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Mary and Barak — the Stocking Feet

Barak and Mary Smith had built a life together. Then, two years after arriving in Collins, they found themselves walking to different meeting houses.

Carlotta Wood and Nora Johnson Brown, who wrote about Collins history in the 1930s under the pen name Alnorca, recorded what the family remembered: “The schism which rent the Quaker society during the first half of the last century sometimes entered the home. It was thus in the Smith family, Barak remaining orthodox and his wife going over to the Hicksites. On one occasion, runs a family story, thinking to prevent her from attending service, Barak hid her shoes but Mary Palmer was not so easily turned from her purpose and she appeared at the meeting house of her choice in her stocking feet.”

He hid her shoes, but she went anyway.

The story has come down through generations as a family legend. We don’t know what was said afterward. The family’s later letters, which survive from the 1850s onward and are full of Mary’s own voice, suggest that Barak would have waited for her to tell him in her own time, and that Mary, having made her point, would have moved on to painting a floor or putting the kettle on. They were practical people. They stayed married for sixty years.

What divided them was not trivial. In 1827, a Long Island preacher named Elias Hicks split the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting over a fundamental question: did religious authority live in the conscience of each person, or in scripture and institution? The rupture spread fast. The following year, in 1828, it reached Collins, and the town’s Quakers built a second meeting house for those who had followed Hicks. The Hicksite branch held to the Inner Light, God speaking directly to every person without mediation. It kept silent worship, no paid ministry, and a strong current toward abolition and social reform. The Orthodox branch moved toward evangelical Protestantism: more structured, scripture-centered, eventually with paid ministers and hymns.

Mary’s letters, written decades later, are among the most spiritually direct in the family correspondence, full of the sense of God as present and personal, available in daily life. Barak’s faith expressed itself differently: in action, in building, in the practical care he extended without accounting for it. They disagreed about which meeting house. They seem to have agreed about almost everything that mattered.

The Orthodox meeting house still stands. The Hicksite meeting house is now the Collins Historical Society. [link to Places to Visit — Collins] [410 words]

The stocking feet story comes from “By the Old Mill Stream,” written by Carlotta Wood and Nora Johnson Brown under the pen name Alnorca in the 1930s [link to come]. The Hicksite/Orthodox split in Collins is documented in Erasmus Briggs, History of the Original Town of Concord (1883), pp. 587–588 — available in full here.