28                      HISTORY OF CLAY COUNTY

    As an infant industry of the pioneer period the manufacture of chairs
is not to be overlooked. A part of the standard household furniture
previous to the making of chairs was the stool, made of a hewn block,
with three holes bored into it in which were placed as many legs. On start-
ing at house-keeping in the primitive cabins of the wilderness, the newly
married couple’s seating capacity usually numbered two of these stools.
In the absence of sawed lumber, out of necessity (the mother of inven-
tion) the white-oak splint bottom was resorted to, which has not yet gone
out of use. The pioneer manufacturer of the splint-bottom chair produced
a substantial piece of furniture, specimens and relics of which are still
to be seen in many households of the county. In the family of A. H.
Wright, in Jackson township, are chairs of this kind still in daily use,
made by the Scammahorn brothers, on Birch creek, in the year 1836.
    James T. Leachman maintained a shop on his homestead in Sugar
Ridge township, two miles southeast of Center Point, where he conducted
this industry for a period of years, beginning at some time prior to the
Civil war. In the year 1860, some one, whose name is not now recalled,
made this kind of chairs at Brazil, in an unpretentious, primitive box-like
building, near the Vandalia Railroad, in the vicinity of the Torbert clay
plant. The chair makers for the territory now comprised within Harrison
township were Ransom Renner and Ambrose Phipps. Renner then
owned and lived on what is now the Christian Willen place, and Phipps,
on the Uri Cooprider place, west of Clay City. The standard exchange
price of their products was two bushels of corn for one chair or twelve
bushels for the full set of six chairs. Fluctuations in the market price of
corn had no effect on its exchange value in the local chair market. Rich-
ard Baker also engaged temporarily in the chair industry at his home in
the south part of the township.
    In the year 1866 or 1867 Ezra 0. Duncan located and put in opera-
tion the first circular saw-mill for the heavy timber area, of the extreme
south end of the county, at a point but a few rods east of the present
Duncan schoolhouse, where James Poe, soon thereafter, engaged in the
manufacture of splint-bottom chairs, spinning-wheels, reels, and other
household utilities of that day, at which, however, he did not continue
more than a year or two.
    Michaelree & Clark operated the only splint-bottom chair factory of
any considerable proportions and capacity, with improved machinery, at
Brazil, which was established about 1870, perhaps a year earlier. In
1871, when they were turning out five hundred chairs a week, they could
not supply the demand for their product. A standard industry in
pioneer times was that of cooperage—the manufacture of barrels, tubs,
buckets, etc.—when all families had their meat-barrels, flour-barrels and
wash-tubs made to order. Then, too, substantially all the products of the
merchant fiouring-mills and the slaughter houses were packed in barrels
for shipment. Fifty years ago, at some point not distant from a village
or rural flouring-mill, was a cooper-shop, which supplied the mill with
barrels. Then, when a less quantity than a barrel of flour was wanted,
the purchaser had to supply the bag or vessel in which to put it. Then,
too, not a pound of flour could be bought anywhere at the stores, only at
the mills or from private individuals who had a surplus. Then the paper-
bag industry, the packing of flour in less quantities than the barrel, and
its being handled by dealers in common with other commodities were not
yet in vogue, not even dreamed of by a pioneer or rural population. To