Democratic Sentinel, Volume 19, Number 34, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 August 1895 — What Is a Croft? [ARTICLE]

What Is a Croft?

The origin of “croft" itself is “wrop In mystery.” It is a very old English term, appearing in the charters of title deeds of estates as long ago as the reign of •Ecjgar, .where the phrase “at the croft’s head” is quoted by Dr. Murray, but it remained long unrecognized in the literary language. The old English form, like the modem one, is croft, meaning an inclosed field. In lowland Scotch it appears generally in the form of craft, which is still employed in many derivatives, but the only other Teutonic equivalent in the sister language 16 the Dutch word “kroft,” which means “a piece of high and dry land,” “a field on the downs,” “a rock headland.” In the North of England, according to I lay, the word croft Implies neighborhood to a bouse, but in the South it Is applied to any small taclosure, near a building or otherwise. Early in the sixteenth century, FitzhCrbert defines a curtylage—whatever that might be—as ~“a Jytell croft or court to put in catell for a tyme.” In the seventeenth century the phrase occurs, “All ould tenants shall, have a croft and a medow,” which sounds as if it came out of a crofter commission report. First Steamboat Before Fulton’s Day The records of Jefferson County, W. Va., prove what is known to but few people in the country—that Robert Fulton, with his steamboat Clermont, had been anticipated over twenty-two years

as the builder of the first steamboat In the United States. The first steamboat, it is claimed, was really built by James Rumsey at Shepherdstown, Va. (now West Virginia). The boat was partially constructed in Frederick County, Md., in 1785. It was fitted up with machinery partly manufactured at a furnace called “the Catoctln,” owned by Johnson Bros., near Frederick, and the two cylinders, boilers, pumps, pipes, etc., were built In Baltimore. Part of the work was done at the old Antietam iron works. The boat was eighty feet In length, and was propelled by an engine which worked a vertical pump placed In the center of the boat. The water was drawn In at the bow of the boat and discharged at the stern through a horizontal pipe. The weight of the machinery was 665 pounds, and the boat’s tonnage or carrying capacity was three tons. All of the machinery, including the boilers, took up a space of only a little over four feet square. The first public experiment took place on the Potomac river on March 14, 1786, at which Rumsey’s boat showed a speed of four miles an hour upstream. The records show that George Washington and Gov. Tom Johnson of Maryland were among the patrons of Rumsey, and that the experiment was really made in the interest of the then proposed Chesapeake and Ohio canal.— Exchange. (But Robert Fulton was the man who first built a steamboat that would go and, pay.)