"History of St. Clair County, Michigan", A. T. Andreas and Co.,1883, p. 706 contains the following biographical sketch of Humphrey Smith:

"Humphrey Smith, farmer, Section 10, P. O. Marine City, is a native of Onondaga County, N.Y., and was born in the town of Lysander July 17, 1807. Upon reaching manhood, he was married February 24, 1828, to Miss Alvira Marriss,(sic Morris) a native of Massachusetts. They removed from Onondaga County to Cattaraugus County, and lived there a year and a half and then concluded to go West to the Territory of Michigan. They came from Buffalo to Detroit on the old steamer Henry Clay. Gen. Winifield Scott was on the steamer, on his way to the Black Hawk War. Mr. and Mrs. Smith arrived at Marine City June 18, 1832, and had only 12 shillings left. They came out near where they now live and took up some land from Government. It was all a wilderness. He cut some poles for a frame, and then cut the tall grass and thatched it so as to protect them from the weather as best he could, and Mrs. Smith lived there with two children, and could hear the wolves around them nights. The next year,they went to Abbottsford and kept a boarding house for Judge Bunce, then came back and lived on the turnpike two years; then in 1836, came back on their land and built a log house. It was almost impossible to get any work, but they paid for their forty acres by working, and earning $18 a month. Mrs. Smith, though she had her little children to care for, worked side by side with her husband. There are very few pioneer mothers who went through what she has endured and are living to-day. Mr. Smith has carried on his back two bushels of wheat to Belle River Mills and back in the same day - a distance of ten miles. He cleared his land, made his farm during summers, and worked in the ship yard and lumbered winters, and for several years he was in the woods, hunting up and selecting pine lands. He owns a good farm of 100 acres of land. Has held school offices, and been Grain Commissioner. they have been married and lived together over fifty-five years, and are the oldest settlers in this part of town, and among the oldest in the county. They have eleven children-Andrew, Philinda, now Mrs. Smith; Harriet, now Mrs. Wilson; Charles, Oramatha, Violetta, now Mrs. Morris; Louisa, now Mrs. Tappan; Catharine, now Mrs. Clark; Leonard, on the farm at home; Laura, now Mrs. Barringer; Jane, now Mrs. Fowler. They are also the grand-parents of seventy-nice grand-children, and the great-grandparents of twenty-eight children."