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Gilbert Palmer and the Danby Meeting

Gilbert Palmer (1731–1806) arrived in Danby around 1780. He was the kind of man the town history would later call “a modest, unpretending Quaker gentleman.” He took his place among the town’s freemen, the men entitled to vote in its affairs.

Gilbert came from Amenia, in New York’s Hudson Valley, where he had spent years in the Nine Partners Quaker meeting, one of the first congregations of any faith in America to declare slavery incompatible with Christian belief. The meeting’s records noted that his first marriage, to Sarah Deuel, had taken place outside the faith. After Sarah died, Gilbert remarried, this time to Mary Sherman, within the faith. He arrived in Danby with a full house of children.

In the early 1780s, Gilbert joined Wing Rogers [link to Wing Rogers], Nathan Smith [link to Caleb Smith], Luther Colvin, and others in formally establishing the Danby Friends meeting.

The children kept coming. On December 5, 1788, Mary Sherman gave birth to twins, Elizabeth and Mary [link to Mary Palmer and Barak Smith]. Mary would grow up to marry Barak Smith. Two years after the twins, the couple’s seventeenth child, Lydia, arrived, when Gilbert was fifty-nine. He was, by every account, a quiet and unassuming man. He was also, apparently, inexhaustible.

Gilbert died in 1806. His estate was declared insolvent, meaning he died with nothing to pass on. But that same year, the Friends laid out their burial ground on land Gilbert had given them, and he was the first person laid to rest in it. It is now called the Red School House Cemetery. There is no stone marking his grave today. [link to Places to Visit] [fewer than 271 words]

Gilbert Palmer’s estate notice appears in the Rutland Herald, July 12, 1806. His origins in Amenia, his marriages, and his Nine Partners meeting connection draw on Quaker records researched by Clarance Maris Smith. Details about the Danby Friends meeting and burial ground draw on J.C. Williams, History and Map of Danby, Vermont (1869) — available here. The Danby Friends burial ground is documented at the Danby historical society.