Welcome back to another episode of Five Minutes in Church History.

On this episode, we are talking about two missionary kids in Stockbridge.

And these two kids are Esther and Jonathan, a daughter and a son of Jonathan and Sarah Edwards.

Now, Esther wasn't really a kid.

She was a young woman when the Edwards family moved from Northampton to Stockbridge.

She was 19 going on 20.

She would only be there for about a year or so, and then she would marry Aaron Burr, and she would

move off to New Jersey.

But while she was in Stockbridge, she kept a diary and she gives us some insight into what

life was like for the Edwards family.

First, she describes this about Stockbridge in the winter.

She says this town is delightfully located for

winter sports. The river has a very quiet flow so that we have skating parties. And the hills

all around furnish suitable declivities for coasting. Now, I had to look the word up. A declivity

is a downward slope in coasting, of course, a sledding.

She would talk about how they would get on their sleds and they would slide over the crust

of the snow and then they would hit one of those declivities and they would have this rapid,

she says, like lightning flashing downward descent until they finally made it to the safety of the town below.

She also describes a very interesting way that they had to get the Mohicans and the Mohawks

that were there living in Stockbridge to come to church. She says a new sound echoes through

our hills. Every Sabbath day and every

lecture day, one of the praying Indians blows a conch shell to call the people to worship. At first

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