But the non-resistant character of the neighborhood, perched between the Connecticut Yankees, who took ardent interest in the Revolution, and the aggressive settlements of Pawling, Fredericksburgh and Beekman, rendered the Hill at times an asylum, strange to say, of the most adventurous forces. Whenever in Colonial days an adventurer or soldier sought a peaceful region in which to recruit his forces, he thought upon Quaker Hill; and in four memorable instances used the Hill as a place of safe refuge. There no one would by force resist his enjoyment of a time for recruiting.

The first instance of this is the so-called "Anti-Rent War," which in 1766 excited the inhabitants of Dutchess and Columbia Counties. Its sources were in the land grants made by the Crown, and in the independent character of the settlers in this state. The series of disturbances so caused continued until well into the years of the nineteenth century. They concern the local history only in one year, 1766.

The Anti-Rent War of 1766 is a forgotten event. But in that time it aroused the Indians and the white settlers to revolt. Bodies of armed men assembled, British troopers marched from Poughkeepsie to Quaker Hill, to seize a leader of rebellion; and at the time of his trial at Poughkeepsie in August, 1766, a company of regulars with three field-pieces was brought up from New York.[19]

The prime cause of this insurrection was the granting of the land in great areas at the beginning of the century to favored proprietors, so that the actual settlers could not become owners but only tenants. Fragments of such great estates remain in the hands of certain families till our time. The ownership of Hammersley Lake by the family of that name is an example. The exercise of authority by these monopolists of natural opportunities drove the actual tillers of the soil, who had given it its value, to desperation. I have shown that in 1740 no land owners were enrolled on Quaker Hill, and that the list of its most representative citizens in 1755 contained few landowners.[20] A further cause of this conflict may have been that, in the year of the settlement of the boundaries of the Oblong it was granted to one company by the British Crown, and to another by the Colony of New York. This brought the title of all the lands on the Oblong into dispute. Moreover, boundaries were carelessly indicated and loosely described, a pile of stones or a conspicuous tree serving for a landmark. All this worked great confusion, for the settlement of which in a crude community courts were ineffective.

Finally the popular discontent broke out to the north in armed refusal of settlers to pay the rents exacted. The movement spread from Dutchess to Columbia County. William Prendergast, who is said to have lived in a house standing on the ground now part of the golf links in Pawling, was the leader of the insurgents in this county. He assembled a band on Quaker Hill so formidable that the grenadiers at Poughkeepsie waited for reinforcements of two hundred troopers and two field pieces from New York before proceeding against him. The sight of the red coats was enough. Prendergast surrendered. But so great was the local excitement that, to forestall an attempt to rescue, he was taken a prisoner to New York. In July he was brought back for trial; and on the same boat with the King's counsel, judges, lawyers and prisoner came a company of soldiers to put down the continued disturbance in Columbia County.[21]

The trial occurred the first fortnight of August. Prendergast was assisted in his defense by his wife, who made a strong impression on the jury, proving that her husband, before the acts of which he was accused, was "esteemed a sober, honest and industrious farmer, much beloved by his neighbors, but stirred up to act as he did by one Munro, who is absconded." So ardent was this woman advocate that the State's attorney forgot himself and moved that she be excluded from the court room. The motion was denied, and the mover of it emphatically rebuked. But there was not lacking proof of the fact of treason, and Prendergast was convicted and sentenced to be hanged in six weeks. Then this valiant woman's energy and perseverance rose to their highest. She set off for an audience with the Governor, Sir Henry Moore, Bart., and returned about the first of September with a reprieve. Just in time she arrived, for a company of fifty mounted men had ridden the whole length of the county to rescue her husband from the jail. She convinced them of the folly of such action as they proposed, and sent them home, while she turned to the task of obtaining a pardon from the King. Here, too, she was successful; for, six months later, George III, who required six years to be subdued by a Washington, released her husband. They arrived home amid great popular rejoicings.

William Prendergast and Mehitabel Wing, whose descendants settled later about Chautauqua Lake, New York, were bound to the Quaker Community by ties of marriage and of trade. William was not, so far as I can learn, a member of the Meeting; but Mehitabel was a daughter of Jedidiah Wing, whose family was devoted to the Society from 1744 until the "laying down" of the Meeting in 1885. William Prendergast was, however, a member of the community. His name heads an account in the ledgers of the Merritt store, in 1771 and 1772, and his purchases indicate that he was a substantial farmer whose trading center was Quaker Hill.[22] Prendergast was an Irishman.

Before the Revolution he with his family and possessions, a caravan of seventeen vehicles and thirty horses, emigrated westward, going as far south as Kentucky, then north through Ohio and New York. A part of the family company proceeded to Canada. His son James settled, with other Prendergasts, on Chautauqua Lake, and became the founder of Jamestown, where his family, now extinct there, has given the city a library. When William Prendergast and Mehitabel Wing, his resolute wife, died, is not known. None of that name is later found on or near Quaker Hill.

