by Mary Grow

From Rufus Matthew Jones, your writer goes backward and then forward in the Jones family.

Rufus Jones was the nephew of Eli Jones and his wife Sybil (Jones) Jones, well-known Quaker missionaries. Rufus and Elizabeth (Cadbury) Jones’ daughter, Mary Hoxie Jones, born almost a century later than Eli Jones, was a historian and poet.

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Eli Jones (March 12, 1807- Feb. 2, 1890) was Abel and Susannah Jones’ oldest son. According to his nephew’s 1889 biography, Eli and Sybil Jones: Their Life and Work, his formal education was limited to China’s one-room schools and three months at the Friends School, in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1827.

Despite a speech impediment, Rufus Jones wrote, his uncle spoke in Friends meetings from an early age, in China and in Providence. Home from Providence, he helped organize, and became secretary of a local branch of the Sons of Temperance; and helped organize the still-active South China public library.

Rufus commented that when Eli took on these community projects, he had “barely become a full-fledged citizen” and had no family example to follow. The explanation, Rufus wrote, was that “there was something in him which forbade rest and inaction” when the inner spirit presented a task.

In addition to working on the family farm, Eli helped run mills in China and Albion.

In 1833, he married Sybil Jones (Feb. 28, 1808 – Dec. 4, 1873), born in Brunswick and living with her parents in Augusta. Her nephew described her (in his chapter on the Friends in Henry Kingsbury’s Kennebec County history) as physically frail, but with “a poetic soul” and a “beautiful, melodious voice and a flow of suitable words to give utterance to the thought which seemed to come to her by inspiration.”

Sybil attended the Providence Friends School in 1824-25, and worked as a teacher. She wrote poetry; much of it she destroyed, and Rufus observed that what survived was often “tinged with thoughts of death and the grave.”

Eli and Sybil lived in South China until they moved into their own house at Dirigo in or after 1833 (sources differ). The house, still standing on the south side of what is now Route 3 at the Dirigo Road intersection, is described as a north-facing, L-shaped story-and-a-half wooden Cape on a granite foundation. It has been on the National Register of Historic Places since March 22, 1984.

The couple traveled over much of the world, in horse-drawn carriages and wagons, on small sailboats and large steamboats and on the backs of donkeys, spreading Quaker beliefs. Despite her health issues, described by one source as serious back problems, Sybil was often the one who felt called to these missions.

Their first trip was to Nova Scotia and New Brunswick in 1840. Their first overseas mission was to Liberia in 1850. In 1852 and 1853 they visited half a dozen northern European countries; in the spring of 1854 they were in southern France.

After their oldest son’s death in the Civil War (see below), Sybil spent time in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. hospitals nursing wounded soldiers. Rufus estimated 30,000 men heard her message. After President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination on April 15, 1865, she twice visited his widow to offer comfort.

Sybil’s last mission, a multi-year trip to England, France and the Middle East, beginning in 1867, led to the founding of Friends’ missions on Mount Lebanon and in Ramallah, the latter named the Eli and Sybil Jones Mission. (Your writer found on line a history of the Friends in Ramallah, written in 2016 by Maia Carter Hallward and titled The Ramallah Friends Meeting: Examining 100 Years of Peace and Justice Work, in Quaker Religious Thought: Vol. 127.)

The first of Eli and Sybil’s five children, James Parnell Jones (1835 – 1864), is locally famous as “the fighting Quaker.” Enlisting in the Seventh Maine Volunteers, he was killed July 12, 1864, at Crystal Springs, near Washington, D. C.

The younger children were Sybil Narcissa (1839 – 1903); Richard Mott (1843 – 1917; his son, Charles Richard Jacob, was Rufus’s close friend for many years); Susan Tabor (1847 – 1913, who lived with her father from his return to China until his death) and Eli Grellet (1850 – 1933 or 1934).

Between foreign trips, Eli was active in town affairs. In addition to the temperance society and the South China library, he helped start Erskine Academy, in South China (in 1883; he was president of the first board of trustees) and held official town positions.

