CHAPTER VIII.

THE TOLERATION OF HOSTILE FORCES.

Quaker Hill has been always a place of peace. The earliest settlers came

to make an asylum for the propagation of the principles of peace. I have

spoken elsewhere of their consistent belief and practice of this

principle.

The community always acted promptly in response to the known injury of

its members. The Quakers have a "Meeting of Sufferings," at which are

related and recorded the persecutions from which they suffer. This

community, which for one hundred years was Quaker, has always been

prompt to act "solidly and judiciously" in support of the injured. An

illustration is the riot in opposition to Surgeon Fallon, who in

January, 1779, was left here with convalescent soldiers in the Meeting

House. It is very interesting as showing the length to which men will go

in the interest of peace, even to the use of violence. It illustrates

also the fact that kindness to the sick and wounded, simply because they

are helpless and needy, is modern, a humanitarian not a dogmatic

development.

To superior power the Quakers of this place have always submitted. Their

forefathers were loyalists in England, and they in America, till far

into the Revolution. But see the resolutions passed in April, 1778:

"The answering of the 14th Query Respecting the Defrauding of the King

of his dues is omitted by reason of the Difficulty of the times

therefore this meeting desires the Quarterly meeting to Consider whether

it would not be well to omit the answering that part of the Query in

future until the way may appear more Clear." This action was taken by

the meeting five months before the coming of Washington to the Hill,

immediately after the heroic winter of Valley Forge and just before the

British retreated from Philadelphia. An official body which could speak

of dues to the king at that time, after their country had been separated

from him for three years, surely represented a community in which the

great majority were Loyalists, and the disorderly and violent were

Tories.

But the non-resistant character of the neighborhood, perched between the

Connecticut Yankees, who took ardent interest in the Revolution, and the

aggressive settlements of Pawling, Fredericksburgh and Beekman, rendered

the Hill at times an asylum, strange to say, of the most adventurous

forces. Whenever in Colonial days an adventurer or soldier sought a

peaceful region in which to recruit his forces, he thought upon Quaker

Hill; and in four memorable instances used the Hill as a place of safe

refuge. There no one would by force resist his enjoyment of a time for

recruiting.

The first instance of this is the so-called "Anti-Rent War," which in

1766 excited the inhabitants of Dutchess and Columbia Counties. Its

sources were in the land grants made by the Crown, and in the

independent character of the settlers in this state. The series of

disturbances so caused continued until well into the years of the

nineteenth century. They concern the local history only in one year,

1766.

The Anti-Rent War of 1766 is a forgotten event. But in that time it

aroused the Indians and the white settlers to revolt. Bodies of armed

men assembled, British troopers marched from Poughkeepsie to Quaker

Hill, to seize a leader of rebellion; and at the time of his trial at

Poughkeepsie in August, 1766, a company of regulars with three

field-pieces was brought up from New York.[19]

The prime cause of this insurrection was the granting of the land in

great areas at the beginning of the century to favored proprietors, so

that the actual settlers could not become owners but only tenants.

Fragments of such great estates remain in the hands of certain families

till our time. The ownership of Hammersley Lake by the family of that

name is an example. The exercise of authority by these monopolists of

natural opportunities drove the actual tillers of the soil, who had

given it its value, to desperation. I have shown that in 1740 no land

owners were enrolled on Quaker Hill, and that the list of its most

representative citizens in 1755 contained few landowners.[20] A further

cause of this conflict may have been that, in the year of the settlement

of the boundaries of the Oblong it was granted to one company by the

British Crown, and to another by the Colony of New York. This brought

the title of all the lands on the Oblong into dispute. Moreover,

boundaries were carelessly indicated and loosely described, a pile of

stones or a conspicuous tree serving for a landmark. All this worked

great confusion, for the settlement of which in a crude community courts

were ineffective.

Finally the popular discontent broke out to the north in armed refusal

of settlers to pay the rents exacted. The movement spread from Dutchess

to Columbia County. William Prendergast, who is said to have lived in a

house standing on the ground now part of the golf links in Pawling, was

the leader of the insurgents in this county. He assembled a band on

Quaker Hill so formidable that the grenadiers at Poughkeepsie waited for

reinforcements of two hundred troopers and two field pieces from New

York before proceeding against him. The sight of the red coats was

enough. Prendergast surrendered. But so great was the local excitement

that, to forestall an attempt to rescue, he was taken a prisoner to New

York. In July he was brought back for trial; and on the same boat with

the King's counsel, judges, lawyers and prisoner came a company of

soldiers to put down the continued disturbance in Columbia County.[21]

The trial occurred the first fortnight of August. Prendergast was

assisted in his defense by his wife, who made a strong impression on the

jury, proving that her husband, before the acts of which he was accused,

was "esteemed a sober, honest and industrious farmer, much beloved by

his neighbors, but stirred up to act as he did by one Munro, who is

absconded." So ardent was this woman advocate that the State's attorney

forgot himself and moved that she be excluded from the court room. The

motion was denied, and the mover of it emphatically rebuked. But there

was not lacking proof of the fact of treason, and Prendergast was

convicted and sentenced to be hanged in six weeks. Then this valiant

woman's energy and perseverance rose to their highest. She set off for

an audience with the Governor, Sir Henry Moore, Bart., and returned

about the first of September with a reprieve. Just in time she arrived,

for a company of fifty mounted men had ridden the whole length of the

county to rescue her husband from the jail. She convinced them of the

folly of such action as they proposed, and sent them home, while she

turned to the task of obtaining a pardon from the King. Here, too, she

was successful; for, six months later, George III, who required six

years to be subdued by a Washington, released her husband. They arrived

home amid great popular rejoicings.

William Prendergast and Mehitabel Wing, whose descendants settled later

about Chautauqua Lake, New York, were bound to the Quaker Community by

ties of marriage and of trade. William was not, so far as I can learn, a

member of the Meeting; but Mehitabel was a daughter of Jedidiah Wing,

whose family was devoted to the Society from 1744 until the "laying

down" of the Meeting in 1885. William Prendergast was, however, a member

of the community. His name heads an account in the ledgers of the

Merritt store, in 1771 and 1772, and his purchases indicate that he was

a substantial farmer whose trading center was Quaker Hill.[22]

Prendergast was an Irishman.

Before the Revolution he with his family and possessions, a caravan of

seventeen vehicles and thirty horses, emigrated westward, going as far

south as Kentucky, then north through Ohio and New York. A part of the

family company proceeded to Canada. His son James settled, with other

Prendergasts, on Chautauqua Lake, and became the founder of Jamestown,

where his family, now extinct there, has given the city a library. When

William Prendergast and Mehitabel Wing, his resolute wife, died, is not

known. None of that name is later found on or near Quaker Hill.

The motive of their hegira appears to have been chagrin and a sense of

humiliation at the sentence of death pronounced upon the head of the

family. In the Prendergast Library at Jamestown is a book containing

family histories, which came from the Prendergast private library. From

this book two pages had been cleanly cut away. The Librarians set

themselves to replace the lost material, and after patient efforts in

many quarters, discovered another copy, and had typewritten pages made

and pasted in. Upon the missing pages, thus replaced after the

extinction of James Prendergast's family, was found the account of

William Prendergast's sentence to be hanged. His descendants, had they

lived longer, might have been more proud than ashamed of his rebellion

against injustice.

The Quakers, because they would passively tolerate an intrusion, were

forced to harbor another rendezvous of turbulent men. It is said that

Enoch Crosby, the famous spy of the Revolution, who is believed to

have been Cooper's model for the hero of the novel, "The Spy," came to

Quaker Hill during the Revolution, in pursuance of a plan he was at that

time following, and got together a band of Tory volunteers, who were

planning to join the British army; and delivered them to the Continental

authorities, as prisoners. In this he was assisted by Col. Moorehouse,

who kept a tavern on a site in South Dover, opposite the brick house

which now stands one-half mile south of the Methodist Church.

[Illustration: INTERIOR OF OBLONG MEETING HOUSE

On the "facing seats" are: OLIVE HOAG, ROBY OSBORN, BETSY POST, RICHARD

OSBORN, JOHN L. WORDEN]

I have spoken above of the sullen loyalty of the Quakers to the British

Crown during the Revolution. It may have been in part owing to their

loyalty that their neighborhood became more congenial for the Tories who

during that period harried the country-side. The Quakers were Tories,

and are so called in the letters of the period; but the word "Tories"

remains in the speech of Quaker Hill as a name of opprobrium. It

describes a species of guerrillas who infested parts of New York and

Connecticut.

The "Tories" of the Revolutionary days furnish the substance of the

stories of violence that are told about the fireside to Quaker Hill boys

and girls. It is difficult, however, to persuade those who have heard

these tales to relate them. Those who know them best are the very ones

who cannot recall them in systematic or orderly form. I mention only one

more of the free lances of the time. The chiefest of all bandit-leaders

of those turbulent times was Waite Vaughn. It is related that this

fellow was the head of a band of Tories, which means locally the same

that the term "Cowboys" or "Skinners" means in the history of

Westchester County. The latter were lawless bands who infested the

regions in which the armies made civil life insecure, and subsisted by

stealing cattle, plundering houses, robbing and often murdering

citizens. "They seemed," says a writer, "like the savages to enjoy the

sight of the sufferings they inflicted. Oftentimes they left their

wretched victims from whom they had plundered their all, hung up by

their arms, and sometimes by their thumbs, on barndoors, enduring the

agony of wounds that had been inflicted to wrest from them their

property. These miserable beings were frequently relieved by the

American patrol."[23] Waite Vaughn lived in Connecticut in the part of

New Fairfield known as Vaughn's Neck. Under the house, recently

demolished, in which "Dr. Vaughn," his brother, is said to have lived

during the Revolution, was found rotted linen below the cellar floor.

Behind the great heap of the chimney also was found a secret cellar, for

years forgotten, in which, among other rubbish of no significance, are

said to have been found counterfeit coins of the Revolutionary period

and other evidences of outlaw practices in that time.[24]

Vaughn used to ride at night with his troop to Quaker Hill, through

Connecticut neighborhoods, which knew the sound of his passing. The

Pepper family still relate the tradition of his riding up "Stony Hill,"

past the point where stands Coburn Meeting House, in the night, while

they and their neighbors stayed discreetly indoors. This rendezvous was

a place in the woods on Irish land, about half way between Sites 96 and

120, now known as "The Robber Rocks." Here the Vaughns are said to have

concealed booty at times, and from this point they made forages upon

farmhouses in the richest neighborhoods of this vicinity. Probably they

spared the Quakers. I will speak later of the fact that Quakers have

ways of their own for protecting themselves against intruders. Moreover,

their men were not gone to the war.

The record of these years, on the pages of the clerk's minute-book, are

a disappointment. One searches in vain for even the slightest trace of

the presence in the Meeting House of the troops. There is no record of

the presence in the Meeting House of the "Tories" or guerrillas of the

Revolution; and not a word about the makers of the rifle-ports in the

gables of this building which the present writer discovered there,

unless it be the unruffled and serene utterance, under date of 8th

Month, 9th, 1781, the very period at which the "Tories" must have been

at their worst: "Samuel Hoag is appointed to take care of the Meeting

House, and to keep the door locked and windows fastened, and to nail up

the hole that goes up into the Garratt." The "Tories" robbed the store

on Site 28. They had hidden for that purpose in the loft of the Meeting

House and were discovered by some young Quakers who were skylarking in

the Meeting House under pretense of cleaning it. The story is that one

of the young men, being dared--of course by a maiden--to open the

trap-door into the garret, and look for the Tories, found them hiding

there. The bandits, being discovered, tumbled down the hole from the

garret, and compelled their discoverers to go with them to the store;

and proceeded at once to plunder it, relying no doubt on the

non-resistant character of the people of the Hill. They stacked their

arms at the door and went about their business in a thorough manner. But

there was that in the blood of some Quakers there that could not contain

itself within the bounds of non-resistance, and one of them, Benjamin

Ferris, cried out, "Seize the rascals." In the scrimmage that resulted

from the excitement of this remark, the leader of the Tories was

recognized by the young lady who had by her challenge to the young man

discovered them, and being taunted by her was so incensed that he

stabbed her. It is only said in closing the story that the blood of both

the fair and adventurous young Quakeress whose abounding spirit brought

on all the trouble, and that of the leader of the "Tories," flows in the

veins, of some who live on the Hill in the twentieth century.

Samuel Towner, a relative of Vaughn, resident in the region of

Fredericksburgh (now Patterson), returning from a trip, once found

Vaughn at his home, and urged him at once to leave, as his property

would be confiscated, if Vaughn's presence there were tolerated.

Vaughn was once pursued by farmers near Little Rest, and was sighted and

surrounded in a lonely road. He turned upon his pursuers coolly and

said: "Now, gentlemen, you can arrest me, or kill me, but you must take

the consequences; for I will kill some of you." Daunted by his

resolution, they stood motionless while he crossed a fence and a field,

and disappeared among the trees of a wooded hill.

Quaker Hill became known as Vaughn's rendezvous, and here he met his

end, I think about 1781. His band had robbed the home of one of the

Pearce family, then as now resident in the valley where Pawling village

stands. The victim was hung up by his thumbs till life was almost

extinct. The next day, Capt. Pearce, of the Revolutionary army, returned

unexpectedly to his home, and set off with armed assistance for the

Robber Rocks on Quaker Hill. Near that spot, in the fields east of Site

97, on the Wing lands, Vaughn and his men were resting, some picking

huckleberries, and some playing cards on a flat stone. Pearce gave no

warning, but opened fire at once. Vaughn fell mortally wounded. He was

carried to John Toffey's residence, Site 53, where he soon died. He is

buried under the trees outside the "Toffey Burying Ground," beside the

brook, in the very heart of Quaker Hill, into which he had intruded

because in that peaceful neighborhood he had for a time a safe asylum.

