It may be a small city, but even so, it was home. And much larger than where I’m now living.
So some of what I miss?
The over-the-fence or across-the-street conversations. Especially the guy stuff. Tim, Mark, Jack, Mayor Bob, that circle, especially.
Recycling. I feel guilty putting it all in one bag. Unless the volunteers regroup after this Covid thing.
The indoor pool. Not just the physical exercise of swimming, but the banter with other swimmers and the lifeguards.
The Quaker Meeting and Greek circle, too. Not just older folks, but meeting the babies who have come along in the interim.
Our garden, even though it was a lot of work. It was even visually pleasing.
That leads to glutting out on fresh asparagus for nearly a month in late spring.
And heirloom tomatoes, with tomato and mayo sandwiches for the better part of two months come high summer. (Downeast Maine is too cold at night for them to mature.)
A range of dining options, not all of them in Dover. We weren’t far from neighboring communities. Not just ethnic, either. LaFesta Pizza would be a prime example of taking a specialty a step extra.
The Amtrak as an escape to Boston or Portland. Not that I had used it that often, back before Covid, but I had plans.
Dishwasher, clothes washer and dryer. Without the renovations on our new old house, it was a return to a primitive era for me. The two nearest laundromats were an hour away, in opposite directions.
Hampton’s 1701 meetinghouse is now a private residence.
Through the first century of English habitation in New Hampshire, the other Quaker Monthly Meeting was at Hampton, and like Dover, it soon had satellite worship groups before coalescing in today’s Amesbury, Massachusetts.
Its full history is one that needs to be told. I’d like to know more about how it and Dover interacted.
Amesbury, Massachusetts, Friends meetinghouse.Its interior has been lovingly restored. After her marriage in Dover, Abigail Hussey worshiped in Amesbury, eventually living just down the street.
Its Hussey family was one that came to be part of Dover Meeting. The family had two well-know weddings that occurred in the present Dover meetinghouse – May 3, 1769, of Samuel Hussey and Mercy Evans, and October 3, 1804, of their daughter Abigail to John Whittier of Haverhill, Massachusetts – another of Hampton/Amesbury’s Preparative Meetings.
Dover’s Hussey farm was on Baer Road in today’s Rollinsford but Somersworth at the time of the second wedding. It’s some beautiful farming country.
John and Abigail Hussey Whittier became the parents of the influential poet and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier, who was a frequent visitor to Dover Friends. Her portrait, reproduced in my recent post about the Whittiers, hangs above the stairway from the main floor to the lower level of the meetinghouse.
Two stories are told about the anvil that sits in a corner of the Dover meetinghouse. One is that it was recovered from the ruins of the Otis house after the Cochecho Village massacre. Richard Otis was a Quaker blacksmith. The other is that it comes by way of the Hussey family, which turned Civil War cannons into plowshares.
The Hussey family has a significant presence in New England Quaker history. Settler Christopher Hussey, described as the most prominent man in early Hampton, was one of the purchasers of Nantucket Island in 1659, where son Stephen eventually moved as it became a Friends stronghold.
Though Christopher was not a Quaker, his other son, John, was severely fined and threatened as an early Quaker, as Elizabeth Hooton related from her American visits. He was a Friends minister, married Elizabeth Perkins from another distinctive Hampton Quaker family, and they had 17 children, mostly daughters, before migrating as Friends to New Castle, Delaware, in 1688 or 1692.
There is argument whether John and Rebecca Hussey’s son Richard (1660-1733) remained behind and moved to Dover or whether it was an immigrant. Either way, a Richard Hussey who was a weaver moved to Dover by 1691, wed Jane Canney, and had a dozen children. Among them was Joseph (1699-1762), who then married Elizabeth Robinson and sired Samuel Hussey (1714-1814), leading to the Whittier connection.
Some of the Nantucket line, however, reconnects in Berwick, Maine, complicating the picture, especially when a Hussey marries another Hussey.
Stephen Hussey’s second son, Bechelder, moved from Nantucket to Biddeford, Maine, which leads to son Stephen, who had 12 children, the last three born in Berwick.
More prominent among the Berwick Quakers were the children of Ebenezer Hussey, Stephen’s fifth son, who wed Abigail Hale.
What is known is that in 1770, James Hussey – possibly Richard and Jane’s grandson or great-grandson – moved from Dover to North Berwick. His son William (1800-1870) created an efficient plow in the 1830s.
It’s right beside the millstream. The textile mills were owned by another Quaker.
The enterprise drew on Quaker connections, beginning with Joseph David Hoag’s relocation from Charlotte, Vermont, to North Berwick in 1825. The son of famed Friends minister Joseph Hoag, he brought with him a cast-iron plow created by blacksmith Jethro Wood of Scipio, New York, another Quaker. Wood’s mother, incidentally, was Diannah Hussey, a niece of Ann Starbuck on Nantucket.
Got all that? Just go with the fact it was a potent mix.
