You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
Dover: where New Hampshire started. Leading to the second-oldest state in New England.
And then? Dover was already 200 years old when the textile mills took over the town.
Note, too, that Dover’s mills predate the more celebrated ones at Lowell, Lawrence, and Manchester on the Merrimac River.
It was hardly a fringe settlement in terms of action.
When I first became active in Dover Friends Meeting in the late 1980s, a group of members and attenders seriously explored the possibilities of creating a cohousing project. Their minutes filed in the meetinghouse could provide the foundation for a fascinating master’s degree exposition, but the wide range of differences in the participants’ needs and dreams proved to be too diverse to accommodate into joint action. Perhaps economic resource differences also came into play. On my end, I was single but had to consider what might happen if I met the ultimate partner and she had six kids. Ahem.
As it was, when I finally met and wed the almost perfect woman, she came with two marvelous daughters and a German mother-in-law, plus she needed or at least dreamed of and deeply desired space for a large garden. My ultimate party obviously would have required much more than a single bedroom with kitchen privileges.
Still, when I looked at what was then the Stringfellow house next to the Dover Quaker meetinghouse, I mused about how it might have evolved as the Friends shared housing project.
Maybe, as I’ve later learned, I wasn’t that far off target.
Better known as the Osborne-Cartland house, this was built by one prominent Dover Quaker and later owned by others with Friends’ connections.
In fact, it’s one more place the celebrated poet John Greenleaf Whittier likely stayed in his many visits to Dover, thanks to his Cartland cousins.
And it had carved off a slice of the original meetinghouse property.
Yes, it plays into my new book, Quaking Dover.
By the way, I should note that it suggests a Quaker neighborhood around the meetinghouse.
Between it and the Isaac Wendell home I recently posted about across Central Avenue was the Stephen Hanson house where Saint Joseph Roman Catholic edifice now stands. Hanson was somehow prominent in introducing manufacturing to Dover and built the house with his wife, Lydia Brown, after razing two smaller dwellings.
Wish I could show you what they, too, built.
The realm of religion can certainly express our highest aspirations as well as manifest some of our darkest fears, as I feel I’ve examined in my new book Quaking Dover.
In my research of early New England, for instance, I see too clearly how often the differences between the Calvinist Protestants known as Puritans led to violent clashes with the French Roman Catholics to the north, as well as the other way around. (Not that I’d expect it to have differed if the Anglicans/Episcopalians had been in charge rather than the Puritans.)
Through their mindsets, the English, in their negotiations with the Indigenous tribes, crudely failed to acknowledge intricacies of decorum or ceremony that included food and dancing. Not so the French, whose missionaries to the Natives established bridges between the Native and Christian faiths. The priests even lived in tribal villages.
More critically, the English failed to impose the moral standards of their faith in their transactions with the Natives. Fair trade rather than widespread cheating would have been a start.
~*~
Where I’m now living, reciting the rosary is an important ritual among the local Passamaquoddy, especially at wakes and funerals. One late tribal leader was also a deacon and has left notes of his efforts to his blend Native religion and his Roman Catholic teachings. I’m hoping that some of this will find publication.
What’s the hold?
Are there comforting commonalities of rosary with chanting or even drumming? Or, from my end, might something connect to the long-lost art of Quakers who preached in “tones,” otherwise called sing-song?
Considering a young cousin’s ability to mimic one minister’s exhorting preaching style I encountered among Ohio’s remaining Wilburite Friends, I’m left wondering how much of the Quaker’s messages was formulaic and how much original, either way an emotional outburst not found in academic sermons and homilies delivered from a pulpit.
I suspect there’s a lot to be learned through what Quaker Douglas Steere called “mutual irradiation” when we do what’s sometimes called “listening in tongues” here.
It doesn’t always have to be about religion, either, though it may underpin much of the historical thinking.
One fascinating new voice from the Indigenous view is Lisa Brooks, author of The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast. Her websites – lbrooks.people(dot)amherst.edu/thecommonpot/ and ourbelovedkin(dot)com/awikhigan/index – continue her presentation.
I believe we can all be enriched by participating in such sharing.
Or maybe a large outhouse, as one map indicates.
I keep wondering if the Pine Hill school, at the fringe of the city cemetery, was originally one of Dover Friends early schoolhouses.
The Meeting apparently had a second one in Maine.
But horse sheds were also common around Quaker meetinghouses.
Not that I’ve found any evidence of these now.
As a parent, you really try to keep your kids from a lot of painful encounters but they never listen to your advice, as far as you can tell, which seems to be futile no matter how hard you try, and then the next thing you hear is crying.
Maybe that’s a good thing, if from their experience they learn more than you knew.
There are several books that fall into that model. Had I read them before completing Quaker Dover, I might have overlooked some fresh insights. But now that my book’s out, I really appreciate what else I’m finding.
Donald R. Bryant’s History of the First Parish Church is one of them. The 160-page volume, first published in 1970 and enlarged in 2002, offers another side of my argument of the Quaker invasion in town, for one thing, while relating other parts of the early years with, well, perhaps more discretion. And, my, I do admire his resources and tenacity.
One of my favorite sections is the profile of John Williams that Bryant works into the narrative. Williams, a member of the parish, was, as he says “a visionary, a leader in bringing textile manufacturing to America,” and a cofounder of what became the big millworks in today’s downtown.
But he also became part of the faction of 26 male members who announced in 1828 they were leaving the church to join the Unitarian Society in establishing a new congregation. The split among the heirs of the Puritans into Unitarian or Trinitarian Congregational at the time paralleled a similar one among American Quakers into Orthodox and Hicksite. New England somehow remained Orthodox, as far as Friends went.
