I was perhaps seven or eight years old, was to "hand in" the warp, thread by thread, to these girls as they passed it through the reed and harness of the loom. The knowledge I thus acquired of warp and woof laid the foundation of my future financial success. About 1844 my great grandmother Stroud came to live with us. I remember well the stories she told me of the outrages of Lord Rawdon's troops when he invaded North Carolina with the Hessians and destroyed her father's property. Her father was once arrested for secreting a neighbor rebel in a sack of wool under the bed, discovered by the Hessians sticking their bayonets into the wool and wounding the rebel. They placed a rope around her father's neck and were taking him out to hang him, when he was rescued by the sudden arrival of some of Generals Lee and Sumter's soldiers. She described, too, her visit to the battle-field of the Cowpens near her father's plantation, to care for the wounded, and told of her three brothers who served in the Revolutionary Army, one of them being killed. She was so vehement in her denunciation of the English and Hessian soldiers that, all my life, I have been intensely prejudiced against the English. Later she left our house to live with her youngest daughter, Lydia (Mrs. John Frazier), and died there in 1847, aged eighty-two. Like my father, my mother had small patrimony, only two hundred dollars, which her father gave her in lieu of the one hundred and sixty acres he gave each of her brothers. Like him, she never attended school. In Coshocton, Ohio, by an unwritten law, no girls were permitted to enter the school house during sessions, so her knowledge of letters was gained through instruction by her parents and brothers. But, if lacking in schooling, both my parents had the greatest of all endowments--strong hands, clear heads and brave hearts, with which to enter their life struggle for existence. They had nine children: Anson, William W., Marietta, Eliza Jane, Emmett, Allen, John, Caroline and Thomas Edwin, seven of whom grew to maturity. (Cuts, 28, 29.) Thorntown had been a partially civilized Pottawottomi village under French Jesuit control, the seat of their reservation, where corn and other products were cultivated. When their reservation was opened to settlement, the Indians moved to Kansas. The birds carried the hawthorn seed and deposited it on the freshly plowed furrows of the farm land the Indians abandoned, which resulted in a beautiful orchard of hawthorn. Hence the name, Thorntown.