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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Of the sixteen children of Miers and Sarah Redwood Fisher nearly all died young, descendants surviving only to Redwood Fisher; Lydia Fisher (who married Benjamin Warner); my grandmother, Sarah Redwood Fisher (who married Samuel Longstreth); Hannah Fisher, who married William Price, and the youngest son, Jabez Maud Fisher, who was born in 1801 and died 1876.
The only one I ever knew was Uncle Jabez. Him I knew well, and he was often at our house throughout my boyhood and early manhood. Uncle Jabez was eighteen years of age at the time of his father's death, and being fond of anecdote and having a retentive memory, had much information which came directly from his father. The relations between my mother and her uncle were those of affectionate interest. His Wife had died in 1866, and his children, with whon from time to time we were much thrown, had become scattered, so that with the exception of a year or two spent by him in Europe with his son, Morton C. Fisher, in the early Seventies, he was a constant visitor at our house both in South 17th Street and South 22nd Street during the last years of his life.
His early youth had been spent at Ury, his father's country home. Ury was and is situated on the Pine Road near the village of Foxchase, some miles outside of Philadelphia. An account of it will be found in Townsend Ward's "Second Street and the Second Street Road, and their Associations." It was bought and improved by Miers Fisher in 1795, and it was he who gave it the name Ury, after the well-known seat of Robert barclay in Scotland, to whom I have before referred in writing of Barclay Hall.
Of Ury my Uncle Jabez has related to me with zest certain anecdotes with reference to a visit of the two grandsons (or great grandsons) of William Penn, who passed some time in this country at the end of the last century (the 18th century). Evidently the Quaker spirit had not descended into the third generation, for the young men seem to have been possessed of ardent temperments and to have made things very lively in the Ury household. From the account of Uncle Jabez, they were evidently not teetotallers.
Grandma Fisher lived to an advanced age and died in 1847. From all I can learn her character and disposition endeared her throughout her life to all those who were in any way associated with her. I have always understood that my father, though her junior by fifty-six years, was particularly devoted to her.
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