The motive of their hegira appears to have been chagrin and a sense of humiliation at the sentence of death pronounced upon the head of the family. In the Prendergast Library at Jamestown is a book containing family histories, which came from the Prendergast private library. From this book two pages had been cleanly cut away. The Librarians set themselves to replace the lost material, and after patient efforts in many quarters, discovered another copy, and had typewritten pages made and pasted in. Upon the missing pages, thus replaced after the extinction of James Prendergast's family, was found the account of William Prendergast's sentence to be hanged. His descendants, had they lived longer, might have been more proud than ashamed of his rebellion against injustice.

The Quakers, because they would passively tolerate an intrusion, were forced to harbor another rendezvous of turbulent men. It is said that Enoch Crosby, the famous spy of the Revolution, who is believed to have been Cooper's model for the hero of the novel, "The Spy," came to Quaker Hill during the Revolution, in pursuance of a plan he was at that time following, and got together a band of Tory volunteers, who were planning to join the British army; and delivered them to the Continental authorities, as prisoners. In this he was assisted by Col. Moorehouse, who kept a tavern on a site in South Dover, opposite the brick house which now stands one-half mile south of the Methodist Church.



I have spoken above of the sullen loyalty of the Quakers to the British Crown during the Revolution. It may have been in part owing to their loyalty that their neighborhood became more congenial for the Tories who during that period harried the country-side. The Quakers were Tories, and are so called in the letters of the period; but the word "Tories" remains in the speech of Quaker Hill as a name of opprobrium. It describes a species of guerrillas who infested parts of New York and Connecticut.

The "Tories" of the Revolutionary days furnish the substance of the stories of violence that are told about the fireside to Quaker Hill boys and girls. It is difficult, however, to persuade those who have heard these tales to relate them. Those who know them best are the very ones who cannot recall them in systematic or orderly form. I mention only one more of the free lances of the time. The chiefest of all bandit-leaders of those turbulent times was Waite Vaughn. It is related that this fellow was the head of a band of Tories, which means locally the same that the term "Cowboys" or "Skinners" means in the history of Westchester County. The latter were lawless bands who infested the regions in which the armies made civil life insecure, and subsisted by stealing cattle, plundering houses, robbing and often murdering citizens. "They seemed," says a writer, "like the savages to enjoy the sight of the sufferings they inflicted. Oftentimes they left their wretched victims from whom they had plundered their all, hung up by their arms, and sometimes by their thumbs, on barndoors, enduring the agony of wounds that had been inflicted to wrest from them their property. These miserable beings were frequently relieved by the American patrol."[23] Waite Vaughn lived in Connecticut in the part of New Fairfield known as Vaughn's Neck. Under the house, recently demolished, in which "Dr. Vaughn," his brother, is said to have lived during the Revolution, was found rotted linen below the cellar floor. Behind the great heap of the chimney also was found a secret cellar, for years forgotten, in which, among other rubbish of no significance, are said to have been found counterfeit coins of the Revolutionary period and other evidences of outlaw practices in that time.[24]

Vaughn used to ride at night with his troop to Quaker Hill, through Connecticut neighborhoods, which knew the sound of his passing. The Pepper family still relate the tradition of his riding up "Stony Hill," past the point where stands Coburn Meeting House, in the night, while they and their neighbors stayed discreetly indoors. This rendezvous was a place in the woods on Irish land, about half way between Sites 96 and 120, now known as "The Robber Rocks." Here the Vaughns are said to have concealed booty at times, and from this point they made forages upon farmhouses in the richest neighborhoods of this vicinity. Probably they spared the Quakers. I will speak later of the fact that Quakers have ways of their own for protecting themselves against intruders. Moreover, their men were not gone to the war.

The record of these years, on the pages of the clerk's minute-book, are a disappointment. One searches in vain for even the slightest trace of the presence in the Meeting House of the troops. There is no record of the presence in the Meeting House of the "Tories" or guerrillas of the Revolution; and not a word about the makers of the rifle-ports in the gables of this building which the present writer discovered there, unless it be the unruffled and serene utterance, under date of 8th Month, 9th, 1781, the very period at which the "Tories" must have been at their worst: "Samuel Hoag is appointed to take care of the Meeting House, and to keep the door locked and windows fastened, and to nail up the hole that goes up into the Garratt." The "Tories" robbed the store on Site 28. They had hidden for that purpose in the loft of the Meeting House and were discovered by some young Quakers who were skylarking in the Meeting House under pretense of cleaning it. The story is that one of the young men, being dared—of course by a maiden—to open the trap-door into the garret, and look for the Tories, found them hiding there. The bandits, being discovered, tumbled down the hole from the garret, and compelled their discoverers to go with them to the store; and proceeded at once to plunder it, relying no doubt on the non-resistant character of the people of the Hill. They stacked their arms at the door and went about their business in a thorough manner. But there was that in the blood of some Quakers there that could not contain itself within the bounds of non-resistance, and one of them, Benjamin Ferris, cried out, "Seize the rascals." In the scrimmage that resulted from the excitement of this remark, the leader of the Tories was recognized by the young lady who had by her challenge to the young man discovered them, and being taunted by her was so incensed that he stabbed her. It is only said in closing the story that the blood of both the fair and adventurous young Quakeress whose abounding spirit brought on all the trouble, and that of the leader of the "Tories," flows in the veins, of some who live on the Hill in the twentieth century.

