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, “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.

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 lé 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 N, 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 N, 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.

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.”

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.

The Quaker Hill man and woman desire to make money. They instinctively love money, though not for any other purpose than saving. They cherish no illusions of an unworldly sort about it. This is true of Quaker and Catholic, laborer and summer resident. It is true of the small class of cultivated intellectual-aesthetes, who might be expected to be less mercenary. They all value money; but not for display, not for luxury, scarcely for travel; not for books or the education of children. Quaker Hill men and women would accumulate money, invest and manage it wisely and live in respectable “plainness.” This characteristic is written largely over the whole social area. It is an instinct.

The emotional nature of this population has been by long-continued application of an accepted discipline, economic and religious, restrained and schooled. More beautiful personalities than some of the Quaker and Irish women of the Hill, schooled in a discipline which produces the most charming manners, the gentlest kindness, one may never see. There is no cloud in the sky of these women’s justice, truthfulness, goodness. One may remember, even with them, a day of anger, of indignation; but it was a storm restrained; the lightnings were held in sure hands, and the attack was eminently just.

But this very discipline has resulted, in other persons, in an explosive emotionality. One person suffers this explosion in a periodic lawsuit a rare action for the Hill; another in an almost insane family quarrel, another in an occasional fury of futile violence, another in periods, increasing in frequency as he grows older, of causeless and uncontrolled anger, or extravagant grief; and when weightier occasion is lacking, in torrents of language poured forth from the treasuries of an exhaustless memory. The very serenity and placidity which Quaker worship and industry produce in the true Quaker have resulted in the emotional ruin of some, and in the subconscious volcanic state in others.

Strange to say, the immigrants, Irish and American, have in this conformed to the better type; so that gentle manners, placidity of character and restraint of emotion may be said to prevail among them.

As for judgment, on economic questions and matters of benevolence the judgment of Quaker Hill people is sound. They use money sanely and with wisdom. They act wisely in matters of poverty and need, or appeal on behalf of the dependent. On other matters, outside the range of the social discipline in which the community has been to school, not so much can be said.

The judgment of the community is not determined by evidence in any other matters than economic. The Quaker Hill mind works subjectively on the lines of instincts and habits inherited and inbred. Auto-suggestion has been a great force in this community. Men and women have had an impression, “a leading,” believed to come from the Divine Spirit, and have acted upon it and have led others with them. So that the prevailing determination of the social judgment has been by personal suggestion, and the appeal of inner convictions, fortified by alleged divine influence. It must be said that this is a disappearing habit. Even those born Quakers, now that the Hicksite Meeting has been discontinued since 1885, and the Orthodox since 1903, and the Quarterly Meetings of both societies have ceased to come to the Hill, do not so often see visions or act upon “leadings.” The influence of non-Quakers in the place has been of late to quarantine such “leadings” and prevent social contagion.

Frugality is universal. Almost every resident laboring man has a bank account. Indeed, these laborers have done more in saving than have the farmers. But the tastes of all are simple. Clothing is never showy or expensive, and housekeeping is carried on with the most sparing use of purchased articles.

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.

The community has grown in compassion since the days when Surgeon Fallon’s soldiers were starved and neglected in the Meeting House. To-day I am sure no class of men in real need could appeal to the community, or to any constituent group of it, in vain. The growth has been along lines which, beginning in a group-compassion that has from earliest days recompensed any poor member of the Meeting in his sudden losses of property, have widened first to Quakers of other places, then to other Christians, then to other men, and last of all to Quakers of the other Quaker sect; and from Protestant to Catholic and Catholic to Protestant.

Property seems to be sacred. Doors of houses and barns do not require locks, but one winter there was a series of house-breakings, in which almost every summer residence on the Hill was entered. Contents were inspected, but nothing was stolen. But the honesty here is a passive honesty. It is not the aggressively just fulfilment of obligation which one finds in New England.

The Hill is a community with a high level of chastity. This may be said of all classes, though not uniformly of all. Yet it was not always so. The first century of the life of the Quakers here is recorded in the minutes of Oblong Meeting as one long struggle of Quaker discipline against unchastity. There is an amazing frankness about these records, and a persistence in the exercise of discipline, a frequency of accusation, proof, conviction, expulsion from the Meeting, which is astonishing to the twentieth century reader. The best families furnished the culprits almost as often as they supplied the accusers and prosecuting committees. So many are the cases and so frequent the expulsions, often for matters which might better have been ignored, but generally for substantial offences, that one wonders who was left in the Meeting. But men often confessed and were received again, and the Meeting held its ground. In general it may be said that often in the eighteenth century there were more cases of unchastity dealt with in a year by the Meeting, in a population no larger than the present, than have come to public knowledge in the past ten years in this community. The change shows also in a reserve of speech upon these matters.

The characteristic pleasures of the community, as a whole, are few. There is a group of women of leisure, of course, devoted to bridge-whist, who come in the summer and do not go far from the Hotel. Young men go hunting, and a few grown men are fond of fishing. The typical person provides himself with no pleasures outside of his family and home. Men and women are too busy to play, and the Quakers educated themselves out of a playful mind.

There are a few pleasures which are native and general. One of these is public assembly, with an entertaining speaker as a central pleasure. 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. Only one other attraction is more generally responded to; I refer to a dinner. Something good to eat, in common with one’s neighbors, in a place hallowed by historic associations, under religious auspices here you have the call that brings Quaker Hill all together. On such a day there will be none left behind.

