P. M. House
The "Blackland Farmer"
from "Southeast Corner of Tarrant County Before the Civil War"
by Sallie Hodges McKnight
P. M. House was the first farmer to settle on the immediate blackland section. He was a quiet, unobtrusive old man from Tennessee, dressed in "homespun." He was not at all bloodthirsty,
although he might inform you quite casually that he had just "axed" a neighbor for his plow.
That wouldn't mean that either the neighbor or good English had suffered violence. It was just a fancy bit of Chaucer English somehow handed down through a long line of English ancestry
from the time when "axe" meant to "ask." As this settlement was largely English, it was not uncommon to run up on such Chaucer expressions at "hit" for "it," "pore" for poor," and the English of Shakespeare was in common use, as in the following:
If a man didn't "keer" to do a thing, he was not inclined to do it. He "holp" (helped) his neighbor, or "clomb" (climbed) a fence, or "wropped" (wrapped) a package, or "whupped" (whipped) the children in true Shakespearean style.
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