The plot within First Parish further thickens over the kind of minister it needed along with the construction of a new, and present, house of worship. What follows in the parish history is a turmoil that includes the changing economics of the town I haven’t yet found in the Quaker Meeting.
Bryant’s history then turns largely to the successive ministers rather than the congregation’s members and their influence in the community.
Still, I appreciate the comments by David Slater at the end of the book. He was First Parish pastor when I first came to Dover and quite engaging. He offered a checklist on how church life was changing that remains relevant, though nothing hit me more than this:
“Christianity is becoming more and more counter-cultural.”
That takes me back to the Quaker invasion into Dover, back in the mid-1600s.
As for the city’s other congregations? I’m anxious to hear more.
Dover’s public library has been quite proactive in developing an online presentation of the city’s historical profiles and images. I’ve found those resources to be very useful for fast checks when drafting these posts and related material, for certain.
Its dark-hued historical room upstairs is a treasure chest of local lore, as I discovered decades ago chancing upon Dover’s Quaker family records serialized in the fat volumes of the New Hampshire Genealogical Record, 1903-1909. They’ve since been keyboarded and made available online, if you Google, though I’m still relying on my photocopies.
In time, as a library cardholder, I even had online access to U.S. Census records from home in the wee hours. What a privilege!
If it weren’t for the Covid restrictions and my relocation to far eastern Maine, I’d like still be digging around on the top floor there. I certainly encourage others to do so.
While Quakers were active in the Underground Railroad for fugitive slaves, the practice wasn’t universally embraced within the Society of Friends. In fact, much of the illegal action across the North was undertaken by evangelical Protestants who even created the altar call at revivals to enlist fellow workers.
Yes, it’s one more story in the American experience that needs to be better known, in all of its gritty reality.
As I describe in Quaking Dover, the Cartland family farm in Lee is believed to have been a stop on one of those lines to freedom. While documentation of such participation is rare, escaped slaved turned abolitionist Frederick Douglass was a frequent visitor to the farm, and like also its small Quaker meetinghouse and school.
The bigger question would be how did the fugitives get that far and where did the route head from there? Not everyone along the way was sympathetic, after all. Newburyport, Massachusetts, for one, was downright hostile and thus an unlikely place to jump ship. As for Portsmouth or Dover?
Establishing reliable yet invisible connections every ten or 20 miles would have been quite an accomplishment. What prompted households to risk everything to the moral cause? They were, after all, a threat to a vast economic system and its wealth.
It’s one more another interesting twist to develop in future research through New Hampshire.
The home Isaac Wendell built by 1827 sits across Central Avenue from the Quaker meetinghouse.
I often parked next to it on the side street and admired the bird boxes and woodworking details on the ample barn and house additions.
He’s most noted as the cofounder with John Williams of the Dover Cotton Factory, the forerunner of the big mills downtown, but of interest to my story, he had married Anna Whittier, a close cousin of the celebrated poet John Greenleaf Whittier.
We can assume Greenleaf was a welcome guest there on his many visits to Dover.
Let me add, the relatively humane working conditions in the mills deteriorated drastically after Williams and Wendell lost control to new investors, leading to the first labor strike by women in America in 1828.
Wendell also shows up in the founding of the Sawyer Mills, which I discussed a week ago, as well as a foundry.
Some Sunday mornings, my drive to and from the Quaker meetinghouse a half-hour from my home is a meditation in its own right.
Even in fog or snow, it can be refreshing.
Much of the road is through forest, plus stretches along Passamaquoddy and Cobscook bays and their tributaries. The route also passes through a tribal reservation and a national wildlife preserve, which does sound a bit exotic though I take it as routine.
Eagle sightings are common, and I have had to stop for deer or turkeys in the middle of U.S. 1. Once I even spotted a moose far ahead on the pavement.
A radio program of classical choral music on a CBC station that comes in quite clearly is often also an element, depending on my mood.
Do you remember the freedom you felt when you first learned to drive? Some mornings, especially when there’s no other traffic, that elation returns.
While I’m tempted to proclaim “What could be more glorious than this!” I will also note many of the scattered homes I pass resemble junkyards – poverty in Washington County is a constant – so there’s a reminder of that reality, too. I suspect there are more dead cars and trucks here than people.
As an added touch, there are no traffic lights, either.
The town’s textile mills don’t get a lot of attention in my book Quaking Dover, in part because I haven’t found a lot of interaction between the emerging industry and the town’s Friends. Indeed, the Quaker Meeting was seriously aging about the same time the thriving mills transformed the town into an industrial power.
Dover’s conventional histories, on the other hand, have good reason to focus on the big brick mills along the Cochecho River, world famous for the quality of their calico and their stunning print designs and execution.
You might be surprised to learn, though, that they were in operation much earlier than the legendary cotton mills at Lowell, Lawrence, and Manchester on the mighty Merrimac River.
Largely overlooked, as one Friend reminds me, are the woolen mills on the Bellamy River south of Dover’s downtown and only a few blocks from the Quaker meetinghouse. These operated from 1824 to 1899 and were often innovative, employing up to 600 workers before being sold and continuing till 1954.
They were renowned especially for their flannel and were, at stretch, the largest woolen mills in the Granite State.
Today the mills and their historic housing have emerged as a charming residential district.
While there were some Sawyers in the Meeting, I’ve not yet found any connection to those owning the mills.
Based on the naming of some of their children, those were apparently Methodist.
Jnana's Red Barn 