Radio Script #106
Little Talks On Common Things
April 29, 1951
I think we cannot repeat too often the facts about who owns the big industrial companies. We hear so much talk about a few industrialists holding the destiny of all America in their hands, that many people have come to believe that a few people actually own the whole country. One of the big companies that is submitted to a lot of vilification and harsh cd ticism is E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company of Wilmington, Delaware. Who owns that great company? On March 31, 1951 DuPont stock was owned by 131,421 shareholders, an increase of more than 15,000 over the previous year. Now get this: 44 per cent of all the stockholders are women. Isn’t it plain as day that a company like DuPont needs brainy, efficient management? If its management is not efficient, the families represented by more than 130,000 persons suffer loss, and of those losers, 52,000 are women.
Every time our federal government decides to step in and do something more for us, it usually also does something to us. Coercion is an ugly word; it is quite different from persuasion. Can you force your neighbor to do anything if he knows that you cannot injure him in his person, his property, or his good name? Neither can government force us to do its will except by its powerful threat to injure us — its power to make us pay fines, serve in prison, even give up our lives.
Government is society’s jealously guarded monopoly of coercion, and we would not have it otherwise, because we rely on government. for our fundamental security — on local government for security against thieves. and. murderers, on national government for security against the tyranny of a foreign power. But, within the framework of that security, we prize something else that is characteristically American — we prize fteedom. And every time the govemment in Washington steps in to do the things that voluntary associations of men and women have traditionally done for themselves and for each other, and ought still to do, another measure of freedom is lost, and another step on the road to totali tarian government has been taken.
I, for one, am not teady to believe that the gteat majority of Americans want either an authoritarian government, threatening all life for us, nor a socialist government trying to do everything for us. We want a govemment which assures a good measute of indiv1d,ual freedom, and no glowing promises of security can take fteedom’s place. Along with the test of America, and indeed of all the world, the Kennebec Valley owes much to the Society of Friends, commonly called the Quakers. Only last week I repeated to you my conviction that, of all sons of Maine, the one most deserving of a statue to represent our state in the national capitol’s Hall of Fame is Rufus Jones. It is fitting, therefote, that we should devote a part of the program tonight to the society of which Dr. Jones was the most illustrious modern member, and what that society had to do with the development of our Kennebec Valley.
In 1775, the same year that heard the death-dealing shots at Lexington and Concord, starting the War of the Revolution, thete came to Newport, Rhode Island a man who hated war and spread the gospel of peace. He was Dav:l.d Sands. He came to Newport to attend the Friends Meeting, for he was alteady known as a Friends mniste r at Cornwall, New York. At Newport Sands made his decision to travel through the scatteted settlements of northern New England, visit the few Quaker families he could find, and help them establish groups of their teligious faith and even make the fonnal foundation of Friends Meetings. It was in the midst of the Revolution in 1777 when Sands reached the District of Maine. Forttmately he kept a joumal, so we know what happened when he reached the upper Kennebec. He wrote:
”We had many meetings, though always passing through a wildemess cOtmtry. We had two meetings at the house of Remington Hobbie at a place called Vassalboro on the Kennebec River. We next proceeded up the river for two days tthrough great fatigue and suffering, having to travel part of the way on foot, finally coming to a Friend’s house, there being no other habitation within 45 miles. ”
The seeds sown by David Sands bore fruit. In 1780 the first regular Friends Meeting in our region was established at Vassalboro. As one historian put it, “As the settlers increased, many embraced the peculiar views of the Quakers.” How did the Friends happen to be called Quakers? George Fox, founder of the movement, called his followers Children of the Light. The name Quaker was almost certainly given them in derision. In his joumal Fox wrote: “Justice Bennett, in 1650, was the first that called us Quakers, because we did bid him tremble at the word of the Lord.” On the other hand, Robert Barclay’s book entitled “Apology” states that the Quakers got their name ”because of the trembling Friends sometimes experienced in their meetings”.
Although they never disclaimed the name Quakers and indeed came eventually to take pardonable pride in it, they have always preferred and still prefer the name Friends. They are, and long have been, officially the “Religious Society of Friends”. Tie Friends Meeting House at Vassalboro Was opened in 1786. In 1788 was confirmed the first marriage to be held in it. This was actually a double wedding, for on the same day two sisters were married according to the Quaker custom; Sarah Taber marrying Joseph Howland and Lydia Taber marrying Pelatiah Hussey. Present as a w1.tness at that first wedding in the Friends Meeting House was Remington Hobbie, the good Quaker at whose home David Sands had stopped in 1777. A week ago little did I .think I should ever see the signature of Remington Hobbie. much less see it on an original marriage document of a Quaker wedding. But only a few days ago I did see that signature, and I saw it on what I regard as a precious historical· document of ancient Vassalboro. The document to which I refer is owned by Mr. Edward J. E.stes of Mohegan Street, l-linslow, and it is the official statement of a Quaker marriage at Vassalboro in 1791. It is not a photostat, not a copy, but the original document with the names of 36 witnesses appended by their own hands. No minister officiated at that or any other true Quaker marriage. The bride and groom perform the ceremony themselves. This is the way Mr. Estes’ old document reads:
”Peleg Dileno of Vassalborough, son of Peleg DUeno of Vassalborough, in the County of Lincoln and State of Massachusetts Bay, and Sarah his wife, and Ruby Hoxie, daughter of Hezekiah Hoxie of Vassalborough afo-resaid, and Elizabeth his wife, having declared their intention of taking each other in marriage before several monthly meetings of the people called Quakers, in the county aforesaid, according to the good order used among them, their proceeding after due inquiry and deliberate consideration thereon, were allowed by the said meeting, they appearing clear of all others and having consent of parents. Now these are to certify all whom it may concern, that for the full accomplishment of their said intentions this 27th day of the seventh month in the year of our Lord 1791, they the said Peleg Dileno and Ruby Hoxie appeared at a public assembly of the aforesaid people and others in their meeting house in Vassalborough, and the said Peleg Dileno, taking the said Ruby Hoxie by the hand did openly declare, as followeth: Friends, I take this my friend Ruby Hoxie to be my wife, promising through divine assistance to be unto her a loving and faithful husband until it shall please the Lord by death to separate us. And then the said Ruby Hoxie did in like manner declare as follows: Hy friends, I take this my friend Peleg Dileno to be my husband, promising through divine assistance to be unto him a loving and faithful wife until it shall please the Lord by death to separate us — or words of the like import. “And the said Peleg Dileno and Ruby Hoxie, as a further confirmation thereof have hereunto set their hands, she after the custom of marriage assuming the name of he r husband.”