The China bicentennial history says the latter included an undated term as liquor agent, given by state law “a monopoly on the distribution of alcoholic beverages.” The history comments that while he was liquor agent, “China had a dry year.”

Maine had enough temperance advocates in the mid-1800s to persuade the state legislature to enact a prohibition law in 1850. Rufus wrote that many people thought it insufficiently enforced.

China voters hoped to improve enforcement, he said, when, in 1854, they chose Eli Jones their representative to the Maine legislature “by a large majority over two other candidates.” (Though his nephew referred to Eli as a candidate, it is not clear that he was one: Rufus wrote that his election was “wholly unexpected,” and he had been working to elect one of the others.)

Because Quakers follow Jesus’ admonition not to swear oaths (in Matthew 5:34-37), Eli did not participate when the Governor administered the oath of office to the legislators. He stood separately to affirm that he would do his job.

Eli’s committee assignments included the committee on temperance. Rufus wrote that his uncle “seldom spoke, most of his work being in the committee.”

Fellow legislators devised a trick to make the pacifist Quaker speak: they unanimously appointed him major-general in command of a division of the state militia.

Eli rode home to Dirigo that evening and consulted until late with family and friends. When he returned to Augusta, sleepless, the next day, he found almost all the legislators from both houses and many city people waiting to hear what he would say.

Rufus reprinted most of his uncle’s speech. Eli said he feared appointing a pacifist Quaker to head the militia was “a little in advance of the times,” despite progress on temperance and on resistance to slavery.

If he was mistaken and the legislature really wanted him to serve, he would, he promised. He would order the troops to ground arms, beat swords into plowshares and spears into pruning-hooks and go home and read the New Testament.

But, believing the legislature was not endorsing such a policy, he would and did decline the appointment.

Rufus wrote that the speech was frequently interrupted by applause and “made a great sensation” not just in Maine, but internationally, being reported in the United States and Great Britain and even in one African newspaper. The intended jest, in his view, let his uncle “preach peace to a very extended audience”; it also gained him increased respect among his fellow lawmakers.

In 1857, Eli helped reopen Oak Grove School, in Vassalboro, after lack of funds closed the high school that had opened in December 1850. He served as principal of the renamed Oak Grove Seminary for a year, the first of 10 men named Jones (including his son Richard, from 1870 to 1874, and his nephew Rufus, from 1889 to 1893) to head the school before 1918. In 1870 and 1871 he was supervisor of schools in China.

Sybil Jones died Dec. 4, 1873, at their Dirigo home. Eli continued to live there with his younger daughter Susan until they returned to South China in 1884, except for two more trips to the Middle East, in 1876 and 1882.

Rufus described his uncle as satisfied with farming, especially fond of and loved by his sheep and other animals; and a lover of all nature, who was happy sitting under a tree watching birds and insects, never knowingly stepping “on a worm or beetle” or killing anything else. He was interested in “fossils and geological specimens.” A frequent and welcome visitor at Quaker meetings throughout the area, he was also a respected speaker at China’s town meetings.

Eli Jones died Feb. 2, 1890. According to the Town of China cemetery records (with which Find a Grave disagrees), he and Sibyl are buried in Dudley Cemetery, with their oldest son, James Parnell Jones, and their younger daughter, Susan Tabor Jones (identified as Susan L. in the town records).

Dudley Cemetery is on the east side of Dirigo Road a short distance south of Eli and Sybil’s house, farther from the road than Dirigo Friends Cemetery. Family members buried in the Dirigo yard include Eli’s parents, Abel and Susannah Jepson Jones; his sister, Peace; and his brothers, Edwin and Cyrus.

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Rufus and Elizabeth Jones’ only child, Mary Hoxie Jones (Eli Jones’ great-niece), was born July 27, 1904, in Haverford, Pennsylvania, and lived there or in adjoining Bryn Mawr most of her life, spending vacations at Pendle Hill, in China.

From 1916 to 1922, she was a student at the Baldwin School, a private, non-sectarian girls’ school in Bryn Mawr. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College, in South Hadley, Massachusetts, in 1926.