Of all these sorts is the attraction the Quaker Hill Conference has for the people of the neighborhood. It is a universal appeal to the capacity for pleasure in the community. It presents famous and eloquent speakers through the days of the week. Matters of religion, farming, morals, literature, are discussed, by men of taste and culture; and the closing day is Quaker Hill Day. On this day, after an assembly in the old Oblong Meeting House, erected in 1764, at which the neighborhood has listened to papers descriptive of the past of the Hill, all adjourn for a generous dinner under the trees of Akin Hall, or latterly under a tent beside the Meeting House, partaken of by four hundred people, of all groups and classes, and followed by brisk, happy speeches by visitors present. This, after almost two centuries of keen interest in the question of amusements, is the last and most perfect expression of the capacity for amusement in the community.

Of active pleasure-taking, Quaker Hill, purely considered, is incapable.

It should be said that the Roman Catholic Church in Pawling provides its people with a yearly feast, parallel with the Conference, which was for years held in a grove on the borders of Quaker Hill.

Traits of character which are general or even common among Quaker Hill people are worthy of mention under the heads of regular industry, frugality, cleanliness, temperance, chastity, honesty as to property, and compassion.

Politically the Hill was until the year 1896 inclined to be Democratic. For years a number of the Protestants on the Hill have been Prohibitionists.

Primitive notions of morals survive in spite of what has been said earlier, in isolated instances, or tend to recur in certain families. Until twelve years ago members of certain families maintained the right to catch fish with a net in Hammersley Lake. Over the line in Connecticut this practice, and that of taking fish with a spear, survive in spite of law. But this primitive method was forcibly ended by the attempt to arrest the chief offender. He made his escape from the officers, but has never returned, and the practice has not till this date, 1905, been resumed on Quaker Hill.

Primitive moralities of sex appear in certain families, in which in each generation there appears one illegitimate child, at least; as it were a reminder of their disorderly past. The chari-vari survives among the better class of working people, a strange, noisy outbreak for a Quaker community, with which a newly married pair are usually serenaded.

I find also no animistic ideas, or practices; no folk-lore and no magic. The Quaker Hill imagination has been disciplined.

The preferred attainment in this community is neither power, splendor, pleasure, nor ceremonial purity; nor yet justice, liberty or enlightenment; but rather, first of all, prosperity, a well-being in which one’s good fortune sheds its favors on others; secondly, righteousness, to be enjoyed in religious complacency; and thirdly, equality. This last is one of the few elements of a social ideal actually realized. Even among the women of the place there is a simple and unaffected democracy in the religious and communal societies, which is quite unusual in such a place.

Of sacred places there are avowedly none. But the historic sense of the community is reverent, almost religious, in its regard for the past; so that the Oblong Meeting House, cradle of the community, and for over a century its home and house of government, is chief in the affections of all. In the summer of 1904 this place was marked for all time by the placing there of a boulder of white feldspar, bearing a bronze tablet inscribed with the important facts of the history of that spot.

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 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. Even Albert J. Akin, whose dogma was the union of all Christians, had no patience with any divergence in religious experience from this, his dogma.

The forms of complex activity that are chiefly cherished are, first, the economic arts; second, religion; third, morals; and fourth, things pertaining to costume. The institutions chiefly prized are the family and marriage, the economic system and the cultural system, especially the church.

Social welfare is conceived of under forms of peace, the increase and diffusion of wealth, industry, and by a minority, culture. High morality is most valued as an element in the social personality. Next after it is a highly developed sociality. Social policies would be favored on the Hill as they represented authority and individualism. Conversion is the accepted means of modifying type.

Practical politics may be said to be foreign to Quaker Hill, for reasons drawn from its isolation and religious offishness. An exception was in the early part of the nineteenth century, when Daniel Akin, apparently in consequence of mercantile position, was elected County Judge. After him, his brother Albro was appointed to the office.

The consciousness of kind on Quaker Hill is stronger in the group than in the community. Yet the general sense of “unity” is very strong and it often comes into play.

The chief social bonds which unite the whole community are, first of all, imitation, in which process it seems to me the Quakers are a peculiarly subtle people. Second, a good-will which pervades the Hill like a genial atmosphere. Third, kindness, which on certain occasions draws the whole community together in unusual acts of helpfulness to some member in need.

CHAPTER V

Practical differences and resemblances.

The prevailing type of mind among Quaker Hill folk is the Ideo-Emotional; for these folk are a gentle, social sort of persons, ready of affection, imaginative and analogical in mental process, weak and complacent in emotionality, with motor reaction rather inconstant, and of slow response. Of these I find thirty-seven families.

The next category is that of the Dogmatic-Emotional, in which I observe twenty-two families. These are composed of persons in whom austere and domineering character proceeds from a dogmatic fixity of mind, and expresses itself in the same inconstant application shown by the former class.

A few of the more notable of the personalities produced by Quaker birth and breeding belong, I think, in the Ideo-Motor class. I find only seven families of that type, but the forceful character, of aggressive bent, moderate intellect and strong but well-controlled emotion, is distinctly present; and this class has furnished some of the most successful of the sons of Quaker Hill.

I have known only six persons resident on the Hill in the twelve years under study who could be described as Critically-Intellectual. Of these, four have been bred in the larger school of the city, and only two have lived their lives upon the Hill. Of these six, five are women.

There is, of course, only one language spoken in Quaker Hill. Indeed only one or two persons have any other than English as their native tongue. And very few have acquired any other as a matter of culture. The vocabulary used is limited. An intelligent observer says: “The vocabulary of the native community is the meagerest I have ever known, except that of the immigrant.” There are, however, very few illiterates; none, indeed, in the literal meaning of the term.

