In 1842 and the year following, Friend Hopper travelled more than usual.  In August ’42, he visited his native place, after an absence of twenty years.  He and his wife were accompanied from Philadelphia by his son Edward and his daughter Sarah H. Palmer.  Of course, the haunts of his boyhood had undergone many changes.  Panther’s Bridge had disappeared, and Rabbit Swamp and Turkey Causeway no longer looked like the same places.  He visited his father’s house, then occupied by strangers, and found the ruins of his great-grandfather’s dwelling.  Down by the pleasant old creek, shaded with large walnut trees and cedars, stood the tombs of many of his relatives; and at Woodbury were the graves of his father and mother, and the parents of his wife.  Every spot had something interesting to say of the past.  His eyes brightened, and his tongue became voluble with a thousand memories.  Had I been present to listen to him then, I should doubtless have been enabled to add considerably to my stock of early anecdotes.  He seemed to have brought away from this visit a peculiarly vivid recollection of “poor crazy Joe Gibson.”  This demented being was sometimes easily controlled, and willing to be useful; at other times, he was perfectly furious and ungovernable.  Few people knew how to manage him; but Isaac’s parents acquired great influence over him by their uniform system of forbearance and tenderness; their own good sense and benevolence having suggested the ideas which regulate the treatment of insanity at the present period.  The day spent in Woodbury and its vicinity was a bright spot in Friend Hopper’s life, to which he always reverted with a kind of saddened pleasure.  The heat of the season had been tempered by floating clouds, and when they returned to Philadelphia, there was a faint rainbow in the east.  He looked lovingly upon it, and said, “These clouds seem to have followed us all day, on purpose to make everything more pleasant.”

In the course of the same month he accepted an invitation to attend the Anti-Slavery Convention at Norristown, Pennsylvania.  His appearance there was quite an event.  Many friends of the cause, who were strangers to him, were curious to obtain a sight of him, and to hear him address the meeting.  Charles C. Burleigh, in an eloquent letter to the Convention, says:  “I am glad to hear that Isaac T. Hopper is to be present.  That tried old veteran, with his eye undimmed, his natural strength unabated, his resolute look, and calm determined manner, before which the blustering kidnapper, and the self-important oppressor have so often quailed!  With the scars of a hundred battles, and the wreaths of an hundred victories in this glorious warfare.  With his example of half a century’s active service in this holy cause, and his still faithful adherence to it, through evil as well as good report, and in the face of opposition as bitter as sectarian bigotry can stir up.  Persecution cannot bow the head, which seventy winters could not blanch, nor the terrors of excommunication chill the heart, in which age could not freeze the kindly flow of warm philanthropy.”