It provided his straight logs for building, his block mortars hollowed--by fire and stone--for corn-grinding, his solid plain furniture, his axles, rifle butts, ax handles, and so forth.
It supplied his magic wand for the searching out of iniquity in the junior members of his household, and his most cogent argument, as a citizen, in convincing the slothful, the blasphemous, or the dishonest adult whose errors disturbed communal harmony.

Its nuts fed his hogs.
Before he raised stock, the unripe hickory nuts, crushed for their white liquid, supplied him with butter for his corn bread and helped out his store of bear's fat.

Both the name and the knowledge of the uses of this tree came to the earliest pioneers through contact with the red man, whose hunting bow and fishing spear and the hobbles for his horses were fashioned of the "pohickory" tree.

The Indian women first made pohickory butter, and the wise old men of the Cherokee towns, so we are told, first applied the pohickory rod to the vanity of youth! A glance at the interior of a log cabin in the Back Country of Virginia or North Carolina would show, in primitive design, what is, perhaps, after all the perfect home--a place where the personal life and the work life are united and where nothing futile finds space.

Every object in the cabin was practical and had been made by hand on the spot to answer a need.