In one way the tulip-tree is closely connected with the most picturesque and interesting period of American development.  I mean the period of “hewed-log” houses.  Here and there among the hills of Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Carolinas, there remains one of those low, heavy, lime-chinked structures, the best index of the first change from frontier-life, with all its dangers and hardships, to the peace and contentment of a broader liberty and an assured future.  In fact, to my mind, a house of hewed tulip-logs, with liberal stone chimneys and heavy oaken doors, embowered in an old gnarled apple-and cherry-orchard, always suggests a sort of simple honesty and hospitality long since fallen into desuetude, but once the most marked characteristic of the American people.  It is hard to imagine any meanness or illiberality being generated in such a house.  Patriotism, domestic fidelity, and spotless honesty used to sit before those broad fireplaces wherein the hickory logs melted to snowy ashes.  The men who hewed those logs “hewed to the line” in more ways than one.  Their words, like the bullets from their flint-locked rifles, went straight to the point.  The women, too, they of the “big wheel” and the “little wheel,” who carded and spun and wove, though they may have been a trifle harsh and angular, were diamond-pure and the mothers of vigorous offspring.

I often wonder if there may not be a perfectly explainable connection between the decay or disappearance of the forests and the evaporation, so to speak, of man’s rugged sincerity and earnestness.  Why should not the simple ingredients that make up the worldly part of our souls and bodies be found in all their purity where nature’s reservoir has never been disturbed or its contents tainted?  Why may not the subtile force that develops the immense tulip-tree and clothes it with such a starry mantle have power also to invigorate and intensify the life of man?  “I was rocked in a poplar trough,” was the politician’s boast a generation ago.  Such a declaration might mean a great deal if the sturdy, towering strength of the tree out of which the trough was dug could have been absorbed by the embryo Congressman.  The “oldest inhabitant” of every Western neighborhood recollects the “sugar-trough” used in the maple-sap-gathering season, ere the genuine “sugar-camp” had been abandoned.  Young tulip-trees about fifteen inches in diameter were cut down and their boles sawed into lengths of three feet.  These were split in two, and made into troughs by hollowing the faces and charring them over a fire.  During the bright spring days of sugar-making the young Western mother would wrap her sturdy babe in its blanket and put it in a dry sugar-trough to sleep while she tended the boiling syrup.  A man born sixty years ago in the region of tulip-trees and sugar-camps was probably cradled in a “poplar” trough; and there were those born who would now be sixty years old if they had not in unwary infancy tumbled into the enormous rainwater-troughs with which every well-regulated house was furnished.  I have seen one or two of these having a capacity of fifty barrels dug from a single tulip bole.  In such a pitfall some budding Washington or Lincoln may have been whelmed without causing so much as a ripple on the surface of history.