ere was but little drunkenness. Whisky
and brandy were medicine, used as first aid, regardless of the ailment,
while awaiting the arrival of the doctor with his saddlebags of pills
and powders. Their social value, too, was recognized, and the gourd and
demijohn appeared almost simultaneously with the arrival of any guest.
But it was bad form--evidence of a weak will--for anyone, save the old
men, to show the influence of what they drank. This was, however, a
perquisite and one of the tolerated pleasures of old age.

In the records of a lawsuit tried in Fentress county in 1841 the
price-list of some necessaries and luxuries are shown:

"To two gallons of liquor, $1; one quart of whisky and six pounds of
pork, 80 cents; one deer-skin, 75 cents; two kegs of tar, $2; two ounces
of indigo, 40 cents; one gallon of whisky, 50 cents; five and one-half
pints of apply brandy, 31-1/4 cents."

They were almost uneventful years at Pall Mall from the days of Coonrod
Pile until the Civil War. Less than a score of years lapsed from the
death of the pioneer in 1849 until over the mountains broke the warstorm
in a fury that has no parallel except in wars where father has fought
son, and brother fought brother; where the cause of war and the
principles for which it is fought are lost in the presence of cruelties
created in personal hatred and deeds of treachery perpetrated for
revenge. A third generation had grown to manhood at Pall Mall.

In Fentress county, the polling of the vote upon secession was marked
with bloodshed. The county was on the military border between the free
and the slaveholding states. Coonrod Pile had been a slaveholder, but
few of the mountaineers were owners. Slavery as an institution did not
appeal to their Anglo-Saxon principles; poverty had prevented slavery's
advance into the mountains as a custom, and as racial distinction was
not to be clearly defined into master and worker, the negro's presence
in the mountains was unwelcomed. A war to uphold a custom they did not
practise did not appeal to them; so as a great wedge the Alleghany
mountains, extending far into the slaveholding states, was peopled with
Union sympathizers.

Fentress county on the slope of the great mountain range and on the
border between the territory firmly held by the North and by the South
became a no-man's land, subjected successively to marauding bands from
each side, a land for plunder and revenge.

Before the war the county had be