With his death it is believed that his band dispersed, and their

depredations ceased.

A peaceful people like the Quakers must find means of their own to

protect themselves against intruders. No one can live long on Quaker

Hill without knowing that they have done so. One may brusquely intrude

once, but he will be a violent man indeed, not to say a dull one, who

continues to enjoy invading the preserves of the "Friends." The fourth

instance of a forcible invasion of the Hill was that of Washington's

army, which encamped in the vicinity in the fall of 1778, the

Headquarters being in John Kane's house, on a site now within the

borders of Pawling Village. See on Map I, "HeadQrs."

On his arrival, September 19, 1778, Washington,[25] with his bodyguard,

was entertained for six days at the home of Reed Ferris, in the Oblong,

Site 99,[26] an honored guest, when he moved to the place designated as

his Headquarters on his maps by Erskine. His letters written during his

residence here are all dated from "Fredericksburgh," the name at that

time of the western and older part of the town of Patterson.

Washington's general officers were quartered in the homes of various

residents of the neighborhood. One was so entertained by Thomas Taber,

at the extreme north end of the Hill. It is natural to suppose that

others were housed in nearer places. That Lafayette was entertained at

the home of Russell, who lived at Site 25, now the Post-office, is

reliably asserted. The brick house standing at that time was torn down

by Richard Osborn, who erected the present house. That Washington, with

other officers, was entertained at Reed Ferris's home is asserted by the

descendants most interested, and is undoubtedly true.

The Meeting House was appropriated by the army officers for a hospital,

because it was the largest available building. The only official record,

says Mr. L. S. Patrick, is that of Washington's order, Oct. 20th, "No

more sick to be sent to the Hospital at Quaker Hill, without first

inquiring of the Chief Surgeon there whether they can be received, as it

is already full." Arguing from the date of Washington's order above,

Oct. 20, and from that of Surgeon Fallon below, this use of the

building for a hospital continued three and perhaps five months.

Meantime the Friends' Meetings were held in the barn at Site 21, then

the residence of Paul Osborn. This barn had been the first Meeting House

erected on the Hill in 1742. It was removed to Site 21 in 1769, when it

was used as a barn till 1884, when it was removed by the present

resident.[27]

There is no mention, even by inference, in the records of Oblong Meeting

that proves this occupation of their building by soldiers. It was not

voluntarily surrendered; other records show that the use of the building

was supported by force; its surrender was grudging, not a matter to be

recorded in the Meeting. It is characteristic of the Friends that they

ignored it.

This toleration of the Hospital was never sympathetic. A letter of great

interest to the student of those times was written to the Governor of

the State of New York, Hon. George Clinton,[28] by Dr. James Fallon,

physician in charge of the sick which were left on Quaker Hill, in the

Meeting House, after the departure of the Continental army. He could get

no one to draw wood for his hospital in the dead of winter, till finally

"old Mr. Russell, an excellent and open Whig, tho' a Quaker," hired him

a wagon and ox team. He could buy no milk without paying in Continental

money, six for one. He declared that "Old Ferris, the Quaker, pulpiteer

of this place, old Russell and his son, old Mr. Chace and his family,

and Thomas Worth and his family, are the only Quakers on or about this

Hill, the public stands indebted to." The two pioneers of the Hill, the

preacher and the builder, were patriots as well. He denounces the rest

as Tories all, the "Meriths," Akins, Wings, Kellys, Samuel Walker, the

schoolmaster, and Samuel Downing, whom he declared a spurious Quaker and

agent of the enemy; also the preacher, Lancaster, "the Widow Irish;"

and many he called "half-Quakers," who were probably more zealous, and

certainly more violent for Quaker and Tory principles than the Quakers

themselves.

The trouble culminated in Dr. Fallon's impressing the wagons of Wing,

Kelly and "the widow Irish," to take fourteen men to Danbury and

Fishkill to save their lives. The former impress was not resisted; but

the soldiers who took the Irish team had to battle with a mob, headed by

Abraham Wing and Benjamin Akin, who used the convalescent soldiers

roughly, but could not prevent the seizure. They were not the first men

to do violence for the sake of the principle of non-resistance. One can

see, too, that modern Quakerism has taken a gentler tone.

The small violence done by Abraham Wing and Benjamin Akin, like that of

young Ferriss to prevent the robbery of the Merritt store, was

ineffective. But the Quaker mode of self-protection was more effective

than violence. They "froze out" the doctors and their soldiers from the

Meeting House, by leaving them alone in the bitter winter, by letting

them starve. The bitterness of their Toryism, and the zeal of Quaker

ideals, the ardor of their "make-believe," carried them too far. They

forgot mercy for the sake of opposing the cruelty of war.

Among the soldiers who lay sick in the Meeting House many are said to

have died. They were buried in the grounds of the resident on Site 32,

in the easterly portion of the field facing the Meeting House. No stones

mark their place of rest, as none were ever placed in the cemetery of

the early Quakers in the western part of the same field. Over them both

the horses of persons attending meeting were tethered for many decades.

The ploughman and the mower for years traversed the ground. But it is

not forgotten who were buried there.

Says L. S. Patrick in his attempt to estimate the amount of sickness

and death of soldiers on the hill that winter:[29] "Of the conditions

existing, the prejudices prevailing, and the probable number in the

Hospital, Dr. Fallon's letter to Governor Clinton furnishes the only

account known to exist: 'Out of the 100 sick, Providence took but three

of my people off since my arrival.' On the occasion of the arrival of

Col. Palfrey, the Paymaster General, at Boston from Fredericksburgh,

General Gates writes to General Sullivan: 'I am shocked at our poor

fellows being still encamped, and falling sick by the hundreds.'

"The death list--out of the oblivion of the past but four names have

been found--John Morgan, Capt. James Greer's Co., died at Quaker Hill

Hospital, Oct. 19, 1777(?); Alexander Robert, Capt. George Calhoun's

Co., 4th Pa., Nov. 6, 1778; James Tryer, Capt. James Lang's Co., 5th

Pa., Oct. 22, 1778; Peter King, 1st Pa., enlisted 1777, Quaker Hill

Hospital, N. J.(?) 1778 (no such hospital).

"Some doubt may exist as to two of these, but as the hospital is named,

an error may exist in copying the original record."

[19] "Dutchess County in Colonial Days," 1898, and "Dutchess

County," 1899, papers read before the Dutchess County Society, in the

City of New York, by Hon. Alfred T. Ackert. Also, "History of Dutchess

County," by James H. Smith.

[20] See pp. 20 and 21.

[21] See "New York Mercury," July 28, 1766, August 18 and 25,

1766, September 15, 1766. See also "Dutchess County," by Alfred T.

Ackert, 1899, p. 5.

[22] See Appendix B.

[23] Thacher's "Military Journal of the Revolution."

[24] The narrative of Vaughn is gleaned from old residents,

Almira Briggs Treadwell, Archibald Dodge, Jane Crane, and others.

[25] "Washington Headquarters at Fredricksburgh," by L. S.

Patrick; Quaker Hill Series, 1907.

[26] This matter is very fully treated in "Washington's

Headquarters at Fredericksburgh," by Lewis S. Patrick. Quaker Hill

Conference Local History Series, XVI. 1907.

[27] See No. III, Quaker Hill Series, pp. 12, 42, and No. VIII,

pp. 16, 17.

[28] "Letters of Governor George Clinton," New York State

Library.

[29] "Washington Headquarters at Fredricksburgh," by L. S.

Patrick, 1907.

PART II.

The Transition.

CHAPTER I.

COMMUNICATION--THE ROADS.

The roads were originally bridle paths, and to this day many a stretch

of road testifies in its steep grade to its use in the days of the pack

saddle. No driver of a wheeled vehicle would have selected so abrupt a

slope.

In the early days the roads had a north and south direction. In the

Period of Transition, with the diversion of commerce to the railroad in

Pawling, the roads of an east and west direction became the principal

roads, though the one great Quaker Hill highway north and south is still

the avenue of communication on the Hill.

As the years passed wagons were used; indeed, by the time of the

Revolution, in the second generation, they were bearing all the

transportation. The state of the roads is shown, however, by the fact

that Daniel Merritt was accustomed to pay, in 1772, £1, or $5, for

carting four barrels of beef to the river; that is, about 1,000 lbs.

constituted a load. At the present state of the country roads, a Quaker

Hill employer would expect 2,000 lbs. to make a load. The state of the

roads before the turnpikes were made, that is, before 1800 to 1825, is

described by a resident as follows: "The road was so full of stones,

large and small, that people of to-day would consider impassable for an

empty wagon, to say nothing of drawing a load over it. In the fall of

the year it is said that toward evening one could hear the hammering of

the wheels of the wagons on the stones of the road a distance of four

or five miles."[30]

I cannot learn that Quaker Hill was during the Quaker Period on any main

line of country travel. Marquis De Chastelleux records in his "Travels

in North America," that he journeyed in 1789 to Moorehouse's Tavern (see

Map I) along the Ten Mile River, two or three miles from the Housatonic

to "several handsome houses forming part of the district known as _The

Oblong_. The inn I was going to is in the Oblong, but two miles farther

on. It is kept by Col. Moorehouse, for nothing is more common in America

than to see an inn kept by a colonel ... the most esteemed and most

creditable citizen." There was no inn on Quaker Hill and no colonel. The

Quaker aversion to military titles was then as great as to the sale of

rum. The houses referred to by the French traveller were probably the

northern boundary of the Quaker community, at what is now Webatuck. I

cannot find record of any post road coming nearer than this, until in

the 19th century a stage was maintained between Poughkeepsie and New

Milford, by way of Quaker Hill, making the journey every other day, and

stopping at John Toffey's store at Site 53.

The building of turnpikes became, in the years following 1800, a popular

form of public spirit. Says Miss Taber: "In fact, turnpikes seemed to be

a fad in those days all over the state and probably a necessary one. The

longest one I learn of in this part of the country was from Cold Spring

on the Hudson River to New Milford in Connecticut. The turnpike in which

the people of this neighborhood were most interested was the one

incorporated April 3, 1818, and reads, 'That Albro Akin, John Merritt,

Gideon Slocum, Job Crawford, Charles Hurd, William Taber, Joseph Arnold,

Egbert Carey, Gabriel L. Vanderburgh, Newel Dodge, Jnrs., and such other

persons as shall associate for the purpose of making a good and

sufficient turnpike road in Dutchess Co.' It was named as the Pawlings

and Beekman Turnpike, being a portion of what is known as the

Poughkeepsie road passing over the West Mountain, but we do not find

that anything was done until after the act was revived in 1824, when

Joseph C. Seeley, Benoni Pearce, Samuel Allen, Benjamin Barr and George

W. Slocum were associated with them."

The Pawlings and Beekman Turnpike maintained a tollgate till 1905, when

it was burned down; and the company, which had long discussed its

discontinuance, then abandoned its private rights in that excellent

stretch of road. The turnpike which crossed Quaker Hill ended at the

Jephtha Sabin residence, known to the present generation as "the Garry

Ferris place," Site 74. The roads of the neighborhood were the same in

1778-80 as at the present day, as will be seen from a comparison of Map

I, made by Erskine for Washington, and Map 2, which is a copy of the U. S.

Survey; except the road from Mizzen-Top Hotel to Hammersley Lake,

made after the hotel was erected. The comparison of maps shows also, to

one who knows the use of these roads, that they have changed from a

north and south use to an east and west use; the highway on the

northward slope of the Hill in Dover, and on the southward slope in

Patterson, being but little used to-day. The road from the Meeting House

and cemetery westward, which was once much favored, is now scarcely ever

used, and being neglected by the authorities, is little more than a

stony gutter.

The whole character of the neighborhood was changed by a revolution in

transportation. Not turnpikes effected the change, but railroads. The

early years of the nineteenth century were filled with expectation of

new modes of travel. Robert Fulton was building his steamboat amid the

derision of his contemporaries, and to their amazement steaming up the

Hudson against the tide. At first canals seemed to country folk the

solution of their problem. They occupied in the dawn of the 19th century

the place which trolley cars occupy in the minds of promoters to-day. A

canal was planned to run through the Harlem valley, where now Pawling

stands, and Quaker Hill men were among the promoters of it, among them

Daniel Akin and Johnathan Akin Taber.

Presently, however, came the promotion of railroads, and many of the

same men who had favored the canals, entered heartily into the new

projects. The foundation of Albert Akin's fortune was made when, about

1830, he began to borrow money of his neighbors and invest in the

rapidly growing lines of steam-cars in New York State. There were those,

however, who foresaw dire things from the new iron highway, and old

residents tell of "one man who said that whosoever farm that locomotive

passed through would have to give up fatting cattle, as it would be

impossible to keep a steer on the place."

For many years the railroad came no nearer than Croton Falls. Richard

Osborn used to tell the story of one resident of the Hill who boasted

that he could go to New York and return the same day. This he finally

attempted and accomplished by driving with a good pair of horses to

Croton Falls in the morning, taking an early train to New York,

returning in the evening, and driving home before night. This story,

which is well authenticated, proves the good condition of some of the

roads before 1849, for the drive to Croton Falls is about twenty miles.

Among leading Quaker Hill residents who promoted railroads in the valley

were Jonathan Akin, Daniel D. Akin, J. Akin Taber, John and Albert J.

Akin. The two men who were most influential in completing the last link

of the road--from the local viewpoint--were Albert Akin and Hon. John

Ketcham, of Dover, both recently deceased. They supplied cash for the

continuation of the road from Croton Falls to Dover Plains. To Mr.

Akin the promise was made that if he would supply a building for a

station the road would place an eating house at the point nearest Quaker

Hill. There was then no such village or hamlet as Pawling, the locality

being known as "Goosetown." Patterson was an old village, west of its

present business center one mile, and was known as Fredericksburgh.