Manners on the whole are uniform for the resident population. Of course the summer people have the conventional manners, or lack of manners, of the city. So far as religion has shaped the manners of the old Quaker group, they are often gentle and refined; but as often blunt and imperious. The Irish have the best manners, I observe, and the more transient summer people and farm-hands the worst. In both the last two classes there is too often a pride in rudeness and vulgarity which the native of mature years never exhibits. The Quaker and the Catholic are equally ceremonious in inclination. The latter always desires to please. The Quaker, when he desires to please, is capable of very fine courtesy; but he does not always desire, and he has less insight into the essence of a social situation.

The community has had a history, of course, in the matter of costume. The Meeting House law made costume a matter of ethics for a century. But to-day there is great diversity. Probably this is a sign of the transition from the Quaker to the broader human order. But all one can say upon costume is that there is now no dress prescribed for any occasion. At one extreme there are a few, in 1905 only three, in 1907 only one, who wear the Quaker garb. At the other extreme are outsiders who dress as the city tailor and milliner clothe them. And between these there is liberty.

The dispositions again are varied. One finds the aggressiveness of five stirring men and three capable women sufficient to give character to the place. Many functions of the community are still vigorously upheld, yet the number of aggressive spirits is diminishing. The instigative type is present in three, and its processes give pleasure to all who behold. The domineering type is present in eight members, especially in those families which claim by right of inheritance either social or religious leadership. And, as to others, as I quoted an observer above, “They are an obedient people.” I do not know any creative minds, much less any class with original initiative. If there had been any such, Quaker Hill would have produced artists, great and small, and writers, not a few. There is a consciousness of material for creation, and in certain families the culture which creation presupposes; but something in Quakerism has quieted the muse and banked the fires.

As to types of character, there are forceful persons, a very few, nine at the utmost being of this type. Austere persons, who have in the past given to the Hill much of its character, have almost disappeared, not more than four being within that category, among the population under study in this part of the book.

The number of the rationally conscientious is as small as is that of the convivial. The Meeting, which was for over a century the organ of conscience for the community, denied to the convivial their license, and released the conscientious from any obligation to be rational. The Meeting has now but recently passed away, and its standards of character speak as loudly as ever. I find three women who may be called rationally conscientious, one a Quakeress, one a New Yorker, and one of Quaker birth and worldly breeding. I find also three who are truly convivial in type, one a son of Quakers, and two who are Irish Catholics; while to these might be added two whose designation ought to be Industrious-Convivial, hard-working men who are fond of social pleasure as an end of life.

A few in certain households, three in number, are intellectually aesthetic in a passive way, fond of art and books, but creating nothing. Two artists of note have in the past twelve years come to the Hill, bought places and made it at least a summer home.

It must not be inferred from the foregoing that there is 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. The other is leisurely, indolent in movement, though a diligent man, and is as much burdened by increase of responsibilities as the former is stimulated. These two men are not exceptional, but typical. The extreme of slowness is indeed represented in one man whose tortoise pace in all matters dependent on the mind and will is oddly contrasted with his vigor and energy of manner. His movements are a provocation of delighted comments by his neighbors; I think partly because they are felt to be representative of what is latent in other men, and partly because he is surrounded by others more alert. Such men are the outcropping of a vein of degenerate will. It is not immoral degeneracy, but its weakness is incapacity for action of any kind, inability to see and do the specific task. This degenerate will does not extend to traditional morals, and does not always affect whole families. But its pervasive effects are seen in almost all the representatives of three large families of the old Quaker stock. Contrasted to these are some of the old stock, who though slow of thought and barren of mental initiative, are swift of action, sure in synthesis of a situation, and instant in performance of precisely the requisite deed.

One finds on the Hill many examples of native administrative ability of a high order for a farm is as complicated a property as a railway is. There are fully as many others who would be burdened with the cares of a ticket-chopper.

Not a few on the Hill are like the farmer who, sent on an errand to bring some guests from a train to a certain house, spent half an hour after meeting the guests in conversation with them in the railway station before mentioning his errand; and would have made it an hour had they not inquired of him for a conveyance. Yet a neighbor of his, in the same social group, closely related, has unusual capacity for affairs.

The instincts of the people of the Hill are not, I think, so varied. They involuntarily respect religion, when expressed with sincerity, and incarnated in strength of character. It must have the authority, however, of strength, at least passive strength, to appeal to local instinct.

CHAPTER VI

The social organization.

The members of the community have organized themselves into associations for the carrying on of special forms of activity to a degree which is worthy of record. As one might expect, the societies of most vigor are those maintained by the women, since the men have never been able spontaneously to organize, or to maintain, any society on the Hill.

Central to all this organization, through the period of the Mixed Community, has been Akin Hall Association, created by one man, and endowed by him. Under its shelter a church and library live, and a yearly Conference is maintained for five days in the month of September. In this chapter we will consider first the incorporated, then the unincorporated societies.

The chief incorporated institution on Quaker Hill is Akin Hall Association, founded in 1880 by Albert J. Akin. It was his intention to create an institution of the broadest purpose, through which could be carried on activities of a religious, literary, educational, benevolent and generally helpful order. “Albert Akin endowed,” said a visitor, “not a college or a hospital, but a community!” The charter of the Association, which was from time to time, on advice, amended, up to the time of Mr. Akin’s death in 1903, provided for the most catholic endowment of Quaker Hill, in every possible need of its population.

