I’ve long been fascinated by what I’ve come to call the “shadow Meeting” – people who continued to worship as Quakers and uphold many of the values after being “read out of Meeting” for violating its discipline, usually over marriage procedures.

It’s a fact for several generations of my own ancestry in North Carolina.

One place I see it in Dover is with the Varneys.

The patriarch of this prolific Quaker line was Humphrey Varney (1636-1714), a brickmaker who moved to Dover from Ipswich, Massachusetts. He married Sarah Starbuck, widow of Joseph Austin, as her second husband.

After the Dover’s disastrous massacre, their son, Ebenezer Varney (1664-1753), married Mary Otis after her return from captivity, and their son Peter (1666-1732) wed Elizabeth Evans.

After that, well, it seems the Varneys married into all of the other Dover Friends families. Many of them also spread, most notably across Maine.

The family made its imprint on Dover, though I’m not sure how many remained Friends.

Jesse Varney was a morocco shoemaker when his store was consumed in flames in December 1810.

By 1837, Varney’s Block stood at Lower Square on Central Avenue near Washington Street. In 1844, a bigger building was erected.

In 1847, 99-year-old Eunice Varney died. She was the oldest resident and a member of the Society of Friends.

There’s Varney Road, extending Long Hill Road to Blackwater Road. And Varney Cleaners, founded by Fred Varney.

The Varney School on Washington Street, used from 1861 to 1953 and now as law offices, was named in honor of Judge John R. Varney. He died in an 1882 fire that destroyed the Washington Street Baptist Church building.

George Varney was a prominent merchant for more than 40 years and owned a drug store on Washington Street before retiring in 1920 at age 65 and passing the next year. He built a large home on Arch Street in 1913.

John R. Varney was co-owner of two newspapers – the Dover Enquirer, purchased in 1868, and the Dover Daily Republican, acquired in 1880.

My curiosity, of course, wonders how many of the Quaker values continued in their lives, as well as what directions their faith took. I like to think it worked like yeast.

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Check out my new book, Quaking Dover, available in a Nook edition at Barnes & Noble.

Welcome to Dover’s upcoming 400^th anniversary.

 

One thing that fascinates me in regards to religion is the distinction between faith, based on a holy experience, and a culture, handed down within a family.

Among the Dover families that belonged to Meeting are the Tuttles, long known for their Red Barn market. Yes, Red Barn, like the name of this blog.

Three Dover Combination signers shared a tragic introduction to the New World when their ship, the Angel Gabriel, broke up in the August 14 “Great Colonial Hurricane of 1635,” either in the harbor at Pemaquid, Maine, or at the Isles of Shoals.

One was John Tuttle, who was about 17 years old at the time of the disaster. After their rescue, he arrived in Chebasco (in Essex or Ipswich, Massachusetts). By 1638 Tuttle settled in Dover, where he was known as Shipwreck John and had a farm on today’s Bellamy River – one that grew into what was long known as America’s oldest family-owned and operated enterprise. (Never mind that Thomas Roberts’ heirs nearby would have a longer claim.) Tuttle’s son Thomas was killed by a falling tree while still a young teenager, leaving John Jr. to continue the family name.

Shipwreck John’s grandson, James Tuttle (1683-1707), is believed to be the first Quaker in the family. He married Rose Pinkham (1682-1728) and they had two children before his death – Elijah Tuttle and Phebe, who married Moses Varney. Yes, these Quaker families quickly intermix.

The next four generations were very active in Dover Friends Meeting, according to William Penn Tuttle, who added that their home was always a resting place for visitors during Quarterly Meeting.

And some of the family even went abroad in missionary service.

Their farm on Dover Point Road, with its red barn, was long noted as a marketplace for fresh produce.

Across the river in Maine, one line still produces remarkable cider each fall – King Tut’s. Yes, short for Tuttle’s.

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Check out my new book, Quaking Dover, available in an iBook edition at the Apple Store.

Welcome to Dover’s upcoming 400^th anniversary.

Business opportunities lured some Dover Friends to more lucrative destinations within the changing economy. With their many Quakers, Lynn, Massachusetts, and Philadelphia, especially, beckoned.

As a widely repeated quip goes,

Friends went to Pennsylvania to do good, and they did very well, indeed.

Among those who went to Penn’s Fair City was Lydia Brown Hanson’s nephew Moses Brown (1793-1878), who left Dover in 1815 to join his brother Jeremiah in the domestic textile trade. Moses, I should emphasize, was not the famed Rhode Island Quaker. These were the sons of William Brown and Abigail Peaslee, whose daughters Lydia, Alice, and Anna all married under the care of Dover Meeting. The brothers’ move to Pennsylvania came the year after the first textile mill in Dover was built – were the Browns selling its fabrics?