Dover also was a place of distinction in the country-side. Mr. Akin,

with several yoke of oxen, hauled a dwelling to the railroad track from

the site on which Washington's Headquarters stood in 1778; and thus was

initiated the settlement of the village which is now among the most

thriving on the road.

[Illustration: A QUAKER GENTLEMAN]

At that time Quaker Hill was the most prosperous community for many

miles around. A description of its industries will be found elsewhere,

in Chap. IV, Part I. The coming of the railroad changed the whole aspect

of things. The demand for milk to be delivered by farmers at the

railroad station every day, and sold the next day in New York, began at

once. It soon became the most profitable occupation for the farmers and

the most profitable freight for the railroad. Eleven years after the

first train entered Pawling came the war, with inflated prices. The

farmer found that no use of his land paid him so much cash as the

"making of milk," and thereafter the raising of flax ceased, grain was

cultivated less and less, except as it was to be used in the feeding of

cattle, and even the fatting of cattle soon had to yield to the lowered

prices occasioned by the importation of beef from western grazing lands.

The making of butter and cheese, with the increased cost of labor on the

farms, was abandoned, that the milk might be sold in bulk to the city

middleman. The time had not come, however, in which farmers or their

laborers imported condensed milk, or used none. Quaker Hill farmers lived

too generously and substantially for that; but they ceased, during the

Civil War, when milk was bought "at the platform" for six cents a quart,

to make butter or cheese.

Thus the Harlem Railroad transformed Quaker Hill from a community of

diversified farming, producing, manufacturing, selling, consuming,

sufficient unto itself, into a locality of specialized farming. Its

market had been Poughkeepsie, twenty-eight miles away, over high hills

and indifferent roads. Its metropolis became New York City, sixty-two

miles away by rail and four to eight miles by wagon road.

With the railroad's coming the isolated homogeneous community scattered.

The sons of the Quakers emigrated. Laborers from Ireland and other

European lands, even negroes from Virginia, took their places. New

Yorkers became residents on the Hill, which became the farthest terminus

of suburban traffic. The railroad granted commuters' rates to Pawling,

and twice as many trains as to any station further out. The population

of the Hill became diversified, while industries became simplified. In

the first century the people were one, the industries many. In the

Period of the Mixed Community, in the second century, the people were

many and the industries but one. I speak elsewhere of these elements of

the mixed community. Suffice it to have traced here the simplifying of

the economic life of the Hill, by the influence of the railroad, which

made the neighborhood only one factor in a vaster industrial community,

of which New York was the center. When the Meeting House and the Merritt

store were for a century the centers of a homogeneous Quaker community,

it was a solid unit, of one type, doing varied things; when Wall Street

and Broadway became the social and industrial centers, a varied people,

no less unified, did but one thing.

[30] "Some Glimpses of the Past," by Alicia Hopkins Taber.

CHAPTER II.

ECONOMIC CHANGES.

The transition from the mixed or diversified farming of the Quaker

community to the special and particular farming of the mixed community

is written in the growth of the dairy industry, which in the year 1900

was the one industry of the Hill. In 1800 dairy products were only

beginning to emerge from a place in the list of products of the Quaker

Hill lands to a single and special place as the only product of salable

value. While the Hill people constituted a community dependent on itself

and sufficient unto itself, the exceptional fitness of the "heavy clay

soil" to the production of milk, butter and cheese did not assert

itself, and wheat, rye, flax, apples, potatoes were raised in large

quantities and sold; but in the period of opening communication with the

world in general, exactly in proportion as the Hill shared in the growth

of commerce, by so much did the dairy activities supplant all other

occupations. The order of this emergence is a significant commentary

upon the opening of roads and the development of transportation. The

stages are: first, cheese and butter; second, fat cattle; and third,

milk. At the end of the Quaker community, when the best roads were of

the east and west directions, and Poughkeepsie was the market-place,

cheese and butter were made for a "money crop," by the women, who

retained the money for their own use.

There is a story told in the Taber and Shove families, which prettily

shows the customs in the Quaker century. Anne Taber, wife of Thomas

Taber, substantial pioneer at the north end of the Hill, "had a fine

reputation as a cheese maker." Being a New England woman, she was of the

few who in Revolutionary days were in sympathy with the Colonies, and

she gave forth that she would present a cheese to the first general

officer who should visit the neighborhood. "One day, being summoned to

the door," writes one of her descendants, "she was greatly surprised to

find a servant of General Washington, with a note from him claiming,

under conditions of the promise, the cheese. Of course it was sent, and

the General had opportunity to test her skill in that domestic art."[31]

The Taber family did not preserve that note; but in the Treasury

Department of the United States, among Washington's memoranda of

expenditures, is the item under date of Nov. 6, 1778, "To Cash paid

servant for bringing cheese from Mr. Taber, 16 shillings." It would seem

that the fame of Anne Taber's cheeses had won her a market with the

officers at Headquarters, for sixteen shillings was payment "for

bringing cheese" in large quantity, and the date is six weeks after the

arrival of Washington for his stay in the vicinity.

In the ledger of the Merritt store, under date of Nov. 6, 1772, Thomas

Taber, Esq., is credited as follows: "By 29 cheses wd. 484 lb. at 6d.,

£12 2s." In that year Thomas Taber, Esq., satisfied his account with an

ox, £6 16s.; cash, £10; three pounds and nine ounces of old pewter, 4s.

6d.; seven hogs, £20 11s. 6d., and the above 29 cheeses. So that

approximately one-fourth of the "money crop" of this substantial farmer

was in the form of a dairy product. In the year 1895, the average Quaker

Hill farm was producing, as will be shown in Chapter III, Part III,

ninety per cent. of dairy product, namely milk.

The second phase of the industry proper to Quaker Hill was that of

raising fat cattle. This culminated at the end of the period of the

Quaker Community. In this industry were laid the foundations of some

large fortunes. It brought in its day more money into the neighborhood

than any other occupation had ever brought. It disappeared with the

coming of the railroad into the valley, bringing, in refrigerator cars,

meat from western lands, and killed in Chicago. Then the cattle were

fattened on these hills, in the rich grass, and driven to New York to be

killed and sold there.

In "Some Glimpses of the Past," Miss Taber says: "But the chief business

of most farmers was the fatting of cattle. The cattle were generally

bought when from two to three years old, usually in the fall, kept

through the winter and the following summer fattened and sold. They were

the only things that did not have to go to the river to reach the

market. From all over the country they were driven to New York on foot,

and the road through the valley was the main thoroughfare for them.

Monday was the market day in New York and all started in time to reach

the city by Saturday. From Pawling the cattle were started on Thursday,

and those from greater distances planned to reach this part of their

journey on that day. It used to be said that the dealers could tell what

the market would be in New York on the following Monday by watching the

cattle that passed through Pawling on Thursday. The cattle were

collected and taken to the city by drovers; theirs was a great business

in those days. Hotels or taverns were provided for their accommodation

at frequent intervals along the road. Ira Griffin was a drover and Mr.

Archibald Dodge remembers when a boy going to New York with him and his

cattle, walking all the way. There were also droves of cattle other than

fat ones, on the road, some called store cattle, and the books of Mr.

Benjamin V. Haviland, who kept one of the taverns, show that in the year

1847 there had been kept on his place 27,784 cattle, 30,000 sheep and

700 mules, and it is said that occasionally there would be 2,000 head

between his tavern and that of John Preston's in Dover. When Mr. Albert

J. Akin was a young man he was considered an expert judge and buyer of

steers for fattening, and generally had the finest herd of fat cattle."

This reference is to the business at its height and applies to the years

1800-1850. In the books of John Toffey's store are frequent references

to the business.

Interesting material is furnished for the study of the period of

transition, in the records of the store kept by John Toffey at Site No.

53. These old day-books and ledgers are incomplete, but they cover

spaces of time in the years 1814, 1824, 1833; and their account of the

purchases made by John Toffey's customers furnishes a record, we may

suppose, of the goods brought into the households on the Hill at that

time, from other communities; as well as the actual exchange of

commodities on the Hill, where at that time diversified industries were

carried on.

The growth of trade in these respects, from the period 1814-1816 to the

period 1824-1833 will be considered in four lines, as it is exhibited in

the commodities: first of Costume, second of Food and Medicine, and

third of Tools and Material for Industry, fourth, of House-furnishings.

It is assumed that John Toffey kept a representative store, and that the

growth in his trade corresponded to the growth in the commercial

interchange in the community.

In 1814-1816 the imported goods kept and sold by John Toffey are cloth

(perhaps in part locally manufactured), indigo, thread, cambric,

penknives, knitting needles, spelled "nittenneedels," plaster, fine

salt, molasses, tea, apple-trees, nutmeg, shad and occasionally other

fish. The list is brief, and its proportion to the other commodities

sold in the store evidences the simplicity of a community dependent

chiefly upon itself, and living a life of rudeness and content.

Among prices which change in the twenty years recorded in John Toffey's

books are those of molasses which was in 1814-1816 $2.00 per gallon, and

fell to $1.25 and in 1824 to 35c. per gallon. "Tobago" was sold in 1814

at $2.75 per pound, and later for 62c. Flour was sold in 1814 for $18

per barrel, or 9c. per pound; wool hats at $4; fine salt 10c. per pound;

plaster $3.25 per hundredweight; boots at $9.00; tea at $2.75 per pound.

A day's work for a man in 1814-1816 was from $1.00 per day for ordinary

work, to $1.25 for driving oxen, or $1.50 for "digging a grave," or the

same amount "for going after the thief."

House-rent is recorded at the rate of thirty dollars a year.

One may explain the high rates of many of these commodities, and the

relatively high rate paid for labor by the prevalence of war prices at

the time. Commodities such as molasses would be expensive as a result of

the stoppage of sea-trade; and the labor market was exhausted to supply

the army with soldiers.

In 1824 Toffey imported, for Costuming, shawls, crepe at $1 per yard,

silk, skein-silk, twist, ribbon, velvet at 90c. per yard, drab-cloth,

flannel, braid, handkerchiefs, buttons and button-moulds, gloves,

suspenders, calico, vest patterns, pins, chrome-yellow, "bearskin" at

82c. per yard, dress handkerchiefs, beads, buckles, silk flags and

morocco skins.

Of new foods he imported molasses at 35c. per gallon, oranges at 2c.

each, which he seems to have sold only one by one, sugar at 6c., tobacco

at 12c., alum, tea at 85c., salt at $1 per bushel, pepper, all-spice,

raisins, salt-peter, pearlash, castile soap, hard soap, paregoric,

ginger, logwood, vitriol, cinnamon, snuff, sulphur, cloves, mustard,

opium, coffee, loaf sugar, watermelons, and seeds for beets, lettuce,

parsnips.

Of House-furnishings, he had for sale, knives, forks--one set of knives

and forks selling for $13, plates, bowls, pitchers, mugs, teacups,

teapots, decanters, almanacs, brooms, oilcloth, glass and putty,

inkstands, bedsteads, spoons in sets, sugar-bowls, tin pans.

Of Tools and Materials for Industry he sold nails by the "paper," by the

hundred and by the pound, files, oil at 75c. a gallon, locks, slates,

paper, pocket-books, pencils, turpentine, raw steel and iron, spectacles

at 34c., sandpaper, shovels and spades, screws, gimlets.

Rum, brandy and gin appear also, with powder, shot and fishhooks, as

tributes to the convivial and adventurous spirit. But the convivial

spirits were the better patrons, for there was scarcely an entry in

certain years in which was not an item of alcoholic spirits. The

sporting goods were only occasionally purchased.

In 1833 for Costuming, cotton-batting had appeared, and canton flannel,

canvas, blue jeans at 83c. per yard, brown Holland, cloth at $3.64 per

yard, hats at 44c. each, hooks and eyes, pearl buttons at 10c. a dozen,

side combs, bandanna handkerchiefs; while sole-leather was still sold in

quantity, with buckskin mittens, which were scarcely made on the Hill.

For Industry, behold the arrival of pincers, gum arabic, "Pittsburgh

cord" at 21c. per yard. In Housings, candles, frying pans, tin pails,

dippers, tin basins, wash-tubs made their appearance; and in this year

for the first time window-blinds were sold, for 75c.

For Food and Medicines John Toffey offered at this time codfish, coffee,

souchong tea, crackers, castor oil, camphor gum, Epsom salts.

Meantime, a day's wages had fallen from $1 and $1.50 to 65c. and 75c.

per day.

The growth of trade in John Toffey's store is summarized in Table I. In

this table may be seen also the growth of economic demand. The increase

of the number of kinds of commodities in each evidences the acquirement

of varied tastes by this people of the Hill.

TABLE I. JOHN TOFFEY'S STORE.

--------------------+---------+--------+---------

Commodities | 1814-16 | 1824 | 1833

--------------------+---------+--------+---------

Costume | 5 | 25 | 38

Food and Medicine | 5 | 29 | 36

Tools and Materials | 5 | 18 | 21

House Furnishings | | 18 | 24

--------------------+---------+--------+---------

Daily Wage |$1.-$1.50| |65c.-75c.

--------------------+---------+--------+---------

The above summary of the importations to the Hill in the years 1814-1833

casts light upon the social and religious history of the period in

question; in which occurred the greatest social convulsion this

community has ever known. In the year 1828 the Religious Society of the

Friends was divided, never to be united, the integrity of the community

as a social and religious unit was ended, the ties of a century were

severed, and instead of the "unity" of which Quakers are always so

conscious, came mutual criticism, recrimination, and excommunication of

one-half of the community by the majority of the Meeting. Thus ended the

communal life of Quaker Hill, and began the disintegration of the

community which is now almost complete.