The particular directions in which this endowment has been used are two. A library and a church are in active use by the neighborhood, the former since 1883, and the latter since 1895, of which I will speak in detail hereafter.

Akin Hall Association is a corporation consisting of five trustees, a self-perpetuating body, and eleven other “members.” The number of trustees was originally sixteen, but Mr. Akin early yielded to legal advice in concentrating authority in five persons; while continuing the remaining eleven as a quasi-public to whom the five report their doings, and with whom they regularly confer. The annual meeting of the Association is upon the birthday of the founder, August 14th. At that time the trustees assemble at two p. m. for the transaction of business, election of members and of officers; and at 3 p. m. the members’ meeting is called to order, the officers of the trustees being officers of the whole body. Members are permitted and expected to inquire as to activities of the Association, its funds and its work in general, and to vote on all matters coming before the body for its action. Only no action involving the expenditure of money, or the election of trustees, shall be valid without the concurrence in majority opinion of a majority of the trustees.

The chief interest of the trustees has always been the care of the property of the Association, which includes invested funds, and the following buildings, with about thirty acres of land: a hotel, having rooms for two hundred guests, a stone library, a chapel, and seven cottages. The hotel is usually rented to a “proprietor,” and the duties of the library and church are laid upon a minister, the earliest of whom, Mr. Chas. Ryder, was called the “Agent.”

The Akin Free Library, consisting of about three thousand books, selected with uncommon wisdom by committees of ladies through about twenty-five years, was originally established by the ladies of the Hill, in the early eighties, through a popular fund. It has ever since been funded by the Akin Hall Association, who have also given it quarters, and care, in the Chapel known as Akin Hall. It will soon be moved into the stone Library, erected in 1898, but only finished in 1906, and it is reasonable to suppose that it will there have a wider scope and an increasing use.

The Library has been managed primarily for the use of “the Summer people,” and the books have the excellence of their selection, as well as the proportion of certain kinds of books, determined by the preferences of the Summer residents. No adequate records are kept of the books used; so that it is impossible to give statistics of the specific utility of the library. But it occupies a real place in the community, and is drawn upon by families from every section of the population.

The fact that it was originally assembled by popular subscription, and only later sustained by the Akin endowment is a token of the exceptional latent interest in literature, and the passive culture, to which tribute has been paid in this study of the Quaker Hill population. It is fair to say, however, that such interest has been confined to a small group of the population, now fast disappearing.

There is a small corporation, formed for the purpose of holding and caring for the “Old Meeting House.” It is known as Oblong Meeting House, Incorporated. To this corporation, consisting of three trustees, a self-perpetuating body, the Yearly Meeting of Friends handed over in 1902 the building and grounds known as the “Old Meeting House,” at Site 28. This ancient building, erected in 1764, is probably the oldest edifice on the Hill, and is the embodiment of the religious and historical traditions of the community. These trustees attend to the repair of the Meeting House, which is maintained in exactly the condition in which it was used for over a century. No meeting of worship is held now in this building, the “monthly meeting” having been “laid down” in 1885. The building is, however, the center of frequent pilgrimages during the summer, by the visitors to the Hill and boarders, who delight in its quaint interior. It is used for occasional “sales” for the “benefit” of some public interest. Once a year at the close of Quaker Hill Conference, it is the place of “Quaker Hill Day” exercises, at which addresses and papers are presented, in celebration and commemoration of the past history of the community.

The Hill has record of few revivals. Quaker ways preclude surprises, and revivals usually arise from new things. There was, however, during five years, 1892-1897, a religious awakening, prolonged month after month, for five years with undiminished force. The cause of it seems to have been the study of the Bible in the historic method; a new mode of awakening traditional religious interest. During that time the whole community was keenly alive, old and young; and in certain cases a change of life became permanent. In many young persons a definite religious impulse was the result.

This quickened religious interest involved all the Quaker influence, both Orthodox and Hicksite, and it was reinforced by several strong personalities from outside the Hill, persons trained in church work in New York and elsewhere. It crystallized in the organization of “Christ’s Church, Quaker Hill,” in the Spring of 1895, which received at the beginning adherents of all the religious groups represented on the Hill. Within three years it had grown to a membership of sixty-five, among whom were members or adherents of the following religious bodies, Protestant Episcopal Church, Anglican and Roman Catholic Churches, Quakers, Hicksite and Orthodox, Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist Episcopal, Congregational, Disciples and Lutheran.

This church is served by the minister employed in Akin Hall, and it has therefore a peculiar place. Its membership is drawn from the population resident on the Hill. Its doctrinal truths are simple, namely the Apostles’ Creed. Its ordinances are elastic, baptism being waived in the case of those who, being trained as Quakers, do not believe in water baptism; and by the conditions affixed to Mr. Akin’s endowment, that no denominational use should ever be made of Akin Hall, it is without sectarian connections.

The religious services in Akin Hall have in Summer been attended since 1880 by numbers of “summer people,” from Mizzen-Top Hotel and the boarding-houses. A Sunday School was maintained from 1890 to 1905, a Christian Endeavor Society from 1894 to 1903. Both have been discontinued, owing to lack of members.

The church has also a diminished membership, especially since 1903, owing in part to mere removal of population; and even more to the death and removal from the Hill of persons of forceful, aggressive type, and the impoverishment of the population in respect of initiative and coherence.

