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Biographical Sketch: The Smiths and the Prays
- University of Washington Press
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xxix Biographical Sketch The Smiths and the Prays PATRICIA D. SILVER CONNECTED BY FAMILY TIES, A SHARED PURPOSE, AND A DEEP, LOVing friendship, Charles and Sarah Smith and Frederick and Eleanor Pray, all originally from New England, made Vladivostok their home and became eloquent witnesses to its character. Without these four people, the Eleanor L. Pray Collection and this book would not exist today. Charles Henry Smith and his brother Oscar first went to Siberia in 1858, sailing around Cape Horn with a Captain Morse of the Boston firm Amos Lawrence and Company. By the mid-1860s, the brothers were buying land in the center of Vladivostok, which had been founded in 1860. As an agent for the China and Japan Trading Company of New York, in the 1880s Charles built his own house overlooking the city’s beautiful bays. On a home visit in 1880, Charles married Sarah (“Sadie,” sometimes “Sally”) Elizabeth Pray of Great Falls (today Somersworth), New Hampshire. After a few years in Cambridge (Massachusetts), they settled in Vladivostok in 1886 and opened their own trading company, the American Store. First located in part of their home, the store advertised the availability of a multitude of goods for sale: hunting rifles and other guns; farming necessities such as axes, saws, and seeds; mining and camera equipment; bicycles; gramophones and records; typewriters; dried fruits and nuts; coffee; chocolates; and canned foods. At the same time, Charles was buying furs from Russian trappers and sending them to the New York and London markets. Through their work, kindliness, and social skills, Charles and Sarah became close friends with other merchant families, and saw their work prosper. By the mid-1890s, extra help was needed in the store, and Charles asked his wife’s younger xxx ✴ Patricia Silver brother, Frederick, to come to Vladivostok to assist. When Charles died from a heart attack in 1898, Sarah became the owner of the store, and her brother and his wife stayed to support her. Like his sister Sarah, Frederick (“Fred” or “Ted”) Shenstone Pray was born in Great Falls at the family home, Echo Farm. Frederick was a gifted metal engraver and machine builder, but studied accounting and commercial practices in order to have steady work. When Ted graduated from high school on 17 June 1887, “after all the ceremony and congratulations,” he accompanied his classmate “Roxy” Lord home and asked her to be his wife. Later she wrote, “And how happy I was, even if we did have to wait seven long years” (17 June 1929 to daughter Dorothy). They married in April 1894. Roxanna Eleanor Lord Pray had been born in Berwick, Maine, at Elm Wold, the Lord family home built by an ancestor in 1796 and still owned by the family today. Roxy’s father was a judge and farmer who instilled in his daughter a deep love of knowledge. In May and June of 1894, the Smiths and the Prays went to East Siberia together, traveling first by train across the northern United States to San Francisco , and then by schooner via Japan to Vladivostok. They shared a household , and Sarah and her sister-in-law Roxy became as close as sisters. From the very first day of their trip, Roxy wrote long letters, often sending scores of pages at a time, to her relatives and friends in New England. In 1906, Ted and Roxy’s daughter Dorothy was born. Because Sarah never had a child, and because Roxy had suffered a miscarriage in 1900, this was a momentous event. Dorothy was deeply loved by both her parents and by her Auntie Sarah, but 1916 was a wrenching year. The family decided to send Dorothy to the Shanghai American School, and Sarah went with her, finding a position as housemother there. Except for vacations (through early 1923), neither Sarah nor Dorothy was to live in Vladivostok again. This emotional hardship was alleviated by Sarah’s and Roxy’s weekly correspondence, a communicative practice that they had adopted when either had been temporarily away from Vladivostok: “Oh, sister Sarah, I do long sometimes to have a long talk with you, and especially after I get one of your letters. There are so many things I can talk over with you that I can’t talk over with anybody else in the world with the same pleasure” (31 July 1905 to Sarah). World War I made it difficult to bring merchandise into Vladivostok, and in early 1918, Ted closed the American...