THE TOWN OF RYE. 



*73 



situated on Pulpit Piain, as it was called, at the north-west corner of the 

 post road and the road to the Cedars, subsequently opened. Here the 

 church was built, and here it stood until the Revolutionary war. Tradi- 

 tion states that it was a plain frame building, without belfry or spire but 

 tolerably capacious. 



The church at White Plains, which blonged to the same society, was 

 built two or three years earlier. 



The village of Rye now had two separate places of worship. The con- 

 gregations were about equal in size, numbering about sixty families in 

 each. As there was no bell in either church, the roll of the drum an- 

 nounced the hour of service probably to both. 



The Rev. Edmund Ward who had ministered to them for over two 

 years, left them in 1729 ; and they remained without any stated minister 

 for nearly thirteen years. 



On the 30th of December, 1742, a council of the Eastern Association 

 of Fairfield County, Connecticut, met at Rye and ordained Mr. John 

 Smith as minister of that place. He seems to have been a man of rare 

 excellence, able, earnest, consistant and godly. He was a native of 

 Newport, Pagnell Bucks, England; and born May 5th, 1702. His father 

 settled in the city of New York. The celebrated Jonathan Edwards, 

 when preaching in New York, made Mr. Smith's house his home. John 

 Smith and Edwards were about of an age, Smith a little the oldest ; and 

 there sprang up between them a warm friendship, which lasted through 

 life. 



A few weeks after his settlement, Mr. Smith secured a house for his 

 family in the village of Rye. On the 20th of February, 1743, he pur- 

 chased of John Abrahamson a house and six acres of land for ^"180, 

 afterwards he bought another house with eight acres and a quarter of 

 land situated in the northern part of the village and in the neighborhood 

 of his church. Some years after Mr. Smith removed his residence from 

 Rye to White Plains, but continued to preach here alternate Sabbaths, 

 riding to and fro on horseback. The house in which he lived, at White 

 Plains, is still pointed out near the come* of the cross road leading to 

 the Purchase. In his later years he owned a farm of about one hundred 

 acres; in 1763 he added the church at Sing Sing to his charge, where 

 he occasionally preached for the next five years, but he was growing old 

 and not so active as he had been. Mr. Ichabod Lewis, a cousin of the 

 Rev. Isaac Lewis of Greenwich, was therefore invited by the Presbytery 

 to help him; and on the nth of October, 1769, he was ordained at 

 White Plains. Mr. Smith continued to do what he could up to the time 

 of his death, which took place at White Plains February 26th, 177 1. His 



