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Caleb Smith and the Road to Quakerism

In 1778, at sixty, Caleb Smith (1718–1797) left Uxbridge, Massachusetts and traveled north to Danby, a small town in southwestern Vermont. The town history later described his spot in the “vast wilderness” as “one of the most picturesque and beautiful in Vermont, overlooking as it does the broad valley of Otter Creek.”

Caleb built a log house and went to work. He cut and burned over twenty acres. A year or two later he planted a wide field of corn. Land agents promoted cheap Vermont land hard in these years, and New Englanders came by the thousands. Caleb joined them, and his family would hold that farm for generations.

The Smiths arrived to find a strong and growing Quaker community. Luther Colvin had carried the Quaker faith to Danby from Rhode Island a decade earlier. Wing Rogers [link to Wing Rogers] and Gilbert Palmer [link to Gilbert Palmer] helped establish the local meeting — the congregation that gathered for worship and ran the community’s affairs.

The Smiths had come from a Puritan background, but in Danby they became Quakers. In 1786, eight years after the family arrived, Caleb’s son Nathan married Elizabeth Rogers, daughter of Wing Rogers [link to Wing Rogers]. It is the first time a Smith appears in the Danby Quaker records. The town history remembered Caleb himself as “a member of the Quaker society, a man of peaceable and quiet habits, whose name is ever mentioned by those who knew him, with profound esteem and most affectionate remembrance.”

We don’t have any record of why the Smiths turned toward the Quaker faith. Caleb’s son Barak had marched to Lexington and Concord three years before the family left Massachusetts, and spent his first day of war burying the dead. [link to Barak Smith and the Revolution] A family who had seen violence up close may have found something compelling in a faith built, above all, on peace.

Generations of Smiths carried this faith. It inspired them to fight against slavery, from New York to Iowa to Kansas. [fewer than 338 words]

Sources

Details of Caleb Smith’s arrival in Danby, his farm, and his character, along with the founding of the local Friends meeting by Luther Colvin, Wing Rogers, and Gilbert Palmer, draw on J.C. Williams, History and Map of Danby, Vermont (1869) — available here, and research by family genealogist Clarance Maris Smith.