Samuel Towner, a relative of Vaughn, resident in the region of Fredericksburgh (now Patterson), returning from a trip, once found Vaughn at his home, and urged him at once to leave, as his property would be confiscated, if Vaughn's presence there were tolerated.

Vaughn was once pursued by farmers near Little Rest, and was sighted and surrounded in a lonely road. He turned upon his pursuers coolly and said: "Now, gentlemen, you can arrest me, or kill me, but you must take the consequences; for I will kill some of you." Daunted by his resolution, they stood motionless while he crossed a fence and a field, and disappeared among the trees of a wooded hill.

Quaker Hill became known as Vaughn's rendezvous, and here he met his end, I think about 1781. His band had robbed the home of one of the Pearce family, then as now resident in the valley where Pawling village stands. The victim was hung up by his thumbs till life was almost extinct. The next day, Capt. Pearce, of the Revolutionary army, returned unexpectedly to his home, and set off with armed assistance for the Robber Rocks on Quaker Hill. Near that spot, in the fields east of Site 97, on the Wing lands, Vaughn and his men were resting, some picking huckleberries, and some playing cards on a flat stone. Pearce gave no warning, but opened fire at once. Vaughn fell mortally wounded. He was carried to John Toffey's residence, Site 53, where he soon died. He is buried under the trees outside the "Toffey Burying Ground," beside the brook, in the very heart of Quaker Hill, into which he had intruded because in that peaceful neighborhood he had for a time a safe asylum. With his death it is believed that his band dispersed, and their depredations ceased.

A peaceful people like the Quakers must find means of their own to protect themselves against intruders. No one can live long on Quaker Hill without knowing that they have done so. One may brusquely intrude once, but he will be a violent man indeed, not to say a dull one, who continues to enjoy invading the preserves of the "Friends." The fourth instance of a forcible invasion of the Hill was that of Washington's army, which encamped in the vicinity in the fall of 1778, the Headquarters being in John Kane's house, on a site now within the borders of Pawling Village. See on Map I, "HeadQrs."

On his arrival, September 19, 1778, Washington,[25] with his bodyguard, was entertained for six days at the home of Reed Ferris, in the Oblong, Site 99,[26] an honored guest, when he moved to the place designated as his Headquarters on his maps by Erskine. His letters written during his residence here are all dated from "Fredericksburgh," the name at that time of the western and older part of the town of Patterson. Washington's general officers were quartered in the homes of various residents of the neighborhood. One was so entertained by Thomas Taber, at the extreme north end of the Hill. It is natural to suppose that others were housed in nearer places. That Lafayette was entertained at the home of Russell, who lived at Site 25, now the Post-office, is reliably asserted. The brick house standing at that time was torn down by Richard Osborn, who erected the present house. That Washington, with other officers, was entertained at Reed Ferris's home is asserted by the descendants most interested, and is undoubtedly true.

The Meeting House was appropriated by the army officers for a hospital, because it was the largest available building. The only official record, says Mr. L. S. Patrick, is that of Washington's order, Oct. 20th, "No more sick to be sent to the Hospital at Quaker Hill, without first inquiring of the Chief Surgeon there whether they can be received, as it is already full." Arguing from the date of Washington's order above, Oct. 20, and from that of Surgeon Fallon below, this use of the building for a hospital continued three and perhaps five months. Meantime the Friends' Meetings were held in the barn at Site 21, then the residence of Paul Osborn. This barn had been the first Meeting House erected on the Hill in 1742. It was removed to Site 21 in 1769, when it was used as a barn till 1884, when it was removed by the present resident.[27]

There is no mention, even by inference, in the records of Oblong Meeting that proves this occupation of their building by soldiers. It was not voluntarily surrendered; other records show that the use of the building was supported by force; its surrender was grudging, not a matter to be recorded in the Meeting. It is characteristic of the Friends that they ignored it.

This toleration of the Hospital was never sympathetic. A letter of great interest to the student of those times was written to the Governor of the State of New York, Hon. George Clinton,[28] by Dr. James Fallon, physician in charge of the sick which were left on Quaker Hill, in the Meeting House, after the departure of the Continental army. He could get no one to draw wood for his hospital in the dead of winter, till finally "old Mr. Russell, an excellent and open Whig, tho' a Quaker," hired him a wagon and ox team. He could buy no milk without paying in Continental money, six for one. He declared that "Old Ferris, the Quaker, pulpiteer of this place, old Russell and his son, old Mr. Chace and his family, and Thomas Worth and his family, are the only Quakers on or about this Hill, the public stands indebted to." The two pioneers of the Hill, the preacher and the builder, were patriots as well. He denounces the rest as Tories all, the "Meriths," Akins, Wings, Kellys, Samuel Walker, the schoolmaster, and Samuel Downing, whom he declared a spurious Quaker and agent of the enemy; also the preacher, Lancaster, "the Widow Irish;" and many he called "half-Quakers," who were probably more zealous, and certainly more violent for Quaker and Tory principles than the Quakers themselves.

