Chapter I 



BOYHOOD, EARLY SCHOOLING, AND TEACHING. FLORA OF MICHIGAN. 

 STUDY AT MICHIGAN AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE. 



ERW'IN FRINK SMITH was born on January 21, 1854, at 

 Gilberts Mills, New York, the son of Louisa Frink Smith 

 and Rancellor King Smith, a tanner and shoemaker by trade. 

 Nine generations of the ancestry of Rancellor King Smith had 

 lived in the United States, as early as 1628-1629 the first having 

 migrated from England, settled at Salem, Massachusetts, and, 

 moving on to Connecticut, attained to positions of considerable 

 wealth and eminence in various towns, Norwalk most promi- 

 nently. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, about 1784, 

 one Noah Hoyt, the seventh of ten children, migrated to New 

 York, lived for a while in Saratoga County, and settled perma- 

 nently in Onondaga County. Lucy King, the granddaughter of 

 Noah Hoyt, married one Charles Smith on November 15, 1821. 

 He, it is believed, hailed from Palermo, Long Island, Nev/ York. 

 But he took up his occupation as a tanner in Oswego County, 

 and the couple was blessed with ten children, of whom the third 

 was Rancellor. On September 24, 1850, and at the age of twenty- 

 four years, this son, who had chosen his father's trade as his life 

 work, married Louisa Frink, of Herkimer County, New York, 

 daughter of Asa Leonard and Lydia Ellis Frink, and to them were 

 born two children, Erwin Frink, and Lillian, some two years 

 younger.^ 



Gilberts Mills, located not far from Syracuse and in the midst 

 of a progressive agricultural setting, was named for its principal 

 industry — its flour mills. It was a contented, thriving village, of 

 happy, strong folk. Many years later Erwin Smith redescribed his 

 recollections of this serene, untroubled community where he spent 

 his first fifteen years: 



^ This paragraph is based on materials which Erwin F. Smith himself gathered 

 and was in part founded on data taken from David W. Hoyt's A ^genealogical 

 history of the Hoyt, Haight, and Hight families, 2nd ed., Providence, R. L, 1871. 



