A. T. Smith Diary transcript 1843

Title

Description

A transcription of a 1843 diary in which Alvin Thompson Smith writes about topics such as his daily life living as a settler on the Tualatin Plains, his tending to daily farmwork and chores; constructing a barn; reading and attending prayer meetings and church; his travels to Willamette Falls; Congregational Minister Harvey L. Clark (or Clarke), P.B. Littlejohn, missionary John Smith Griffin, and the business affairs between the men; and his fellow settlers James and David Flet, C. M. Walker, Charles McKay and Cornelius Rogers, amongst others. Smith also describes taking in the children of Joseph Gale.

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 original diaries are held by the Oregon Historical Society (Mss 8).