The trouble culminated in Dr. Fallon's impressing the wagons of Wing, Kelly and "the widow Irish," to take fourteen men to Danbury and Fishkill to save their lives. The former impress was not resisted; but the soldiers who took the Irish team had to battle with a mob, headed by Abraham Wing and Benjamin Akin, who used the convalescent soldiers roughly, but could not prevent the seizure. They were not the first men to do violence for the sake of the principle of non-resistance. One can see, too, that modern Quakerism has taken a gentler tone.

The small violence done by Abraham Wing and Benjamin Akin, like that of young Ferriss to prevent the robbery of the Merritt store, was ineffective. But the Quaker mode of self-protection was more effective than violence. They "froze out" the doctors and their soldiers from the Meeting House, by leaving them alone in the bitter winter, by letting them starve. The bitterness of their Toryism, and the zeal of Quaker ideals, the ardor of their "make-believe," carried them too far. They forgot mercy for the sake of opposing the cruelty of war.

Among the soldiers who lay sick in the Meeting House many are said to have died. They were buried in the grounds of the resident on Site 32, in the easterly portion of the field facing the Meeting House. No stones mark their place of rest, as none were ever placed in the cemetery of the early Quakers in the western part of the same field. Over them both the horses of persons attending meeting were tethered for many decades. The ploughman and the mower for years traversed the ground. But it is not forgotten who were buried there.

Says L. S. Patrick in his attempt to estimate the amount of sickness and death of soldiers on the hill that winter:[29] "Of the conditions existing, the prejudices prevailing, and the probable number in the Hospital, Dr. Fallon's letter to Governor Clinton furnishes the only account known to exist: 'Out of the 100 sick, Providence took but three of my people off since my arrival.' On the occasion of the arrival of Col. Palfrey, the Paymaster General, at Boston from Fredericksburgh, General Gates writes to General Sullivan: 'I am shocked at our poor fellows being still encamped, and falling sick by the hundreds.'

"The death list—out of the oblivion of the past but four names have been found—John Morgan, Capt. James Greer's Co., died at Quaker Hill Hospital, Oct. 19, 1777(?); Alexander Robert, Capt. George Calhoun's Co., 4th Pa., Nov. 6, 1778; James Tryer, Capt. James Lang's Co., 5th Pa., Oct. 22, 1778; Peter King, 1st Pa., enlisted 1777, Quaker Hill Hospital, N. J.(?) 1778 (no such hospital).

"Some doubt may exist as to two of these, but as the hospital is named, an error may exist in copying the original record."

[19] "Dutchess County in Colonial Days," 1898, and "Dutchess County," 1899, papers read before the Dutchess County Society, in the City of New York, by Hon. Alfred T. Ackert. Also, "History of Dutchess County," by James H. Smith.

[20] See pp. 20 and 21.

[21] See "New York Mercury," July 28, 1766, August 18 and 25, 1766, September 15, 1766. See also "Dutchess County," by Alfred T. Ackert, 1899, p. 5.

[22] See Appendix B.

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

[24] The narrative of Vaughn is gleaned from old residents, Almira Briggs Treadwell, Archibald Dodge, Jane Crane, and others.

[25] "Washington Headquarters at Fredricksburgh," by L. S. Patrick; Quaker Hill Series, 1907.

[26] This matter is very fully treated in "Washington's Headquarters at Fredericksburgh," by Lewis S. Patrick. Quaker Hill Conference Local History Series, XVI. 1907.

[27] See No. III, Quaker Hill Series, pp. 12, 42, and No. VIII, pp. 16, 17.

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

[29] "Washington Headquarters at Fredricksburgh," by L. S. Patrick, 1907.



PART II.

The Transition.



CHAPTER I.

COMMUNICATION—THE ROADS.

The roads were originally bridle paths, and to this day many a stretch of road testifies in its steep grade to its use in the days of the pack saddle. No driver of a wheeled vehicle would have selected so abrupt a slope.

In the early days the roads had a north and south direction. In the Period of Transition, with the diversion of commerce to the railroad in Pawling, the roads of an east and west direction became the principal roads, though the one great Quaker Hill highway north and south is still the avenue of communication on the Hill.

