The Smith Library
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The Catskill Mountains of eastern New York
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Strong minded folk loaded all they had into an oxcart and headed west, following the new Erie Canal. They came in family groups, one settled at "Smith Corners" in Hayfield Township, Crawford County, Pennsylvania, near the future Ohio border.
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Crawford County, Pennsylvania
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Crawford County, Pennsylvania offered land and water. Polly [West] Smith spun her own thread to weave cloth for clothes. Nelson Smith became a traveling lay preacher for the Methodist Church and a homeopathic doctor as well as landowner and farmer. His neighbor and brother Almon Smith adopted the children of the widow Beatty. A Beatty son married a Smith from across the road in the next generation.
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And they kept heading West.
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Cora Smith was born in Sioux City, spent a year of her girlhood with the Beatty cousins in Pennsylvania, then taught in a one-room schoolhouse in the Idaho panhandle. She altered her name to Coral and spent the remainder of her adulthood in Washington State, dying in Seattle in 1953.
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