Menard County IL Archives News.....History of Pioneer Hornback Family is History of County part 2 August 16, 1929
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Matthew F Menardhx@gmail.com September 17, 2018, 6:20 pm

Petersburg Observer August 16, 1929
THEY ALL LIVED IN THE HOUSE DURING THE GREAT SNOW OF ‘30

HORNBACK FAMILY KEPT COW AND PIGS IN THE HOUSE DURING STORM.

Following is the second and last installment of the history of the Hornback 
family in Menard county.  The first appeared in this paper last week.

At the age of 23, Andrew Hornback married Mahala Powell and was later 
married to Jemima Sales.  The hardest year he ever saw was in 1830.  His 
account of the Deep Snow as he saw it is that it commenced to snow between 
Christmas and New Years Day and they never saw the sun nor the moon shine 
for forty days and nights.

It snowed just as hard in the house as out of doors.  The cabins were built 
of logs, with puncheon floors, were covered with boards four or five feet 
long which were held down with logs as there was not a nail in Menard 
county.  The boards warped at the ends and the snow blew in as long as there 
was room for it.

The cabin of Mr. Hornback’s was 18x20 feet.  The fire-place was composed of 
mud, and all hickory wood that they could pile on could not make enough heat 
to melt the snow in the room, yet these hardy people subsisted.  A heifer 
belonging to Mr. Hornback jumped into the house when the door was opened.  
He also had three ewe sheep with lambs down under the puncheon floor and a 
sow wit eight pigs in one corner of the house.  With these and the family, 
our modern people will think the room was packed pretty full.

In the morning when they got up the room would be covered with six inches of 
snow on the floor and there was no escape from stepping into it.  They had 
to go to the fields and carry feed on their backs for the stock and at times 
the wind would blow them flat on the ground.  At places they waded through 
the snow up to their shoulders.

The family subsisted during this terrible period on corn pounded in a 
mortar, or soaked in lye and mashed and made into bread.  Three friends from 
Kentucky called on Mr. Hornback about this time and said if Illinois was so 
much like the North Pole they would go back home.  When the returned to 
Kentucky and told about the snow the people would not believe them.

A while after Mr. Hornback returned to Kentucky while court was in session 
and he was asked to settle a bet of eight gallons of whiskey that the deep 
snow story was not true.  They asked him “Did you have a cow, a sow and 
sheep in your house?”.  And he answered “Yes”.  The treat was given and the 
judge and lawyers all drank until the eight gallons of whiskey was gone and 
court adjourned until the next day.

When the snow melted in the spring it made the biggest flood that was ever 
known in the county.  The people traveled everywhere in skiffs.  The weather 
had been so cold that all seed corn was ruined and Abe Pickerell sent his 
son Frank to Kentucky to get 500 bushels of corn.  He brought it down the 
Ohio and then up the river to Beardstown and over to Menard where he sold it 
for $3 per bushel.  The settlers had no money to pay for it so Mr. Pickerell 
exchanged it for hogs, calves, colts or anything of value at that time in 
the community.  The ground was so full of water for two years afterwards 
that the crops would not grow.

Mr. Hornback dragged along for ten years after settling here and after his 
children got big enough to help him he did much better and was finally able 
to give each of them several hundred acres of land at his death.

He has related that he used to go to the mill at Salem where Abraham Lincoln 
and Berry first started their grocery store.  They had to wait for their 
grist and always found Lincoln on a lounge reading a book and Berry behind 
the counter.  Lincoln would say “Berry, give the boys something to drink”.  
Hornback voted for Lincoln for Representative although they did not belong 
to the same party.

In the memoirs Mr. Hornback also states that Leonard Alkire was one of the 
first settlers of Sweetwater and built a large brick house.  The clay was 
tramped and worked by George Miller with his feet at the magnificent sum of 
$8 per month.  This same Miller homesteaded the land where the city of 
Chicago now stands and afterwards traded it for Miller’s Ferry.

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