It is true that this schism was general throughout the denomination, in

all the United States; and that it was shared in its doctrinal

influences by the Congregational churches, the Unitarian Association

having been formed in Boston in 1825. But nevertheless it had roots on

Quaker Hill in an economic condition; and that economic condition may

have been general throughout the Eastern States.

Let the doctrinal causes of this schism be considered elsewhere.[32]

Economic causes are hinted at in the above paragraphs. There came in

many embellishments of life which must have seemed to early Friends mere

luxuries, and to the stricter few must have appeared instruments of sin,

as "beads," "ribbons," velvet, silk, braid, crepe, shawls, dress

handkerchiefs, buckles, silk flags, pearl buttons--these are expressions

of new states of mind. The economic change underlying the social

convulsion is seen in the increase of varied stuffs for costume,

articles and materials for the food and medicine cupboards of the

farmhouses, and in more varied tools and materials both for industry and

house furnishing.

Even more influential than the exciting power of luxuries would be the

quieter and more pervasive stimulus of comfort. Houses that are glazed

and ceiled and furnished with well adapted implements in every room;

tables set with all the wares of leisurely and pleasurable feeding speak

a new state of affairs. The people so clothed and so fed begin to

produce in every family some members of cultured tastes, some of

independent thought, who are restive under the denials of Quakerism.

Business and industry too become more varied; and the effect of this

prosperous and varied industry shows itself in active and critical

minds. Importation from places beyond Poughkeepsie awakened imagination

and invited reflection upon the state of the world.

All this time the daily wage continued to fall, from $1 and $1.50 in

1814 to 50c., 65c. and 75c. in 1833. It is said that men bitterly

commented, in those days of the rapid development of the country, that a

farmer who paid a laborer fifty cents for a day's labor in the hay-field

from daybreak to dark, would pay the same amount, fifty cents, for his

supper on the Hudson River boat, when he made his annual visit to the

great city of New York.

We have, then, in John Toffey's daybook a reflection of conditions

which had to do with the break-up of the community, as truly as did the

theological difference between Elias Hicks and the Orthodox. Comfortable

living, diversified and intensified industry, importation of expensive

and stimulating comforts, leisure with its sources in wealth, and its

tendencies toward reflection, and especially a differentiation of the

homogeneous community into diverse classes, owing to lowered wages and

multiplied embellishments of life, made up altogether the raw materials

of discontent, criticism and division.

These factors go with a state of growing discontent and disintegration.

The men and women possessed of leisure cultivated a humanist state of

mind, with which arose a critical spirit, a nicer taste and a cultured

discrimination. They were offended by literalism, bored by crudeness

however much in earnest, and disgusted with the illogical assertions of

pietists. The imperative mandate of the meeting awakened in them only

opposition. They found many to sympathize with their state of mind.

On the other side there were those who seriously feared the incoming of

luxurious ways. They distrusted books, remembering the values of one

Book to the laborer who reads it alone; they believed in plainness, and

their minds associated freedom of dress with freedom of thought. They

resented also the new privileges conferred on some by wealth, because to

most had come only harder work with discontent.

The schism which rent the community was an economic heresy, the belief

in the use of money for embellishment of life. All the Quakers regarded

with favor the making of money. The Liberals, however, saw ends beyond

money, and processes of ultimate value beyond administration and

business. They looked for household comforts, books, travel, and the

leisure with great souls who have written and have expressed the

greatest truths. They believed in a divinity such as could have made,

and regarded with favor, the whole teeming world.

The Orthodox saw the values of prosperity only in plainness of life,

recognized no divinity in humanized manners, and sternly but

ineffectually called the community back to idealized commonplaceness,

and to hear the utterances of rude ploughmen and cobblers in the name of

Deity.

One ventures to believe, too, that there was a falling away from all

religious exercises at this time, and that the pious of both schools

were troubled about it, and accused one another. The poor were too hard

worked and too poorly paid to feel anything but discontent; and the

leaders of the community differed as to the solution of the religious

problem. Hence came division.

The Quakers are conscious of religious "unity," but their mode of life

is a true economic unity. The Quaker Community was re-arranging itself

economically, but the members felt a religious change. Class division

was coming upon them, and they felt it as a sectarian division. It was

indeed the end of the old community ruled by religion, and the formation

of a new neighborhood life; a new Quakerism, ruled by economic classes:

the persons of influence being invariably persons of means, and the

dominating leaders rich. Doubtless the Quakers who led in the Division

of 1828 hoped, in each party equally, to maintain the old religious

domination. The community has never granted that leadership to the

divided Meeting, neither to the Orthodox, nor to the Hicksites. The real

power has, since a period antedating the division, been in the hands of

those who have owned farms centrally located; who in addition to owning

land centrally located have been possessed of large means: the "rich

men" and "wealthy women" have possessed a monopoly of actual leadership.

If also, they have been religiously inclined, their leadership has been

absolute.

[31] "Thomas Taber and Edward Shove--a Reminiscence," by Rev.

Benjamin Shove; Quaker Hill Series, 1903.

[32] The matter is fully treated in "Quaker Hill in the

Nineteenth Century," by Rev. Warren H. Wilson; Quaker Hill Series of

Local History No. IV.

CHAPTER III.

RELIGIOUS LIFE IN TRANSITION.

In religion the solidarity of this country place has been best shown in

the fact that, during most of its history, it has had but one church at

a time. For one hundred years there was the undivided meeting. From 1828

to 1885 the Hicksite--Unitarian, branch of the Friends held the Old

Meeting House, with diminishing numbers. The Orthodox had their smaller

meeting house around the corner, attended by decreasing gatherings. In

1880 was organized Akin Hall, in which till 1892 were held religious

services in the summer only. Since that time religious services have

been held there all the year round. The early united meeting had a

membership of probably two hundred, and audiences of three hundred were

not uncommon.

The church in Akin Hall, named "Christ's Church, Quaker Hill," had in

1898 a membership of sixty-five, and audiences of fifty to two hundred

and fifty, according to the occasion and the time of year. In the past

the general attitude of the community toward religion has been reverent

and sympathetic. It is no less so to-day.

Of religious ceremonies the Quakers claim to have none. But they are

fond of ceremoniousness beyond most men. The very processes by which

they abolish forms are made formal processes. They have ceremonies the

intent of which is to free them from ceremony. The meeting is called to

order by acts ever so simple, and dismissed by two old persons shaking

hands; but these are invariable and formal as a doxology and a

benediction. They receive a stranger in their own way. A visiting

minister is honored with fixed propriety. An expelled member is read out

of meeting with stated excommunicatory maledictions.

Worship has had on Quaker Hill a large place in characterizing the

social complexion of the people. By this, I mean that the peculiarities

of the Quaker worship, now a thing of the past, have engraved themselves

upon character. Those peculiarities are four: the custom of silence; the

non-employment of music, or conspicuous color or form; the separate

place provided for women; the assertion and practice of individualism.

The silence of the Quaker meeting is far from negative. It is not a mere

absence of words. It is a discipline enforced upon the lower elements of

human nature, and a reserve upon the intellectual elements, in order

that God may speak. I think that in this silence of the meeting we

discover the working of the force that has moulded individual character

on Quaker Hill and organized the social life. For this silence is a

vivid experience, "a silence that may be felt." The presence and

influence of men are upon one, even if that of God be not. The

motionless figures about one subtly penetrate one's consciousness,

though not through the senses. They testify to their belief in God when

they do not speak better than they could with rhetoric or eloquence. It

is the influence of many, not of one; yet of certain leaders who are the

organs of this impression, and of the human entity made of many who in

communion become one. The self-control of it breathes power, and

principle, and courage. One would expect a Quaker meeting to exert an

imperious rule upon the community. It is an expression of the majesty of

an ideal. I believe that the Quaker Hill meeting has been able to

accomplish whatever it has put its hand to do. The only pity is that the

meeting tried to do so little.

The original religious influence of Quakerism, carried through all

changes and transformation, was a pure and relentless individualism. It

was the doctrine that the Spirit of God is in every heart of man,

absolutely every one; resisted indeed by some, but given to each and

all. With honest consistency it must be said, the Quakers applied

this--and this it was they did apply--to the status of women, to the

question of slavery, to the civic relations of men. This it was that

made Fox and Penn refuse to doff their hats before judge, or titled

lord, or the king himself.

The character of the common mind of the community has been much

influenced by the fact that the Quakers made no use of color, form and

music either in worship or in private life; that they also idealized the

absence of these. They made it a matter of noble devotion. In nothing do

local traditions abound more than in stories of the stern repression of

the aesthetic instincts. One ancient Quakeress, coming to the well-set

table at a wedding, in the old days, beheld there a bunch of flowers of

gay colors, and would not sit down until they were removed. Nor could

the feast go on until the change was effected. So great was the power of

authority, working in the grooves of "making believe," that those who

might have tolerated the bouquet in silence, as well as those who had

sensations of pleasure in it, supported her opposition.

I have spoken elsewhere of the effect of this century-long repression

and ignoring of the aesthetic movements of the human spirit, in banking

the fires of literary culture in this population. The present

generation, all inheriting the examples of ancestors ruled in such

unflinching rigor, has in none of its social grouping any true sense of

color or of the beauty of color. Neither in the garments of those who

have laid off the Quaker garb, nor in the decorations of the houses is

there a lively sense of the beauty of color. None of the women of Quaker

extraction has a sense of color in dress; nor can any of them match or

harmonize colors. I except, of course, those whose clothing is directly

under the control of the city tailor or milliner. The general effect of

costume and of the decorations of a room, in the population who get

their living on the Hill, is that of gray tones, and drab effects; not

mere severity is the effect, but poverty and want of color.

In forms of beauty they know and feel little more. I do not refer to the

lack of appreciation of the elevations and slopes of this Hill itself--a

constant delight to the artistic eye. Farmers and laborers might fail to

appreciate a scene known to them since childhood. But there is in the

Quaker breeding, which gives on certain sides of character so true and

fine a culture a conspicuous lack in this one particular.

As to music, even that of simplest melody, it has come to the Hill, but

it "knows not Joseph." An elderly son of Quakerism said: "You will find

no Quaker or son of the Quakers who can sing; if you do find one who can

sing a little, it will be a limited talent, and you will unfailingly

discover that he is partly descended from the world's people."

The effect of this aesthetic negation appears, it seems to the present

writer, in a certain rudeness or more precisely a certain lack in the

domain of manners, outside of the interests in which Quakerism has given

so fine a culture. This appears to be keenly felt by the descendants of

Friends. Not in business matters; for they are made directors of savings

banks and corporations, and trustees, and referees, and executors of

estates, in all which places they find themselves at home. Nor is it a

lack of dignity and composure in the parlor or at the table. Nor is it a

lack of sense of propriety in meetings of worship. But it is in matters

ethical, civic and deliberate, and in the free and discursive meetings

of men, in which new and intricate questions are to arise; in positions

of trust, in which the highest considerations of social responsibility

constitute the trust; in these, the men and women trained in Quakerism

are lacking throughout whole areas of the mind, and lacking, too, in

ethical standards, which can only appeal to those whose experience has

fed on a rich diversity of sources and distinctions.

In this I speak only of the Quaker group and of those who have been

under its full influence. It does not apply to the Irish Catholics, nor

to the incomers from the city. The Quakers and their children lack

precisely those elements of aesthetic breeding which would be

legitimately derived from contemplation and enjoyment of beauty aside

from ethical values. Ethical beauty, divorced from pure beauty, a stern,

bare, grim beauty they have, and their children and employees have. But

they have little sense of order in matters that do not proceed to the

ends of money-making, housekeeping and worship. They do not seem to

possess instinctive fertility of moral resource. It may be due to other

sources as well, but it seems to the present writer that the moral

density shown by some of these birthright Quakers, upon matters outside

of their wonted and trodden ethical territories, is due to their long

refusal to recognize aesthetic values, and to see discriminations in the

field in which ethics and aesthetics are interwoven.

They made red and purple to be morally wrong, idealizing the plainness

of their uncultured ancestry, and sweet sounds they excluded from their

ears, declaring them to be evil noises, because they would set up the

boorishness of simple folk of old time as something noble and exalted,

"making believe" that such aesthetic lack was real self-denial and

unworldliness. It is not surprising that in a riper age of the world,

after lifetimes of this idealization of peasant states of mind, their

children find themselves morally and mentally unprepared for the

responsibilities of citizenship, of high ethical trust and of the varied

ways of a moral world, whose existence their fathers made believe to

ignore and deny.

Women have always occupied in Quakerism a place theoretically equal to

that of the men, in business and religious affairs. George Fox and his

successors declared men and women equal, inasmuch as the Divine Spirit

is in every human soul.

After the influence of the early Friends ceased, the place of woman

began to be circumscribed by new rules, and crystallized in a reaction

under the influence of purely social forces; so that this most sensible

people made women equal to men in meetings and in religious legislation

through a form of sexual taboo.

Following the custom of many early English meeting houses, the men and

women sat apart, the men on one side of the middle aisle, and the women

on the other, so that men and women were not equals in the individualist

sense, as they are for instance, in the practice and theory of

Socialism, but were equals in separate group-life; to each sex, grouped

apart from the other, equal functions were supposed to be delegated.

Oblong Meeting House, on Quaker Hill, had seats for two hundred and

fifty people on the ground floor, and in the gallery for one hundred and

fifty more. The men's side was separated from the women's, of equal size

and extent, by wooden curtains, which could be raised or lowered; so

that the whole building could be one auditorium, with galleries; or the

curtains could be so lowered that no man on the ground floor could see

any woman unless she be a speaker on the "facing seats"; nor could any

young person in the gallery see any one of the opposite sex; yet a

speaker could be heard in all parts. The curtains could be so fixed,

also, that two independent meetings could be held, each in a separate

auditorium, even the speakers being separated from one another.

