My newest book, Light Seed Truth, challenges traditional religious teaching, the kind that results in “thou shalt not” combined with a fear of eternal suffering or some equivalent.
My book outlines an alternative to the legalistic framework found across religious traditions with their institutions and rituals grounded in second-hand retelling of mystical encounters. As you’ll see in the book, it’s not just religion, either.
Do note, though, the price will more than double shortly after the official release on June 7. So buying now helps you.
Preorders are one way of boosting the algorithm of first-week sales, and that can increase the title’s visibility on those ebook retailers’ bookshelves. So that helps me.
You can find it in the digital platform of your choice at Smashwords prior to the official release.
Whittier is a poet I’ve come to know largely through Dover, where his maternal grandparents and an uncle and cousins on his father’s side lived. His parents in fact, married in our Quaker meetinghouse.
His poems aren’t about himself but rather a greater faithfulness. While he’s self-effacing, many of his works are deeply felt political and social protests that remain biting and land on-target.
Despite the seeming simplicity of his rhyming form, his lines are sharp. When you read his poems, don’t stop at the end of the line but keep moving onward as a full-sentence thought. There you can breathe. Robert Frost follows in Whittier’s footsteps.
His poem, “How the Women Went from Dover,” commemorates an important event that appears in my Quaking Dover as well.
Somewhere in the past I heard about a kind of public journal that wasn’t overtly personal but carefully recorded by devoted individuals. News items, witty thoughts, chance encounters, weather observations might fill them.
Recently, I came across one of those, the Record Book Kept by Daniel C. Osborne (1794-1871), Quaker and Banker. The copy was online at the Friends of Allen County’s website – the highly regarded genealogical center at the public library in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
What especially interests me is that he was a member of Dover Friends Meeting in New Hampshire. His entries provide fresh insights on the life of the congregation and the broader community, both the subjects of my book, Quaking Dover.
A record book, as this one demonstrates, is a collection of random accounts the individual found fascinating or significant. Daniel’s, for instance, has entries on the manufacture of watches in U.S., John Jacob Astor’s will and estate, the popular vote for president 1848, the wife of president Franklin Peirce president-elect, population of the states 1855, English Bible translations list, executions for murders, steam boat accidents and Atlantic Ocean steamers lost, even the royal family of England – most of those notations are on distant events – but they accompany family genealogies and other things closer to home.
Daniel, a son of Marble and Mercy (Nock/Knox) Osborne, operated an iron foundry and was later president of the Strafford Bank, now part of TD Bank. He lived in a Georgian Colonial style home his father had built adjacent to the Quaker meetinghouse, where Daniel continued as an active member while the congregation aged and declined.
These entries note visitors from other locations to Dover Friends Meeting, perhaps all of them in traveling ministry.
Although his penmanship was impeccable, I’m not confident in my ability to decipher it clearly. Even so, I find his records filling in details I’m not sure I’d uncover otherwise. The family genealogies, for instance, have details otherwise lost from the Quaker records when an individual “married out of Meeting,” was “disowned” for other reasons, or moved from the area.
The accounts of deaths, mostly around Dover but sometimes including U.S. presidents, the Marquis de Lafayette, or soldiers at Lexington, Massachusetts, also name neighbors who weren’t Quaker. Perhaps they were even involved in business dealings with him. Notations in the margins point to a surprising number of suicides and, especially, drownings. One 53-year-old man was killed by his own father. Mention of the passing of Quaker evangelist Joseph John Gurney reflects the branch of Friends that Dover followed while that of Congregational minister Lyman Beecher indicates an openness to religious liberalism.
Notations of family marriages point to a much broader interaction of Dover Friends with fellow Quaker families in Rhode Island than I had suspected, including the Wilbur family, prominent in a schism in the yearly meeting, through no blame of their own. I’m guessing it’s because so many attended what’s now the Moses Brown School in Providence.
I wasn’t expecting this tidbit.
Of special interest to me is this notation, “10th mo 22, 1864. Israel Estes of this City, died this day, aged 64 years. He was a lineal descendant of Joseph Estes, who died in Dover Neck in 1626, coming over with Edward Hilton, in the first vessel, and had lands assigned to him as early as 1631.” If true, it would add another person – and, obviously, eventually a wife – to the settlement before the Puritan invasion that multiplied the frontier settlement now known as Dover. As the history stands now, Thomas Roberts was the only other person who arrived with Edward, and they were followed a few years later by brother William Hilton.
It would also place the origin of the surname in America at Dover rather than Massachusetts.
Well, that’s what I get in a first sweep through the record book. I suspect there’s much more to glean.
Yes, time marches ahead. I can’t count the number of times I rewound and reset this before Quaker worship in Dover each Sunday, or First-Day, in the old parlance. Some Friends said the ticking kept reminding them, “Slow down, slow down.” Others found the sound disturbing.
It’s hard for me to believe my book Quaking Dover has been published more than a year now.
Last year, a spate of deaths altered my position in a greater hierarchy.
First, a cousin born a few months before my dad, passed, having reached 100. Shortly after his death in 2009, we had a fruitful exchange of correspondence answering many of my questions about my grandparents, which now appear as Dayton’s Leading Republican Plumber on my Orphan George blog.