As the years passed wagons were used; indeed, by the time of the Revolution, in the second generation, they were bearing all the transportation. The state of the roads is shown, however, by the fact that Daniel Merritt was accustomed to pay, in 1772, L1, or $5, for carting four barrels of beef to the river; that is, about 1,000 lbs. constituted a load. At the present state of the country roads, a Quaker Hill employer would expect 2,000 lbs. to make a load. The state of the roads before the turnpikes were made, that is, before 1800 to 1825, is described by a resident as follows: "The road was so full of stones, large and small, that people of to-day would consider impassable for an empty wagon, to say nothing of drawing a load over it. In the fall of the year it is said that toward evening one could hear the hammering of the wheels of the wagons on the stones of the road a distance of four or five miles."[30]

I cannot learn that Quaker Hill was during the Quaker Period on any main line of country travel. Marquis De Chastelleux records in his "Travels in North America," that he journeyed in 1789 to Moorehouse's Tavern (see Map I) along the Ten Mile River, two or three miles from the Housatonic to "several handsome houses forming part of the district known as The Oblong. The inn I was going to is in the Oblong, but two miles farther on. It is kept by Col. Moorehouse, for nothing is more common in America than to see an inn kept by a colonel ... the most esteemed and most creditable citizen." There was no inn on Quaker Hill and no colonel. The Quaker aversion to military titles was then as great as to the sale of rum. The houses referred to by the French traveller were probably the northern boundary of the Quaker community, at what is now Webatuck. I cannot find record of any post road coming nearer than this, until in the 19th century a stage was maintained between Poughkeepsie and New Milford, by way of Quaker Hill, making the journey every other day, and stopping at John Toffey's store at Site 53.

The building of turnpikes became, in the years following 1800, a popular form of public spirit. Says Miss Taber: "In fact, turnpikes seemed to be a fad in those days all over the state and probably a necessary one. The longest one I learn of in this part of the country was from Cold Spring on the Hudson River to New Milford in Connecticut. The turnpike in which the people of this neighborhood were most interested was the one incorporated April 3, 1818, and reads, 'That Albro Akin, John Merritt, Gideon Slocum, Job Crawford, Charles Hurd, William Taber, Joseph Arnold, Egbert Carey, Gabriel L. Vanderburgh, Newel Dodge, Jnrs., and such other persons as shall associate for the purpose of making a good and sufficient turnpike road in Dutchess Co.' It was named as the Pawlings and Beekman Turnpike, being a portion of what is known as the Poughkeepsie road passing over the West Mountain, but we do not find that anything was done until after the act was revived in 1824, when Joseph C. Seeley, Benoni Pearce, Samuel Allen, Benjamin Barr and George W. Slocum were associated with them."

The Pawlings and Beekman Turnpike maintained a tollgate till 1905, when it was burned down; and the company, which had long discussed its discontinuance, then abandoned its private rights in that excellent stretch of road. The turnpike which crossed Quaker Hill ended at the Jephtha Sabin residence, known to the present generation as "the Garry Ferris place," Site 74. The roads of the neighborhood were the same in 1778-80 as at the present day, as will be seen from a comparison of Map I, made by Erskine for Washington, and Map 2, which is a copy of the U. S. Survey; except the road from Mizzen-Top Hotel to Hammersley Lake, made after the hotel was erected. The comparison of maps shows also, to one who knows the use of these roads, that they have changed from a north and south use to an east and west use; the highway on the northward slope of the Hill in Dover, and on the southward slope in Patterson, being but little used to-day. The road from the Meeting House and cemetery westward, which was once much favored, is now scarcely ever used, and being neglected by the authorities, is little more than a stony gutter.

The whole character of the neighborhood was changed by a revolution in transportation. Not turnpikes effected the change, but railroads. The early years of the nineteenth century were filled with expectation of new modes of travel. Robert Fulton was building his steamboat amid the derision of his contemporaries, and to their amazement steaming up the Hudson against the tide. At first canals seemed to country folk the solution of their problem. They occupied in the dawn of the 19th century the place which trolley cars occupy in the minds of promoters to-day. A canal was planned to run through the Harlem valley, where now Pawling stands, and Quaker Hill men were among the promoters of it, among them Daniel Akin and Johnathan Akin Taber.

Presently, however, came the promotion of railroads, and many of the same men who had favored the canals, entered heartily into the new projects. The foundation of Albert Akin's fortune was made when, about 1830, he began to borrow money of his neighbors and invest in the rapidly growing lines of steam-cars in New York State. There were those, however, who foresaw dire things from the new iron highway, and old residents tell of "one man who said that whosoever farm that locomotive passed through would have to give up fatting cattle, as it would be impossible to keep a steer on the place."

For many years the railroad came no nearer than Croton Falls. Richard Osborn used to tell the story of one resident of the Hill who boasted that he could go to New York and return the same day. This he finally attempted and accomplished by driving with a good pair of horses to Croton Falls in the morning, taking an early train to New York, returning in the evening, and driving home before night. This story, which is well authenticated, proves the good condition of some of the roads before 1849, for the drive to Croton Falls is about twenty miles. Among leading Quaker Hill residents who promoted railroads in the valley were Jonathan Akin, Daniel D. Akin, J. Akin Taber, John and Albert J. Akin. The two men who were most influential in completing the last link of the road—from the local viewpoint—were Albert Akin and Hon. John Ketcham, of Dover, both recently deceased. They supplied cash for the continuation of the road from Croton Falls to Dover Plains. To Mr. Akin the promise was made that if he would supply a building for a station the road would place an eating house at the point nearest Quaker Hill. There was then no such village or hamlet as Pawling, the locality being known as "Goosetown." Patterson was an old village, west of its present business center one mile, and was known as Fredericksburgh. Dover also was a place of distinction in the country-side. Mr. Akin, with several yoke of oxen, hauled a dwelling to the railroad track from the site on which Washington's Headquarters stood in 1778; and thus was initiated the settlement of the village which is now among the most thriving on the road.



