HYDESVILLE.
THE STORY OF THE ROCHESTER KNOCKINGS.
CHAPTER I.
The birth-places of the greatest of the world's social, political, and religious reformations have generally been of insignificant and lowly aspect, and apparently under the most inauspicious circumstances for producing any great effect upon mankind. The Babe of the lowly manger becomes the Spiritual King of millions of human hearts and souls, and the "Wood Hut" becomes the gateway through which Holy Ministers of Light, from their world of Truth and Beauty, send the evidence of man's immortality, through the instrumentality of a child, to the weary worn pilgrims of earth, who, praying for the "touch of a vanish'd hand, and the sound of a voice that is still," welcome with joyful hearts the Spirit message "WE STILL LIVE."
The scene of the manifestations dealt with in the following pages, was a small wooden homestead, one of a cluster of houses like itself, in the little village of Hydesville, near to the town of Newark, Wayne County, New York (being so called after Dr. Hyde, an old settler, whose son was the proprietor of the house in question). The place not being directly accessible from a railroad, was lonely and unmarked by those tokens of progress that the locomotive generally leaves in its track, hence it was the last spot where a scene of fraud and deception could find a possibility of a successful execution. The house was a humble frame dwelling fronting south, consisting of two fair-size parlours opening into each other, east of these a bedroom and a buttery or pantry, opening into one of the sitting rooms; and a stairway between the buttery and the bedroom leading from the sitting room up to the half storey above and from the buttery down to the cellar.
This humble dwelling had been selected as a temporary residence during the erection of another house in the country, by Mr. John D. Fox, who, with his family, soon afterwards became so prominently identified with the phenomena which have since become world famous. Their little dwelling, though so small and simply furnished as to leave no shadow of opportunity for concealment or trick, was the residence of honest piety and rural simplicity. All who ever knew them bore witness to the unimpeachable character of the good mother, while the integrity of the simple-minded farmers who were father and brother to the sisters who have since become so celebrated as the "Rochester Knockers" stands proved beyond all question.