Author: Jnana Hodson

In downsizing to a remote fishing village in Downeast Maine, this eclectic writer feels everything's coming together.

Perhaps one of your family lines runs through Dover Friends Meeting

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

We get the occasional inquiry from someone researching a family genealogy and wondering if they were part of Dover Friends Meeting.

Records for early Dover are pretty scanty, including both First Parish and the Quakers.

Family registers in New England Quaker Meeting minutes have never been indexed, unlike William Wade Hinshaw’s ambitious volumes for Pennsylvania, New York, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Ohio or the subsequent multivolume project for Indiana.

Well, Dover’s births, marriages, and deaths compiled for publication in the early 1900s can now be found online, for those so interested.

Also, I should point out that the Puritans never called themselves such and did evolve into today’s Congregational and Unitarian-Universalist denominations. First Parish is heir to that stream.

On the Quaker side, connecting the dots from the Dover Combination signers as an early census, the court convictions for non-attendance at public worship, and the Friends Meeting’s records from 1701 and 1703 on hinted at the foundation of Quaker membership in the early years. A survey of online family genealogies helped immensely in filling in the general body, though I take many of those details with a grain of salt.

So here’s the core of the historic Friends community around the Piscataqua watershed:

Ring any bells?

We’re becoming a port of call

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Eastport has the deepest natural harbor in the continental U.S., but getting here requires going through Canadian waters. As a consequence, especially in the aftermath of 9/11, there are far fewer boats than you might expect during much of the year.

My first year up here, we had some impressive superyachts but no cruise ships. After seeing some celebrated floating hotels overshadowing Key West and then Portland, Maine, I would consider that as a blessing. From the water, the QE2 looked bigger than the Queen City of Maine’s downtown.

One of the newer trends, though, has been a revival of smaller cruise vessels of 200 or so passengers, and last summer we had a handful of those. Apart from the fact that they blocked some very popular mackerel fishing from the pier, they were a welcome addition to the downtown.

Bar Harbor, at the other end of our Downeast Region, has decided it’s become too popular as a port of call. Some days in summer have had two visiting cruise ships that drop off thousands of tourists on the town’s narrow streets and neighboring Acadia National Park. The local reaction has been to impose a limit, and that may be sending some itineraries our way.

This year it looks like we’re getting up to 11 ships, 16 visits in all, most of them in the autumn foliage season.

Here’s what I’ve found.

  • Pearl Mist, May 8 and again September 11.
  • Holland America Line’s Zaadam, May 22. The largest of the ships, with a maximum of 1,432 passengers plus staff, the 781-foot long vessel has more people than Eastport’s year-round population.
  • The 520-passenger Roald Amudsen. After a visit last September, the icebreaker expedition ship returns on September 15 on its four-ocean bucket-list voyage from the British Columbia across the Arctic Sea and down to Antarctica.
  • Star Pride, 212 passengers, October 2 and 6.
  • Viking Mars, 944 passengers, October 5.
  • Seven Seas Mariner, October 12.
  • Insignia, October 17, 21, 24, and November 8.
  • Viking Star, 944 passengers, October 19.
  • Ocean Navigator, 220 passengers, October 26. A return after spending two weeks in April at the Breakwater preparing for its summer season on the St. Lawrence and Great Lakes.
  • Le Bellot, October 30.
  • Le Dumont, November 10 or so.

It will be interesting to see what the infusion of visitors in the fall shoulder season will do to the town. Things really slow down after Labor Day.

Business, one way or another

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

I COME INTO A MEETING of two black-robed Buddhists. A dark office, maybe. They’re discussing something. Turns out one of them is an accountant, the other an investor or banker. They are about to foreclose on the Ashram. They are debating whether it should be done immediately, on notice, or whether the one should visit for a week and pull the trigger slowly. They turn to me for my opinion, realizing as a former resident I might have some insight. I lean forward slowly.

 

I RETURN TO OAKDALE and Mom starts telling me that – she didn’t actually know him – had barged in, looking for something from the office, so he said. (At the office, all I knew was he had left at noon, for the day.) Stereo and computer wires, disarrayed, parts broken.

“Did you call the police?”

“No, what good would that do?”
Unwanted intruder, for starters. Restitution, too.

 

PLAYING CARDS WITH A GROUP of coworkers. J.T. pulls out a pack he bought cheap at some outlet store. “Here, let’s use my deck,” he says, proud of his purchase. He deals. As we pick up our hands, we notice the face or number crossed out and a rubber stamp replacement ALL CAPS with the new assignment – QUEEN OF SPADES or TEN OF HEARTS, for instance.

You couldn’t play a game with cards like that! I started laughing in my sleep.

Among the reasons for Quaker decline, let me suggest

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Relocation to the West, especially, wasn’t the only reason Dover Friends Meeting in New Hampshire declined in the 1800s. Here are a few other factors.

  1. Being Quaker can be hard work. Not just a Sunday thing. Things like honesty.
  2. Tightening of personal discipline in the mid-1700s. The marriage restrictions definitely cut into membership.
  3. Plainness in clothing, design, and possessions. That is, personal expression.
  4. Employment and other business ethics. Refusal to take oaths kept Friends out of some professions, such as the law, and bankruptcy was a disownable offense.
  5. No “vain entertainments.” And thus, no music, dancing, fiction, theater, paintings, card playing, horse racing, or gambling.
  6. Pacifism during the Revolutionary and Civil wars, plus withdrawal from political offices in the 1760s.
  7. The separations that split the Society of Friends into factions from the 1820s on.
  8. Aversion to emotion, starting with anger.
  9. Emerging restrictions on alcohol and tobacco. Being “disguised by hard liquor” was a big problem on the frontier.
  10. Even the appearance of wrongdoing could be an offense. And all that led to deadly quaintness.

Not that these quite apply today. Still, they could prompt a book in themselves. For now, you’ll have to consider Quaking Dover for the story. Order your copy at your favorite bookstore. Or request it at your public library.

The persecution wasn’t consistent

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Had the Puritan persecution of dissidents been consistent, the Quakers and Baptists likely wouldn’t have survived. Instead, it came in waves aimed more at the traveling missionaries as well as to constrain the political and business prowess of resident Friends.

Further, there were relatively few congregations or ministers in New England. Despite required attendance at worship on the Sabbath, the buildings couldn’t hold them all, had they showed up.

Who was keeping attendance rolls, anyway?