At that time Quaker Hill was the most prosperous community for many miles around. A description of its industries will be found elsewhere, in Chap. IV, Part I. The coming of the railroad changed the whole aspect of things. The demand for milk to be delivered by farmers at the railroad station every day, and sold the next day in New York, began at once. It soon became the most profitable occupation for the farmers and the most profitable freight for the railroad. Eleven years after the first train entered Pawling came the war, with inflated prices. The farmer found that no use of his land paid him so much cash as the "making of milk," and thereafter the raising of flax ceased, grain was cultivated less and less, except as it was to be used in the feeding of cattle, and even the fatting of cattle soon had to yield to the lowered prices occasioned by the importation of beef from western grazing lands. The making of butter and cheese, with the increased cost of labor on the farms, was abandoned, that the milk might be sold in bulk to the city middleman. The time had not come, however, in which farmers or their laborers imported condensed milk, or used none. Quaker Hill farmers lived too generously and substantially for that; but they ceased, during the Civil War, when milk was bought "at the platform" for six cents a quart, to make butter or cheese.

Thus the Harlem Railroad transformed Quaker Hill from a community of diversified farming, producing, manufacturing, selling, consuming, sufficient unto itself, into a locality of specialized farming. Its market had been Poughkeepsie, twenty-eight miles away, over high hills and indifferent roads. Its metropolis became New York City, sixty-two miles away by rail and four to eight miles by wagon road.

With the railroad's coming the isolated homogeneous community scattered. The sons of the Quakers emigrated. Laborers from Ireland and other European lands, even negroes from Virginia, took their places. New Yorkers became residents on the Hill, which became the farthest terminus of suburban traffic. The railroad granted commuters' rates to Pawling, and twice as many trains as to any station further out. The population of the Hill became diversified, while industries became simplified. In the first century the people were one, the industries many. In the Period of the Mixed Community, in the second century, the people were many and the industries but one. I speak elsewhere of these elements of the mixed community. Suffice it to have traced here the simplifying of the economic life of the Hill, by the influence of the railroad, which made the neighborhood only one factor in a vaster industrial community, of which New York was the center. When the Meeting House and the Merritt store were for a century the centers of a homogeneous Quaker community, it was a solid unit, of one type, doing varied things; when Wall Street and Broadway became the social and industrial centers, a varied people, no less unified, did but one thing.

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



CHAPTER II.

ECONOMIC CHANGES.

The transition from the mixed or diversified farming of the Quaker community to the special and particular farming of the mixed community is written in the growth of the dairy industry, which in the year 1900 was the one industry of the Hill. In 1800 dairy products were only beginning to emerge from a place in the list of products of the Quaker Hill lands to a single and special place as the only product of salable value. While the Hill people constituted a community dependent on itself and sufficient unto itself, the exceptional fitness of the "heavy clay soil" to the production of milk, butter and cheese did not assert itself, and wheat, rye, flax, apples, potatoes were raised in large quantities and sold; but in the period of opening communication with the world in general, exactly in proportion as the Hill shared in the growth of commerce, by so much did the dairy activities supplant all other occupations. The order of this emergence is a significant commentary upon the opening of roads and the development of transportation. The stages are: first, cheese and butter; second, fat cattle; and third, milk. At the end of the Quaker community, when the best roads were of the east and west directions, and Poughkeepsie was the market-place, cheese and butter were made for a "money crop," by the women, who retained the money for their own use.

There is a story told in the Taber and Shove families, which prettily shows the customs in the Quaker century. Anne Taber, wife of Thomas Taber, substantial pioneer at the north end of the Hill, "had a fine reputation as a cheese maker." Being a New England woman, she was of the few who in Revolutionary days were in sympathy with the Colonies, and she gave forth that she would present a cheese to the first general officer who should visit the neighborhood. "One day, being summoned to the door," writes one of her descendants, "she was greatly surprised to find a servant of General Washington, with a note from him claiming, under conditions of the promise, the cheese. Of course it was sent, and the General had opportunity to test her skill in that domestic art."[31]

The Taber family did not preserve that note; but in the Treasury Department of the United States, among Washington's memoranda of expenditures, is the item under date of Nov. 6, 1778, "To Cash paid servant for bringing cheese from Mr. Taber, 16 shillings." It would seem that the fame of Anne Taber's cheeses had won her a market with the officers at Headquarters, for sixteen shillings was payment "for bringing cheese" in large quantity, and the date is six weeks after the arrival of Washington for his stay in the vicinity.

