The Home at Jericho.
The village of Jericho, Long Island, is about 25 miles east of New York
City, in the town of Oyster Bay. It has had no considerable growth
since the days of Elias Hicks, and now contains only about a score and
a half of houses. Hicksville, less than two miles away, the railroad
station for the older hamlet, contains a population of a couple of
thousand. It was named for Valentine Hicks, the son-in-law of Elias.
Running through Jericho is the main-traveled road from the eastern
part of Long Island to New York, called Jericho Pike. In our time it
is a famous thoroughfare for automobiles, is thoroughly modern, and as
smooth and hard as a barn floor. In former days it was a toll-road, and
over it Elias Hicks often traveled. A cross-country road runs through
Jericho nearly north and south, leading to Oyster Bay. On this road,
a few rods to the north from the turn in the Jericho Pike stands the
house which was originally the Seaman homestead, where Elias Hicks
lived from soon after his marriage till his death.
The house was large and commodious for its time, but has been
remodeled, so that only part of the building now standing is as it
was eighty years ago. The house ends to the road, with entrance from
the south side. It was of the popular Long Island and New England
construction, shingled from cellar wall to ridge-pole. Four rooms on
the east end of the house, two upstairs and two down, are practically
as they were in the days of Elias Hicks. In one of these he had his
paralytic stroke, and in another he passed away. The comparatively wide
hall which runs across the house, with the exception of the stairway,
is as it was in the time of its distinguished occupant. A new stairway
of modern construction now occupies the opposite side of the hall from
the one of the older time. This hall-way, it is said, Elias Hicks loved
to promenade, sometimes with his visitors, and here with characteristic
warmth of feeling he sped his parting guests, when the time for their
departure came.
Like the most of his neighbors, Elias Hicks was a farmer. The home
place probably contained about seventy-five acres, but he possessed
detached pieces of land, part of it in timber. Several years before
his death he sold forty acres of the farm to his son-in-law, Valentine
Hicks, thus considerably reducing the care which advancing years and
increased religious labor made advisable.
Jericho still retains its agricultural character more than some of
the other sections of neighboring Long Island. The multi-millionaire
and the real estate exploiter have absorbed many of the old Friendly
homes toward the Westbury neighborhood, and are pushing their ambitious
intent at land-grabbing down the Jericho road.
If Elias were to return and make a visit from Jericho to the meeting
at Westbury, as he often did in his time, three or four miles away,
he would pass more whizzing automobiles en route than he would teams,
and would see the landscape beautifully adorned with lawns and walks,
with parks and drives on the hillsides, not to mention the costly Roman
garden of one of Pittsburg's captains of industry. Should he so elect,
he could be whirled in a gasoline car in a few minutes over a distance
which it probably took him the better part of an hour to make in his
day. As he went along he could muse over snatches of Goldsmiths'
"Deserted Village," like the following, which would be approximately,
if not literally, true:
"Hoards, e'en beyond the miser's wish abound,
And rich men flock from all the world around.
Yet count our gains: this wealth is but a name
That leaves our useful products just the same.
And so the loss: the man of wealth and pride
Takes up the place that many poor supplied;
Space for his lake, his parks extending bounds,
Space for his horses, equipage and hounds,
The robe that wraps his limbs in silken sloth,
Has robbed the neighboring fields of half their growth."
But there are some compensations in the modern scene, and however
emotionally sad the change, the helpfully suggestive side is not in
lamentation over the inevitable, but in considering the growing demands
which the situation makes upon the practical spiritual religion which
Elias Hicks preached, and in which his successors still profess to
believe.
A hundred years ago, wheat was a regular and staple farm product on
Long Island, especially in and around Jericho, and on the Hicks farm.
But no wheat is raised in this section now. The farmer finds it more
profitable to raise the more perishable vegetables to feed the hungry
hordes of the great city, which has crowded itself nearer and nearer to
the farmers' domain.
Less than a quarter of a mile up the road from the Hicks home is the
Friends' Meeting House, which Elias Hicks helped to build, if he did
not design it. The timbers and rafters, which were large, and are
still sound to the core, were hewed by hand of course. Like most of
the neighboring buildings, its sides were shingled, and probably the
original shingles have not been replaced since the house was built,
a hundred and twenty-two years ago. The "public gallery" contained
benches sloping steeply one above the other, making the view of
the preacher's gallery easy from these elevated positions. Over
the preacher's gallery, and facing the one just described, is room
for a row of seats behind a railing. Whether this was a sort of a
"watch-tower" from which the elders might observe the deportment of the
young people in the seats opposite, or whether it was simply used for
overflow purposes, tradition does not tell us.
The fact probably is that what is known as the Hicks property at
Jericho came to Elias by his wife Jemima. There is every reason to
believe that at the time of his marriage he was a poor man, and as
the young folks took up their residence at the Seaman home soon after
their marriage, there was no time for an accumulation of property on
the part of the head of the new family. The economic situation involved
in the matter under consideration had a most important bearing on the
religious service of Elias Hicks. Taking the Seaman farm brought him
economic certainty, if not independence. It is hardly conceivable that
he could have given the large attention to the "free gospel ministry"
which he did, had there been a struggle with debt and difficulty which
was so incidental in laying the foundations of even a moderate success
a century and a quarter ago. It is by no means to be inferred, however,
that Elias Hicks was ever a wealthy man, or possessed the means of
luxury, for which of course he had no desire, and against which he
bore a life-long testimony. The real point to be gratefully remembered
is that he was not overburdened with the care and worry which a less
desirable economic condition would have enforced.
In the main, Elias Hicks saw his married children settle around him.
Royal Aldrich, who married his oldest daughter, had a tannery, and
lived on the opposite side of the road not far away. Valentine Hicks,
who married another daughter, had a somewhat pretentious house for the
time, at the foot of the little hill approaching the meeting house, and
just beyond the house of Elias, Robert Seaman, who married the youngest
daughter, lived only a few steps away. Joshua Willets, who married the
third daughter, resided on the south side of the island, some miles
distant. The time of scattering families, lured by business outlook and
economic advantage, had not yet arrived.