The Covenant, Signed Twice

On the third of October, 1791, in the house of Captain Jehial Franklin at Wysox, Pennsylvania, fourteen settlers organized themselves into a church — the first church, so far as any record shows, in what became Bradford County, "separated by a distance of at least eighty miles from any organization of Christian people." The man who gathered them was Jabez Culver: sixty years old, a convicted seditionist, a Loyalist exile, and "the very first to blow the gospel trumpet."

This episode is about why that founding is better read as a repetition. In 1636 the founders of Dedham, Massachusetts opened their town book with THE COVENANT — everlasting love as a foundation, a fence against the contrary-minded, and a fifth article requiring every man received to subscribe his name, obliging his successors after him for ever. Sixty-eighth on the roll stands Edward Colver, wheelwright: Jabez's great-great-grandfather. One hundred and fifty-five years, five colonies and states, one revolution, and one sedition conviction separate the two documents — and the same family hand signed both. The family had been whipped out of the covenant's churches and never once stopped being covenantal. The reflex is the inheritance.

And on the communion roll of the founding day, one name to hold: Rachel Brink, of the Sheshequin family into which Sergeant Timothy Culver — the Patriot cousin, one name, two flags — would later marry. The near-touch is documented. The meeting is not. The difference between those two sentences is the whole method of this project.

Text, sources, and notes at history.collver.biz.