Mary Hoxie Jones was steeped in Quakerism all her life, often traveling abroad with her parents. From 1939 to 1951, she held staff positions with the American Friends Service Committee, and served on its board of directors for many years afterwards.

Her historical writing started with collecting and organizing documents about her family’s history and genealogy. One product was a short biography of her father, published as a pamphlet by the Friends Home Service Committee in 1955, in London.

More general works included a 1937 history of the Friends Service Committee from its founding in 1917, and a 1961 history of New England Friends in the latter half of the 1600s. The first book she dedicated to her father, to his great pleasure.

A series called Pendle Hill Pamphlets included a history of Quaker poets and a collection of notes her father made for his sermons and talks – notes which, she commented, he never appeared to use. Apparently they served to “fix a central idea firmly in his mind” and “as a springboard” for his speeches.

Jones’ work was recognized when Haverford College made her a research associate in Quaker studies in 1962 and awarded her an honorary doctorate in 1985.

Her first published book of poems was Arrows of Desire (1931). Beyond This Stone came out in 1965, Mosaic of the Sun in 1975.

The first poem in Beyond This Stone is a light-hearted tribute to her father on his 70th birthday, Jan. 25, 1933. Before reciting some of the many greetings he received, she began:

I wish you much felicity
Now that you have reached seventy.

After five more near-rhymes, including “postal” with “Pentecostal,” “thorough” with “Vassalboro” and “Kansas” with “pansies,” the first stanza ends:

Or who else could maneuver
A message out of Herbert Hoover?

Many poems express Jones’ appreciation of nature. Others show her dislike of war and of modern inventions, including the atom bomb; machines that destroy nature to build highways; man-made “hardware in the sky” and flights to the moon while the local trains don’t run reliably; and Christmas that has become “a frantic helter-skelter” and a “worry” when it should be “a stillness.”

Wild Geese combines the themes.

The wild geese leave the north and fly
In V formation through the sky.
Honking above the pines and lake
I hear them, far away and high,
And hearing them my heart will break
Knowing that man has fashioned wings
To fly, like birds, great silver things.
Each carrying bombs, the planes go forth,
A wedge of death, as autumn brings
The wild geese flying from the north.

Main sources

Beard, Frank A., and Roger G. Reed, National Register of Historic Places Inventory – Nomination Form Eli and Sybil Jones House, February 1984.
Grow, Mary M., China Maine Bicentennial History including 1984 revisions (1984).
Jones, Rufus M. Eli and Sybil Jones (1889).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Correction to Meeting House location

Your writer was probably in error when, in the April 25 article on Rufus Jones, she cited the source that said the family drove from South China north (on what is now Route 202) to the Pond Meeting House twice weekly, while he was a child in the 1860s and 1870s. Elizabeth Gray Vining, in Friend of Life: The Biography of Rufus M. Jones, wrote that his family worshipped at the Friends meeting house at Dirigo.

A reference in Jones’ Finding the Trail of Life to the road through the woods to meeting as “hilly” supports Vining: current Route 3 east to Dirigo is hillier than Route 32 north to Pond Meeting House.

The Dirigo meeting house was abandoned in 1884, when Friends meeting moved to South China Village. Your writer found no information on how long it had been used.

by Mary Grow

Part of Rufus Matthew Jones’ story of his early life, in his 1921 book titled A Small-Town Boy, was summarized last week. This week’s article continues his story, starting with his primary schooling in one-room schoolhouses in South China and Weeks Mills.

Jones wrote that he was “four years and six months old” when he first walked with his older sister the quarter-mile to the South China schoolhouse, just south of the four corners. He was starting at the beginning of the 1867 summer term; only younger students attended, because “the big boys” were doing farm work.

The woman teacher taught all ages and all subjects. After the morning prayer, Scripture reading and hymn, she called the grade levels one at a time to the blackboard at the front of the room to begin lessons.

Winter sessions, Jones wrote, were different. The back two or three rows of seats were occupied by “big boys and girls,” and discipline was a problem. Teachers were likely to be men, on the theory that muscle mattered – though he promptly cited a woman who maintained excellent order and a man who provided “a fine illustration of educational chaos.”

