A blacksmith is a person who manufactures metal objects by hand, such as wrought iron gates, grills, railings, furniture, sculpture, weapons, decorative and religious items, cooking utensils, and tools.

Blacksmiths work by heating pieces of metal (usually steel or iron) with a forge until the metal becomes soft enough to be shaped with a hammer, punch, or other tool while lying on an anvil. Originally, heating the metal was done by burning coal, charcoal, or coke. Propane or natural gas can also be used. Blacksmiths make horseshoes, but someone who puts them on a horse is called a farrier. One person may do both. Two blacksmiths are shown above at work on an anvil.

Knitting is one of several ways to turn thread or yarn into cloth. Unlike woven fabric composed of threads such as the denim used to make blue jeans, knitted cloth is composed of much more widely spaced, parallel rows of yarn, which is thicker than thread. Rows are joined to each other by interlocking loops. Knitting can be done either by hand or by machine. When done by hand two knitting needles are used. The picture above shows a woman knitting.

Crocheting is a similar way of creating cloth from a length of cord, yarn, or thread with a hooked tool.

In early America clothes were made by women at home. A spinning wheel was used to make thread out of cotton or wool. A spinning wheel is pictured above. A loom was used to convert the thread to cloth. Thread was also used to sew the cloth into clothes. Later mills powered by falling water were used to make cloth that was sold in stores that women bought and made into clothes at home. Even later, clothes were made in mills, which eventually relied upon electricity to power their looms. Mills powered by falling water were built below a point where a creek or river began to descend rapidly. Above this point a dam was built. Water from the mill pond that backed up behind the dam was diverted to the mill's water wheel, whose elevation was a good bit lower than the level of the water in the mill pond. By the use of gears the turning of the water wheel's axel was used to power the mill's looms.

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Up until well into the 20^th century Georgia farmers dug the furrows into which they would put seeds with plows that were pulled by mules. A mule is the offspring of a male donkey and a female horse. The offspring of a female donkey and a male horse is called a hinny. Neither of these can have offspring. Mules are normally much larger than a hinny, which is why they were used to pull plows. A mule is said to possess the sobriety, patience, endurance, and sure-footedness of the donkey and the vigor, strength, and courage of a horse. (A mule is shown both at the top of this article and above this text pulling a plow. Notice the long ears the mule inherits from its donkey father and size inherited from its horse mother.)

Farmers were sometimes called rednecks because of what all the exposure to the sun while they were working in their fields did to their necks. Farmers were also sometimes called crackers. Supposedly this was due to the sound whips made when a teamster (wagon driver) cracked his whip to get the team of horses, mules, or oxen pulling his wagon to move faster.

In the 20^th century tractors powered by gasoline engines were introduced that gradually replaced mules, oxen, and horses. (The first tractors were steam powered, but they were less satisfactory than were gasoline-powered tractors.) Mechanical harvesting equipment for crops like wheat was first developed in the 19th (1800s) century. The mechanical harvesting of cotton in Carroll County was not practical until after World War II (1941-1945).

Butter is made by churning fresh cream. Cream is a layer of fat skimmed from the top of raw milk. If you let raw milk sit for awhile this fat will rise to the top. The milk you buy in the store today is not raw milk—milk straight from the cow. It is homogenized so that it will not separate. Homogenized milk was introduced in the 20th century.

  This is how butter was made:

  “Beef” cows were raised for their meat. Other cows, called milch--the German word for milk--cows provided the family with milk. Even as late as the early 20^th century many city-dwelling families kept a milk cow. Some also kept chickens and hogs.

   After a family’s cow was milked, the milk was strained in order to remove any debris and left to cool; perhaps in a root cellar that stayed relatively cool because it was underground. Another possibility was to put it in a spring house that was relatively cool because it was built over water. There containers of milk were placed in the water with only a few inches of the top of the container being above water.

   As the milk cooled, cream rose to the top. (Older people will remember that the bottles of milk delivered to city people’s doors by the milkman had cream at the top. Before you drank the milk, you would shake the bottle to remix the cream with the rest of the milk.)

