The father of William Few, the narrator, had trekked down from Maryland and settled in Orange County, some miles east of the little hamlet of Hillsborough.

"In that country at that time there were no schools, no churches or parsons, or doctors or lawyers; no stores, groceries or taverns, nor do I recollect during the first two years any officer, ecclesiastical, civil or military, except a justice of the peace, a constable and two or three itinerant preachers....

These people had few wants, and fewer temptations to vice than those who lived in more refined society, though ignorant.

They were more virtuous and more happy....
A schoolmaster appeared and offered his services to teach the children of the neighborhood for twenty shillings each per year....

In that simple state of society money was but little known; the schoolmaster was the welcome guest of his pupil, fed at the bountiful table and clothed from the domestic loom....
In that country at that time there was great scarcity of books." The journals of itinerant ministers through the Valley of Virginia and the Carolina piedmont zone yield precious mementoes of the people, their longing after the things of the spirit, and their pitiful isolation from the regular preaching of the gospel.
These missionaries were true pioneers in this Old Southwest, ardent, dauntless, and heroic--carrying the word into remote places and preaching the gospel beneath the trees of the forest.
In his journal (1755-6), the Rev.Hugh McAden, born in Pennsylvania of Scotch-Irish parentage, a graduate of Nassau Hall (1753), makes the unconsciously humorous observation that wherever he found Presbyterians he found people who "seemed highly pleased, and very desirous to hear the word"; whilst elsewhere he found either dissension and defection to Baptist principles, or "no appearance of the life of religion." In the Scotch-Irish Presbyterian settlements in what is now Mecklenburg County, the cradle of American liberty, he found "pretty serious, judicious people" of the stamp of Moses, William, and James Alexander.