Quaker Hill

“ The history of Quaker Hill in the eighteenth century is the story of these two schools of idealists, who ignored each other, but were moved by the same passion, obeyed the same spirit. It is said that a locality never loses the impression made upon it by its earliest residents. Certain it is that the roots of modern things are to be traced in that earliest period, and through a continuous self-contained life until the present day. ”

“ It seems to have been the desire of the first settlers to form a community where they could live apart, maintain their form of religion and possess land fertile and rich. The Quakers are always shrewd as to economic affairs, and the business motive is never lost sight of in the spiritual inner light. In choosing Quaker Hill soil they selected ground which after one hundred and sixty-seven years is the richest in the region, sustains the best dairies, and is able longer than any other in the neighborhood in time of drought to afford abundant green grass and verdure. ”

“ Interest which attaches to Quaker Hill is of a three-fold sort: historical, scenic and climatic. The locality has a history of peculiarly dramatic interest. It is beautiful with a rare and satisfying dignity and loveliness of scene; and it is [11] the choice central spot of a region bathed in a salubrious atmosphere which has had much to do with its social character in the past, and is to-day very effective in making the place a summer settlement of New York people. The population is increased one hundred per cent. ”

“ 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 [113] house, erected over sixty years ago, even retains the Quaker way of seating the men and women apart. ”

“ Quaker Hill does not desire to expand. The type of community preferred is the simple, small, and exclusive. In this all agree, whether they confess it or not. No expansion will ever come by native forces or conscious purpose.
Quaker Hill reveres leaders, not heroes; and not saints, for men have been cherished for their leadership in dogmatic [129] activities, rather than for their abstract goodness or human value. The type of the social mind that has been most esteemed is the dogmatic-emotional. ”

“ Cleanly most of the people of the Hill are, in person and in their care of house and grounds, of carriages, horses and other properties. The houses and barns are always freshly painted, and an appearance of neatness pervades the community.
For reasons which I will mention in a later paragraph the men and women trained under Quakerism are not orderly, either in the use of their time or in the management of their labor, or in anything, save in the discipline of their religion and in the economic system to which they give themselves. ”

“ Their fundamental principle is that the divine spirit dwells and acts in the heart of every man; not in a chosen few, not in the elect only, but in all hearts. Quaker Hill to this day acts this out, in that every person in the community is known, thought upon, reckoned and estimated by every other. Towns on either side have a neglected population area, but Quaker Hill has none. Pawling in its other neighborhoods has forgotten roads, despised cabins, in which dwell persons for whom nobody cares, [34] drunkards, ill-doers, whom others forget and ignore. Quaker Hill ignores no one. ”

“ Quaker Hill has always been a community with great [112] 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. ”

“ Connecticut people, some of them of the same original Quaker stock, have settled on small holdings of lands, and held them till isolation and poverty have driven them to suicide, insanity or other miseries. Quaker Hill was from the beginning differentiated into a healthier diversity, and it has been the better for her people.
There are few mentally abnormal persons in the community. One may designate three persons as unbalanced, two of them unmarried women; and another such as probably insane, though residing at home. But even the aged do not die first in the head. ”

“ I think the end for which the Quaker Hill population have lived could be called Individual-Social. They are consciously individual, and unconsciously, inevitably social. These people have sought generation after generation for personal salvation and personal gain. "And that," says a resident, "that is why the place is dying." Yet the common interest was a logical corollary of the Quaker doctrine of God in every man, and therefore a community was formed, a community indeed which was no one's conscious care. ”

“ Akin's leadership, written for the Memorial Service after his death in 1903, is of interest here, as showing the influence of persons upon him who were not of Quaker Hill ancestry or of Quaker breeding:
"In all the years he lived on the Hill he had to do with every movement and was in touch with every person on the Hill. ”

“ Quaker Hill audiences are alert and keen hearers, and indulgent critics of a public speaker. There are only two other forms of public entertainment more pleasing to them. The first is a dramatic presentation. Many of the Quakers are excellent actors, and the Irish are quite their equals, while the other newcomers are equally appreciative. The Christmas play in Akin Hall is a great annual event, assembling all the people on the Hill of all classes and groups, for it embodies very many of the appeals to characteristic pleasure. ”

“ The Akin, Taber, Briggs families came from Dartmouth, which was in a region of both temporary and permanent Quaker settlement. Quaker Hill, R. I., is within fifteen miles of Dartmouth. The residents of Quaker Hill, New York, preserve traditions of the returns of the early Friends "to Rhode Island." There is a Briggs family tradition of the first pair of boots owned on the Hill, which were borrowed in turn by every man who made a visit to the ancestral home at Dartmouth. ”

“ Their influence is described in the chapter upon "The Common Mind of the Mixed Community." Purchases of land have been made in the years [97] 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. ”

“ Their deaths, with the deaths of certain others whom they represent, have brought to an end the period of Quaker Hill's history which I have called "The Mixed Community." The others who with them made up this group were Jedediah and Phoebe Irish Wanzer, Anne Hayes, Olive Toffey Worden, and six other persons still living, of whom four are past eighty years and two are very near one hundred years of age. This group of persons were the center of that Mixed Community. They possessed the actual authority which this population always has required in its leaders. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It must not be inferred from the foregoing that there is [133] not a wide range of mental difference among Quaker Hill men and women. In the matter of quickness and slowness of action this variation appears even among the members of any one group. In the same family are two brothers, both farmers, both tenants. One is able to farm a thousand acres more successfully than the other can cultivate two hundred. The one is instant in judgment, swift in action, able to compress into an hour heavy physical labor and also the control of many other men. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Indeed, the town of Pawling has not another college graduate among its sons. There have been, however, a few who have gone to school to the grade of high school and no normal schools. In the past ten years ten young men and women have done so. One youth all but completed a college course in 1906. Two young women are just completing courses as nurses.
Personality is the field in which the conscious purpose cherished on Quaker Hill would have wrought its best efforts. But personality was always on Quaker Hill inhibited, restrained and schooled into mediocrity. ”

“ The excellence of the climate is witnessed in the long lives of its residents. There were living in 1903, in a population of four hundred, five persons, each of whom was at least ninety years of age; and fifteen, each of whom was more than seventy-five years of age.
CHAPTER III. THE ASSEMBLING OF THE QUAKERS.
The social mind of the Quaker Hill population was formed, [16] at the settlement of the place, in a common response to common stimuli. ”

“ The minutes of Purchase Meeting at Rye, through which meeting most of the Quaker Hill settlers came, indicate in only a limited number of cases that the immigrant came from a farther point; and leave the impression that the Friend so commended to the Oblong was already a resident of "the Purchase," or of its related meetings at Flushing on Long Island. An example is the case of William Russell and his wife, notable pioneers, the earliest residents of Site 25, whose letter from Purchase Meeting in 1741 indicates only that they came to Oblong from Purchase. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The time has come when the authors of America, the men who view with pride the growth of a pure and elevated National literature, should go to the Quaker graveyard and bear the bones of Brockden Brown to that Laurel Hill which he loved in his boyhood; yes, let the remains of the martyr author sleep beneath the shadow of some dark pine, whose evergreen boughs, swaying to the winter wind, bend over the rugged cliff and sweep the waters of the Schuylkill as it rolls on amid its hilly shores, like an image of the rest which awaits the blessed in a better world. ”

“ 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. ”