Quaker Families of Smyrna

Reminiscences - Quaker Families of Smyrna

Chenango County, New York

Morning Sun, Norwich, NY, January 30, 1904

A Friend [Quaker] in Smyrna has furnished the writer with the following for the [Oxford] Times.  About the year 1820 some Friends, Henry Knowles, Benjamin Knowles, Benjamin Boss, Rufus Briggs and Arnold Briggs founded their society in Smyrna.  Meetings were first held in a private dwelling one and a fourth miles south of the village and later worshipped for about half a century in a meeting house three-fourths of a mile farther north, then erected a plain but beautiful edifice in the village, and a few years later disposed of it and located their place of worship in Upperville, four miles west of Smyrna.  Henry Knowles had four sons, Henry A., Abraham, Robert and Benjamin, also five daughters, Susan, Mary A., Alice, Letitia and Sarah, who married respectively John Peckham, Daniel Peckham, James Boss, George Carpenter and John Carpenter. Other prominent Friends are Benjamin Knowles, Joseph Knowles, Benjamin Knowles 2d, Samuel Purdie, Chester Weaver and Charles Weaver and families.  All business matters are to be transacted through preparative meetings, monthly meetings, quarterly meetings and yearly meetings.  

We close with the following remarkable incident, verbatim et literatim, by the Friend above referred to, Henry Knowles, who had been out in this part of the country a horseback, on returning early in the spring, found the water was high and one stream he crossed after dark, just before stopping for the night at a hotel .  Where he stopped they asked him which way he came.  He told them and they said that could not be for the bridge was gone, but he told them he came right straight along, made no turns that he knew of, but as it was very dark he gave his horse the reins to pick his own way, and some of the men went in the morning and found the prints of his horse's calks in the large stringer that it walked over, and was thus preserved by the Master.  He said that he hardly ever inquired the way but was led by the unerring Spirit.