The other agency carried on under the patronage of Akin Hall Association is the Quaker Hill Conference. Founded in 1899 by Mr. Akin, entertained by Miss Monahan, this assembly has made September of each year a focal point in local interest. For five days of public meetings, Bible study, addresses upon religion, social and economic topics, culminating in a great dinner, of which four hundred partake, it is the modern successor of the now extinct Quaker Quarterly meetings. It expended in 1907 about $1,400, of which about half was contributed by Akin Hall Association, and the remainder by individuals.

The groups in which the women of the Hill are associated are of great interest. The Roman Catholic women have only their kinship associations, and no voluntary associations, being generally in the employ of Protestants, and having their church center away from the Hill in Pawling village.

The King’s Daughters is the largest association, and most representative of the Hill, both in its numbers, frequency of meetings and variety of interests; though it is not the oldest. It has a membership of forty, and is actively devotional, charitable and benevolent. It serves also a useful purpose in providing social meetings, bazaars, sales and other occasions throughout the year which bring neighbors together; and uses their assembling for the assisting of the poor, ignorant or needy.

This society, as well as the one to be mentioned next, exemplifies the real democracy in which the women of the Hill meet and plan for common local interests; a fine spirit and practical efficiency characterizing their meetings, and each woman, however, humble, having a part with the best in the general result.

The Wayside Path Association is smaller in number of members, as well as older than the King’s Daughters; indeed, it has perhaps no fixed membership, but is an assembling of the women of the place about a small group as a working center for a yearly duty. Its purpose is to maintain a dirt sidewalk, over three miles in length, which follows the road northward and southward, from the Glen to the Post Office, with branches. Once a year the Association meets, gathers funds by a “sale” or by subscription, hires a laborer to repair the Wayside Path; then for a year lies dormant. In 1898 there was a general effort made to transform this association into a general Village Improvement Society, with diversified interests, into which men would come, but it failed, and no such society exists.

The West Mountain Mission is an association of ladies of the Hill, who through sales and bazaars, supplemented by gifts, contribute to the support of a chapel of the Protestant Episcopal Church, two miles west of Pawling. This association draws its membership from the hotel guests and from residents in the cottages; and but little from the essential Quaker Hill households.

The same may be said of whist clubs maintained in the summer at the hotel and cottages.

CHAPTER VII

The social welfare.

Quaker Hill is an example of the working of a religious and economic system toward its inevitable results in social welfare. The results consciously sought were mainly personal. They were not seeking culture or security or equity, and not attempting to create a community, those early Quakers; but they sought with all their heart and mind after prosperity, individual and communal; after vitality, morality and that self-expression which is in the form of self-sacrifice or altruism in “the service of others.” The conscious mind of the Quaker fathers of this community was other-worldly, except in the matters of business of which more later. That “spiritual” state of mind was intensely individual. All the interests it regarded were of the self, conceived as an inner, immaterial duplicate of the body, destined for heaven after death, and now enjoying interchanges of experience, especially of emotion and intelligence, with the Deity, during life.

It was a mind consciously framed to serve personal development, with no thought of public or common interests. Yet subconsciously the Quaker was acutely aware of common interests. A Quaker frequently uses the expression “I feel myself in unity with them.” Their doctrine of the indwelling of the divine in every man made them quick to feel common emotion. Their group-sympathy was lively and strong. They felt the community, though they never thought upon it. Subconsciously, though not consciously, they were public-spirited. They acted upon a fine social spirit, thought they taught no social gospel.

“The supreme result of efficient organization," says Professor F. H. Giddings, “and the supreme test of efficiency is the development of the personality of the social man. If the man himself becomes less social, less rational, less manly; if he falls from the highest type, which seeks self-realization through a critical intelligence and emotional control, to one of those lower types which manifest only the primitive virtues of power; if he becomes unsocial, the social organization, whatever its apparent merits, is failing to achieve its supreme object. If, on the contrary, the man is becoming ever better as a human being, more rational, more sympathetic, with an ever broadening consciousness of kind, then, whatever its apparent defects, the social organization is sound and efficient.” Let us consider whether Quaker Hill has met this test. It has been well organized. It has had definite purposes. What has been the type of welfare enjoyed as a result? What kind of man has emerged from almost two centuries of cultivation of a religious and economic ideal?

In economic operations the Quakers dwelt in this world. They sought a living and they sought wealth not for the services wealth can render in culture and education, but to accumulate it, possess it, invest and manage it, and to live “in plainness.”

Yet they subconsciously did also seek after a prosperity that should be general. Not closely, not in any declarations or definite teachings of their code, but still in a real way, as a by-product of their code of life, they acted so that none in their community should be in want. This they did with profound wisdom for they taught no communal doctrine and the details of their action toward weaker members of the neighborhood were uncommonly shrewd and sensible. I will show later the effects of this in the fact that the population under our study shows the absence of defective classes in a significant degree. There are no idiots, no defective, no criminal, no pauper classes among the Quaker Hill population.

The mind of the community had, indeed, an active interest in liberty and the contribution noted above (see Ch. IV. Part I) in the agitation for the abolition of slavery in this state was an act of public spirit along the lines of a great national experience. The fact that the meeting of Friends in 1767 was held on Quaker Hill, which initiated effective action against slave-holding, is much cherished on the Hill, and is commemorated in a stone and bronze memorial at the Meeting House.

Equality of suffrage and universal suffrage are jealously believed in, owing to the Quaker teaching as to woman’s parity with man. Yet in the school-meeting, in which women have the same right to vote that men have, there are seldom any women present. Indeed, except for a packed meeting once in a decade, to decide some agitated question, few women attend school-meetings.

