Daniel’s Early Years 

Daniel K. Oliver was born on August 30, 1845 into a lower-middle class family of Scotch-Irish and English descent  in a small community in Pennsylvania called Smoketown located in southern Franklin County near the county seat of Chambersburg. (NUMBER OF CHILDREN) His father was a weaver, a trade natural to the family heritage from their origins in Scotland and Ireland. His father had a small store facing the main street. Nearby they had a house and surrounding property. As it was the age of the horse and buggy we presume that they also had a barn and probably enough property to grow food for the family and grazing for the animals. Heating for the home would likely have been wood provided for both a stove for cooking and a fireplace for heating the main area of the house. Water would have come from a well and a hand-operated pump. Water for washing up in the morning would have been poured into large porcelain bowls placed on a table or dresser. Toilet facilities would have been provided by chamberpots and an outhouse some ways from the home.  Cooking would have been done on a large wood-fired stove the heat from which would have been controlled by the skill of the cook in stoking the fire properly and discerning the heat of the stove surface or oven by various tests as to appropriate temperature for cooking. We don’t know for sure how the family clothed themselves, but their father was a weaver who could make cloth and their mother was no doubt a skilled seamstress, as were all women of the time. Store bought clothes were very rare at this time—the 1840s and 1850s when Daniel and the other children were growing up.

The thing that struck me doing research through census data was how much their life in 1860 was like the life of 1960 where I was growing up. In 1960 technological achievement was vastly different, but when I grew up in northern Idaho most of the people I knew still lived on farms or at least rural properties where the chores were the same as in the past. I lived with my aunt and uncle part of this time and they had chickens for eggs and for eating. The phrase “chicken with its head cut off” is not a metaphor for me, but a memory of the day they were killed for that evening’s meal. My uncle raised and slaughtered cattle. And since people kept animal stock these creatures would need food and most of that would be in the form of hay. So in 1960 (when I was fourteen and living in the small town of Sandpoint) I was hired by a farm family to help them with the haying and I stayed with them several days. And in the census of 1860 in Franklin County Pennsylvania 14-year-old Daniel Oliver was listed as living with the Issac Lehman family no doubt to make money by helping them during the haying season.

His life at that time was typical of people in mostly rural America who were usually described on census records as “laborer.” Even though Daniel’s father was a weaver none of the sons followed their father in his work. Daniel no doubt went to grade school and spent his days doing chores on the family property. He likely finished school with the sixth or eighth grade level, after which he worked at various forms of physical labor. In 1864 at the age of eighteen he joined the 21s Pennsylvania Cavalry during the Civil War. He had to have his parents permission to join the army as men could only join the army without such permission if they were twenty-one years old or older.