by June Portnoy
At age 92, Sam Snipes of Falls Township epitomizes a Hometown Hero, which is why Bucks County resident Jonathan Sprout recently nominated him with the distinction of our Hometown Hero Award.
Jonathan met Sam 10 years ago at the Fallsington Quaker Meetinghouse, which Sam’s family helped establish in 1680. They were among the many Quaker refugees who fled religious prosecution in England to settle in this area.
“When I first met Sam, I was in total awe of him,” says Jonathan. “I always thought of Sam as a patriarch of this community, which is why I was struck by his humility.
Sam’s earliest memory goes back to when he was just four, living on the farm that his great-grandparents had purchased in 1848 near present-day Morrisville.
“It was a tree nursery at the time,” says Sam. “I lived my childhood like one living on a Southern plantation.”
It wasn’t till 1911 that this land was shifted into a dairy farm, and not until 1951 when it was re-created to resemble the well-known Snipes Farm and Nursery it is today.
During WWII, Sam served as a religious objector.
“I felt it was my duty to uphold the Quaker testimony against fighting,” says Sam, who spent the war battling forest fires in North Carolina and in the Sierras in California and with the public health service in Florida. After the war, in 1946 and 1947, Sam served in Germany administering refugees for the United Nations.
Sam became an attorney, and one of his most noteworthy cases took place in 1957. As a proponent of civil rights and interracial housing, Sam prepared an agreement of sale that helped sell a home to William and Daisy Myers, the first black residents in Levittown.
Sam was met with hostility when a mob of approximately 1,000 angry racists gathered together prepared to attack the Myers’ new house. Sam stood his ground in front of the Myers’ home hoping to divert the crowd’s attention to him instead of the house.
Regardless of the mob’s constant chanting and throwing cigarette butts and small stones at Sam, he did not budge and ultimately the community accepted the Myers and other subsequent black families who moved into Levittown.
Sam, who continued to feel strongly about civil rights, participated in the famous 1963 Martin Luther King, Jr. march in Washington DC.
