Pioneer history of Ingham County, compiled and arranged by Mrs. Franc L. Adams, secretary of the Ingham County pioneer and historical society.

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PI'ONEER IIIS;TORY OF INGIAM COUNTY

ward learned had been condemned. They had gone only seven
miles when morning came and so many floats were broken from
the paddle wheels that the vessel only dared stop once at Erie
before running straight to Detroit. They bought their furniture
in Jackson where they found brother John with an ox-cart waiting
to take them to the new home in Ingham county. Most of the
furniture had to be left behind, and when they had settled in the
log house on John's farm and the first meal was on the table Mr.
Swan sat on the churn and his wife on the bed. Soon, however,
the rest of the furniture was brought from Jackson and in the fall
they moved to the farm nearby, bought that summer of an insistent
neighbor, where they lived together ever after until the death of
Mrs. Swan. Mr. Swan still holds the old deed, dated August 2,
1852, and all his tax receipts. The tax that year on his 80 acres
was $2.11; six years later it reached the low figure of $1.66. In
1860, on 116 acres, he was taxed $7.25 as compared with $53.57
for 1908.
The house was a comfortable dwelling with walls of solid logs,
hewn smooth on the inside, and with the chinks "mudded up" to
make them wind and weather proof. The only sawed lumber in
the whole building was used in the door and window casings and
these boards were sawed by hand by whip-sawyers. The floors
were made of split basswood, puncheons; the same puncheons,
hollowed down the middle, were laid concave side up for a roof, and
others with the hollowed side down were laid over the joints and
the chinks were filled with moss. A great fireplace nearly filled
one end of the living room, and at one end of this swung the iron
crane on which the pots and kettles were hung and then suspended over the fire.
One night that fall Mr. Swan was asked to bring his fiddle to a
dance at Hunt's tavern, two miles south of his farm. IIe went and
then and there he says was danced the first cotillion ever called
off in Michigan west of Detroit. He formed the young people on
the floor and taught them cotillions, with their various figures and
movements. "Country dances," which were never "called off,"
were all that had been known here, and the news went over the
country that a man over in Ingham could fiddle cotillions and call
them off. After that he and his fiddle were kept busy, and he
played at dances far and near for three shillings and sixpense per