FOLSOM, Paul (c. 1818-?) and Margaret (c. 1820-?)

A “confectioner” living in Somerville, just outside Boston, Massachusetts, Paul Folsom was first mentioned in the Review in 1851. For the next 13 years his home was an important center for Sabbatarian Adventists in the Boston area, both as a place for meetings and conferences and as a temporary home for visiting preachers, including James and Ellen White. Folsom himself served on planning committees and traveled as a delegate to conferences in Maine and Battle Creek, Michigan. There is some evidence that he did occasional lay preaching, or “exhorting.”1EGWLM 828.2

Paul Folsom's involvement with the church came to a rather sudden halt in 1864. The precipitating factor, according to Ellen White, appears to have been a “testimony of reproof” she sent to Paul and Margaret Folsom, probably in the autumn of 1864. “I am sad that you have despised the testimony given you of Heaven,” Ellen White wrote in October 1864. Although the testimony in its entirety has not been preserved, it is possible that an undated document, classified as “Lt 18, 1864,” is a fragment of the original testimony. In November 1864 the Whites visited the Folsoms briefly, but there was no resolution, and by January 1865 J. N. Loughborough, also on a visit, reported “that Bro. Folsom had chosen to go with the world, and leave the obedience of God's commandments, which he still acknowledges to be truth.”1EGWLM 828.3

See: 1850 U.S. Federal Census, “Paul Folsom,” Massachusetts, Middlesex County, Medford, p. 448; 1860 U.S. Federal Census, “Paul Folsom,” Massachusetts, Middlesex County, Somerville, p. 76; J. N. Loughborough, “Report From Bro. Loughborough,” Review, Feb. 7, 1865, pp. 84, 85; search term “Folsom” in Review and Herald online collection, www.adventistarchives.org; Ellen G. White, Lt 7, 1864 (Oct. 14); Lt 18, 1864 (c. 1864); Elizabeth Knowles Folsom, Genealogy of the Folsom Family (Rutland, Vt.: Tuttle Pub. Co., Inc., 1938), vol. 1, p. 418.1EGWLM 828.4