In Philadelphia, Moses had the good fortune to marry Mary Waln Wistar, a descendant of a socially prominent Quaker family, and their son Thomas Wistar Brown was born in 1826.

Described as a successful dry goods mer­chant who never went to college, T. Wistar Brown became a self-taught scholar and patron of education. A long-time manager of Haverford College and for 25 years its board president, he gave the college three professorial chairs and much of its old library and books, among his many philanthropic endeavors.

His profile calls him a quiet man of strong faith and convictions – including a refusal to succumb to the use of the telephone and automobile. As a young man he had followed Abraham Lincoln on horse­back on the way to the first inaugural, and he saw Lincoln’s Vice President, Hannibal Hamlin, spattered with mud after a hairbreadth escape from an assassin’s bullet. During the Civil War he escorted the wife of his cousin, General Isaac Wistar, through enemy lines to visit her husband at Fort Monroe.

He was also a founder, with other Quaker businessmen, of the Provident Mutual Life Insurance Co. of Philadelphia.

 

When he died in 1916, the Evening Post of New York in a long tribute said of him: “There was a blend of the stoic in his Christian resignation; he saw much and suffered much, gained much and lost much. He was one of the last of the old generation of Quakers who inherited from their forefathers discipline and patience, silence, and self-control. He faced life with quiet fortitude.”

He is buried with his wife, Mary Farnum, and other kin in the T. Wistar Brown Cemetery, now managed and used by Dover Monthly Meeting.

At times I do wonder if the City of Brotherly Love is reflected in the naming of some of Dover’s streets – Arch, Chestnut, Locust, Maple, Spring, Central, Broadway (from Broad) – as a result of the Philadelphia connections. A number of the city’s other streets carry Quaker family names, including Hill Street, named for a Varney and Hill land development partnership rather than its inclines.

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Check out my new book, Quaking Dover, available in a Nook edition at Barnes & Noble.

Welcome to Dover’s upcoming 400^th anniversary.

 

My favorite – and least expected – story from Annie Pinkham’s historical sketch of Dover Meeting includes a profile of Ambrose Bampton, who appears in Whittier’s “Snow-Bound” in the couplet, “We stole with her a frightened look / At the gray wizard’s conjuring book.”

Friends carefully avoided anything smacking of superstition, yet Bampton (1717-1790) had a local reputation for possessing “certain powers of disclosing the unknown and declaring the coming of future events with remarkable accuracy. To him resorted farmers who had lost their cattle, matrons whose silvers spoons and other treasures had disappeared, or maidens whose sweethearts were among the missing.”

Known as the Sorcerer, he may have been a continuation of traditions handed down in Devonshire, England, possibly through his mother, Hannah. “The meek-spirited old man received them all kindly, put on his iron-rimmed spectacles, opened his conjuring book, and after a season of deliberation, gave the required answer without money and without price,” in Pinkham’s telling.

Once, when a group of young people came to him for advice, he said to one of the girls,

“If ever thee marries anybody, thee will marry me.” She replied, “I would marry the devil first.”

A clue to her reaction might be hinted at in a notation that at the time of his death, he was said to weigh 400 pounds. I have no idea where Whittier had him already gray at this point.

The girl was a Quaker, Rebekah Austin, the daughter of Nathaniel Austin and Catherine Neal. Contrary to the prediction, she wed in 1745 with Simeon Hill in the manner of Friends. But five years later, as a widow, she did in fact marry Ambrose, again in a Quaker service. He had left First Parish and rejoined Dover Meeting. She predeceased Ambrose in 1802.

Ambrose’s father, John, was a member of Friends by 1705, so there were Quaker threads to build on.

Besides, I look at him as one more confirmation of my sense that some Friends are far more psychic than we’d let on.

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Check out my new book, Quaking Dover, available in a Nook edition at Barnes & Noble.

Welcome to Dover’s upcoming 400^th anniversary.

Dover, New Hampshire, sits on the tidal waters of the Atlantic Ocean but that didn’t inhibit its influence on Midwest and then West Coast Quaker growth.

Consider the leadership of Dover Friends Meeting in the years leading up to the American Civil War. Benjamin H. Jones served as clerk for six years, 1841 to 1847, and also traveled in ministry. Olney Thompson then served a year as clerk, followed by John Meader, 1848 to 1851.

In September 1852, however, “Benjamin H. Jones, having removed with his family to reside within the limits of Salem Monthly Meeting (in Iowa), inquires after a Removal Certificate thereto for himself, his wife Mahalth E. and their children, Robt H., Lucy T., and George N. Jones.” This would have been a transfer of membership taking them west of the Mississippi River.

New England’s rocky soils – usually either clay or sandy, rarely loam – had long made for difficult farming, and railroads were making Midwestern crops and livestock competitive in eastern markets.

In 1855, James Canney, an overseer and assistant clerk at Dover, moved with his family to Minneapolis and later to San Jose, California.