It was the custom for women to have delegated to them certain religious

functions, at Monthly Meeting and Quarterly and Yearly Meetings, on

which they deliberated, before submitting them to the whole meeting.

This old Oblong Meeting House is a mute record and symbol of the

century-old contest of the Puritan spirit among the old Quakers,

striving for an inflexibly right relation between the sexes. They

attained their ends through the creation of a community, but not until

the community dissolved.

The position of woman among Friends is another eloquent tribute to the

two-fold "dealing" of Quakerism with women. She is man's equal, but she

is man's greatest source of danger. She must be on a par with him, but

she must be apart from him. The relations of men and women are therefore

very interesting. In doctrinal matters, in discussion, in preaching and

"testifying," men and women are equal, and the respect that a man has

for his wife or sister or neighbor woman, in these functions of a devout

sort is like that he has for another man. Generally the men of the

Quaker school of influence believe as a matter of course in the

intellectual and juristic equality of women with men; and in the

religious equality of the individual woman with the individual man. But

in the practical arts and in business a woman is a woman and a man is a

man. Here the women are restricted by convention to housekeeping, which

on large farms is quite enough for them; and the men have the outdoor

life, the "trading," and the gainful occupations--except the boarding of

city people. There is no especial respect for the "managing woman" who

"runs a farm"; the community expects such a woman to fail.

Moreover, between the sexes there is no camaraderie, no companionship of

an intellectual sort between husband and wife, no free exchange of ideas

except in circles made up of the members of one sex. In any public

meeting the men habitually sit apart from their wives and from the women

members of their families, even though the audiences be not bilaterally

halved.

The orbits of man's and woman's lives are separate, though each ascribes

to the individuals of the other sex an ethical and religious parity. The

effect is seen in the diminishing of the numbers of men on the Hill, in

the group-life of the women, and in the type of woman. It may be well to

consider these in reverse order.

The individual Quaker Hill woman, so far as she differs from women

generally, may be described as a woman almost perfectly conformed to

type, presenting fewer variations than elsewhere, either in the form of

youthful prettinesses and follies, or in the strenuous opinion of mature

years. She is neither a flirt as a girl, nor a radical as a woman. Color

has not yet come into her maidenly days, nor violence of opinion into

her womanly years. She affects neither fashion nor intellectual

eccentricity. Yet she attains to a better average of reasonable,

sensible action than she could otherwise do. She knows less of the

impulsive, emotional prettiness of adolescence than women of other

country communities, and in later years gives herself less to

intellectual vagaries. Women's rights are established on the Hill; it is

impossible to be strenuous about them.

The numerous groupings and associations of women are especially

interesting in view of the fact that the men of the Hill have no

associations whatever, now that the stores are closed; and are assembled

in no fixed groupings. It has never been possible, so far as records go,

to maintain a society of men on the Hill. In the early part of the

period under study a literary and debating society was organized, with

social attractions; but it was feeble and short-lived. There are not

enough leaders among the men to make such group-life possible. They are

related by ties of labor, rather than of class-fraternity; and they have

never acquired any interest common to their sex to assemble them in

groups and companies; the discipline of the religion known to the Hill

has discouraged and outlawed it.

This contrast may have something to do with the departure of men from

the Hill. So long as the stores were in operation, at Toffey's, Akin's,

and Merritt's places, the men could meet there, and had in their

assembling a natural group-life, which satisfied many with life in the

country. But with the closing of the stores after the coming of the

railroad in 1849, this also failed, and the men having no capacity for

general association with one another, and few interests possessed in

common with the women, have been the more impelled to leave the Hill.

Economic advantage had only to be as good elsewhere, and the man

emigrated. I have not known those who have left the place, in my

knowledge of it, to give as a reason inability to make a good living

there; but always they have spoken most emphatically of the bareness and

lack of interest in the social life of the Hill as their reason for

emigrating to the city or large town.

Part III.

The Mixed Community, from 1880 to the Present.

CHAPTER I.

DEMOTIC COMPOSITION.

There are ninety-three dwellings on Quaker Hill, as defined above, and

illustrated in Map II. The shaded area alone is referred to here as the

area proper to the term "Quaker Hill." In these dwellings live four

hundred and five persons. This gives a density of population of 26.667

per square mile. In the summer months of July and August there come to

the Hill at least five hundred and nineteen more, increasing the density

of population to more than 61 per square mile.

There is a steady emigration from the Hill, due to the departure of

working-people and their families in search of better economic

opportunities. This has in ten years removed thirty-nine persons. Death

has removed or occasioned the removal of twenty-seven more, while only

three have been removed by marriage.

Over against this there has been an immigration in the years 1895-1905

of thirty persons; of whom eleven have come in to labor, and nineteen

for residence on their own property.

There were resident in 1905 on Quaker Hill the following social-economic

classes: Professional men, three; one minister, two artists; wealthy

business men, three; farmers, thirty-eight; laborers, forty (heads of

houses).

There were fifty-three births in ten years, 1895-1905, of which fourteen

were in the families of property-owners, and thirty-nine in families of

tenants. There were in these ten years thirty-one deaths, of which

twenty-five were in the families of property-owners, and only six in

those of tenants. Thus the tenant class, bound to the community by no

ties of property, contributed 73 per cent. of the births and only 20 per

cent. of the deaths, while the property holders suffered 80 per cent. of

the deaths and were increased by only 26.4 per cent. of the births. The

number of persons in the families of property holders in 1905 was 184,

and in those of tenants 221. These are as one to one and one-fifth. This

difference is not enough to account for the great disparity in births

and deaths between the two classes of families. For, allowing for this

difference, births are two and one-third times as numerous in the

working and landless class as among the landowners; and deaths are

almost three and a half times as many among the landholders as among

their servants and tenants.

The present population of the Hill is of a composition which is

explainable by migration, and by the effect of the topography of the

Hill upon that population. There is every evidence that before the

coming of the railroad in 1849 the population was unified, and the

community freer of neighborhood groupings. The lists of customers who

traded at Daniel Merritt's store, given in Appendix B of this volume,

indicates the centering on the Hill of a wide economic life. Every

record and tradition of a religious sort indicates that the Oblong

Meeting House was also the center of a religious community as

wide-spread as the business of the stores. The Hill was one neighborhood

until 1828, when the Division of the Meeting occurred; and 1849, when

the railroad came to Pawling. It is not now one neighborhood. Three

groupings of households may be discerned, roughly designated "The North

End," "Quaker Hill Proper," and "Wing's Corners." The second of these,

being the territory most under scrutiny in Part III, might again be

divided into the territory "up by the Meeting House," and that "down by

Mizzen-Top." The difficulty one experiences in naming these groupings

of houses is a token of the indefiniteness of these divisions. They are

accentuated by events occurring in the more recent history of the Hill.

The older history which shapes the consciousness of the community does

not know these neighborhood divisions. Yet the change of the emphasis of

travel to the roads running east and west, from those north and south,

has separated these neighborhoods from one another. "The North End,"

therefore, is composed of those households between Sites 1 and 15, who

go to the village of Pawling for "trading" and "to take the cars," along

the road which passes Sites 16 to 18. They include Hammersley Lake and

Hurd's Corners in their interests.

The "Middle Distance," or as I would call it "The Meeting House

Neighborhood," is composed of those households from Sites 21 to 41; "the

Hotel Neighborhood," of those from Site 42 to 95; and these all, whether

regarded as one or as two sections, go habitually to the village by the

"Mizzen-Top road," past Sites 99 and 113.

"Wing's Corner" is properly the name of Site 100, but it may serve for a

title of the southern neighborhood from Site 122 to 104. From this

neighborhood all travel to the valley by the road westward from the

"Corners."

The "North End" and "Wing's Corners" are settled almost entirely by

Americans, and until within the past two years, by families derived from

the original population. "Quaker Hill Proper" is the place of residence

of the Irish-Americans. It has been also the place of residence of the

last of the Quakers during the period, just closed, of the Mixed

Community. It is also the territory in which land has the highest value.

Here also are the residences of all the persons of exceptional wealth.

The community most cherishes the central territory, lying upon the two

miles of road between the Mizzen-Top Hotel and the Meeting House, and

extending beyond these points and on either hand one-half mile. Within

this area land is nominally held at a thousand dollars an acre.

"The proximate causes of demotic composition," says Professor

Giddings,[33] "are organic variation and migration. The ultimate causes

are to be looked for in the characteristics of the physical

environment." The Quaker Hill population, drawn originally from a common

source, was in 1828 perfectly homogeneous. The very intensity of the

communal life had effected the elimination of strange and other

elements, and preserved only the Quakers, and those who could live with

the Quakers. Since 1849 this population has become increasingly

heterogeneous. It is not yet a blended stock. There is but little vital

mixture of the elements entering into social and economic union here.

They do not generally intermarry. They are related only by economic

facts and by religious sympathies, so that the effect of organic

variation does not yet appear among them. But in this chapter the effect

of immigration will be indicated.

The influence of the physical environment is worthy of brief notice.

Between one and another of the three neighborhoods lie stretches of

land, nearly a mile wide, valued less highly than that on which the

clusters of houses stand. In the days before the railroad, the

population passed over this territory to the centers of the community in

the three stores at Toffey's, Akin's and Muritt's places, and to the

Meeting House. But with the necessity of driving westward to the

railway, the stretches of road passing poorer land had diminished use,

and the clusters of households, once closely related, ceased to

interchange reactions and services; so a segregation of neighborhoods

began, which is increasing with time.

The list of members of the Meeting in Appendix A, and that of customers

of one of the stores in Appendix B, will serve to show the extent of the

community, religious and economic, in the eighteenth century. A steady

shrinkage has drawn in the margins of this communal life. At this date

Quaker Hill receives no tribute from any outer territory; and might be

confined to the limits of "Quaker Hill Proper," as some indeed call the

"Middle Distance." The present writer, while not so limiting the Hill,

has omitted both Burch Hill to the south and the stretches toward

Webatuck to the north, which lie in other towns.

Just a word about neighborhood character. There is no especial character

localized in the Wing's Corners neighborhood. The central territory has

been fully described in this book, and especially in the chapters on

"The Common Mind," and "Practical Differences and Resemblances." "The

North End" is the most isolated of any neighborhood included within the

Hill population. Its families are less directly derived from Quaker

stock. The older Quaker families once living there have disappeared. It

is a genial, kindly, chatty neighborhood, without the exalted sense of

past importance or of present day prestige which affects the manners of

"Quaker Hill Proper." It has, moreover, none of the Irish-American

residents, and until recently no New York families. The seven family

groups resident in these fifteen houses have been long acquainted, and

have become used to one another. A kindly, tolerant feeling prevails.

Gossip is not forbidden. Standards of conduct are not stretched upon

high ideals, and a preference for enjoyments shows itself in a greater

leisure and a laxer industry than in the central portion of the Hill.

The greater distance from the railway also forbids some of the

activities of "Quaker Hill Proper." The milk wagon which in 1893-1899

was driven each day from Site 1 to the railway, gathering up the milk

cans on the successive farms, has been discontinued, and in winter the

road between Sites 15 and 21 is often blocked with snow for weeks. The

resident at Site 3 has for about twenty years maintained a

slaughter-house and a wagon for the sale of meat, using his land for

fatting cattle and sheep, and selling the meat along two routes. The

resident at Site 15 maintains a fish-wagon, buying his fish at the

railways and selling at the houses along selected routes, through the

summer. The other residents follow the diversified farming, based on

grazing, which in this country includes fatting of calves and pigs,

raising of poultry and other small agricultural industries. One family

only in this neighborhood takes boarders in the summer.

The peculiar religious character of Quaker Hill had by 1880 drawn in its

margins to "Quaker Hill Proper," though the population in these outlying

neighborhoods had a passive acquiescence in it. They still respond to

the activities which are centered in the focal neighborhood. Of

themselves, none of these neighborhoods originates any religious

activity.

In this connection mention should be made of the Connecticut

neighborhood known as Coburn, in which a certain relation to Quaker Hill

has always been maintained. It is not here regarded as a Quaker Hill

neighborhood. Its characteristics are those of Connecticut, and its

traditions are not Quaker, in a pure sense; but Quaker Hill has

influenced it not a little, religiously. In Coburn remains a measurable

deposit of Quaker Hill population.

Among the changes wrought by the railroad was the introduction of new

social elements into the community. The Quaker population had become

divided into rich and poor, but all were of the same general stock. The

parents of all had the same experience to relate. Their fathers had come

to Quaker Hill in the early or middle part of the eighteenth century,

had endured together the hardships of pioneer days, had known the

"unity" of Quaker discipline for one hundred years, and had held loyally

to the ideas and standards of Quakerism.

With the approach of the railroad came Irish laborers, who settled first

in the valley below, generally in the limits of Pawling village, and

later came on the Hill as workers on the farms in the new forms of dairy

industry to which the farmers were stimulated by the railroad. This

immigration continued from 1840 until 1860. In that time, a period of

about twenty years, there came laborers for almost all the farmers on

the Hill. I am informed that in the decade following the Civil War the

work on all the farms, "from Wing's corner to the North End," was done

by young Irishmen.

The first Irishmen of this immigration whose names appear upon the

tax-lists of the town of Pawling are Owen and Patrick Denany, who are

assessed upon one hundred acres in 1845, the land upon which they first

settled being in the western part of the town. These two brothers came

before the railroad was extended to Pawling, in 1840. In 1867 Patrick

moved to Quaker Hill and bought a place, midway between Sites 128 and

131. Thomas Guilshan in 1858 and years following was taxed upon nine

acres, the land upon which his widow still lives, at Site 93. John Brady

lived for years at Site 71, and in a house now removed except for traces

of a cellar, about fifty feet southeast of the Akin Free Library, lived

Charles Kiernan. Among the earliest Irish Catholics came James Cullom

and Margaret, his wife, who acquired land at Site 34. Other names of the

earlier Irish generations are Hugh Clark, who acquired land at Site 116,

James Rooney, Fergus Fahey, James Doyle, Kate Leary, James Hopper, who

settled in Pawling or Hurd's Corner, and David Burns, who became a

landowner at Site 117.

