The frame of Rutherford Hayes's shop had been pinned, not
spiked together--for nails were still a scarcity. That was one rea-
son Brattleboro needed a blacksmith. Less than a month after his
arrival, sparks were flying from his anvil. "A dirty, black business!"
he used to cry, half-apologetically, "but it does bring in white
money!"

Young Hayes found lodging with the Smiths, a family which
had come to the wilderness from Hadley, Massachusetts. The
eldest of the nine Smith children was Chloe, a girl of sixteen.
Hard-working, obedient, cheerful, she was already inured to the
hardships of frontier life. Her grave, appealing countenance drove
all thoughts of returning to New Haven from the mind of Ruther-
ford Hayes. They were married the following year--in 1779.
Chloe was eighteen when their first child was born. It was a little
girl, and they named her Polly.

In physical endurance Chloe Hayes was a fitting companion
for her brawny husband. In will-power, neighbors testified, she
was even more indomitable. Not long after the birth of Polly, an
opportunity to take over the management of a tavern near West
Brattleboro, at a point where the pike turned west over the green
hills to Marlboro, was offered to the young couple. They named
it the Hayes Tavern; but soon it was known in the neighborhood
of Brattleboro as the Big House. How proud the young Hayeses
were of its fourteen great fireplaces! The largest of them all, with
its long, blackened crane, and its spacious Dutch ovens for roast-
ing meat and fowls, roared in the cellar. There, under the rafters
of a low-beamed ceiling, Mrs. Hayes established an undisputed
reputation as the first cook in southern Vermont.

A noisy brood of little Hayeses, as the years passed, gathered
like chicks about her busy petticoats. Upstairs to bed they were
sent before the crowd in the great taproom to the right of the
wide hallway became noisy. How merry was the ballroom on the
second floor of the Big House, when the whole countryside
gathered to celebrate the admission of Vermont as the fourteenth
State of the Union! A bar-cupboard opened off this ballroom, and,
there, on such festive occasions, Chloe Hayes officiated. She could
wait on the guests of these tavern balls all night, and start out the
next morning on horseback, with her husband, on a two-hundred
mile trip to Bainbridge, in Chenango County, New York, to visit
the elder Smiths.

Late every Saturday afternoon, Mrs. Hayes pushed her work-
basket as far as she could under the high, four-poster bed, so that
she might not be tempted by it over the Sabbath. Every Saturday

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