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The house at Cool Spring looked old; its antiquity accentuated by peeling paint and a jungle that had once been a yard. We lived in an old house up in Dover, but this place was ancient. Even though it was only a short distance from where we had parked the car, I felt that my dad and I were on an archaeological expedition.
As I approached the squat-looking wooden house with its unusual roof, I remembered something I’d learned about snakes and mice at Camp Arrowhead, so each step through the tall grass was slow and deliberate.
“The people who built the house were Quakers,” my dad explained, “and what’s more, you’re related to them.” I suddenly felt a kinship to this place; it was now more than just another abandoned farmhouse in rural Delaware.
That was 40-some years ago, after a group of people befriended and bought this lonely example of early Quaker vernacular architecture.
The house was built around 1730 by Joshua Fisher, a talented man remembered by historians for having produced the first accurate nautical chart of the Delaware Bay and River. He later sold the house to James Martin, a Presbyterian minister, and the Martin family occupied the place for more than two centuries.
In 1980, the house was moved onto property adjacent to the Zwaanendael Museum in Lewes to become, the following year, an integral part of the town’s 350th anniversary celebration.
The Fisher-Martin House is now home to the Lewes Chamber of Commerce and functions as a welcome center. According to Executive Director Betsy Reamer, the guest book records roughly 7,000 visitors annually.
Last year, my in-laws, visiting from California, wanted to add their names to those welcomed to the First Town in the First State. As I told them how my dad had shown me the house years ago and explained our connection to it, my father-in-law said something about six degrees of separation, the concept that all of us on this third rock from the sun are known to one another.
I think that would please my Quaker ancestors. Interestingly, the ship that transported William Penn and the Society of Friends to these shores was the Welcome.
My apical ancestor in America, John Miers, was a Quaker who emigrated from England to Pennsylvania in 1686. Two years later he married Mary Haworth Haslum of Philadelphia, and shortly thereafter the couple purchased property in Lewes. John and Mary had six children, and I am descended from their second son, James Miers, who unfortunately was lost at sea in 1742, but not before marrying Joshua Fisher’s sister, Margery, in 1722 and fathering five children. The family connection to Joshua Fisher did not end there. In 1733, the builder of “The Welcoming House” married Sarah, the daughter of James’s sister of the same name.
Peter Miers teaches travel writing at Delaware Technical & Community College, Owens Campus.
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