The Autobiography of Thorn Smith

My great-grandfather, Thorn Smith, was a chemist by profession. He was born and grew up in a small town called Portland, Michigan. His father was George Rogers Smith; his mother’s given name was Katerina Elizabetha Shaefer. She was the daughter of German immigrants.

Among the gifts he left his family was an autobiography. When I say he left this as a gift, I mean it quite literally. He was himself an ardent genealogist by avocation (it is upon his work that Aunt Dianne and I are building), and he recognized the importance of leaving behind his story so that later generations could understand a bit of what life looked like for him.

He writes:

This is not written in the spirit of the usual autobiography in which the writer is so inordinately proud of his record that he feels the world is waiting, with bated breath, for what he has to say. Sometimes [his] descendants are interested in learning the customs, the accommodations, conveniences and general habits of living of a bygone era. No attempt is made to erect a monument or set up a standard of living, for it is realized that every generation has a right to live its own life, knowing that its following generation will be still different. [Vol 2., p 9.]

Thorn was born in 1871. Thorn was a family name, coming from his great-grandmother, Sally Thorn (Smith), and long before her, our English ancestor, William Thorne, Sr., one of the signers of the 1657 Flushing Remonstrance. The latter sought an end to the persecution of Quakers in New Netherland, and was one of the precursors of the U.S. Constitutional protection of free exercise of religion.


The autobiography discusses early memories, including the planting of “Centennial Trees” for the US centennial celebration of the Declaration of Independence. [Vol. 2, p. 10]. Though his father George was a Democrat, GGpa Thorn writes of hanging from the gate of the family home as a little boy in the 1876 election and shouting for Rutherford B. Hayes. Good boy.

There are memories of going to his grandparents’ house (his grandfather’s name was also Thorn), and of his uncles and aunts gathering at the family place.

There is no house of this day, nor has there been these many years, that smelled like grandmother’s, and one of the impressions I have carried for more than sixty years is that “smell.” . . . which I think came from the cellar, for down there in the most utter darkness were apples and potatoes and many cans of preserves. . . . Somewheres down there was a big crock of fried cakes, not doughnuts, and when she opened that crock out came the smell that pervaded the house. When it came time to eat, the bible was used to get my chin above the table surface, and I can remember its use for that purpose. I was put to bed early on a big feather bed. [2:16].

He was interested in the natural sciences at a young age.

When or before I was 15 years old I was reading Darwin, Huxley, and others. I was also trying to absorb abstruse work on Physics but the big eggs called it something else. [Physics was called Natural Philosophy in those days.] Even before then I was hammering on the big chunks of limestone which lined the banks of the Grand River. I was laughed at for my exertions and even when I showed one the fossil shells he did not believe in them. [1:33].

GGpa Thorn was a careful writer, so let’s unpack that last sentence a bit. He lived at a time when Biblical literalism was colliding head-to-head with the natural sciences. So when Thorn showed off the fossils he had found, the observer disbelieved the existence of fossils, because fossils were inconsistent with Biblical teaching. There are of course still some folks who still so disbelieve, but Thorn was among the spearhead of the scientifically-informed faith predominant today.

Thorn was raised in the Universalist church, which not only believed that all humans would be granted entry to heaven, but tended toward a disbelief in hell whatsoever. This was in stark contrast to the faith of his great-grandfather, William T. Smith (a Baptist deacon) and his great-great-grandfather, Thomas Smith (also a Baptist, though I have a theory the latter converted to Baptism later in life, and may originally have been a Quaker. I will discuss this in another post.)

There is some real sadness in here too. His father seemingly believed that to spare the rod was to spoil the child, and Thorn suffered greatly for this until his teens. He survived by the skin of his teeth a bout of diphtheria; some neighbor children died from it.

Thorn was, as far as his autobiography discloses, areligious, nor did he seem to have much use for organized religion in general, though he spoke respectfully of a Celestial Economy.

No one who proclaimed himself as a Universalist could be a member of the YMCA and even in this supposedly enlightened day he cannot be an officer of such. Was and is that not a sign of brotherly love or of that nature? All churches of whatever nature are working with the same end in view and it gets my goat – or a whole flock of goats – why in a supposedly enlightened age there can be a difference between Evangelical and Non-Evangelical. Is it common sense or the lack of it? . . . To a mere boy with a limited knowledge of chemistry the whole thing is a dream of an opium addict.  [Addl Chapters:2]

The autobiography walks us through the birth of Thorn's children (including Rossman, the Original Pompo) in Tennessee, as well as moving back to Michigan because there were no schools in Tennessee, and Thorn and Mertie Belle insisted on educating their children. We meet Mr. Diack, and learn of the struggles of the early business ventures. It's all quite affecting, especially for those of us - and there are many of us - who remember the later plant and the Diack Controls.

Much like a brook, the whole work is a lovely, meandering thing, written in fits and starts through the end of his life in 1958. GGpa Thorn was a very literate and I think surpassingly humble man. He ends volume 2 this way:

I have written. It may not appeal to some but to others it will. All things change, but sometime, perhaps a hundred years from now, someone will read this and know how an ancestor lived.

The end will come, when, how or where I do not know, because it is unavoidable. But when it arrives I want no mourning, no pomp and nothing to mark the fact that I lived and died. . . . I want no formal place of burial, I want no tombstone and above all I want no weeping. Let me go in the knowledge that I have done the best I could,and carry on as though I were a casual friend.

I have spoken. November 29, 1938. [2:94]

So far we are 78 years into the century of which he speaks.

In the Portland, Michigan cemetery there is a Smith plot, and within this plot is a small headstone marking the location where his cremated remains and those his wife Mertie Belle, as well as some of his other family, are laid to rest. Out of respect for his wishes I will not post the photo here.

As to his wish that there be nothing “to mark the fact that I lived and died,” well, I suspect he was speaking in terms of graven stones. The principal thing that marks his life are his descendants who live today and honor his memory. That, I hope, would be just fine with him. He was, after all, a genealogist. RIP.

You can download his autobiography (consisting of two main volumes and a couple smaller manuscripts) from here (.zip, 3 pdf files, 11.2 mb).