Now all through the document the name is spelled DILENO. But the signatures of bride and groom stand out clearly Peleg DELANO Jr. and Ruby DELANO. The scribes of that time were never careful about spelling, and it is not unusual to find two or even three different spellings in the same document.
Now what makes this old marriage document of great local value historically are the signatures of those 36 witnesses, for they show us clearly who was who in Friends Meeting at Vassalboro in 1791. Rem. J. Hobby is certainly David Sands’ Remington Hobbie. There were several Tabers; besides the women were Silas, Jacob and Bartholomew. There were a number of Husseys, including the well known patriarch of the family, Isaac. Of course the Hoxies were there, for one of their kin was the bride. Hezekiah, Silas and Abel Hoxie all signed the docwnent. There were three Bowermans — David, Elizabeth and Peace; two Sleepers — Moses and Hannah; only one of the Howlands — Joseph. And the first name, leading all the other 35 is that of Vassalboro’s great pioneer, Joshua Fry. How did Mr. Estes come by this valuable document? He isn’t quite sure. He only knows it was in an old desk brought to Winslow by his mother many years ago. The Estes family goes back many generations in <l1ina and Vassalboro. Mr. Edward Estes is still a vigorous man of only 71, but his father, a veteran of the Civil War, was bom in 1840. After the war the veteran and his father, Edward Estes’ grandfather, conducted a hay and grain business at Getchell’s Comer. Somewhere in the past Mr. Estes t branch of the family was related to the Hoxie’s and into the Estes family, by some now unremembered route, came the marriage doc\Dllent of Ruby Hoxie, written and signed when George Washington was President of the United States.
I hope the diversion to that fine old marriage document has interested you as much as it did me. Now let’s get back to the story of the development of the Quaker movement in our vicinity. We had left that story with the opening of the Friends Meeting House in 1786 and the double marriage held in it in 1788. By 1790 a number of Friends had settled in the eastern part of Vassalboro, near the outlet of China Lake. In 17,98 a. meeting house was built there, called East Pond Meeting, to distinguish it from the River Meeting. For many years the Vassalboro monthly meeting alternated between the two meeting houses — the older one at Vassalboro and the newer one at East Vassalboro. In 1831 was built the well known brick meeting house at East Vassalboro. In 1803 Abel Jones had come to China from Durham and had joined a small band of Friends on the east sn-ore of the lake. In 1806 he married Susana Jepsen. the first Friends marriage in O1ina. On the east shore, about three miles from the north end of the lake, a Friends meeting house, known as the Pond Meeting House the first in China — was built in 1807.
Prior to 1795 the Friends Quarterly ~eting at Salem included all Friends east of Boston. That meeting did hold one session a year at Falmouth (the old name for Portland) to accomodate the gtowing number of Friends in Maine. In 1795 a regular Quarterly Meeting was established at Falmouth, and by 1813 the society had become so numerous in Vassalboro and China that Vassalboro Quarterly Meeting was established and continued to flourish. The Vassalboro Quarterly Meeting had thus been in existence for seven years when Maine became a State, and it was that meeting which secut:ed the passage of Article 7, Section 5 of the Constitution of Maine, which to this day exempts members of the Society of Friends from military service of the State.
On a later program I want to tell you mot:e about those early Quakers of the Kennebec, especially about their staunch religious beliefs which won the respect of all their neighbors. And I want to tell you about some of them who, as individuals, became nearly as distinguished as did Rufus Jones. But tonight we have left only time to quote what was said of them in 1892 by the young man who was then principal of Oak Grove Seminary. For that young principal was Rufus Jones himself. In those days, long before he had become the great Quaker of international fame, he wrote of those founders of the Kennebec Society of Friends:
“These people were with very few exceptions ignorant of book education. The Bible was, in many cases, their only book. The heroes of faith pictured in the Old Testament were the only heroes they ever heard of. David and Isaiah were their poets. The Bible furnished their only history and their only ethics; it was the child’s reader and spe,lling book. But with all their days devoted to stubborn toil, with all the scarcity of books and their difficulty in reading, these people of the wilderness grew refined and took on a culture and a grace admired by all who knew them.”
Year: 1951