The Irish Catholics early differentiated into two classes, only one of

which, with their children, remains to the present day. There were the

"loose-footed fellows," who followed the railroad, worked for seasons on

the farms, drifted on with the renewal of demand for railroad laborers,

and disappeared from the Hill. Their places were taken, in the years

following 1880, by American laborers, and a very few other foreigners,

of whom I will speak below. The other class of Irish Catholics sought to

own land. The details given above indicate their promptness in acquiring

interest in the soil. From them has been recruited almost all the

present Catholic population of the Hill, which in 1905 amounted in all

to twenty-five households and one hundred persons.

Whereas the early immigration of Irish worked in all the dairies from

one end of the Hill to the other, the land owned by Irish-Americans now

is all in the central portion of the Hill, within a radius of one mile

from Mizzen-Top Hotel. Within this mile also all the Irish laborers

employed on the Hill are at work. They are employed about the Hotel, on

the places of the wealthier landowners of the Hill, and in such

independent trades as stone-mason, blacksmith or wheelwright. Only an

occasional Irish-American is found among the hired hands on the dairy

farms.

In contrast to the indifference of the original population of the town

to education, it is worthy of note that the grandson of an

Irish-American named above promises at this writing to be the first

youth born in the town to graduate from a higher institution of

learning, being in his last year at West Point.

The Irish population who have remained on the Hill are singularly

homogeneous, and thoroughly imbued with the spirit of the place. In the

chapter on "The Ideals of the New Quakerism," I have commented on Irish

acquisition of a character like that of the Quakers. The gentleness of

manner, the quickness of social sympathy and the industrious quietness

of the Quakers have come to be theirs. Yet they are loyal Catholics, and

with very few exceptions support their Church in the village regularly.

Many of them who have not conveyances have for years employed a

stage-driver to transport them on Sunday morning to St. Bernard's

Church. This church has been built by the Irish and Irish-Americans. At

the time of their coming in 1840-1850, there was no Catholic church, and

"if you wanted to hear mass said, you had to drive to Poughkeepsie."

Later, a tent was erected for a time, for the Catholic services, then a

Baptist church building was purchased. This building was destroyed by

fire about 1875, and the present structure in the village was erected.

The Catholic population of the Hill is now equal to the Quaker

population, there being of each twenty-five households; the old and the

new. But each has gone through striking changes since the Catholics

came, sixty years ago. "When I was a boy," says a prominent

Irish-American, "you could hardly see the road here for the carriages

and the dust, all of them Quakers going to the Old Meeting House, on

Sunday, or to Quarterly Meeting. But now they are all gone." The

religious faithfulness of those Friends of two generations ago has

descended upon no part of the population more fully than upon the

handful of Catholic families, who now drive to Pawling every Sunday in

great wagon-loads, while the members of the Quaker households have

closed their meeting houses forever.

Of the Irish-Catholic population here described only eleven are Irish

born. The rest, about ninety in number, are American born of Irish

parents.

The other elements who have been adopted into the Quaker Hill population

are small in number in comparison with the Irish. They are among the

working people, one Swiss, two Poles, who have bought small places at

Sites 42 and 75, respectively; and two New York ladies who about 1890

purchased places at Sites 41 and 35, who have become a strong influence,

being socially and religiously in sympathy with the original Quaker

population. Their influence is described in the chapter upon "The Common

Mind of the Mixed Community." Purchases of land have been made in the

years 1905-1907, more than in the preceding decade, by persons coming

from outside the Quaker Hill population, all of the buyers being from

New York City. These purchases are all upon the outer fringes of the

Hill territory, at Sites 107, 108, 111, 118, in the southwestern part,

and Sites 6 and 10 in the "North End," and in the Coburn neighborhood,

Sites 88 and others near the Meeting House, Site 139. The land in the

central section has changed hands, in the years 1890-1907, only through

the increase in the holdings of those who owned large estates before the

period of the Mixed Community.

[33] Descriptive and Historical Sociology, p. 118.

CHAPTER II.

THE ECONOMY OF HOUSE AND FIELD.

The hospitality of the Quakers is worthy of a treatise, not of the

critical order, but poetic and imaginative. It cannot be described in

mere social analysis. It has grown out of their whole order of life, and

expresses their religious view, as well as their economic habits. I

showed in Chapter VII, Part I, that the hospitality of the Friends

acquired religious importance from their belief that in every man is the

Spirit of God. With the simplicity, and direct adherence to a few

truths, which characterized the early Friends this belief was practiced,

and became one of the religious customs of the Society. They entertained

travellers, "especially such as were of the household of faith." They

made it a religious tenet to house and welcome "Friends travelling on

truth's account."

With equal directness they proceeded further to welcome every traveller,

and to endure often the intrusions of those who would not be desired as

guests, because they believed that such might be acting by the divine

impulse.

The hospitality, therefore, of such a community is very beautiful. For

they have their ways of asserting themselves, in spite of

non-resistance. They open their doors, they set their table, with a

religious spirit. A thoroughness characterizes all their household

arrangements, a grace is given to all their housekeeping, which infuses

an indescribable content into the experiences of a guest in these homes.

Their hospitality to one another has been therefore a powerful enginery

for continuing and for extending the domains of Quakerism.

On Quaker Hill the living generations have known this hospitality in two

notable ways only, in the Quarterly Meetings, and in the transformed

hospitality of the boarding-house. The Quarterly Meeting is now gone

from the Hill. Both the Hicksite Meeting, which was "laid down" in 1885,

and the Orthodox Meeting, which ceased to meet in 1905, brought in their

day to the Hill, once in the year, an inundation of guests, who stayed

through the latter days of a week, and then went their way, to meet

quarterly throughout the year, but in other places, until the season

came again for Quaker Hill.

The Quaker Hill Quarterly was in August, and "after haying." "The roads

were full of the Quakers going up to the Meeting House." In every Quaker

home they were welcomed, whether they had written to announce their

coming, or whether they had not. All through the days of the Meeting,

they would renew the old ties, and discuss the passing of the Society,

the interests of the Kingdom, as they saw it, "the things of the

spirit."

They meet no more. In the Quarterly Meeting, which comprises the Monthly

Meetings of an area comparable to Dutchess County, there are still some

Friends, and some meetings which are not "laid down." But they come no

more, at "Quarterly Meeting time" to Quaker Hill. Many of the older

members are dead. Of the younger members many have only a passive

adherence to Quakerism, only sufficient to excuse them from undesirable

worldliness, and from irksome responsibility in other religious bodies.

The hospitality of the old Quaker assemblings has passed over into the

business of boarding city people. The same table is set, the same

welcome given; but to the paid guest.

The passing of the old hospitality of the Friends was illustrated in the

years of the writer's residence on the Hill, in the person of an old

peddler, known as Charles Eagle. It had been the ancient custom to

entertain any and every wayfarer; and Eagle journeyed from South to

North about once a month in the warmer seasons, for many years. He had

enjoyed the entertainment of the Quakers, following the ancient line of

their settlements along the Oblong, and stopping overnight in their

ample, kindly households. He carried a pack on his back and another

large bundle in his hand. His pace was slow, like that of an ox, but

untiring and unresting, hour after hour. His person, sturdy and short,

was clothed in overall stuff, elaborately patched and mended. At first

sight it seemed to be patched from use and age; but closer inspection

showed that the patches were deliberately sewed on the new material. He

wore a straw hat in summer, decorated with a bright ribbon, in which

were flowers in season. He wore also a red wig, tied under his chin with

a ribbon. His face was like that of an Indian, with broad cheek-bones

and small shifting eyes.

Eagle was French, and professed to be a refugee, a person of interest to

foreign monarchs. On the inner wrapping of his pack was written large,

"Vive le Napoleon! Vive la France! Vive!" He had little hesitation about

speaking of himself, though always with stilted courtesy, and always

furtively.

He made a study of astronomy, and every night would ask his hostess,

with much apology but firm insistence, for a pitcher of water, and for

the privilege that he might retire early to his room, open the window

and view the stars. Strange to say, in this he was not merely eccentric;

for his reading was of the latest books on the science, and he exchanged

with Akin Hall Library a Young's Astronomy for a Newcomb's, in 1898. He

accompanied the presentation of the later book, in which was the

author's name inscribed with a note to Mr. Eagle, with a demonstration

of a theory of the Aurora Borealis.

Eagle never tried to sell his goods on the Hill, and indeed it is

doubtful if he carried them for any other purpose than to conceal his

real commodities, which were watches. Of these he carried a good

selection of the better and of the cheaper sorts, all concealed in the

center of his pack, among impossible dry goods and varied fancy wares.

An attempt was made to rob him, or at least to annoy him, by some young

men; and he shot one of his assailants. For this offence he was, after

trial, sent to the Asylum for the Criminal Insane.

His earlier journeys over the Hill found him a welcome guest at the

Quaker homes. But the substitution of boarding for the ancient

hospitality made the peddler unwelcome; and he passed through without

stopping in his later years.

The Quarterly Meeting of the Society of Friends was the annual

culmination of the hospitality of the Hill population. Coming in August,

"after haying," it was for a century and a half the great assembly of

the people of the Hill, and of their kindred and friends; and until the

Orthodox Meeting ceased to meet, in 1905, there was Quarterly Meeting in

the smaller Meeting House. The old hospitality was never diminished by

the Quakers as long as their meetings continued. Even though the same

house were filled with paying boarders, the family retreated to the

attic, the best rooms were devoted to the "Friends travelling on truth's

account;" and the same house saw hospitality of the old sort extended

for one week to the religious guests, and of the new sort faithfully set

forth for the guests who paid for it by the week.

The Quakeress and daughter of Quakers has produced the summer

boarding-house; which is no more than the ample Quaker home, organized

to extend the thrifty hospitality continuously for four months, for good

payment in return, which has always been extended to Friends and

visiting relatives for longer or shorter periods in the past, as an act

of household grace.

The Quaker Hill woman is a good housekeeper. The substantial farmhouses

on the Hill are outward signs of excellent homes within. The table is

well spread, with a measured abundance, which satisfies but does not

waste. The rooms are each furnished forth in spare and righteous

daintiness, over which nowadays is poured, in occasional instances, a

pretty modern color, timidly laid on, which does not remove the prim

Quakerness. Ventures in the use of decoration, however, have been crude

in most cases, and the results, so far as they have been effected by the

taste of the woman of the Hill, are incongruous in color, and

ill-assorted in design. It is in house-furnishing that the tendency of

the daughter of the Quakers shows the most frequent variation.

Occasionally one sees the outcropping of a really artistic

spirit--peculiarly refreshing because so rare--which has only in a

woman's mature years ventured to indulge in a bit of happy color; but

the venture if successful is always reserved and simple; and the most of

such ventures are of unhappy result.

The housekeeping arts have reached a high degree of perfection on the

Hill. Cooking is there done with a precision, economy and tastefulness

in sharp contrast to the non-aesthetic manner in which the Quakers

conduct most occupations. It is, moreover, a kind of cooking after the

Quaker manner, at once frugal and abundant. For of all people, the

Quakers have learned to manage generously and economically.

The outcome of this housekeeping is the diversion of much of the

business energy of the Hill to the "keeping of boarders." Seven of the

old Quaker families, and one Irish Catholic household are devoted to the

keeping of boarders; five of them being supported in the main by this

business. Of these five families, however, four reside upon farms of

more than one hundred and fifty acres apiece. These families sell at

certain times in the year, a certain quantity of milk, or make butter,

or fatten calves, but not as their central means of support.

To these farmhouses come year after year the same paying guests, each

house having its own constituency, built up through thirty years of

patient and unbroken service. The charm of the Quaker character, the

excellence of the cooking and the enjoyable character of the other

factors of the household, bring patrons back; while the benefits of the

elevation and pure air are, to city dwellers, material returns for the

moneys expended. For this board, the price charged is, in the Irish

Catholic household, five dollars per week; in one of the oldtime Quaker

houses, six dollars, and in the others from eight to ten or twelve

dollars per week.

The season in which boarders can be secured in paying numbers is a

period extending from June fifteenth to October first, with the houses

filled only in the months of July and August. For this period, which is

one continued strain upon the housekeepers and their aids, preparation

begins as early as the month of March. The housework is generally done

by the women of the family, with some employed help, of an inferior

sort. The horses and carriages on the farm must be used for the

transportation of guests, and for hire to those who drive for pleasure.

On one farm sheep are kept; though most of the boarding-houses buy their

meat supplies of the dealers mentioned below.

Of late years the help employed in these boarding-houses, in addition to

members of the family, has come to be negroes from Culpepper County,

Virginia. These employees come each spring and return in the fall.

The one Irish Catholic boarding-house is for the entertainment of the

hired men on the lower part of the Hill, near the Hotel. It is

maintained throughout the year, with a varying number of guests, by a

woman ninety years of age, who in addition to the management, does much

of the hard work herself.

The conservatism of the Hill families is shown in the fact that the

boarding-house business has never been extended. No house has ever been

erected for that purpose alone; but the present business of that sort

is carried on in the old Quaker homes, each receiving only as many paid

guests as it was used to receive of its hospitable duty, when the

Quarterly Meeting brought Friends from afar, once in the year.

