You mought find it curious, I’ll warrant, that the dialect Yankees have always associated with hillbillies, crackers and rednecks, in fact originated in their own neck of the woods. And so Conrad Richter delivers it in The Trees, the first (1941) book in his Awakening Land triology.
It’s the memorable story of Worth and Jary Luckett, and their spirited children, especially daughter Sayward, woodsies all, who pull up stakes and leave behind their puncheon-floor cabin in 1780s Pennsylvania, treking single-file into the virgin forests of the Ohio Valley to start anew.
Their "early, vigorous spoken language," Richter notes in his foreward, "contrary to public belief, had its considerable origin in the Northeastern states, whence it was carried by emigrants into pioneer Ohio and adjoining territories, where today it has largely disappeared, and along with the Pennsylvania rifle, into the South and Southwest, where it has more widely survived…"
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 