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[Harrison Gardner PIERCE]

Grandfather Parmenter's father (Adin Parmenter Sr.) was captured by the Indians in the French and Indian War at Ticonderoga, adopted by a Seneca chief who thought his son had been killed. After a year of practical "slavery" (as he had to wait upon and obey the chief's squaw and was carefully watched lest he run away), their own son came home and Adin Sr. was released. Grandfather told us that several times he had accompanied his father on his annual visit to pay his respects to the squaw after the chief had died.

Grandfather married Amorilla Safety Kenyon, a French Huguenot from New Rochelle, N.Y. He came into Wayland, Steuben Co., N.Y., as a young man, "took up" a farm from the government and raised a family of two boys and five girls of whom my mother, Amorilla Safety Parmenter, was the youngest.

When Grandfather settled in Wayland the nearest house to his was six miles away, on the west at Dansville on the Genesee River and on the southeast at the village of Cohocton. After he had built his first house, which was a log cabin, he married; also he induced his friend Chauncy Bennet to "take up" (buy from the government) a farm right across the road from his. There Chauncy built a blacksmith shop, with the help of Grandfather, no doubt, as he was handy with tools, had three sets within my memory, one for boring pump logs with which he had piped water from springs to the houses of people ten miles around, and had an anvil and forge in our woodshed. Grandfather and Chauncy spent most of their waking hours together when I was little, walking the six or seven hundred feet that separated the two houses a half-dozen times a day, going back and forth to visit each other.

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