Age does have compensations. . . . . . . I grew up in a little village in the North Carolina mountains. My parents and I lived in a conventional house with a conventional yard on main street near the court house. My grandmother and most of the older folks lived on the other street known as the Summit. From the front, the Summit houses and lots were as conventional as those on main street. But . . . . . The lots of homes on the Summit were deep, running down to a stream in a small valley. I would estimate that the lots were three or four acres each. My Grandmother lived on the Summit. She had a large barn with storage areas, a loft filled with hay, and stalls beneath where four or five cows lived when they weren't outside grazing; a family of guinea hens lived on the back slope of the lot; the hen house and yard contained twenty-five or more chickens with their biddies; another pen was home to twenty or so grey geese; the hog pen (well away from the house and sheltered by an apple tree for the pleasure of the hogs) held a few mature hogs and several litters each year. Old bridles hanging on the wall in the barn's store room and a couple of old wagon wheels testified that horses had once been part of this town lot. My Grandmother no longer cultivated her land, except for a small kitchen garden with its neat rows. Many people who lived on the Summit grew corn and had large vegetable gardens. Some town dwellers also had large tracts of land in the countryside where they grew tobacco, the mainstay of our county's economy. Dick Reynolds in Winston-Salem bought up all of the tobacco these red hills could produce. Behind my Grandmother's house stood an old well, a smoke house where a small fire sometimes burned to smoke hams hung from the beams; the cows were milked and the milk boiled on the old wood stove, cream skimmed off when it cooled, and butter churned; children went berry picking and the grown people made the best blackberry jelly one would ever want to taste; sometimes I helped collect eggs from the nests underneath the hen's soft down; laundry was 'boiled' in an iron kettle over a backyard fire; a similar iron kettle sufficed for making sausage in the fall; on a summer afternoon neighbor ladies would rock and chat on front porches while they prepared string beans for a family meal. And, yes, there was an out house though by the time I was born, the houses had running water and electricity; and a telephone hanging on the wall in the hall. . . . . If I couldn't find my Mother or my Grandmother, I could stand on a chair at the telephone to turn the crank. The town operator would answer and could almost always tell me where they were. Sometimes she would sit me on her lap and let me pull the lines and plug it into the right hole to connect the caller to the right household. After reading Craig's excellent response comparing livestock holdings with the amount of land owned in the 1786 Huntingdon County PA tax list, it occurred to me to agree with him - one cannot determine the size of a p erson's landed estate based on the inventory of his or her personal estate. It also occurred to me that except for running water, electricity, crank telephones, and Model-T Fords, I grew up in circumstances very similar to the culture of a couple of centuries ago Joyce Browning Fairfax County, Virginia To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe, please see the instructions at http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html