Bro. Tichenor was a Christadelphian with a missionary urge. He was a friend of Sis. Eusebia Lasius, Bro. John Thomas’ daughter. They were both members of the Jersey City ecclesia, established in 1883. He was a tea salesman. He would rent a ‘livery rig’ as it was called — a buckboard wagon and horse — and travel the back roads, selling tea and other staple groceries. One of his customers was Samuel van Aken, who had a small grocery store in the village of Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania. Sam, his wife and three sons all became Christadelphians, and they were responsible for teaching many others in that area the way of salvation. Laura Garing was a young woman who worked for Samuel and his wife. She also accepted the Truth and was baptized.
Bro. Tichenor’s next stop was at the village of Greeley, where he stopped to have his horse shod. He converted the blacksmith named Rosencrance and his wife, Louise, who was the local postmistress. Then he continued to Hawley, where there were several customers. By then, the steel tires on his rented wagon needed tightening and his horse needed to be reshod. So he stopped at the Reifler blacksmith shop. Reifler, who shod the horse, had no interest in his preaching. In fact, later he and his descendants at least to the fourth generation had a hate on Christadelphians which some of them vented on me during my childhood. But James Terwilliger, the wheelwright in the shop who worked on the tires, was an educated man. Not only was he converted and his wife, Addie, but they converted her stepfather, David R. Cooper and his wife Orvilla Potter Cooper, who were my grandparents, and their children Katy, Lloyd and Peter. Subsequently, the youngest daughter, Grace, also became a Christadelphian. My father, Peter, was baptized in 1891, when he was only eleven years old. Their next door neighbours, Jacob and Katherine Sweitzer, were baptized soon afterwards, and their children followed later.
Laura Garing’s father, John Garing, also happened to work part time as a blacksmith in the Reifler smithy, alongside James Terwilliger. He was a farmer in the town of Hawley, about twenty miles west of Lackawaxen. Under the influence of his daughter, his co-worker, and of course Bro. Tichenor, he and his wife became Christadelphians.
In the course of time there were quite a few converts in Hawley, my own birthplace. They met at first in private homes, then in a one-room schoolhouse, then for many years they rented the Oddfellows Lodge Hall.
In 1910, there was a spectacular visit of Halley’s Comet, and many Christadelphians supposed, from something Bro. John Thomas had said before he died, that Christ would return at that time. When this assumption proved incorrect, there was a great fragmentation among the Christadelphians, and some went off and started splinter groups, some calling themselves Christadelphians, and others taking other names. I can’t pretend even to give a list. [This premature date-setting crisis wrought especial havoc in distant Guyana, where there were more than six hundred Christadelphians at the time. Ed.] .
Like my father before me, I was baptized at the age of eleven years and nine months. We were young, but we knew very clearly what we were doing. Such an age for immersion was not unusual in those days. In my case, Jerusalem had fallen to the British under Lord General Allenby, and there was another period of high expectation of the soon return of Jesus. But it was followed by more recriminations and splintering. Because of this problem, my parents and my brother and I left Hawley and travelled to attend meetings at Lackawaxen, which we did until the 1940’s. At that time there was gas rationing, and we could not make the trip. So there was some sort of reunion involving our family, and we were invited back to be members of the Hawley meeting. This period lasted until the mid-1950’s, when there was another split, over what I never was able to find out. As a result, the Hawley ecclesia melted away. In 1963, one group built a chapel at Honesdale, where an active ecclesia still exists. The majority of the members are third, fourth and fifth generation descendants of the pioneer Garing, Cooper, Sweitzer and Frisbie families, and their wives, or are spouses of said descendants.
My mother, Dora Frost, and William Brown were among the original Sunday school scholars of the Jersey City ecclesia back in 1883. After they were both baptized sometime in the 1890’s, Dora moved to Hawley when she married my father, Peter. William Brown then used to visit the area where Bro. Tichenor and brother Terwilliger, the blacksmith, had done their missionary work, and wrote up part of the story in the well-known book, Preaching the Truth. James Terwilliger is Paul Stephanas in the book. I don’t know the details, but I do know that hundreds of brothers and sisters all over the world now rejoice in the Truth through reading that little book. [Probably there are more than a hundred such brothers and sisters in the Caribbean alone. ‘Preaching the Truth’ has been reprinted at least six times in Britain and several times in Australia in the past fifty years. Ed.]
You can tell from my story that being a missionary means being on fire with the word of truth. It need not involve any big cumbersome organization. It means giving an answer of the hope that it is within us graciously and humbly to every man who asks of us. I do so long that more young brothers and sisters may catch that fire that burned in my native Pennsylvania so long ago. My story has a very sad part too. I do hope and pray that my younger brothers and sisters will never again spend precious time striving among themselves as my generation did while people around us are perishing in ignorance of the truth.
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One