The size of the holdings of land on the Hill, and the curve of increase and decrease for seventy years, are exhibited in Table II.

TABLE II.

Land-Holdings on Quaker Hill: Acreages on which Owners are taxed.

Years            1835    1845    1865    1875    1890    1900    1906
------------------------------------------------------------------------
No. Owners         31      26      39      51      48      53      42
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Highest Acreage   610     540     445     420     540     540     540
Higher Quartile   378     260     225     225     183.5   222.5   265
Average           222     206     150.5   147.8   137.8   154     184.2
Median            187     150     131     120     104     120     155.5
Lower Quartile     80     100      59      52      43.5    57      90
Lowest Acreage      1      42       3       6       5       1       6

The above table gives in a graphic manner the tendency of wealth to increase, on the Hill, so far as wealth is represented in land. It is to be noted that these figures, taken from the Tax-Lists of the town of Pawling, are not precisely accurate, especially in the lower ranges. There is an evident inaccuracy in the reporting of the smaller places. Yet from them the following may be inferred: First, that from the beginning of the reports, which was about the end of the period of the Quaker Community, there was a shrinkage in the size of the land-holdings on the Hill; and from the beginning of the period of the Mixed Community a rise in the general averages. The lowest of the curve is about 1890, in the Median, the average and in each of the quartiles. Second, the incoming of the Irish immigrants, who began to be land-holders about 1850, multiplied the number of small holdings of land.

Just what cause has operated in the years 1890-1906 to increase the size of the holdings of land it is hard to say, unless it be the expectation that land would have a value, which is aroused by the presence on the Hill every summer of visitors to a number equal to the numbers of the resident population. It is evident at the present time, when the “milk business” has been reduced to half in the past five years, that the farmers are holding their lands with a hope of selling.

It is worthy of remark that the tax-list of the town furnish no other data of reliable value, or even of suggestion, being obviously inaccurate and uneven in their reports of the values of land, and of the holdings of personal property.

The fact that is not recorded in the above statistics is this: that certain owners, associated in close family ties, own all the land of greatest value. Seven family groups possess, in the names of eleven of the above owners, all the land near the Hotel, all the land for which any one has ever thought of charging more than fifty dollars an acre. These eleven owners of all the land of greatest value possess probably nine-tenths of the personal property.

Holdings of property on Quaker Hill are very unequal. The smallest owner of real estate has an acre, and the largest about six hundred acres. Contrasts here are sharp and permanent. The same families have possessed certain properties for many decades, often for two centuries; and generally Quaker Hill families do not sell till they all die or move away.

Wealth is increasing on Quaker Hill in the slow course of years, and probably along the lines of present growth, will increase. It is distributed with marked inequality. The tendency, especially in central territory, is toward increasing inequality. There is “a small group at a high degree.”

Yet the community is generally prosperous and well-to-do. There are none poor. Indeed, the wealthy women who began to come to Mizzen-Top Hotel in 1880, looking about for some poor to assist, were obliged to go off the Hill to the south, and lay hold of a lonely female with a curious nervous malady but self-respecting withal, and deliberately pauperize her. To this process, after some initial struggles, she has submitted through these intervening years. She has now for years been pensioned by the church in Akin Hall through the year, visited in summer by people in carriages, has maintained an extensive begging correspondence through the mails all winter, and has been generally despised by her neighbors. But she has represented to interested clergymen and charity workers on their summer vacations the fascinating and mysterious problem of poverty.

Very few indeed have been the defectives. I know of none in ten years. The prevailing vitality of the community is high. There were living two years ago five persons past ninety; and one of them died in his hundredth year. Octogenarians drive the roads every day, and manage their estates with ripe discretion and unabated interest in affairs. The religious revival referred to (see Chapter VI) brought into the church an active man of great wealth of ninety-five years of age.

There are no blind persons. One old man, who suffered from cataract, lost an eye in an operation at eighty-five years of age; and refused to submit the other eye-ball to the surgeon. There are no deaf and dumb.

People on Quaker Hill are well-born. I suppose this may be in part due to the high morality of their fathers. I attribute it, in view of the contrast in this respect to the contiguous population in Sherman, Conn., to the highly organic communal life of Quaker Hill. 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. There are no idiotic persons.

The prevailing morality is high. Very few would be classified as immoral, by the public disapproval of their conduct. Individuals have committed theft, or an act of cruelty, or adultery, in the years 1895-1905. They do not constitute classes.

The sociality of Quaker Hill seems to the writer relatively high. Response to a case of real need is prompt, wise and abundant; and common action for others is heartily begun and completed. There are no unsocialized persons; neither paupers, criminals, nor degraded, in the community; at least no class or classes of such. There is a man who perhaps drinks too much and too often; but even he is too far from the saloon to attain to the dignity of neighborhood drunkard.

Quaker Hill has not been of a mind to contribute institutions or resources to the public. Toward war hostile, toward the state always impassive, sometimes actively disloyal in times of war, Quaker Hill has lived a life apart.

Common school privileges are offered to all in the three school houses at Sites 12, 43 and 101 (school districts N, 3, 4) and the advantages offered are generally studiously appropriated by the young. In the ten years under study two families alone have been unwilling to take full advantage of the school opportunities.