In the ledger of the Merritt store, under date of Nov. 6, 1772, Thomas Taber, Esq., is credited as follows: "By 29 cheses wd. 484 lb. at 6d., L12 2s." In that year Thomas Taber, Esq., satisfied his account with an ox, L6 16s.; cash, L10; three pounds and nine ounces of old pewter, 4s. 6d.; seven hogs, L20 11s. 6d., and the above 29 cheeses. So that approximately one-fourth of the "money crop" of this substantial farmer was in the form of a dairy product. In the year 1895, the average Quaker Hill farm was producing, as will be shown in Chapter III, Part III, ninety per cent. of dairy product, namely milk.

The second phase of the industry proper to Quaker Hill was that of raising fat cattle. This culminated at the end of the period of the Quaker Community. In this industry were laid the foundations of some large fortunes. It brought in its day more money into the neighborhood than any other occupation had ever brought. It disappeared with the coming of the railroad into the valley, bringing, in refrigerator cars, meat from western lands, and killed in Chicago. Then the cattle were fattened on these hills, in the rich grass, and driven to New York to be killed and sold there.

In "Some Glimpses of the Past," Miss Taber says: "But the chief business of most farmers was the fatting of cattle. The cattle were generally bought when from two to three years old, usually in the fall, kept through the winter and the following summer fattened and sold. They were the only things that did not have to go to the river to reach the market. From all over the country they were driven to New York on foot, and the road through the valley was the main thoroughfare for them. Monday was the market day in New York and all started in time to reach the city by Saturday. From Pawling the cattle were started on Thursday, and those from greater distances planned to reach this part of their journey on that day. It used to be said that the dealers could tell what the market would be in New York on the following Monday by watching the cattle that passed through Pawling on Thursday. The cattle were collected and taken to the city by drovers; theirs was a great business in those days. Hotels or taverns were provided for their accommodation at frequent intervals along the road. Ira Griffin was a drover and Mr. Archibald Dodge remembers when a boy going to New York with him and his cattle, walking all the way. There were also droves of cattle other than fat ones, on the road, some called store cattle, and the books of Mr. Benjamin V. Haviland, who kept one of the taverns, show that in the year 1847 there had been kept on his place 27,784 cattle, 30,000 sheep and 700 mules, and it is said that occasionally there would be 2,000 head between his tavern and that of John Preston's in Dover. When Mr. Albert J. Akin was a young man he was considered an expert judge and buyer of steers for fattening, and generally had the finest herd of fat cattle."

This reference is to the business at its height and applies to the years 1800-1850. In the books of John Toffey's store are frequent references to the business.

Interesting material is furnished for the study of the period of transition, in the records of the store kept by John Toffey at Site No. 53. These old day-books and ledgers are incomplete, but they cover spaces of time in the years 1814, 1824, 1833; and their account of the purchases made by John Toffey's customers furnishes a record, we may suppose, of the goods brought into the households on the Hill at that time, from other communities; as well as the actual exchange of commodities on the Hill, where at that time diversified industries were carried on.

The growth of trade in these respects, from the period 1814-1816 to the period 1824-1833 will be considered in four lines, as it is exhibited in the commodities: first of Costume, second of Food and Medicine, and third of Tools and Material for Industry, fourth, of House-furnishings. It is assumed that John Toffey kept a representative store, and that the growth in his trade corresponded to the growth in the commercial interchange in the community.

In 1814-1816 the imported goods kept and sold by John Toffey are cloth (perhaps in part locally manufactured), indigo, thread, cambric, penknives, knitting needles, spelled "nittenneedels," plaster, fine salt, molasses, tea, apple-trees, nutmeg, shad and occasionally other fish. The list is brief, and its proportion to the other commodities sold in the store evidences the simplicity of a community dependent chiefly upon itself, and living a life of rudeness and content.

Among prices which change in the twenty years recorded in John Toffey's books are those of molasses which was in 1814-1816 $2.00 per gallon, and fell to $1.25 and in 1824 to 35c. per gallon. "Tobago" was sold in 1814 at $2.75 per pound, and later for 62c. Flour was sold in 1814 for $18 per barrel, or 9c. per pound; wool hats at $4; fine salt 10c. per pound; plaster $3.25 per hundredweight; boots at $9.00; tea at $2.75 per pound.

A day's work for a man in 1814-1816 was from $1.00 per day for ordinary work, to $1.25 for driving oxen, or $1.50 for "digging a grave," or the same amount "for going after the thief."

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

One may explain the high rates of many of these commodities, and the relatively high rate paid for labor by the prevalence of war prices at the time. Commodities such as molasses would be expensive as a result of the stoppage of sea-trade; and the labor market was exhausted to supply the army with soldiers.

In 1824 Toffey imported, for Costuming, shawls, crepe at $1 per yard, silk, skein-silk, twist, ribbon, velvet at 90c. per yard, drab-cloth, flannel, braid, handkerchiefs, buttons and button-moulds, gloves, suspenders, calico, vest patterns, pins, chrome-yellow, "bearskin" at 82c. per yard, dress handkerchiefs, beads, buckles, silk flags and morocco skins.

