Plymouth Magazine-Fall26-DIGITAL - Flipbook - Page 10
Martha and Alvah Frisbie:
The Story of a Marriage
By Lorna Truck (she/her)
The Rev. Alvah L. Frisbie has been cited
as one of Plymouth’s seminal figures.
He was called one of our “King David
figures” by the Rev. David Ruhe in his
150th history of Plymouth Church. But
we have heard less about his wife Martha
Crosby Frisbie who was a major influence
on the culture and development of
Plymouth Church as well. The Frisbies
could have been called a “pastoral
team.” Martha Crosby was an educator
who became a leader in the early
Congregational movement in Iowa.
Rev. Alvah L. Frisbie
Martha (Crosby) Frisbie
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Martha Frisbie was born on May 17,
1840, in Danbury, Connecticut. She was
the first child of Judah and Martha Jane
Crosby and the oldest of four children.
Martha graduated from Mt. Holyoke
Female Seminary and then taught for
four years at Temple Grove Seminary,
a boarding school for young women in
Saratoga Springs, New York. Temple
Grove Seminary was started by the Rev.
Luther F. Beecher, brother of Harriet
Beecher Stowe and the evangelist Henry
Ward Beecher, a Congregationalist
clergyman and abolitionist, and first
pastor of Plymouth Congregational
Church in Brooklyn, New York.
A.L. Frisbie was born October 22, 1830,
in Tompkins County, New York. We
know about Alva’s early years from his
autobiography. His father Daniel Grand
Frisbie died when Alvah was four years
old. Of his father Frisbie said he “died in
1834 leaving his affairs in a very mixed
and unsatisfactory state, he
having been mentally unsound for some
time before he ceased to do business.
The family was left … in real poverty.”
Alvah was a resilient child. The family
took refuge in his uncle’s farm where he
attended a country school. When his
older sister married, Alva moved with
her and her new husband and lived for
a year and a half “not over happily for
Mr. Newell’s temper was peculiar and
he did not well understand a child.”
Alvah was then “transferred to the
home of the uncle where he had rather
severe handling but still had better
opportunities.” His life was a mix of
school, farm work, and teaching school.
He dropped out of Oberlin college to
follow a get rich scheme involving papier
maché but soon returned to Homer Prep
School. In August 1857 he graduated
from Amherst College.
Frisbie married Jerusah Slocomb on
August 23, 1859, in Worchester, MA.
After the marriage he was promptly sued
for breach of promise by a former fiancé.
In his memoirs Frisbie said she was a
“thin girl in all ways.” The letter breaking
off the engagement was “lost in a fire”
and it “did not end well.”
Frisbie served as a chaplain during
the Civil War in General Sherman’s
Regiment. After the war, he and Jerusah
returned to Ansonia, CT and then to
Danbury, CT where he was called to