   To make butter at home, you had to skim the fatty cream off the top. What remained was called skimmed milk. The cream was poured into a churn where, by hand, it was agitated by a wooden dasher. The first result was a frothy whipped cream. Continued agitation produced butter. Kneading the butter would make it smooth.

   Once the butter was formed, it was strained to remove liquid from it that was called buttermilk. Then the family could butter its biscuits with the butter, to which salt was normally added, and wash them down with buttermilk.

 The buttermilk you buy in the store today is not made in this way. It is created by adding a lactic acid bacteria culture to skim or non-fat milk which is then fermented.

A butter churn is a mechanical device used to agitate cream until it becomes butter by causing the gobs of fat it consists of to stick together. Churns come in many different designs. The first ones were hand powered. (The picture above shows a woman churning butter by hand.)

Caning is a way of weaving a chair’s seat by using some kind of vine. Baskets can also be made by weaving some kind of vine or straw.

As a result of the election of Abraham Lincoln as president of the United States in 1860, eleven southern states, including Georgia, left the Union in 1861 and formed the Confederate States of America. Lincoln was the first Republican elected president, and the South feared this party because it opposed slavery and favored high tariffs (a kind of tax) on imported goods--things bought from foreigners and shipped to this country. The creation of the Confederacy led to a war between the Confederate States and the United States. This war is usually called the Civil War. (Confederates called it the War Between the States.)  It ended in April 1865 when the Confederate States surrendered. The most important result of this war was the elimination of slavery, which in 1861 existed in the eleven states that left the Union and other southern states that did not leave the Union. Despite the fact that the nation’s population was vastly smaller then than it is today, and weapons were far less advanced, more men lost their lives in this war (about 600,000) than in all our other wars put together. Property loss in the South was enormous. Pictured above is the flag of the 41st Georgia Infantry in which a number of Carroll County men served.

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In early American guns were occasionally used to fight wars, but they were much more often used for personal protection and for hunting. Before the raising of livestock became widespread, hunting and fishing was the only way many people could get meat to eat. Meat was also obtained by using traps.

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A train consists of one or more locomotives (engines) connected to passenger and freight cars for transporting people and freight. Passenger trains are very rare today, but they were very common until after World War II.  The wood burned to turn water into the steam that powered the first trains was carried in the tender. Later coal was burned to create the steam that powered steam engines. A coal-burning, Southern Railway steam engine and its tender is shown above.

Trains run on a set of parallel metal rails attached to wooden ties anchored by rocks called ballast. In the past locomotives were powered by steam engines. Steam engines were retired from use in the 1950s. Today most trains are powered by diesel engines. A few trains are powered by electricity via electric lines strung above the tracks.

Before the introduction of trains, the great majority of long distance travel was by boat on rivers, canals, and the ocean. It was not until after World War II that trains began to be replaced by trucks and automobiles. Trains are still the cheapest method of moving heavy, low cost materials and products by land. It was not until the 20th century that paved roads existed outside cities and towns. Until that happened, trains could not be largely replaced by land-based methods of transport.

There were no railroad lines in Carroll County until after the Civil War (War Between the States). Atlanta, on the other hand, came into existence because several railroad lines were joined together there, and it became an important center for the distribution of all kinds of merchandize as a result.

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Cotton is a very soft fiber that grows around a cotton plant’s seeds. The above picture is of a farm worker hoeing (chopping down weeds) in a field of cotton. Cotton is native to tropical and subtropical (warm climates) parts of both the Old and New (America) worlds. It is usually spun into a thread and used to make a soft, breathable cloth. Until the middle of the 20^th century it was the South’s major crop. In 1860 it accounted for over half the nation’s exports. (Exports are things grown or manufactured here that are sold to foreigners and shipped abroad to them.) Eventually herbicides (chemicals) were developed that could be sprayed on weeds to kill them.

Corn, a native American plant, was also a major crop in Georgia. Indian corn is the term used to describe the original type of corn, whose kernels are multi-colored. Its cobs are also much smaller than the corn you find in today's grocery stores. Animals, too, such as chickens, cows, and hogs look far different today than they did in early America. Cows today give more milk. Chickens lay more eggs and have more meat on them. Hogs, too, have more meat. This is the result of many decades of selective breeding.

