Annals of our ancestors; one hundred and fifty years of history in the ...

CHAPTER IV
OUR MOTHER, SOPHRONIA KEELER WATKINS
T was August 17, 1804, that a daughter was
born to David and Abigail Skeels Keeler in
Essex County, New York, near Lake Champlain.
She was named Sophronia and was the
first-born daughter of her parents. Older than
she was her brother William, born in 1800,
while after her came Jesse and Hernando
Cortez and last a sister, Julia Ann.
It is hard to realize that her birthplace was a log cabin set
in the stony fields of a wild and rugged country. When three
of her children visited the scene years afterward, the tworoomed
cabins had given place to palatial residences in a thick-
ly settled, well-cultivated country. These little pioneer cabins,
having one room below and one above, with communication
by ladder, had evolved into houses of brick or stone with
spacious and beautiful rooms adorned with works of art; broad
stairways displaced ladders, and treasures from the far corners
of the earth made elegance undreamed of in 1804. Greater
than the lack of luxury was the absence of what we now con-
sider necessities. Schools were rare; a three months' sub-
scription school was thought to be quite sufficient to teach the
children to read and write and give them some knowledge of
"figures." Books were seldom found in the homes of the poor;
the Bible was the one book in houses of poverty. The little
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