The latter, he said, was physically removed from the schoolhouse by some of the unruly older boys. His successor, a physically smaller man, quickly established moral authority over the students and led a successful session.

These schools had books, blackboards and chalk, but little else of supplies or equipment. Jones wrote of learning geography without maps or a globe, and physics and physiology without equipment or experiments.

Jones claimed that he learned the first three letters of the alphabet on his first day of school – “the most momentous intellectual step I have every taken.” He marveled that “all of Shakespeare’s plays, the whole of the English Bible, Browning’s Ring and the Book, and everything else I have ever read are made up of those letters I learned in that Primer Class!”

At 15, Jones walked three miles each way to the Weeks Mills one-room school, because the teacher there was outstanding. The next fall he began 11 weeks at Oak Grove Seminary, in Vassalboro.

He was one of the boarding students, sharing a dormitory room with another boy. Fathers took turns bringing them home for weekends, and mothers supplied a week’s worth of food, which the students ate cold or cooked – boiled eggs, for instance – in their rooms.

At Oak Grove, Jones began learning Latin – by the end of his college education he was proficient in Latin and Greek – and studied astronomy under an excellent female teacher. Even at Oak Grove, there was “no telescope, no observatory, no proper instruments,” but he learned enough to skip astronomy in college, earning a 95 on the exam without taking the course.

In the spring of 1879, Jones wrote, he and his father were planting potatoes together when he informed his father that he wanted to go to the Moses Brown Friends School, in Providence, Rhode Island. The family had no money for the undertaking; Jones was awarded a scholarship that covered a year’s tuition and board.

Another chapter in A Small-Town Boy deals with his informal leadership of a group of boys about his age, especially their outdoor lives. He summarized: “We were absolutely at home on the water, in the water, on the ice or through the ice, in the woods, or in the snow.”

One exciting episode he recounted involved out-of-town pirates net-fishing surreptitiously in China Lake. He and his gang assembled a fleet of rowboats, equipped themselves with grapnels and “revolvers and old muskets” and went in search of the invaders.

In the north end of the east basin, they found two men who had stretched nets from the northernmost island to each shore. The men hauled in their nets and made for shore, chased by the boys shooting “in the air or on the water where we were sure not to hit them.”

The boys caught up as the men reached land and scared them into promising never to return.

Jones wrote about two others of the five China Lake islands that he and his friends frequented as teenagers. Round or Birch Island, in the east basin, was a place for a corn roast and perhaps an overnight camp-out. The amusement park on Bradley’s Island, in the west basin, included a bowling alley.

A Small-Town Boy has brief verbal portraits of some of the Jones’ neighbors, identified by first names only. One was a shy, quiet man “who gave the impression of being very stern and grouchy.” When his mowing machine tipped over and trapped him, Jones wrote that the only thing he said to the neighbor who lifted the machine off him was “That’s all I need of thee.”

This man, Jones said, was secretly “one of the tenderest-hearted persons in the town.” He heard that a neighbor with a sick wife was low on firewood: he left a load of stovewood in the dooryard one night. He heard another family was out of butter: he left them a can of milk with “a four pound chunk of butter” floating in it.

Another neighbor made a hole in the gable of his barn so barn-swallows could come and go, and let Jones and his friends – and birds – eat the cherries from his two cherry trees. Yet another, when his seasonal farm chores were finished, hurried to help any neighbor who was behind schedule with planting, haying or some other job.

Jones mentioned one ungenerous neighbor. The example he related said this man sold some hens to a buyer in the far end of town, and on the journey, some of the hens laid eggs. Seller and buyer argued “for a long period” over who owned the eggs.

Jones had written an earlier book about his boyhood. A Boy’s Religion from Memory was published in 1902, and as the title says, focused more on his religious and spiritual life than on his small-town surroundings.

The Trail books begin with Finding the Trail of Life (1926), which partly repeats and expands on A Boy’s Religion. It was followed by The Trail of Life in College (1929) and The Trail of Life in the Middle Years (1934).

