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Mary Palmer and Barak Smith — A Danby Courtship

Mary Palmer (1788–1875) and Barak Smith (1787–1868) were born a year apart in the small Vermont town of Danby. Mary was the daughter of Gilbert Palmer [link to Gilbert Palmer], who had helped found the town’s Quaker meeting. Barak was the grandson of Wing Rogers [link to Wing Rogers], another of its founders, and the son of Nathan Smith [link to Caleb Smith], who had married Wing’s daughter. Their families had built the meeting together, and Mary and Barak grew up inside it. [link to Danby, Vermont]

Barak carried a name with a story. His parents named him for his uncle Barak Smith (1755–1828), who had marched to Lexington and Concord as a young farmhand and spent his first day of war burying the dead. [link to Barak Smith and the Revolution] When the younger Barak was born in 1787, that uncle was still alive.

Every week, the Friends of Danby gathered. Mary and Barak sat in the same silence, in the same room, week after week, as children and then as young adults. Quaker courtship happened in plain view of their community. A couple who wished to marry declared their intention before the meeting, which appointed Friends to inquire whether they were clear to proceed. Only then could they marry, and they married before the meeting rather than before a minister.

On September 1, 1808, Mary and Barak did exactly that. Mary was nineteen, Barak twenty-one. Their first child, Orpah, arrived the next year, and five more followed while the family lived in Danby.

For eighteen years, Mary and Barak raised their children in the town where they had grown up, in the meeting their families had built. But they would not stay in Danby forever. Vermont’s hill farms were hard country, and by the 1820s many New England families were looking west. In time, Mary and Barak would go too. [link to the move to Collins] [Fewer than 312 words]

Sources

Mary Palmer and Barak Smith’s birth and marriage dates, and the births of their children, draw on Quaker and family records researched by Clarance Maris Smith. The naming of Barak for his uncle, the Revolutionary militiaman Barak Smith (1755–1828), is documented in Clarance’s research; see [Barak Smith and the Revolution]. Details about the Danby Friends meeting draw on J.C. Williams, History and Map of Danby, Vermont (1869) — available here.