excerpt from
Early Reminiscences Associated with the Life and Family of My Mother
Sarah Redwood Parrish
By Samuel Longstreth Parrish
October, 1927
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The combined strength, sweetness and beauty of the face of Sarah Redwood Fisher have been with me a very continuous source of admiration from my earliest days. She came to live in Philadelphia at the age of seventeen. Her future husband was at that time twenty-four years of age, and they married two years later, in the year 1774. It would seem that they took a more active part in the social life of the city then was usual among Friends, for a few months after their marriage we hear of them through the diary of John Adams, of Massachusetts, as having entertained him at a dinner in a manner that evidently gave him great satisfaction. In his diary, an extract from which can be found in the Rodman Book, page 56, he writes:
"We dined with Miers Fisher, a young Quaker and a lawyer. We saw his library which is clever, but this plain friend, with his plain, though pretty, wife, with her Thees and Thous, had provided us a most costly entertainment," etc. (Here follows a detailed list of the wines and dishes served). (The table on which this elaborate repast was served is now in my possession in the family room of the Museum at Southampton, L.I., having been bequeathed to me by my cousin, Sally Lewis (nee Warner), who was a granddaughter of Miers Fisher, and therefore a first cousin of my mother. At this table during the Colonial period and later, after the war of the Revolution was over, my great grandfather entertained various dignitaries who were either residents of or visitors to Philadelphia, among others General George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. Now in the possession of my cousin, Lydia Warner, is a Sharpless portrait of George Washington, given by him to Miers Fisher).
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