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The majority of Sumner's population was involved in agriculture. "Involved in agriculture" was a kind phraseology that blanketed a lifetime of toil, workdays with erratic work hours, myriad fears of blight and mold, of flood and drought, of colic and fevers, of death from childbirth, early freeze and late frost, of dry springs and all the cruelties that mother nature could offer. If crops didn't yield and their farm animals didn't thrive, a family would go hungry.
A family, however, was part of a community, and a community was a family. Every family knew every other family in their community, all traded with the same merchants and usually attended one of two or three of the same churches in their small communities. The spirit of the community----the family----was to share and share alike whether the growing season was prosperous or disastrous, fat or lean.
What would an ordinary day be for the farmer? Before dawn, he and his elder sons would have eaten a hot breakfast. Repairs on the farm would be a priority as would tending to any sick or ailing livestock. Surveying the rock fences for openings, surveying the creeks after the night's hard rains will be amongst the chores. Finding stones for the fences, however, would not require much work. Any resident of Sumner County knows that the soil is rich, but it is extremely rocky with flint and limestone chips.
There would be chores for nearly every child in the house. Eggs would need to be gathered, hogs to be slopped, chickens to be fed, peas to be shelled, beans to be snapped. At an early age, the girls would follow their mother as she worked through the day. They would look on as she mended father's overalls or darned his socks. Quietly, they would sit and play string games or patty-cake singing games at her feet as mother sat churning butter and nursing the baby.
No moment went unfilled. In the evening, mother would teach the girls the essential task of needlework. The girls would have to know how to patch their families' clothing, how to make their own dresses and especially how to craft quilts to keep their own families warm one day. "Store-bought" dresses were a luxury that a poor "dirt-farmer" could not afford for his wife.
What was life like for a member of the "landed gentry"? Sumner County had several families who were truly wealthy in more than one respect. They were community-minded, well-educated, more politically oriented, more inclined to be intermediary between the poorer dirt-farmers and the statesmen. They were, of course, more apt to lead as statesmen themselves, or as elders in the churches.
Their wealth, however, did not offer them lives of flamboyant decadence. Perhaps their ordinary day would be spent about the town square debating points of law, sitting about at hearings, awaiting release from appointment as a juror for the quarterly term. They may have spent time attending the business of educating orphans put into their care, or conducting business as an executor of an estate, perhaps as a counsellor to a fallen brother or sister in their church. They, too, usually owned their own farm, but their role may have been one as employer of an overseer rather than that of his neighbor who rolled up his sleeves and hitched his team of mules to a wagon in the early mist of dawn on a late summer's morning.