Also participating in that exchange was my dad’s youngest sister, who was halfway between him and me in age, as it turned out. She, too, died this year, shortly after her husband. They were the last of the generation in my close linage. So I’m now the eldest male in my grandfather’s descendants.
The year also had a series of deaths in Dover Friends Meeting, including a former clerk, a cherished elder (bishop), a fine minister, a very dedicated longtime treasurer, and a prominent social activist. That leaves me as the oldest surviving clerk of the congregation but living a distance away. The collective memory shrinks, in effect.
What I’m left facing is the reality that there’s no longer that umbrella of older, wiser figures over me, sheltering or guiding me. Instead, that’s now my role in reverse. Frankly, I feel inadequate.
If you’ve wondered about the many unanswered questions in my book Quaking Dover, let me say I’m hoping they become a prompt for other history fans to follow up on.
Frankly, if I hadn’t given myself the deadline of Dover’s 400th anniversary, I’d still be in the research stage rather than having a published book in hand.
I would especially be interested in pursuing what happened to Friends who were disowned by Meeting, especially over matters of marriage. How many joined other congregations – and which ones? How many drifted away from religion altogether? How many Quaker values did they continue, as well as which ones did they reject?
There are also the things from our own time that we might answer, if asked, but that will fall through the cracks. Ours are truly fast-moving times, and I’ve often been startled when presenting my own poetry and fiction to find points I have to explain to younger ears in the room. Transistors, the forerunner to computer chips, was a prime example.
So here we are once again, looking ahead and looking back in our own lives.
As for Dover, as the big 400th anniversary wraps up?
I have to wonder whether my book Quaking Dover is my way of saying farewell to my Friends and congregation in Dover – or of staying in touch, now that I’ve moved further east.
In the colonial era, neither the Congregationalists/Puritans at First Parish nor the Quakers/Friends observed Christmas.
So much for singing festive carols or decorating a tree.
The Friends didn’t sing at all, actually, unless it was somehow spontaneous.
At First Parish, meanwhile, a bass viol was introduced in the 1700s to accompany the hymns.
That gave way in 1829 to an organ built by Bostonian William M. Goodrich. In 1878, the instrument was rebuilt and repositioned by Hutchings-Plaisted of Boston, with alterations in subsequent years.
In 1995, a thoroughly revised instrument was unveiled, the work of Biddeford, Maine, Faucher Organ company. A hybrid of the original pipes and of newer electronic and computer elements, it’s a monster machine capable of rattling the house and shaking the bottoms of your feet.
I am glad we simple Quakers don’t have to pay for its routine maintenance, though I am grateful for those who do.
Not bad for holiday festivities, including accompanying a community-wide Messiah sing.
It’s not the only option in town, either. For some, those carols have to wait till the end of Advent, when the Twelve Days begin.
And, for the record, the Greek Orthodox start celebrating Christmas 12 days later.
I’ve previously mentioned newspaper editor George Wadleigh as a fascinating source of Dover historical narrative.
The Rev. Jeremiah Belknap, a renowned historian, proved far less helpful when it came to the Quakers. They seemed largely invisible to him.
I largely ignored the Rev. Alonzo Hall Quint, another Congregational minister, whose historical notes had been read by Wadleigh, probably when they were originally serialized in the Dover Enquirer from 1850 on. One of my reasons was practical: the scanned ebook edition of the book is nearly unreadable. Besides, even in retirement, I have only so much time. One point worthy of revisiting in the original would be the use of “inner light” in 1855 – if accurate, that would be the first reference to the Quaker doctrine anywhere. Previously, it was Inward Light, with a much different focus. I’m assuming this was a “correction” by John Scales in editing the full book edition published in 1900. Scales himself authored an independent colonial history published in 1923.
One source for later research would be the journals of the Rev. Enoch Place, a pioneer of the Free Will Baptist movement. He visited Friends Meetings in his travels from Strafford, which would offer a fresh perspective, as well as presiding at thousands of burials, baptisms, and weddings from 1810 to 1865. His might balance the histories of the period that revolve around Dover’s downtown mills.
There’s so much more I’d like to know about details related to my Quaking Dover story, but I’m not a professional historian.
Some of these could be fodder for a Ph.D. dissertation.
An examination of Dover Friends book of minutes dealing with young men who enlisted in the Revolutionary War would be one.
Or of where individuals went in their religious affiliations after leaving Friends.
Even Richard Waldron’s full biography.
A list of the clerks of the Meeting and another of the recorded ministers and elders would be helpful.
Or an examination of the actual functioning of the provincial charters, especially the so-called “proprietary colonies.”
And, oh yes, a genealogical index of New England Quakers like William Wade Hinshaw’s encyclopedic indexes of New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Ohio.
I would even like to see an understandable examination of English settlement in Maine in its colonial years. Where, for instance, did the settlers go after watching from sea as smoke and flames rose from what had been their homes and villages in a fateful five-week period of 1676, eradicating all English from east of Casco Bay?
Jnana's Red Barn 