When I joined UUCAS in 1998, Marion Stevens Jones was our organist.  At that time she was 90 years old and had been playing for the church for about 30 years.  Her mother, Georgie Stevens, became the organist at the Sheshequin church shortly after she and her husband moved to Sheshequin from Standing Stone in 1900.  Georgie and her daughter Dorothy, Marion’s sister, were the church’s organists for a combined total of about 70 years before Marion took over.

Not long after I joined, I was told by a longtime member of the church that Marion had been divorced from her first husband when she was a young woman, at a time when divorce was “scandalous.”  She didn’t know who Marion’s first husband was, and I didn’t think much about it until years later, when I began researching the church’s history.  As it turns out, I found her first husband quite by accident.

When I began my history quest ten years ago, I made a list of all the names in the Athens and Sheshequin church record books – about one thousand in all – with the intention of writing a short bio of each of them as a supplement to the history of the congregations.  Many of the people were easy to identify, but some – like “Mr. Smith” – were more challenging.

At the annual meeting of the Athens congregation in January, 1915, there were three vacancies on the Board that needed to be filled.  Moderator Tom Cook “stated that he would like to see Mr. Smith and Mr. Dunham Park on the board, as they were both good, sound business men.”

Trustee George Van Scoten pointed out that these two men were not members and said that recruiting them to serve on the board “would only tend to scare them away from the church.”  Cook’s proposal was apparently dropped, and other nominations were made.

Even though Smith and Park never joined the church or served as trustees, their names were in the record book, so they needed to have bios.  Dunham Park was easy to identify, but who was “Mr. Smith?”

Starting with the assumption that Mr. Smith lived in Athens, I looked at the 1907 directory of the borough.  As one might expect, there were quite a few “Mr. Smiths” in Athens.  However, there was only one who could be considered a “business man”: John W. Smith, who owned the Tioga Dairy Company.

As I pieced together John W. Smith’s life story, I also did some research on his children.  Smith had a son named J. Wesley Smith.  Society news in the Sayre Evening Times in the early 1930s frequently mentioned that his wife, “Mrs. Wesley Smith,” socialized with members of the Stevens family of Sheshequin.  Mrs. Smith’s connection to the Stevenses became clear when I saw in the 1930 census that Wesley Smith’s wife’s name was Marion.

The Evening Times noted in March, 1932, that

“Mr. and Mrs. Wesley Smith were dinner guests of Mr. and Mrs. Clifford Jones at Athens on Sunday.”

Marion, Wesley, and Clifford had known each other since high school.  Wesley graduated from Athens High School in 1924, and Marion and Clifford in 1925.  Marion and Clifford had both been on the editorial staff of the school newspaper. Wesley was Clifford’s best man at his first wedding.

Within two years after that dinner at the Jones’ home, both couples were divorced, and Marion Stevens Smith and Clifford Jones were married.

Marion and Clifford’s marriage lasted for forty-two years, until Clifford’s death in 1976.  Marion Stevens Jones died in 2001.