In the school at Site 43, for which alone an improved, modern building has been erected, there was, beginning in 1893, a determined effort made to provide a school better than the ordinary country school. By the co-operation of certain farmers with children in school, and through contributions of citizens of means who had no children, better teachers were employed, at increased expense, for the space of twelve years. During two years the school was graded, employing two teachers. But the effort in this direction seems to have ceased with the close of the year 1905-1906. This school has had, for the years 1904-6, only one Protestant child, in an enrollment of twenty to thirty.

The other school-districts are maintained “in the old back-country way,” their attendance is small and no effort is made to raise the standard of teaching.

It has been accepted for generations among the authoritative leaders on Quaker Hill that “higher education was not good for the poor.” Of this doctrine, Albert Akin, generally progressive, was a firm believer. He insisted, and other representatives of the leading families have done the same, that “to offer them higher education only makes them discontented”; “they won’t work if you get them to studying and somebody must do the work.”

It seems in strict harmony with this opinion, which I never heard opposed on the Hill, that Quaker Hill has never until 1904 sent a young man or woman through the college or university. Albert J. Akin, 2d, was a member of class of 1904 of Columbia University, but he was not born on the Hill, and never long resided there. 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. Variation was repressed. Spontaneity was forbidden. Ingenuous spirits were firmly and effectively directed into channels believed to be harmless.

The result has been that mediocre people have both lived on the Hill, and gone away from it, in voluntary exile from its beautiful scenes, but not in exile from its spirit of plainness. No person of brilliant mind or of uncommon talents has ever come of the Quaker Hill population. There is not among the sons or daughters of this place one whose name is of lasting interest to any beyond the limits of Pawling. No artist or poet has ever ventured to express the intense feeling of the aesthetic which pervades the place, but has always been hushed from singing, restrained from picturing.

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. In the chapter upon “The Common Mind,” above, I have showed that all the leaders of the community as a whole, save one, have been outsiders, who came to see the integrity of the community with eyes of “the world’s people,” and these leaders in communal service have been grudgingly followed.

That one, Albert J. Akin, who founded Akin Hall Association, lived away from Quaker Hill, in New York City, the most of the months of fifty years, 1830-1880, and fell under the influence of outsiders.

Indeed, a rare beauty characterizes these children of the old Quaker Community; and a fine harmony blends the members of the Mixed Community into one another. The type of country gentleman and lady was perfectly embodied in James J. Vanderburgh, who died about 1889, in his residence at Site 30. He was a good man, hospitable, large-minded, well read, humane; he was sufficiently reverent to be good neighbor to the Orthodox; and he was sufficiently wealthy to express the Quaker economic ideal. He had the Quaker genius of thrift expressing itself in bounty.

Mrs. Zayde Akin Bancroft, resident at Site 32, who died in 1896, was an example of the ideal Quaker Hill lady. A woman of leisure and culture, accustomed to the possession of wealth, and enjoying it in books and travel, she surrounded herself for several of her last years with an atmosphere, and secured for herself enjoyment, of the highest aspirations of the Quaker Hill economic ideal.

No one quite so much embodied that ideal as Albert J. Akin, who died in his hundredth year, in January, 1903. His fortune, which amounted at his death to more than two million dollars, was the culmination of the wealth of his family, acquired since his great-great-grandfather, David Akin, the pioneer, came to Quaker Hill about 1730. He was a far-seeing and brilliant investor, and through his long business life, which lasted until 1901, he followed the growth of railroads in the United States with steady optimism, and almost unvarying profit. After the year 1880 he came to live on Quaker Hill, in the interest of his health, more constantly than he had in the preceding fifty years. He at once interested himself in local enterprises, and Akin Hall Association and Mizzen-Top Hotel were at that time founded by him and others. Until his death, twenty-three years later, he was the leading citizen and the most interesting personality among this social population. Such was his place and so masterful as well as constructive his influence that it was a true expression of the feeling of all which one resident wrote at that time to another: “The king is dead, the man on whom we unconsciously leaned and whom none of us thought of disobeying, though only his personality held us to allegiance, is gone from us. And I for one feel that I have lost a dear friend.”

These three illustrations will serve to indicate both the kind of persons who have come of the Quaker Hill community, and one of its tendencies. They illustrate also the spirit of the community toward its leaders.

Personalities of the austere type, men and women of the devotional side of Quakerism, may be cited in the cases of David Irish and Richard T. Osborn. The former was the last minister of the Hicksite Society of Friends on the Hill. His preaching covered the years of its separate existence, for he was made a minister in 1831, three years after the Division, and he died in 1884, at the age of ninety-two. One year after his death the Meeting was formally “laid down,” in Oblong Meeting House, and from a place of worship it became a house of memories.

David Irish was austere. Believing that slavery was wrong, “he made his protest against slavery by abstaining, so far as possible, from the use of slave-products ... made maple to take the place of cane sugar, and used nothing but linen and woolen clothing (largely home-spun). This abstaining he continued for himself and family until slavery was abolished.” Yet “he never felt free,” continues his daughter and biographer, “to join with anti-slavery societies outside his own, believing that by so doing he might compromise some of his testimonies.” He welcomed in his home the fugitive slave fleeing from the South, and “there must never be any distinction made in the family on account of his color; he sat at the same table and was treated as an equal.”

David Irish was equally opposed to war, and to capital punishment. He wrote, “testified” and “suffered” for these principles. “In the time of the Civil War he allowed his cattle to be sold by the tax-collector, not feeling free to pay the direct war-tax.” His biographer enumerates further his hospitality, his fondness for books, his humor, and mentions with a pride characteristic of the Quaker that he “was often entrusted with the settlement of estates, showing the esteem in which his business capacity and integrity were held by the community.”