  Hominy is made by soaking dried corn in water that has been mixed with lye, which is an alkali. In the past the lye was obtained from wood ash, which was plentiful back when people cooked on a wood stove and heated their homes with fireplaces.

  To make hominy, corn is soaked until the germ and hard outer shell are removed, leaving the bare kernels. This makes the corn more tasty, easier to digest, and easier to process.

  Another corn product that has always been very popular in the South is grits. Traditionally grits were made by grinding corn with a stone in a mill. The resulting ground corn was passed through screens. This separated the finer grains from the larger ones. The finer grains are corn meal, which is used to make corn bread. The coarse grains are grits.

  Up until the mid-20^th century gristmills were common throughout the South. Farmers would take their corn to a nearby grist mill to be ground. The miller would keep part of the ground corn to pay himself for his work.

  Grits were most often eaten for breakfast. Visiting Yankees have often horrified Southerners by putting sugar on them like you would cream of wheat. Cream of wheat is similar in texture to grits, but it is made of ground wheat. Southerners eat grits with butter or gravy.

  Even when cotton was king, more corn was grown in Georgia than cotton. The predominance of corn in the diet of some Georgians led to a deadly dietary disease, pellagra, being a problem as late as the early 20^th century. (These people didn’t eat enough other foods containing protein.)

  Although today you see more sugar-cured ham than country ham, in the old days Southerners usually ate country ham with their grits. Country ham is very salty in taste because it is salt- and saltpeter-cured for about a month before being smoked and aged for several months to a year. The smoking causes it to be redder than other hams. Back before refrigeration was available, smoking was necessary to preserve the meat. A whole country ham will be too salty to eat unless it is scrubbed and soaked for many hours. This both removes mold and much of the salt used to cure it.

In the late 20th century the raising of cattle and chickens in Carroll County largely replaced row cropping--the growing of crops like corn and cotton.

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The preservation of food usually involves preventing the growth of bacteria, fungi, and other undesirable organisms. Prevented, too, is the food becoming rancid or discolored like an apple that is allowed to sit around awhile after being peeled. Drying is one of the oldest methods and can be used for meat and fruits. Pickling and smoking are other methods used in early America that are still used today. Pickling involves placing or cooking food in something that kills bacteria. Often used is brine, vinegar, or a vegetable oil. Hams are often smoked or sugar cured. Freezing could be used  in early America only during the winter. Canning involves cooking fruits or vegetables and sealing them in sterile (germ free) jars, cans, or bottles and boiling them to kill bacteria. Canning did not begin until 19th century (1800s). Food may also be preserved by cooking it in a material that solidifies to form a gel. This is called jellying. The woman in the picture above is standing in front or her preserves and under smoked meat.

  While back before families could refrigerate their food, fruits could be preserved by being cooked in a syrup made of sugar and water and then being stored in well sealed glass jars, for meat a different system was required.

  Today you see many cattle in Carroll County fields. Seldom do you see hogs. In the past the opposite was true. Back then, when the weather turned cold, it was time to butcher hogs. This was because if butchering took place on a hot day, the meat was likely to spoil.

  It has been said that the only part of a hog that was not used was the squeal. Besides providing farm families with meat, soap and candles were made from the hog's fat, and brushes were made from its hair. Some of the meat was turned into bacon and ham in a smokehouse. In addition to adding flavor, smoking the meat helped to preserve it.

  Neighbors were often invited over to help with the butchering. Sharp knives were used to stab and bleed the hog, shave off its hair, dress the carcass, and carve the meat into various cuts. In order to shave the hog’s hair, the hog was first scalded with water from a container heated over a fire.

  Salt was needed for producing fat back, ham, and bacon. Lye was needed to make soap and hominy, and various seasonings were needed to make sausage.

