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Coming to Collins

By the time Barak and Mary arrived in Collins in 1826, much of Danby seemed to have gotten there first.

Barak’s brother Augustus Smith (1792–1886) and his wife Elizabeth [White] Smith (1793–1875) had arrived ten years earlier, in 1816, when there was no road past their own land and the nearest neighbor was miles away. In his first five years in Collins, Augustus spent a hundred days at log raisings, helping build the settlement house by house. Barak’s sister Catherine [Smith] Boyce (1802–1854) and her husband Benjamin Boyce (1796–1869) came to the area not long after, settling just south of Augustus’s land. Other Danby families followed at different moments along the same routes: the Wilbers, the Palmertons, and the Nicholses. By the time Barak and Mary arrived, there was already a log Friends meeting house just over the line in North Collins.

Mary and Barak left a great deal behind in Danby: the meeting Gilbert Palmer had helped found, the burial ground where their parents lay, the hills where they’d both grown up. Yet when they stepped off the wagon in 1826, they found that their community hadn’t disappeared. Much of it had simply moved.

In those days, in winter, a yoke of oxen and a sled with a high box would set out at sunset, stopping at one house and then the next, loading in neighbors, women in the sled and men walking alongside, until they reached a friend’s house and stayed until two or three in the morning. Visiting, wrote Erasmus Briggs in his 1883 history of Collins, was “a business.” When their neighbor Jonathan Soule fell too ill to clear his own fallow for planting, the Friends of the meeting told him to go to Hamburg and rest for a week. He came home to find it cleared, sown with wheat, harrowed, and fenced. Nobody mentioned it. That instinct, to show up without being asked, to give without accounting for the cost, ran through this community and through this family. It would appear again and again in the family’s later letters and diaries: people exposing themselves to illness, crossing difficult country, giving what they had. Mary and Barak were part of that.

Barak worked as a carpenter and built many of Collins’s oldest houses. A sawmill on Clear Creek, built in 1824 by John and David Wilber, later passed into Barak and Augustus’s hands. Barak built a grist mill above it, over the flume. Augustus spent an entire winter shaping the millstones. Carpentry, milling, and a growing web of Danby families arriving one by one. A community was rebuilding itself here, piece by piece. [437 words]

Details of Augustus and Elizabeth Smith’s arrival, and the hundred days of log raisings, draw on Augustus’s own account in Erasmus Briggs, History of the Original Town of Concord (1883), p. 684, available online here. The Quaker mission and Seneca territory are described on p. 524–525 of the same volume. The Jonathan Soule story and the winter visiting custom come from p. 603. The Danby-to-Collins migration is noted on p. 604. Details about the mill and daily community life draw on the Alnorca article, “By the Old Mill Stream,” Gowanda News and Observer, February 21, 1935