As a farmer, William Hussey felt that the plow’s moldboard was much too short. After pouring lead to make a rough pattern of a longer board, he had castings made at a foundry in Newmarket, New Hampshire. The results were carted by horses to North Berwick, where skilled carpenter Henry Estes made the wooden framework. William then traveled among his farmer friends to sell the plows.
With the distinctive size and shape of the furrow board, the plow could be pulled by less power than its rivals. As the company’s business envelopes proclaimed, “If I don’t hold easy, draw lightly, and turn a flat furrow, after five days return me.”
In his later years, William Hussey ran the N. Hobbs Inn at Bracey’s corner, but as a staunch temperance advocate, he refused to sell liquor. He was also an ardent abolitionist.
That led his son, Timothy Buffum Hussey (1831-1913), to establish the T.B. Hussey Plow Company, now operating as Hussey Seating and the oldest business in Maine.
The company’s early headquarters.
After graduating from Friends School in Providence and teaching there, his son, Timothy Buffum Hussey (1831-1913), took over the business in 1855. With his younger brother, William Penn Hussey, he also operated a foundry nearby.
After the American Civil War, he bought up cannons and melted them down in the foundry to make plows – wryly upholding the swords-into-plowshares prophecy of the book of Isaiah.
After an 1895 fire nearly destroyed the firm, the Husseys refocused on building steel products including fire escapes and bridge supports. I like to think that the shift in focus came to their mind during Quaker Meeting.
Through much of this, Berwick was an independent Monthly Meeting – but it was still part of Dover Quarter and, thus, my history. Besides, when Berwick was laid down as a Meeting, its remaining members, including Husseys, once again were in Dover’s rolls.
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Check out my new book, Quaking Dover, available in an iBook edition at the Apple Store.
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.
The Varney house, which stood near today’s Wentworth-Douglass Hospital, was once the largest home in Dover. After the massacre, it continued to keep its doors unlocked so that passing Natives could spend the night.
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.
The family also made a big impression in Manchester. The Varney School, now a private residence on the West Side, was named in honor of one of the city’s mayors.
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Check out my new book, Quaking Dover, available in a Nook edition at Barnes & Noble.
Moving the event back a month has allowed Dover Friends to spread the word more widely, and I’m definitely excited.
Well, it’s their history, too.
The official book release party for Quaking Dover is Saturday at 7 pm in the historic meetinghouse at 141 Central Avenue in Dover, and you’re welcome to join us, if you’re in the area.
In addition to the meet-and-greet, I’ll present an illustrated overview of the story and the ways this book came to be. I have to admit I was surprised by much I uncovered along the way.
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.
Tuttles’ Red Barn along Dover Point Road remains a landmark, even after the family finally sold the farm.
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.
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.
Brown and family members are buried in the plot at the end of the lane in Dover.
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.
When I was last in Dover, 18 months ago, the downtown was booming with construction. But on my return a few weeks ago, when I first glimpsed this rising over Central Avenue, I thought a skyscraper was going up and I’d somehow missed the news.
I am impressed by the cloud as a backdrop.
A second look, though, had me realizing it was the clock tower on city hall, getting spiffed up for the city’s big 400th anniversary next year.
Well, it kind of look likes a space rocket about to take off, too.
Banners proclaiming that event are already along the major streets.
My history of Dover, focused on its Quaker Meeting, begins trailing off about the time the textiles mills prosper at the Lower Falls in the Cochecho River. There’s no escaping the fact that the mills completely reshaped the direction of the emerging city, then and now.
The complex began with the Dover Cotton Factory in 1812, but the surviving buildings were constructed between the 1880s and early 20th century. The downtown is built around them. The mills even span the river below the falls.
A clerical error in the company’s 1827 reorganization, as the Cocheco Manufacturing Company, dropped the second h from Cochecho, leading to ongoing confusing about the proper spelling of the river’s name.
In 1828, the mill was the site of one of the earliest labor strikes in the nation, the first to be conducted entirely by women. They were protesting a pay cut.
The mills brought waves of immigrants to the city, especially from Ireland, Quebec, and Greece. The complex eventually employed 1,200 workers, most of them women.
At its height in the 1880s, the mills shipped 65 million yards of printed calico worldwide annually, with esteemed designs from the associated printing operation on the site of today’s Henry Law Park.
The buildings were subject to disastrous fires and floods. They were also noisy and cold in winter, hot in summer.
The company owned lakes upstream to ensure water power through the year.
The mills operated as the Cocheco Manufacturing Company and then the Cocheco Mill Company until 1908, when the operation was bought by the Pacific Mill Works of Lawrence, Massachusetts, which shuttered everything in 1937. The buildings were then bought at auction by the city.
In the early 1980s, entrepreneur Joseph Sawtelle purchased the largest vacant building in the county and began a visionary restoration that uncovered the boarded windows and led to offices, entrepreneurial incubators, and retail stores in the heart of the city. After his death in 2000, Eric Chinburg acquired the properties and added trendy apartments to the mix.
The mills were placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2014.
Check out my new book, Quaking Dover, available in an iBook edition at the Apple Store.
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.
Devon, a county southwest of London, is the origin of many of Dover’s early settlers.
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.
Jnana's Red Barn 