  The hog was hung from a pole for cleaning, dressing, and cooling before the meat was carved. Its feet were cut off to be processed into pickled pigs feet. The brains and intestines were also removed to be eaten. The ears, nose, and tail were also removed and eaten. The thick layers of fat on each side of the backbone were made into lard, which was used in baking.

  The intestines were washed several times before being slid over sticks inside out. Then the insides were thoroughly washed. Once they were boiled, which was very foul smelling process, this meat, called chitlins or chitterlings, was ready to eat.

  Some of the chitlins were laid aside to be used as sausage casings. The basic contents of sausage came from lean meat from the loins and shoulders mixed with fat. A hand-cranked meat grinder was used to grind this meat up. After being mixed with seasonings, this was stuffed into chitlin casings with a hand stuffer. Fat trimmed from the various cuts of meat were cubed for making soap. Salt pork used in frying and flavoring vegetables was created by soaking some of the meat in brine. (Brine is water saturated or nearly saturated with salt.)

  In order to smoke meat it was hung in a building called a smokehouse that was made as air tight as possible in order to keep the smoke used to cure the meat from escaping. Hams, shoulders, bacon slabs, and sausage were cured by smoking. The smoke was produced by a fire box on the floor of the smokehouse. Smoked meat might be kept for years without spoiling.

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In early America water-powered grist mills were used to grind grains such as corn, wheat, and rye into meal to be used to bake bread. While some of them were major operations, most were small, neighborhood mills serving nearby farmers. A farmer paid the miller a toll in the form of part of the grain he brought to the mill. The miller would place the grain in a funnel-like hopper above a pair of millstones. He would then open a sluice gate that would let water flow onto and turn a water wheel which would turn the millstones. The grain would be ground into meal between the millstones. (Water from behind a dam upstream from a mill turned the water wheel.) There were a number of water-powered mills in Carroll County. One of the men in the above picture is pouring grain in a grist mill.

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A saw mill was where logs would be cut into boards. Before there were saw mills, two men would cut boards from a log with a cross-cut saw. One man would pull this very long saw, and the other one would push it. Then the man who pulled would switch to pushing, and the other man would pull. This was very hard and slow work. Early saw mills were, like the grist mills described above, powered by a water wheel. The straight saw was eventually replaced by a circular saw powered by a steam engine, which was the same kind of engine used to propel a railroad locomotive. The picture above is of a saw mill. The workers are preparing logs to be sawed into boards.

The first thing to be used to join boards to each other was pegs made of wood. The first nails, which are made of metal, used to join boards to each other were hand made. Later machines were developed to make them out of wire. Because cutting boards required too much labor and required equipment they didn't have, in early America many buildings were made of logs that were attached to each other by notches cut into their ends. Sometimes the logs were roughly squared off with an axe.

America's first settlers from Europe had no way to remove tree stumps, so they planted their crops between the stumps while waiting for them to rot. Because there was so much to do and so few people to do it, instead of chopping trees down with axes (They had no saws.), they sometimes just chopped a ring around them and waited for them to die and fall down. Later they used animals to pull stumps up, or they dynamited them.

The first settlers from Europe arrived in the Eastern part of the United States in the 17th century (1600s). Carroll County was settled by people whose ancestors came from Europe and Africa, displacing in the process its original inhabitants. Prior to their arrival, the people Coweta County is named for lived in Carroll County. Coweta is the Creek Indian's name for themselves. (The first Americans were called Indians because the first Europeans to travel to America thought they were in India.)

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It wasn't until well into the 20th century that most homes ceased to be heated by fireplaces.  In the 18th century (1700s) a better method was invented. It was a round, cast iron container called a potbelly stove into which wood or coal was put into it through a door and burned. It could be sat several feet into a room from a wall. Smoke from it was vented to the outside by a large diameter metal pipe called a flue. It would heat a much larger area than a fireplace would. Similar in nature was the wood stove people cooked on. Its name is due to the fact it burned wood. It was rectangular in shape, and you cooked on its heated top. Some of what was cooked was kept until it was needed in a cellar, which was a place dug out under a house. Food was kept there to keep it cooler.

