Bela Marsh was one of eight children born to Lot and Lydia (French) Marsh of Hingham, Massachusetts. Hingham was a Massachusetts Bay colony, settled in the early 1600s, and Bela’s father was a private in the Revolutionary War. Bela was born in 1797, and was raised near Derby Academy, the oldest co-educational school in the county.

Bela married Mary Beal in 1827, and they had only one child, Thomas, who was born about 1840. Mary must have maintained a boarding house, because in 1850, they had 8 people living with them, including a teacher, a machinist and Irish immigrants.

Bela moved to Boston where he became a publisher and bookseller. His business partners were Nahum Capen, Gardener P. Lyon, T.H. Webb and George W. Williams. Capen was interested in phrenology and founded the Boston Phrenological Society. He was also an editor, author and publisher and frequently contributed to newspapers and magazines.

Bela was not a Spiritualist. He was a Universalist and treasurer for the House of the Fifth Universalist Society in Boston, a growing religion in the city. Universalists believe that no one has a monopoly on truth, and we should respect the beliefs of others and their right to hold those beliefs.

Although he wasn’t a member of the Spiritualist movement, Bela was an agent for the Spiritual Telegraph in the 1850s. His publishing company printed books from many progressive thinkers of the time, abolitionists and early spiritual thinkers, including Adin Ballou, Warren Chase and Henry Clarke Wright.

Bela’s printing house also published the works of Andrew Jackson Davis, including Revelations, the three-volume set of the Great Harmonium and Philosophy of Spiritual Intercourse. Jackson was an uneducated man, who is considered a prime forerunner to modern Spiritualism. Between 1845 to 1885, he wrote over 30 books which covered many subjects, including cosmological philosophy, health, and the afterlife.

In Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, published by Marsh in 1859, Davis predicted the coming of Spiritualism:

“It is a truth that spirits commune with one another while one is in the body and the other in the higher spheres—and this, too, when the person in the body is unconscious of the influx, and hence cannot be convinced of the fact; and this truth will ere long present itself in the form of a living demonstration. And the world will hail with delight the ushering-in that era when the interiors of men will be opened, and the spiritual communion will be established such as is now being enjoyed by the inhabitants of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.”