Olden Times

I enjoy finding out about my ancestry and how my long ago family lived. One of my second cousins, a dear, kind lady sent me quite a lot of information that I’d never find in history books. Digging through some of the letters she sent me years ago, I found one that sheds light on how people lived in earlier days and the hard work they did. She wrote about her parents settling in Mena, Arkansas. With ingenuity, wisdom and a lot of hard work,  they carved a good life for themselves out of what was at that time pretty much a wilderness.

“Dad built the house with logs that he cut farther up in the hills, and pulled them down by horses to where he built the house,” she wrote. “The roof was covered with boards that he made from split, sawed-off logs. The thing he split them with was a steel metal thing with a wood handle. The blade was straight and sharp. It was called a froe.”

I zeroed in on that word “froe”. If you are interested, you can find pictures of a froe on the internet. I imagine it was extremely hard work, this making shingles. I also wondered about the term, “to and fro”. Is that somehow related to the tool that was once used for shingles?

Anyway, with all the re-shingling of roofs being done around my neighborhood, this old tool, froe, came to mind. Roofers nowadays have pre-made shingles. It’s still hard work, though, re-shingling a house. As I watch these men on top of my neighbors’ houses, I think about a long-ago roofer who didn’t have the benefit of ready-made shingles but had to make his own.