Mizzen-Top Hotel is perhaps an exception, if, indeed, a large hotel,

with quarters for two hundred and fifty guests, and at prices ranging

from three dollars per day up, be an exception. It has grown out of the

same conditions which transformed the farmhouses into boarding-houses,

save that it has never been managed at a profit, and they never at a

loss. It is, however, an institution by itself, and will be treated in

another place.

The Mizzen-Top Hotel has always been a sober institution, influenced

thereto by the pleasureless spirit of the Hill. Baseball, tennis, and

golf in their times have had vogue there, but under every management it

has been hard to arouse and maintain active interest in outdoor or

indoor sports. The direct road to Hammersley Lake, formerly called

Quaker Hill Pond, has made possible a moderate indulgence in

carriage-driving. The laying out of the golf links in 1897 set going

that dignified sport, just as the Wayside Path in 1880 occasioned some

mild pedestrianism. But the Hotel diminishes rather than increases in

its play-activities; and only games of cards retain a hold upon the

guests, who prefer the piazza, the croquet ground, the tennis court, and

the golf links in rapidly diminishing proportion.

Intemperance was common in earlier times, and drinking was universal.

Every household made and stored for winter many barrels of cider. Rum

and wine were freely bought at the store. Their use in the harvest field

was essential to the habits of agriculture which preceded the times of

the mower and reaper. This free use of cider, with accompanying

intemperance, survives in only two houses on Quaker Hill.

Miss Taber's account, in "Some Glimpses of the Past," describes the

drinking habits of the older period: "It was customary to have cider on

the table at every meal, the ladies would have their tea, but most of

the men drank cider largely, many to excess, consequently there were

great quantities made in the fall and stored in the cellars during the

winter. A large farmer would lay out a great deal of work, gathering

from ten to twenty cartloads of apples, hooping and cleaning barrels,

and many ground and pressed their own cider, then the large casks were

drawn to and placed in the cellars. This usually occupied a large part

of the month of October. In the spring a portion of the hard cider would

be taken to a distiller, and made into cider brandy to be used in the

haying and harvest field, at sheep washings, butchering, raisings,

shearings and on many occasions. Some was always on the sideboard and

often on the table. In most households there were sideboards well

furnished with spirits, brandy, homemade wine, metheglin, etc., which

were offered to guests. It was a fashion or custom to offer a drink of

some kind whenever a neighbor called.

"My grandfather being obliged to have so many men at least two months

each year became disgusted with the custom of furnishing so much cider

and spirits to the men in the field, as many of them would come to the

house at supper time without any appetite and in a quarrelsome mood.

There would be wrestlings and fighting during the evening and the chain

in the well could be heard rattling all night long. So one year,

probably about 1835 or '36, he decided that he would do it no longer.

His brother and many of his neighbors tried to dissuade him and

prophesied that he would not be able to get sufficient help to secure

his crops, but he declared he would give up farming before he would

endure it any longer, and announced when securing his extra help for

that summer that he would furnish no cider or spirits in the field, but

that coffee and other drinks would be carried out and that every man

should have a ration of spirits at each meal. Most of the men he had had

in past years came back and seemed to be glad to be out of the way of

temptation. The next year he dispensed with the ration at meal times,

and the custom grew among his neighbors with surprising rapidity; it was

but a few years when it became general, with a few exceptions, where the

farmer himself was fond of it, until to-day such a thing is not heard

of, and in fact, the farmer, like the railroads and other large

corporations, do not care to employ a man that is in the habit of using

spirits at all."

In the years 1890-1905 there were only two families on the Hill which

followed primitive custom in "putting in cider" into the cellar in

quantity for the winter. In five more a very small quantity was kept. In

the other cases it was regarded as immoral to use the beverage. The

writer was only once offered a drink of alcoholic beverage in six years'

residence on the Hill.

In respect to the standard of living which is regarded as necessary to

the maintenance of respect and social position, the Hill exhibits two

strata of the population. The city people, and the farmers and laborers.

The former class, besides the Hotel and its cottages, comprise seven

households, who have formed their ways of living upon the city standard.

The others, resident all the year round upon the Hill, live after a

standard common to American country-people generally of the better

class.

The economic ideas and habits are in no way peculiar to the Hill. There

survive in a few old persons some primitive industrial habits. One old

lady, now about ninety, amuses herself with spinning, knitting and

weaving; keeping alive all the primitive processes from the shearing of

sheep in her son's field to the completed garment. Axe-helves are still

made by hand in the neighborhood.

The practical arts of the community are agriculture, especially the

cultivation of grass for hay, cooking and general housekeeping, and the

entertainment of paid guests, as "boarders" in farmhouse and hotel.

There is in addition on one farm, at Site No. 3, a slaughter-house, at

which beef and mutton and pork are prepared for market, the animals

being bought, pastured, fattened and killed on the place, and the meat

delivered to customers, especially in the summer months, by means of a

wagon, which makes its journey twice a week, over the length of the Hill

and in the country eastward.

There is also a fish-wagon owned and maintained by the resident at Site

No. 15, which buys fish during the year and maintains by means of a

wagon a similar trade. These two are the only food supply businesses

maintained on the Hill.

Economic opportunity has always appealed strongly to the Quaker Hill man

and woman. In 1740 John Toffey settled at the crossing of ways which is

called "Toffey's Corners," and began to make hats. Other industries

followed.

In recent years, in almost every Quaker house boarders have been taken,

and a better profit has been made than from the sale of milk. For

twenty-five years the Mizzen-Top Hotel, accommodating two hundred and

fifty guests, has represented notably this response to opportunity. The

beautiful scenery, which the Quaker himself does not appreciate, because

he has educated himself out of the appreciation of color and form, has

offered him an opportunity of profit which he has been prompt and

diligent to seize. All through the summer every one of the six largest

Quaker homesteads is filled with guests. The fact cited above that in

the summer there comes to the Hill a greater transient population than

dwells there through the year, a population of guests, illustrates this

lively economic alertness.

The emigration from the Hill since 1840 of so many persons, notably the

younger and more ambitious, is in itself a token of this response. The

railroad brought the opportunity; the ambitious accepted it; many whole

families have disappeared. Their strong members emigrated; the weaker

stock died out. The Merritt, Vanderburgh, Irish, Wing, Sherman, Akin,

and other families offer examples. In the place of those who departed

have come others, to fill the total population. There were in 1905 on

the Hill twenty-five old families with seventy-five persons, and

twenty-five Irish Catholic families with one hundred persons.

The response to economic opportunity has often been too keen, and the

attempt too grasping. In 1891 wealthy New Yorkers offered for certain

farms so located as to command beautiful views, prices almost double

what they are worth for farming. The reply was a demand in every case of

one thousand dollars more than was offered; and the result was--no sale.

Land is valued, though few sales are made, at $1,000 per acre, near the

Hotel. The acre numbered 42, one mile from Mizzen-Top, on Map II, was

sold in 1893 to a laboring man for $250. At 53, land was sold in 1903

for $700 per acre. At 52, three acres were sold by sisters to a brother

in 1895, the asking-price being $1,000 per acre, and the price paid $800

per acre. For farming, this land is worth $50 and $75 per acre. Four

miles further inland as good recently sold for $10 per acre. Quaker Hill

has not neglected its economic opportunities.

Nearness to the soil has, under the influences of Quaker ethics and

economic ambition, cultivated in this population a patient and steadfast

industry, which expresses itself in the milk dairy, a form of farming by

its nature requiring early hours and late, with all the day between

filled by various duties. I have shown above that this industry is

losing its hold on the farmers of the Hill, but for two generations it

has been the distinctive type of labor on the Hill. To rise at four or

even earlier in the morning and to prepare the milk, to deliver it at

the station, four to eight miles away, to attend to the wants of cows

from twenty to one hundred in number; to prepare the various

food-products, either by raising from the soil, or by carting from the

railroad,--these activities filled, ten years ago, the lives of one

hundred and four of the adult males of the community; and these

activities at present fill the time of sixty of the adult males of the

community.[34]

While "the milk business" is a declining industry, other things are not

less engrossing. The land must be tilled, and is tilled. Hay is the

greatest crop, and the mere round of the seasons brings for a community

used to agriculture a discipline and a course of labor, which make life

regular and industrious.

Farming, as stated above, is carried on with a view to the production of

milk for the city market. It is a laborious and exacting occupation. The

dairy cow, generally of the Holstein stock, or with a strain of Holstein

in her blood, is the most common variety; though the grass of the Hill

is so good that very rich milk is produced by "red cow, just plain

farmer's cow," as the local description runs; and the demands of the

middlemen have brought in some Jersey cattle, which are desired, because

of the greater proportion of cream they produce. The largest profit from

the "making of milk" is secured by those farmers who keep as many cows

as can be fed from the land owned by them. But the more ambitious

farmers rent land, and in a few cases on a small farm keep so many

cattle that they have to buy even hay and corn. It is necessary for the

farmer, in order to meet the demands of the city market, to feed his

cattle on grains not raised on the Hill. One hundred years ago the lands

of the Hill were planted in wheat, rye, corn and other grains, but

to-day the farmers buy all grains, except corn, of which an increasing

quantity is being raised, and oats, of which they do not raise enough

for the use of their horses. There are no silos used on the Hill, the

city milkmen having a standing objection to the milk of cows fed on

ensilage.

The labor problem created by the milk business is an acute one. One man

can milk not more than twenty cows, and he is a stout farm-hand who can

daily milk more than twelve or fifteen. As a farmer must keep between

twenty and forty cows to do justice to his acreage, on the average Hill

farm, there must be at least two men, and often there must be five or

six men employed on the farm. To secure this number of capable men, to

keep them, and to pay them are hard problems. Their wages have risen in

the past twelve years, from fourteen dollars a month and board to

twenty-three dollars and board; or for a married man, who has house

rent, wood, and time to cut it, garden and time to tend it, and a quart

of milk a day, the wages have risen from twenty-eight to thirty-five

dollars a month.

These men are recruited from a class born in the country, and of a

drifting, nomadic spirit; and from the city, the latter a sinister,

dangerous element, whom the farmers fear and suspect. On a large farm,

with five men in employ, the farmer may expect to replace one man each

month; and to replace his whole force at least once a year. So

changeable are the minds of this class of laborers.

Those who are married are somewhat more stable; but of the others it is

asserted by the farmers that out of their wages they save nothing.

There has been a rise in the price secured by the farmers for their milk

in the past ten years, but it has been only for limited periods. The

variation was from 1.9 cents and 2 cents, the price in 1895-98, to 3

cents, the price paid in the winter of 1907. In the summer the price is

always lower. The farmers have no control over the price paid them for

milk, nor have they control over the prices to be paid for labor,

though of course in this matter, there is room for a certain skill in

bargaining and for the lowering of the total wages paid on the farm

through the skillful employment of the cheaper kinds of hands.

There is also a difference in the price paid for milk by "the Milk

Factory," a plant established at the railway in the past ten years, in

each dairy-town. This establishment takes milk from the poorer dairies

under conditions less exacting than are laid down by some buyers, and in

consequence pays a price correspondingly lower than the market rates for

milk and the higher prices secured by the better farmers.

One energetic farmer, who has in the past five years had large farms to

manage, on hire, or on shares, has prepared milk for hospital use in the

city, meeting the exactions of inspection, and the prescribed care of

stables, animals, workmen and receptacles in a way intolerable to the

average farmer. He receives in return a price twenty per cent above the

market rate.

The effect of the above conditions is seen in the fact that in the

twelve years under study nine owners of large farms have "given up the

milk business," have sold their cows, or keeping them have made butter

and fatted calves for market. The profits to be made in dairy-farming

are so small, unless the farmer conduct his dairy in an exceptional

manner, or on a very large scale, that the average man on the Hill

cannot continue it. Indeed, the average farmer on the Hill is unable

through lack of vitality or incapacity for application, to conduct any

business, successfully, against competition. The state of mind of such

men, in the worst cases, is illustrated by the remark of one of them who

approached a successful dairyman, saying: "I am going to cease to make

milk for the city market, and I thought I would come to you and find out

something about the way to make butter--not the best butter, such as you

make, but a sort of second-class butter."

[34] Mr. E. I. Hurd is my authority for the following

statement. "In the total income of the farmers of Pawling, nine dollars

are paid them for milk for every dollar in payment for other products."

CHAPTER III.

NEW IDEALS OF QUAKERISM: ASSIMILATION OF STRANGERS.

Quaker Hill has always been a community with great powers of

assimilation. The losses suffered by emigration have been repaired by

the genius of the community for socializing. Whoever comes becomes a

loyal learner of the Quaker Hill ways. I think this is a matter of

imitation. Personality has here made a solemn effort to perfect itself

for a century and a half; and the characters of Richard Osborn, James J.

Vanderburgh, Anne Hayes, David Irish and his daughter, Phoebe Irish

Wanzer, ripened into possession of at least amazing power of example. I

must be sparing of illustration here, where too rich a store is at hand.

I will offer only this striking fact, observed by all who know the Hill:

the Irish emigrant and his American-born children, of whom there are now

as many as remain of the original Quakers, have come to be as good

Quakers in character--though still loyal Catholics in dogma--as if they

said "thee and thou," and wore drab. They are peaceable, gentle folk,

sober and inoffensive; and the transforming influence of Quaker

character is seen in certain of them in a marked degree.

The same statement may be made of the pervasive example of the Quaker

character upon other areas of population; servants who come from the

city, summer guests, artistic people who love the Hill for its beauty

and suggestiveness, ministers and other public teachers who come hither.

The area to the southeast, called "Coburn," settled to a degree by those

who have worked on the Hill in times past as employees, is touched with

the same manner. Its meeting house, erected over sixty years ago, even

retains the Quaker way of seating the men and women apart.

The Quaker Hill Conference, now in its ninth year, is another

illustration of the charm and reach of the gentle influence of the

Quaker Hill ideal upon personal character.

