A settlement in the forest.
1851. The bar in our neck o’ woods has a little human in um.—‘Polly Peablossom’s Wedding,’ &c., p. 53.
1853. By getting what he could, and keeping what he got, he came to be considered as the “man of money” in his “neck-of-the-woods.”—S. A. Hammett (‘Philip Paxton’), ‘A Stray Yankee in Texas,’ p. 47.
1853. Who’d hev looked fur such treatment in a neck of the woods, whar no man ever eats his own beef, unless he eats at a neighbor’s?—Id., p. 187.
1871. He will … find his neighborhood designated as a neck of the woods, that being the name applied to any settlement made in the well-wooded parts of the South-west especially (de Vere).
1874. I reckon I am the beatin’est man to ax questions in this neck of timber.—E. Eggleston, ‘The Circuit-Rider,’ p. 119 (Lond., 1895).
