Benjamin Ferris (August 7, 1780 - November 9, 1867) was a watchmaker and historian from Wilmington, Delaware.
Wilmington is the largest and most populous city in the U.S. state of Delaware. The city was built on the site of Fort Christina, the first Swedish settlement in North America. It is at the confluence of the Christina River and Brandywine River, near where the Christina flows into the Delaware River. It is the county seat of New Castle County and one of the major cities in the Delaware Valley metropolitan area. Wilmington was named by Proprietor Thomas Penn after his friend Spencer Compton, Earl of Wilmington, who was prime minister in the reign of George II of Great Britain.
Ferris was born the sixth of seven children to Ziba Ferris (1743–1794) and Edith Sharpless (1742–1815) in a house on the northeast corner of Third and Shipley Streets in Wilmington. He was a descendant of Samuel Ferris, who had come from Reading, England, in 1682 to settle at Groton, Massachusetts, and of John Ferris, who was among the first settlers in the city of Wilmington in 1748.
Reading is a large minster town in Berkshire, England, of which it is now the county town. It is in the Thames Valley at the confluence of the River Thames and River Kennet, and on both the Great Western Main Line railway and the M4 motorway. Reading is 70 miles (110 km) east of Bristol, 24 miles (39 km) south of Oxford, 40 miles (64 km) west of London, 14 miles (23 km) north of Basingstoke, 12 miles (19 km) south-west of Maidenhead and 15 miles (24 km) east of Newbury as the crow flies.
Groton is a town in northwestern Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, within the Greater Boston metropolitan area. The population was 10,873 at the 2012 town census. It is home to two prep schools: Groton School, founded in 1884, and Lawrence Academy at Groton, founded in 1792 and the third-oldest private school in Massachusetts. Lawrence Academy was founded with a charter from John Hancock.
Ferris moved to Philadelphia at age 14, where he learned the watchmaking business. He was married to Fanny Canby (1778–1833) in Wilmington's Monthly Meeting Cemetery on May 17, 1804. They returned to live in Wilmington in 1813, where he was appointed city surveyor in 1820. The couple had ten children together, William (#1)(1805-1805), Edward (#1)(1809-1810), Anna (#1)(1811–1814), Deborah (1813–1897), Anna (#2)(1815–1890), Benjamin (1817–1831), Martha (1819–1912), David (1821–1908), William (#2)(1822-1909), and Edward (#2)(1825-1919). After the death of his first wife, he married her cousin Hannah Gibbons (1793-1860) on October 15, 1835.
Philadelphia, sometimes known colloquially as Philly, is the largest city in the U.S. state and Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and the sixth-most populous U.S. city, with a 2017 census-estimated population of 1,580,863. Since 1854, the city has been coterminous with Philadelphia County, the most populous county in Pennsylvania and the urban core of the eighth-largest U.S. metropolitan statistical area, with over 6 million residents as of 2017. Philadelphia is also the economic and cultural anchor of the greater Delaware Valley, located along the lower Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers, within the Northeast megalopolis. The Delaware Valley's population of 7.2 million ranks it as the eighth-largest combined statistical area in the United States.
As a member of the Religious Society of Friends, Ferris was a proponent of the views of Elias Hicks, claiming "obedience to the light within" as sufficient for salvation, and publishing a debate with an evangelical minister which contributed to a schism in 1827. [1] In 1839, Ferris was appointed to a committee of the Yearly Meetings of Friends of New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore, to investigate wrongdoings against the Seneca Indians. Although the treaty he recommended was ultimately rejected by the Senate, he was successful in brokering a deal which resulted in about half their land being restored to them.
Elias Hicks was a traveling Quaker minister from Long Island, New York. In his ministry he promoted unorthodox doctrines that led to controversy, which caused the first major schism within the Religious Society of Friends. Elias Hicks was the older cousin of the painter Edward Hicks.
Ferris was particularly interested in preserving the history of Wilmington, devoting several years of his life to research, and studying the Swedish language to enable him to use the records of the Old Swedes Church. In 1846 he published A History of the Original Settlements on the Delaware: From its Discovery by Hudson to the Colonization under William Penn.
Swedish is a North Germanic language spoken natively by 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden, and in parts of Finland, where it has equal legal standing with Finnish. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and to some extent with Danish, although the degree of mutual intelligibility is largely dependent on the dialect and accent of the speaker. Both Norwegian and Danish are generally easier for Swedish speakers to read than to listen to because of difference in accent and tone when speaking. Swedish is a descendant of Old Norse, the common language of the Germanic peoples living in Scandinavia during the Viking Era. It has the most speakers of the North Germanic languages.
Holy Trinity Church, also known as Old Swedes, is a historic church at East 7th and Church Street in Wilmington, Delaware. It was consecrated on Trinity Sunday, June 4, 1699, by a predominantly Swedish congregation formerly of the colony of New Sweden. The church, designated a National Historic Landmark in 1961, is among the few surviving public buildings that reflect the Swedish colonial effort. The church is considered part of First State National Historical Park. The church, which is often visited by tourists, remains open today for tours and religious activities.