Suggestion also explains much. In such a social whole, manners and

customs are fixed. The newcomer is often fresh, ingenuous, and sometimes

intrusive. Little by little he becomes socialized. Ways of action are

fixed for him, and a range of performance comes to be his. In harmony

with this range, suggestion is very fertile; but one learns after a time

that there is a limit to its force beyond which individuals will not go.

Suggestion, to be effective upon the many, must come from the sources

which embody the community's religious and economic ideal.

Ideas, once broached, are usually, if they contemplate action, opposed,

at least by inertness; but after a time they reappear as if native to

the minds which would have none of them by reasonable approaches. This

process is accelerated if the suggestion begins to travel from mind to

mind. Some individuals are less slow than others; and the leaders of

Quaker Hill thinking have always been able to work by the plan of

academic proposal--to avoid rejection--followed by incitement of popular

action in particular quarters. Quaker Hill cannot bear to be divided;

and that which comes to be successful in one quarter soon comes to be

universal. Things can be done by social suggestion which could never be

accomplished by appeal or rational discussion.

The word that has formed the social mind of Quaker Hill has been, not

"the Spirit," not "the inner light," but "orthodoxy" or "plainness." For

this community, it must be remembered, had no great thinkers. It

discouraged study, stiffened reason in formulas and dissolved thinking

in vision. To its formulas the Hill has been exceedingly devoted. He

who upheld them was accepted, and he who rejected them, as well as he

who ignored them, was to the early Quaker Hill as if he did not exist.

This shibboleth has indeed always been religious. Even to-day the way of

direct access to the common heart is a religious one. Catholic as well

as Protestant, Quaker no more and no less than "the world's people,"

welcome religious approaches, respect confessions, and believe

experiences. Nothing can assemble them all which does not originate in

religion and clothe itself in religious sanction. History is religious

history. Business prosperity is approved when the prosperity has

followed religious profession.

I do not mean to say that there are not other symbols than those of

religion. Prosperity has spoken its shibboleths as well as orthodoxy.

"Business is business" on Quaker Hill. Not "to save money" is an

unforgiven sin--and a rare one!

Much has been done in forming the common mind of Quaker Hill by

antipathies and sympathies, chiefly again of a religious order modified

by the economic. The community is markedly divided into rich and poor,

and into orthodox and not-orthodox. These have no inclination one to

another. Each group has its symbols and pass-words, and while

neighborly, and answering to certain appeals to which the community has

always responded, each resident of the Hill lives and dwells in his own

group and has no expectation of moving out of it. So long as a man stays

in his group he is, by a balancing of antipathy and sympathy, respected

and valued. If he venture to be other than what he was born to be, he

suffers all the social penalties of a highly organized community.

Authority, working along the lines of belief and dogma, has almost

irresistible force for the Quaker Hill social mind. A visitor to the

Hill said "These are an obedient people." Any barrenness of the Hill is

to be attributed rather to the lack of leaders who could speak to the

beliefs and in harmony with the dogmas, than to lack of willingness to

obey authority. From the past the families on the Hill inherit their

willingness respectively to command and to obey. This is true socially

of certain families and religiously of others. That to-day some are not

led is due solely to the decadence of initiative in the households

which, by reason of wealth or dogmatic rectitude, inherit and claim the

first place.

It was said above that Quaker Hill has shown great power of assimilating

foreign material, and of causing newcomers to be possessed of the

communal spirit. The agency which from the first accomplished this was

religious idealization, embodied in the meeting, the dress, language and

manners of Friends. Generally the Meeting was recruited from births, and

members were such by birthright. In former times the community and the

Meeting were one. This assimilating of foreign material by social

imitation to the Quaker type, and into organic subjection to the Quaker

Hill community, was wrought by six agencies. They were language,

manners, costume, amusements, worship, and morals. In each of these the

Quakers were peculiar. In the use of the "plain language" the Quakers

had a machinery of amazing and subtle fascination for holding the

attention, purifying the speech, and disciplining the whole deportment

of the young and the newcomer. No one has ever been addressed with the

use of his first name by grave, sweet ladies and elderly saints, without

its beginning an influence and exerting a charm he could not resist; the

more so that the Quaker in so doing is guarding his own soul, rather

than seeking to save his hearer.

The grave manners of the Quakers, both in meeting and without, are

framed upon their belief that all days are holy, and all places sacred.

Their long and triumphant fight against amusements is a tribute to the

gravity of life. The contest to which I have elsewhere referred for pure

morals, in matters of sex, of property and of speech, was a victorious

battle.

In all these matters Quaker Hill was a population socialized by

religion. Central to it all was the worship of the Meeting on First Day,

and on other occasions; and the great solemnity of the annual Quarterly

Meeting. Fascinated by that "silence that can be felt," men came from

far. They would come as readily to-day. They went away under the

domination of that idea of pure and spiritual faith, which kept a whole

houseful of men silent for an hour in communion.

As I have looked into this matter it has seemed to me that the induction

to be drawn from the history of Quaker Hill is this: Religion was a true

organizing power for this social population. Whatever the meeting

determinedly strove to do it accomplished. If it had tried to do more it

would have succeeded.

This was a gain, moreover, without corresponding losses; a total net

gain in all the moralities. The whole area on which this meeting exerted

its influence was by it elevated to a higher moral and social tone, and

organized into a communal whole, characterized by a loftier and cleaner

standard than that of surrounding populations.

Why, then, did it die out? First, because of the bareness of its

worship, the lack of music, color and form; through which it lost in the

nineteenth century some of its best families. Then through dogmatic

differences, of no interest to human beings, it lost its primacy in the

community and so its authority.

In the chapter on "Ideals of the Quakers," I have dwelt upon their

dramatization of life. They "made believe" that "plainness" was

sanctity. They fixed their minds upon the commonplace as the ideal. It

is probable that the early population were men and women of no such

talents as to disturb this conviction; and the variations from plainness

in the direction of gayety were sternly denounced as immoral. Also the

struggle with the wilderness occupied and exhausted the powers of the

exceptional as well as of the average man. But when with wealth came

leisure, there were born sons of the Quakers who rebelled against the

discipline of life that repressed variation, who demanded

self-expression in dress, in language, in tastes, and in pleasures.

Gradually but surely, as the outside world was brought nearer, these

persons were influenced in their restiveness by books and examples, by

imitation and other stimuli from new sources, until they cast off in

their minds the Quaker ideal of plainness. To be ordinary no longer

seemed to them a way of goodness. They were oppressed and stifled by the

ban of the meeting upon variation. And though the ideal of plainness has

subtly ruled them even in their rebellion and freedom, it has done so by

its negative power, in that the community has never furnished

exceptional education. The positive dominion of the meeting broken, the

negative "plainness" of the community rules all the children of the Hill

to this day. So few are the sources of individual variation furnished,

in the form of books, music, education, art, that no son or daughter of

Quaker Hill has attained a place of note even in New York State. The

ideal of "plainness" has been an effectual restraint.

CHAPTER IV.

THE COMMON MIND.

The common mind has been formed to a great degree by strong

personalities; for the common mind has held an ideal of perfection in a

person. The force which at the beginning assembled its elements was

personal. The type represented by George Fox, as interpreted by Barclay,

embodied this influence. In all the history of the place response to

strong personality has been immediate and general. The past is a history

of names. William Russell led the community in erecting a Meeting House,

and then a second one--which still stands. Ferriss, the early settler,

located the meeting house on his land, as later Osborn located the

Orthodox Meeting House, at the Division, on his land. Judge Daniel Akin,

in the early Nineteenth Century, was a leader of the economic activities

of this Quaker community, then differentiating themselves from the

religious. So, too, his nephew, Albert Akin, in the last half of that

century was a leader, gathering up the money of the wealthy farmers to

invest in railroads, founding the Pawling Bank, the Mizzen-Top Hotel,

and launching Akin Hall, with its literary and religious basis.

David Irish, the preacher of the Hicksite Meeting in the middle of the

nineteenth century was leader and exponent of the most representative

phases of Quakerism, for at that time it was still possible for the

business and the religion of Quakerism to be united in the minds of the

majority; Unitarian Quakerism was the result, and of this David Irish

was the ideal embodiment.

The respect paid by the community to leadership is shown in the place

assigned to Admiral John L. Worden, commander of the "Monitor," who

married a Quaker Hill woman, Olive Toffey, spent the summers of his

life on the Hill, and is buried in the Pawling Cemetery. There was

universal pride in his charming personality, interest in his sayings,

and no pious condemnation of his warlike deeds. His nautical names of

the high points on the Hill have been generally accepted; so that the

Hill rides high above all surrounding lands, her heights labelled like

the masts of a gallant ship: "Mizzen-Top," "Main-Top," "Tip-Top."

There is indeed by contrast a corresponding unwillingness to be

impressed by great personality. The residence of Washington with his

troops in the neighborhood left no impression on the records of the

Meeting, though he turned out the worshippers and filled the place with

sick soldiers; no impression upon the devout tradition, except the story

of his being seen once in the woods alone on his knees in prayer; and no

impression upon the social tradition, except the cherished claim of one

family that he used their residence as his headquarters. Washington was

the embodiment of all that this community opposed, and he was ignored.

Another instance of grudging allegiance was the following given to a New

York broker, who set out to build a modern schoolhouse, and was

permitted only by a packed school-meeting, and by paying two-thirds of

the expense himself, to build in 1892 the comely structure at 43, with

which Quaker Hill is content.

The same resident was discouraged from further acts of public service,

in 1894, by the declining of his offer made to the town of Pawling, to

build one mile of macadam for every mile built by the town. He had

constructed in 1893, at 113, a sample piece of such road, covering at

his own expense an ancient sink-hole in the highway, through which

during two months in every year for a century and a half Quaker Hill had

wallowed; and he desired with this object-lesson to convince the

town,--to win the support of at least his neighbors,--to the proposal

to transform the highways into good roads. But there was never a

response, and even his neighbors on the Hill, who cheerfully enjoy his

smooth stretch of stone road over the ancient wallow of their fathers,

manifested no active appreciation of his generosity. The generous

resident had purchased a stone-crusher and other necessaries for the

work; but they have been used only on private grounds.

The most conspicuous instance of following leadership in recent times

has been the measured devotion given by the community to the activities

which have centered in Akin Hall and in the institution known as Hill

Hope, on Site 35. The leaders in this activity have been themselves

under the influence of New York city ideas. Two of the three most

conspicuous persons are of this neighborhood, but have resided in New

York for years, returning to the Hill for the summers. The third is a

New Yorker by birth, and trained in Presbyterian religious experience

and especially in charitable activity.

Akin Hall has in the years 1892-1905 expressed the leadership in

religious confession and worship, after the forms of the Reformed

Christian order, and has embodied this leadership in the conventional

activities of a vigorous country parish.

For ten years Hill Hope, supported personally by the third member of

this group of leaders, was, until it was closed in 1904, a country home

for working girls. By a liberal policy it became also a center of much

interest and of a pervasive influence to the neighborhood. Meetings of a

social and devotional character were held there, to which the residents

were pleased to come, and in which the young women from the city met and

mingled with the Protestant residents of the Hill, especially with those

of the Quaker stock. The influence of Hill Hope was very marked, and its

power in representing to people of a narrow experience the ideals of a

richer and broader life was obvious to any one who saw the place it held

in the interests of the whole resident community.

These influences, thus compounded of the humanitarian, the

liberal-orthodox and the devotional, but in all things confessedly

religious, exerted themselves for the ten years named, unbroken. The

death of one member of this group of leaders, the head of one of the

three households peculiarly identified with its work, appreciably

weakened the group. But in the thirteen years of its influence, it

united the whole community in the formation of a church, to some of

whose services came all the Protestant population; in whose membership

were representatives of all groups of the Protestant residents; and

which was able at least once a year to call the Catholics also together

at Christmas festivities.

To this group of leaders a guarded, though at times cordial following

was given by Orthodox Friends, the Hicksite group, the farmer class,

laborers, Catholics and Protestants, and summer people. It was generally

inert and negative in spirit, seldom actively loyal. At its best it was

willing that leaders should lead and pay the price, and be more admired

than upheld. At its worst it was alert to private and blind to public

interests, peevish of change, incapable of foresight.

I do not think that Quaker Hill people have much expectation of benefit

from social life. They are habitually skeptical of its advantages,

though eager to avail themselves of those advantages when proven. Almost

every person on the Hill, however, is a member of some secret society,

to which he is drawn by anticipations of economic advantage, or of moral

culture.

Nor can I say that there is prompt or general reaction to wrongdoing,

either of one or of many. I might illustrate with two cases. In one a

rich man perverted a public trust, openly, to his own advantage; and a

conspiracy of silence hedged his wrong about. In the other, a youth

entered in one winter every house on the Hill in succession, and there

was no one to detect or to punish him.

The Hill does not exhibit the highest type of social response in the

recognition of impersonal evil, in the quest of knowledge, or in free

discussion. Almost two centuries of dogma-worship, with its

contemplation of selected facts, has made it now impossible to secure

from one thoroughly socialized in the spirit of the place the exact

truth upon any matter. It seems to be reserve which conceals it, but it

is rather the effect of continued perversion of the sense of right and

wrong, and indifference to knowledge for its own sake.

The ideal of the common mind of Quaker Hill is the practice of inner and

immaterial religion. It looks for the effects of certain dogmas, effects

expressed in emotions, convictions, experiences. The ideal contains no

thought of the community or of its welfare. It is purely individual,

internal and emotional.

It was expressed in the comment of one excellent representative citizen

upon another, "He does not seem to me to be the man he once was. He does

not say in meetings the things he used to say. He used to be very

helpful in his remarks." This was said at a time when the citizen

commented on was laboring heroically for a public improvement by which

the citizen speaking would chiefly be benefited.