A. T. Smith Diary transcript 1841

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Description

A transcription of a 1841 diary in which Alvin Thompson Smith writes about topics such as his daily life at the Spaldings Mission in modern-day Washington; his religious life; working the wheel, loom, and at the lumbermill; his interactions with "Indians;" his traveling company that included Peter B. Littlejohn and Congregational Minister Harvey L. Clark (or Clarke); traveling to Waiilatpu, Walla Walla, and Vancouver; visiting physician Marcus Whitman; some farming; and moving West from the Spalding mission through John Day River and the Willamette River before arriving in an area on the Tualatin Plains that is now modern-day Forest Grove. In the last part of 1841, Smith described how he started working on building a new house for himself and his wife.

Born in Connecticut in 1802, Alvin Thompson Smith, along with his wife Abigail Raymond, was amongst the first Euro-Americans to settle in the area on the Tualatin Plains that became Forest Grove, Oregon in the early 1840s. In his life, Smith was a missionary, a postmaster, a notable participant in the Champoeg Meetings, the builder of a 1856 house in Forest Grove that is today recognized by the National Register of Historic Places as the Alvin T. Smith House, and a contributor to an orphanage that became Tualatin Academy and later developed into Pacific University. Smith died in 1888 at the age of 85. This is one part of a collection of transcriptions of Alvin T. Smith's diaries from the years 1840-1853. The transcriptions, which are likely not identical to the diaries themselves and perhaps summarize some entries, were likely typewritten in the 1970s. The diaries are notable for their near daily entries. The original diaries are held by the Oregon Historical Society (Mss 8).