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Shenandoah, 1887 to 1905

About 1887 the family crossed again, this time for good, and settled at Shenandoah, a coal town in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania. They lived on South White Street in the early 1890s and on West Centre Street by 1898. In April 1892 the Evening Herald reported that a Charles Parrish of South White Street was laid up at home with a foot crippled in an accident in the mines; the paper does not say whether it was the father or the son.

The same paper shows the Parrishes at the center of Shenandoah’s Primitive Methodist congregation. Primitive Methodism had begun in Staffordshire, the family’s home county, in the early 1800s, as a revival among working people. In October 1893 Maude was one of Shenandoah’s delegates to the Primitive Methodist Sunday school convention of Schuylkill County at Mahanoy City. In April 1894 she and her brother Charles were among the young people who honored the pastor’s wife, Mrs. Proude. A year later Maude visited Newark, New Jersey. At the Sunday school’s Christmas entertainment in December 1894, Harriet and George sang together, with organ and piano.

The same names stand around the Parrishes in the paper from 1893 to 1899: Marshal Baugh and his family, John Hoskins, Edward Cooper, the Dabbs, the Powells and the Timmins family. They turn up at birthday parties, anniversaries and a pastor’s crystal wedding. The congregation’s pastors in these years included the Rev. John Bath, in 1894, and the Rev. J. Proude. They were most likely fellow members of the congregation.

In September 1896 Elizabeth and her daughter Mary, by then Mrs. Arthur Ward of Jersey City, visited another daughter, Annie, Mrs. William Alsop, at Mount Carmel. In October 1897, when Arthur was in England, his father and a polling clerk were questioned in an election contest about whether Arthur had voted in Shenandoah. On 23 June 1898 the family gave a birthday party at the West Centre Street house for Harriet, who turned eighteen the next day. Her brother George and her sisters Florence and Maude were there, with Richard Sneddon, whom Maude married in 1903, and a Wassell Alsop. Wassell is the middle name Harriet later gave her son, David Wassell Davis. Whether it came to her from the Alsops or from her grandmother’s family is not known. Through 1898 and 1899 Harriet took part in the young people’s society and the church’s gatherings.

On the morning of Monday, 9 January 1899, Elizabeth Parrish took the 7:49 train from Shenandoah to visit her daughter Mary in Jersey City. That day, in what the papers called the Lehigh Valley wreck, the train from Shamokin, carrying passengers from the coal region, collided on a curve with another train at West Dunellen, New Jersey. When Mary sent word that her mother had not arrived, Elizabeth’s sons Charles and Arthur went to New Jersey. A claim agent of the railroad met them at Bound Brook and took them to the morgue, where they identified her, with Mary’s husband, Arthur Ward, beside them. Arthur brought her body home overnight on a special train that also carried seven other victims, from Mount Carmel and Shamokin. The Evening Herald counted seventeen injured in the hospital at Plainfield and expected the dead to number eighteen. The inquiry turned on whether a dispatcher’s order to hold all trains had reached Plainfield.

Elizabeth was 54. The family then lived at 300 West Centre Street. Her funeral left the house on 12 January, with services at the Primitive Methodist church and burial in the Odd Fellows’ cemetery. J. P. Williams & Son were the undertakers, and her pallbearers were Marshal Baugh, Fred Roberts, Edward Cooper, John Hoskins, William Collins and John Pooler. She belonged to the Women’s Relief Corps, No. 50, of Shenandoah. The paper named her surviving children as Mrs. A. Ward of Jersey City, Mrs. William Alsop of Mount Carmel, and Charles, Maude, Arthur, Florence, Harriet and George, living at home. Her memorial records that she was “killed in a train wreck headed to family in New Jersey”. In October 1899 a seventh-district convention of a women’s auxiliary of the Grand Army of the Republic held memorial services for deceased members, among them a “Harriet Parrish, Shenandoah.” Harriet was alive, and the name is most likely an error for Elizabeth, but the notice does not say so.

Family life went on around Charles. In August 1899 he gave a farewell party at his house for Mary Ward’s daughter, who was going home to Jersey City. Maude, Florence and “Hattie” Parrish were there, with Mrs. A. Ward and the Ward sons Charlie, Winfield, Frank and Richard. That month Arthur broke his collarbone when his bicycle struck something on West Lloyd Street, and in October Maude went to Jersey City to visit relatives.

In 1900 Charles, a widower, was living in Shenandoah with his daughter Maude. He was a mine laborer and had been out of work for five months, and his answer to the census question on reading and writing was changed from “yes” to “no”. That year a Harriet Parrish, 20, born in June 1880, was a servant in the household of Charles D. Field in Jersey City, where Harriet’s sister Mary lived. She is possibly Harriet, though that census gives her birthplace as Pennsylvania. Charles died at Shenandoah on 10 April 1901 and lies beside Elizabeth in the Odd Fellows Cemetery, Shenandoah Heights, Section 5, Row 15.

Of Harriet’s brothers and sisters, Mary married Arthur Ward of Jersey City. Besides the daughter of 1899, they had at least four sons, Charlie, Winfield, Frank and Richard. The family’s list names Richard, Herbert and Frank. Richard and Herbert went into business together at Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and Frank settled in California. By the time the list was made Richard had died, and a family update of 1982 placed Herbert in Tennessee.

Annie married William Alsop and lived at Mount Carmel in the 1890s. She is possibly the Annie Allsop of three census households. In 1900, at Mount Carmel, William Allsop, 40, a coal miner born in Wales, and Annie, 34, born in England in October 1865, had been married ten years and had five sons, Stephen, Archibald, George, David and Wilfred. In 1910, at Mahanoy City, Annie, 43, was entered as having come over in 1887, the Parrishes’ own year. She had borne ten children, six of them living, and the household held Stephen, Archie, George, David, Elizabeth and Jennie, who was born in New Jersey. In 1920, at Allentown, William, 59, worked as a laborer at a motor works, and lived with Annie, 53, Jennie, 17, and a granddaughter, Jeanette, 3½. Three Allsop sons who married at Allentown in 1916, 1919 and 1938 each named their mother as Annie Parrish, once spelled Parish, and one gave his birthplace as Shenandoah. William Allsop’s wife was probably born a Parrish, and the three households are probably one family. That she was Harriet’s sister is only possible, because no record names her parents, and none of her sons was named Wassell.

Maude Marietta married Richard Sneddon (1871 to 1947) in 1903. Their daughter, Florence Ethel Sneddon (1911 to 2001), married first a Lamson and later a Hess. Maude died at Shillington, Berks County, on 7 May 1945, and was buried in her parents’ plot. Her death certificate names her parents as Charles Parrish and Eliz. Collins. Her daughter, as Florence Sneddon Lamson, was later the family’s “repository of data” for the Parrish line, and her cousin Herbert C. Ward kept in touch with her into the early 1980s.

Florence married a Stokes. Her daughter, also Florence, married a Meyer and lived at Caldwell, New Jersey. George, by the family’s list the next-to-youngest, was last known to be living in New York City. Of Arthur and Harry the list records nothing more.