Richard T. Osborn was the Elder of the Orthodox branch of the Friends during the same period, subsequent to the Division, as that covered by David Irish’s life. Born in 1816, he was conversant as a child with the period of the Division. The seceding members of the Meeting met in his father’s house and barn until the Orthodox Meeting House could be erected on the land upon which, at his marriage in 1842, he erected his house. Richard Osborn was “the head of his family.” Strong of will, austere, convinced, he lived in the world of Robert Barclay and William Penn, and for years never hesitated to rebuke young or old Quakers or “world’s people,” whom he found violating “the principles of truth.” A summer boarder who played a violin upon his premises was silenced, and the singing of a hymn in the Meeting House of which he was Clerk was once sternly “testified against.”

But Richard Osborn was kindly. He had a gentle and appreciative humor; and about 1890 there come influences in the presence of neighbors to whom he was strongly drawn, as well as the constant presence in his house of boarders from New York; so that his later years were spent in a mellower interest in dogma, and an ever keener interest in the history of Quakerism and of the community in which he lived. His wife, Roby, was a Quakeress of rare sweetness and exquisite gentleness of character. Together this strong, dominating man and his gentle wife constituted an influence, while they lived, which held the community together, and disseminated their principles more successfully than if he had been eloquent, instead of terse, and she an evangelist instead of a meek and demure Quakeress.

These persons were conspicuous examples of the best social product of Quaker Hill. They were not famous, nor great. Their philosophy was one of self-repression and required them to reduce their lives and those of other men to mediocrity. Quaker Hill taught and practiced the prevention of pauperism and the prevention of genius! The ideals of the place discouraged higher education. The leading personages distinctly opposed the offer of higher education to the young.

Therefore this community, which has been exceptionally wealthy for one hundred and fifty years, has done nothing for general education; and has not educated its own sons. As noted above, no person born on Quaker Hill ever completed the courses for a degree in college or university, and though the community has had for a century families with aesthetic and literary tastes, no member of the community has painted a picture, written a song, or published a book.

The personages briefly described above are named for another reason. 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. The piety, the austerity, the forcefulness, the ownership of the land of greatest value, and even the available wealth of the community, were so largely possessed by this group that in the years 1890-1900, in which this group was still intact, its leadership was such as to unite the community and consolidate the whole population for whatever interests the leaders of this group approved. Of that period it was said: “Everybody on Quaker Hill goes to everything!”

With the death of those who have passed away in the latter part of the period under study the power of initiative has gone. New proposals are hushed. Variation is discouraged; the rut of custom and convention is preferred. And a subtle stifling air of the impossibility of all active purposes pervades social and religious and business activity on the Hill.

Religiously speaking, attendance upon public services have decreased by twenty per cent., while the Protestant population has only decreased five per cent.

In business activity reference is made above to the fact that the number of milk dairies has decreased from eighteen to nine, a decrease of fifty per cent. At the same time the largest dairy on the Hill which in the decade 1890-1900 “was milking one hundred cows,” has for the years 1903-1907 “made milk” from only forty and fifty cows, although the owner has more land than his predecessor.

The population which now remains on Quaker Hill contains only a few persons of force and leadership, and they are no longer so grouped as to command. The majority have no ability to follow unless authority be an element in the leadership; and authority to command the whole community has not existed since 1903. “The king is dead.”

“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. He made himself a party to every public interest. When the building of the Hotel was suggested, he put himself at the head of the movement, invested the most money in it, and later obtaining entire control, deeded it to his Akin Hall foundation. When the library enterprise was broached, which has grown into Akin Free Library, he organized and incorporated the institution required, endowed it generously; later reorganized it, upon legal advice; thus accepting ideas from Admiral Worden, William B. Wheeler, Cyrus Swan, Judge Barnard, and others of his neighbors, and contributing his own patient and unflagging executive faculty. When it was thought best, in 1892, to continue the church services throughout the winter under the leadership of Mrs. Wheeler and of Miss Monahan, and the growth of the Sunday school and permanent congregation seemed to require the employment of a resident pastor, Mr. Akin acquiesced; at first as a follower, but steadily and increasingly as a leader, he identified himself more and more every year until his death, with the religious life of Akin Hall and Christ’s Church. He was a good leader, for he confessed himself a follower in the enterprise which he was in a position absolutely to control. He eagerly availed himself of the suggestions of others, took a quiet and lowly place with entire dignity, and exerted without arbitrariness a determining influence.

“When Mr. Akin was about sixty years of age, he bought a residence in New York, and went there to live in the winters. He had as a neighbor a Quaker preacher named Wright, who was accustomed to come to Oblong Meeting in the course of the year. With him Mr. Akin had many conversations on matters of duty and worship.

“He began also to attend the Oblong Meeting in the summer, though the Sunday meetings were not at that time largely attended.

“Later when his residence was at Fifty-sixth Street he became the fast friend and devoted admirer of Dr. John Hall, who used often to call upon him. For years Mr. Akin was carried into Dr. Hall’s Church; but after Dr. Hall died, and even before, he had ceased from that custom.

“The growth of the church on Quaker Hill, under the leadership of Mr. and Mrs. William B. Wheeler and Miss Margaret B. Monahan took strong hold on Mr. Akin’s heart, and exerted over no one a more vital influence than on this old man.” Albert J. Akin A Tribute, by Rev. Warren H. Wilson, Quaker Hill Conference, 1903.