watch-makers learned to make the eight-day
clocks--the last word in time-keepers until the advent of the modern
electric clocks. The manufacturers of the watches and clocks soon made
instruments for surveyors as well as the much needed compasses.

The first successful effort to produce a machine to take the place of
the flail and threshing floor for threshing wheat from the straw had its
start in this same town. The machines were a marvel in their day and the
villagers talked for months at the time when the machine beat out one
hundred bushels of grain in one day!

The Story Teller of the Valley--Samuel Kercheval

PIONEER LIFE

Samuel Kercheval as a boy saw many of the pioneer men and women who had
cut their homes out of the wilderness. He never tired hearing of how
they had left Germany, and later had come down from Pennsylvania into
the Valley. He himself could remember many of the "Newcomers" who were
themselves pioneers. He loved the stories of the forts, the Indian raids
and the customs of the Germans and Scotch-Irish. He later began to write
down many of these stories and after he was older he rode up and down
the Valley gathering more and more stories and reading wills and old
records. Nothing was of too little value for him to record, even
accounts of the freaks of nature, like a six-legged calf, snakes and
other animals.

When Kercheval's friends insisted that he write a book about the Valley,
he objected until they told him how much the children of the country
would enjoy stories of their grandparents. His own children (there had
been fourteen of them in all), like all children, loved stories. Now he
began to get his notes in shape and about one hundred years after the
first settlers came into the Valley, Samuel Kercheval's _History of the
Valley of Virginia_ was ready for the publishers.

This was so popular that all the first edition was soon exhausted. How
pleased he was with the demands for more of them! However, he died
before the second edition came out. He lived at the time of his death in
1845 at "Harmony Hall" near Strasburg. This had at one time been a fort.
During an Indian raid, we are told, sixteen families sought shelter
within its old stone walls. They lived together so peaceably that they
gave it the name of "Harmony Hall."

It is from Kercheval that we get the first pictures of the Valley. He
writes that it was long beautiful prairie, with tall rich grasses, five
and six feet