These books contain a mix of Jones’ outer life, as he attended high school and college and began his career, and his inner life, as life-altering decisions were shaped and carried out primarily according to the inner voice or inner light that Quakers take as their guide.

From the Friends School, he went to Haverford College, in Haverford, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia. Founded by Friends in 1833, it had been accepting non-Quakers since 1849, but did not admit its first women until 1969 (as transfer students; full acceptance dates from 1980).

Jones wrote in The Trail of Life in College that he enrolled as a sophomore in the fall of 1882. Studying Latin and Greek, philosophy and mathematics, he did extra work and took advanced classes. By the end of junior year he needed “only a few hours per week” for another year to earn his bachelor’s degree.

He therefore arranged to write a master’s thesis the same year, 1884-1885, and earned both degrees. The thesis was on American history; but, he wrote, it was his graduation essay on mysticism that was more influential in his later writings.

Returning to the South China family farm, Jones received two offers in two days: a graduate fellowship in history at the University of Pennsylvania, and a one-year teaching position at Oakwood Seminary, described as a Quaker boarding school, in Union Springs, New York.

With the guidance of Aunt Peace (mentioned last week as a powerful influence) and the inner light on which he so often relied, Jones chose teaching – a decision he said he never regretted.

His career kept him away from China, except for vacations, for most of the rest of his life. He taught for two years at Moses Brown School, in Providence. In 1889, he was considering graduate work at Harvard when he was invited to become principal of Oak Grove Seminary in neighboring Vassalboro.

He served four years, 1889-1993, with younger brother Herbert as business manager. In later autobiographical works, he wrote about how much he gained in the Oak Grove community, in leadership skills, problem-solving and friendships.

In 1893 he again planned graduate work at Harvard. This time he was distracted when “the call came to me” to teach philosophy at Haverford and edit the Friends’ Review (later The American Friend).

He took the train from Vassalboro, “leaving my beloved Oak Grove Seminary for the last time with my face wet with quiet tears,” and stayed at Haverford until retiring in 1934. The Find a Grave website says he earned a master’s degree from Harvard in 1901.

Jones traveled in Europe for pleasure as a young man, and later on major errands as a leader among American Friends, especially during the world wars. He was among organizers of the American Friends Service Committee in 1917, and worked for the organization the rest of his life. One AFSC mission in which he participated was an unsuccessful 1938 attempt to talk peace with Adolf Hitler.

In the summer of 1888, Jones married his first wife, Sarah Hawkeshurst Coutant, of Ardonia, New York, whom he met at Oakwood. It was she who encouraged him to take the Oak Grove job in 1889. Their much-loved son, Lowell Coutant Jones, was born there Jan. 23, 1892. Sarah died of tuberculosis in 1899; Lowell died of diphtheria in 1903.

In 1902 Jones married for the second time, to Elizabeth Bartram Cadbury (Aug. 15, 1871 – Oct. 26, 1952). Their only child, Mary Hoxie Jones, was born July 27, 1904.

Family summer vacations were often spent at Pendle Hill, a simple wooden house on the west side of Route 202 in China, overlooking China Lake. Jones and his brother Herbert “cut trees for lumber and designed the house” during the 1915 Christmas vacation, according to the China bicentennial history.

Other sources say a local carpenter did the building the following spring, badly enough so that the Jones brothers did extensive follow-up work. Also on the property was a log cabin that Rufus Jones reportedly built himself.

Jones named the house Pendle Hill (your writer assumes after Pendle Hill, in England, where Quaker founder George Fox had a revelation in 1652). Pendle Hill was added to the National Register of Historic Places on Aug. 4, 1983, at the same time as the Pond Meeting House, on Route 202, and the Abel Jones house, in South China.

Jones died in Haverford on June 16, 1948. His widow died Oct. 26, 1952. Both are buried in a Haverford Friends cemetery.

Main sources

Jones, Rufus M., A Small-Town Boy (1941).
Jones, Rufus M., Finding the Trail of Life (1926).
Jones, Rufus M., The Trail of Life in College (1929).

Websites, miscellaneous.