Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 4).djvu/212

 It is in a healthy situation, on an elevated plain, and contains twenty dwelling houses, including two taverns and three stores. It has also a court-house and a gaol, in the former of which divine service was performing when I arrived to a numerous Presbyterian congregation. One of the houses is well built with stone; one of the taverns is a large framed house, and all the rest are formed of square logs, some of which are two stories high and very good.

Having to get a deed recorded at the clerk's office of the county, which could not be done until Monday morning, I stopt Sunday afternoon and night at West Union, where my accommodations in either eating or sleeping, could not boast of any thing beyond mediocrity.

Monday the 10th August, having finished my business and breakfasted, I resumed my journey through a country but indifferently inhabited, and at four miles and a half from West Union, I stopped for a few minutes at Allen's tavern, at the request of a traveller on horseback, who had overtaken and accompanied me for the last three miles. He was an elderly man named Alexander, a cotton planter in the S. W. extremity of North Carolina, where he owns sixty-four negro slaves besides his plantation—all acquired by industry—he having emigrated from Larne in Ireland, in early life, with no property. He was now going to visit a brother in law near Chilicothe. He had travelled upwards of five hundred miles within the last three weeks on the same mare. He had crossed the Saluda mountains, and the states of Tennessee and Kentucky, and had found houses of accommodation at convenient distances all along that remote road, but provender so dear, that he had to pay in many places a dollar for half a bushel of oats.

{183} Allen's is a handsome, roomy, well finished stone house, for which, with twenty acres of cleared land, he pays a yearly rent of one hundred and ten dollars, to Andrew