The picture on the left above is of a family shelling peanuts in front of their fireplace to be used as seeds. The picture on the right is of a man putting coal into a potbelly stove. This type of heating device was invented by Benjamin Franklin.

Early in the 20th century homes and businesses in cities, where the delivery of coal was relatively cheap, switched to being heated by furnaces that burned coal. Natural gas began to be used for lighting in cities in the 19th century  and became widely used to heat homes in cities in the 20th century. (Natural gas is obtained just like oil is by drilling a deep shaft into the ground. Neither of these is produced in Carroll County.)

In early America few homes had glass in their windows because it was so expensive. When it was cold windows with no glass in them were covered by closing shutters over them. (Window shutters on homes today are simply decorations that cannot be shut over a window.) Window screens to keep out flies and mosquitoes did not become common until well into the 20th century.

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In early America there were no bathrooms, so people depended on outhouses, which were small buildings covering a deep hole in the ground. One is shown in the above picture. Often planks, rather than logs, were used. (A baby carriage sits beside it.) People sat on a wooden bench in the building that had one or more holes in it. Multiple holes meant more than one person at a time could use it. Corn cobs or pieces of newspaper or pages torn from a mail order catalog were used in outhouses before toilet paper became available.

 Piped-in water did not become common even in cities until late in the 19th century and was not the rule until the 20th century. Carroll County began providing piped-in water to its rural residents long after it was available in Carrollton, Villa Rica, and Bowdon where, because houses are closer together, it is cheaper to provide. If you had a well, and you did not have a water pump to pump water to your house, to take a bath required pouring either cold water or water headed on a stove into a portable metal tub to take a bath. People with piped-in water who did not have a water heater would have to heat water on a stove in order to take a hot bath.

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Lamps that work by lighting a wick immersed in kerosene were widely used in the last half of the19th century and early 20th centuries. (Kerosene is made from oil.) They were a big improvement over candles in that they were safer and provided more light. Electricity began to be used for lighting in cities in the late 19th century and became widespread early in the 20th century. However, it was not until the 1930s that it began to be available in most rural areas. In cities electric lighting replaced the (natural) gas lights used to light streets and homes. (Today you only see gas lights in the form of decorative post lanterns in people's front yards.) The boy in the above picture is reaching for a kerosene lamp. Children were often given the job of washing off the soot that accumulated on the lamp's glass globe and trimming the wick.

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Like candles, in early America soap was made at home. To wash using hot water required that it be heated over a fire or on a wood stove. The water would be drawn from a well or a stream. To get stubborn dirt out of a garment it was rubbed vigorously on a scrub or wash board. This was hard on the clothes. Clothes were dried either by spreading them over bushes or hanging them from a line strung between two poles. The woman in picture on the left above is making soap. The woman in the picture on the right is using a wash board to scrub her family's clothes.

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In early America food could be keep cool by building a spring house. This was small house built over a spring. A spring is a place where water comes up out of the ground and is, for this reason, relatively cool. Manufactured ice became widely available in cities in the early 20th century, and the first of what we now call refrigerators were ice boxes, which were refrigerator-like appliances containing a block of ice. Like coal, ice was delivered door-to-door from a truck.

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Radio broadcasting connected rural areas with the rest of the world in the 1920s. Prior to then farmers had to depend on newspapers for local, national, and international news. They learned about farming from farmers' almanacs and at agricultural and mechanical schools, one of which was begun in 1906 in Carrollton. Out of it grew the University of West Georgia. Before phonographs and radio, if people wanted music in their homes, they had to play and sing it themselves.

The boys in the above picture are listening to the radio. If, for example, they were listening to a story about cowboys, they had to imagine what the cowboys and their horses looked like. Children's programs were broadcast on Saturday mornings. What were called soap operas designed to appeal to housewives were broadcast in the afternoon during the week. At night there were baseball games and mystery and comedy shows. Popular in the South was the country music of the Grand Ole Opera, which was broadcast from Nashville. Before television, Atlanta had a minor-league baseball team, the Crackers, who played teams in such places as Birmingham and Little Rock. Carroll County had local, amateur teams. One of the nation's first radio stations was Atlanta's WSB.