The Beans, who settled in Gilmanton in 1772 from Brentwood, became a remarkable case. Among their descendants was John Bean, who wed Elizabeth Hill. The four of their five children who lived to adulthood – James, Joel, and twins Mary and Elizabeth – all headed west before the Civil War. Their education included terms at the Friends Boarding School in Providence, Rhode Island – today’s Moses Brown School.

John sold the farm in Gilmanton and moved to Rochester to become a businessman. Self-inflicted financial difficulties, however, resulted in bankruptcy despite the attempts of Dover Friends John Roberts, Thomas Roberts, Elijah Jenkins, Ken Graham, Daniel Meader, and John Estes to guide him. The experience embittered and devastated him.

That may have set all four of the children looking to horizons beyond New Hampshire. They would each move to Iowa and eventually on to California and Oregon, becoming recorded ministers along the way, as did three of their four spouses, too. Quite simply, they were crucial in the establishment of Friends Meetings west of the Mississippi River.

Before going, daughter Mary wed Charles H. Tebbetts under the care of Dover Meeting on January 19, 1854. Their clearness committee was Sarah K. Prentice and Cyrus Bangs. After a stint in Iowa, the couple moved on to Pasadena. Their son, Charles E. Tebbetts, would become a prominent Quaker pastor and president of Whittier College.

James Bean went with a wagon train to Iowa and Minnesota in 1855, returned to Rochester to wed Roanna Fox on August 16, 1858, and together they moved to the prairie, where he tried his hand at a grocery and a bookstore before becoming the U.S. government paymaster and clerk for the Chippewa Indian agent. In time, they landed in San Jose.

At West Branch, Iowa, Elizabeth Bean wed Benjamin Miles, a widower with three children from Miami County, Ohio. They would move to Newberg, Oregon, where his children would establish George Fox College.

Joel Bean married Hannah Elliott Shipley in Philadelphia, but they were introduced in Iowa when she was visiting. With her prominent Quaker connections, the wedding took place in the Orange Street meetinghouse on June 29, 1859. From there, they went straight to Iowa. In the spring of 1861, they set out as Quaker missionaries to Hawaii. On their return to Iowa, he rose to the position of vice president at a bank and served as clerk of the Yearly Meeting. He and Hannah also traveled in ministry to England, 1872-1873.

So much for four humble siblings from Dover Friends Meeting. They would, however, become embroiled with controversies involving Holiness movement evangelism besetting many of the Midwestern Friends, including a shift to full-time pastors, revivals, and hymn-singing. Joel and Hannah moved on to San Jose, California, in 1882. (Their granddaughter Anna Cox Brinton, widely known among liberal 20^th -century Friends, continued to use Plain speech – mostly with her husband, Howard.) They were joined by James and Roanna.

Dover’s former clerk, Benjamin H. Jones, had returned east, to Lynn, Massachusetts, but was about to try homesteading in Montana with his wife. His son, George, was already in San Jose.

In the end, rather than join California Yearly Meeting, the San Jose Meeting remained independent. Officially, after being disowned by Iowa Friends after he had left, Joel and Hannah applied for membership in Dover Meeting, despite the distance, and were welcomed.

As far as pioneering went, they were way ahead of the high-tech revolution that would take place in their final locale.

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Add to that Tom Hamm’s book, The Transformation of American Quakerism: Orthodox Friends, 1800-1907, which details the impact of railroads and commercial farming on Friends’ life during the nineteenth century, especially across the fertile Midwest.

During this time, the wider Quaker world underwent a number of modifications. Gone in some circles was the restrictive discipline, along with the requirements of Plain speech and dress and the marriage limitations, but sometimes it came with theological strife and new legalism.

By the end of the century, pastors had been introduced through much of the American Quaker world, including Gonic and Meaderboro. Friends had influential roles in interfaith organizations such as the YMCA, too.

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In 1884, Asa C. and Emeline Howard Tuttle, along with their son, returned to Dover “after spending some years among the Modoc Indians in Indian Territory,” as James Bean observed. “They were both ministers of ability. They remained in Dover, beloved and respected by all until Asa’s death in 1898, when Emeline removed to Rhode Island. and later to Louisiana. After the removal of Emeline Tuttle and Lydia E. Jenkins, the meeting continued without a regular minister for some years.”

Emeline is credited with discontinuing the separate men’s and women’s business meetings in 1886 and merging them into one.

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In 1913, the faithful remnant proved to be too small and too old to continue on its own and regular worship was discontinued in the meetinghouse. Officially, Dover Monthly Meeting went on at the Gonic meetinghouse, which had both a pastor and financial support from the mill there.

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Check out my new book, Quaking Dover, available in an iBook edition at the Apple Store.

Welcome to Dover’s upcoming 400^th anniversary.