Of new foods he imported molasses at 35c. per gallon, oranges at 2c. each, which he seems to have sold only one by one, sugar at 6c., tobacco at 12c., alum, tea at 85c., salt at $1 per bushel, pepper, all-spice, raisins, salt-peter, pearlash, castile soap, hard soap, paregoric, ginger, logwood, vitriol, cinnamon, snuff, sulphur, cloves, mustard, opium, coffee, loaf sugar, watermelons, and seeds for beets, lettuce, parsnips.

Of House-furnishings, he had for sale, knives, forks—one set of knives and forks selling for $13, plates, bowls, pitchers, mugs, teacups, teapots, decanters, almanacs, brooms, oilcloth, glass and putty, inkstands, bedsteads, spoons in sets, sugar-bowls, tin pans.

Of Tools and Materials for Industry he sold nails by the "paper," by the hundred and by the pound, files, oil at 75c. a gallon, locks, slates, paper, pocket-books, pencils, turpentine, raw steel and iron, spectacles at 34c., sandpaper, shovels and spades, screws, gimlets.

Rum, brandy and gin appear also, with powder, shot and fishhooks, as tributes to the convivial and adventurous spirit. But the convivial spirits were the better patrons, for there was scarcely an entry in certain years in which was not an item of alcoholic spirits. The sporting goods were only occasionally purchased.

In 1833 for Costuming, cotton-batting had appeared, and canton flannel, canvas, blue jeans at 83c. per yard, brown Holland, cloth at $3.64 per yard, hats at 44c. each, hooks and eyes, pearl buttons at 10c. a dozen, side combs, bandanna handkerchiefs; while sole-leather was still sold in quantity, with buckskin mittens, which were scarcely made on the Hill.

For Industry, behold the arrival of pincers, gum arabic, "Pittsburgh cord" at 21c. per yard. In Housings, candles, frying pans, tin pails, dippers, tin basins, wash-tubs made their appearance; and in this year for the first time window-blinds were sold, for 75c.

For Food and Medicines John Toffey offered at this time codfish, coffee, souchong tea, crackers, castor oil, camphor gum, Epsom salts.

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

The growth of trade in John Toffey's store is summarized in Table I. In this table may be seen also the growth of economic demand. The increase of the number of kinds of commodities in each evidences the acquirement of varied tastes by this people of the Hill.

TABLE I. JOHN TOFFEY'S STORE. - - Commodities 1814-16 1824 1833 - - Costume 5 25 38 Food and Medicine 5 29 36 Tools and Materials 5 18 21 House Furnishings 18 24 - - Daily Wage $1.-$1.50 65c.-75c. - -

The above summary of the importations to the Hill in the years 1814-1833 casts light upon the social and religious history of the period in question; in which occurred the greatest social convulsion this community has ever known. In the year 1828 the Religious Society of the Friends was divided, never to be united, the integrity of the community as a social and religious unit was ended, the ties of a century were severed, and instead of the "unity" of which Quakers are always so conscious, came mutual criticism, recrimination, and excommunication of one-half of the community by the majority of the Meeting. Thus ended the communal life of Quaker Hill, and began the disintegration of the community which is now almost complete.

It is true that this schism was general throughout the denomination, in all the United States; and that it was shared in its doctrinal influences by the Congregational churches, the Unitarian Association having been formed in Boston in 1825. But nevertheless it had roots on Quaker Hill in an economic condition; and that economic condition may have been general throughout the Eastern States.

Let the doctrinal causes of this schism be considered elsewhere.[32] Economic causes are hinted at in the above paragraphs. There came in many embellishments of life which must have seemed to early Friends mere luxuries, and to the stricter few must have appeared instruments of sin, as "beads," "ribbons," velvet, silk, braid, crepe, shawls, dress handkerchiefs, buckles, silk flags, pearl buttons—these are expressions of new states of mind. The economic change underlying the social convulsion is seen in the increase of varied stuffs for costume, articles and materials for the food and medicine cupboards of the farmhouses, and in more varied tools and materials both for industry and house furnishing.

Even more influential than the exciting power of luxuries would be the quieter and more pervasive stimulus of comfort. Houses that are glazed and ceiled and furnished with well adapted implements in every room; tables set with all the wares of leisurely and pleasurable feeding speak a new state of affairs. The people so clothed and so fed begin to produce in every family some members of cultured tastes, some of independent thought, who are restive under the denials of Quakerism.

Business and industry too become more varied; and the effect of this prosperous and varied industry shows itself in active and critical minds. Importation from places beyond Poughkeepsie awakened imagination and invited reflection upon the state of the world.

All this time the daily wage continued to fall, from $1 and $1.50 in 1814 to 50c., 65c. and 75c. in 1833. It is said that men bitterly commented, in those days of the rapid development of the country, that a farmer who paid a laborer fifty cents for a day's labor in the hay-field from daybreak to dark, would pay the same amount, fifty cents, for his supper on the Hudson River boat, when he made his annual visit to the great city of New York.

We have, then, in John Toffey's daybook a reflection of conditions which had to do with the break-up of the community, as truly as did the theological difference between Elias Hicks and the Orthodox. Comfortable living, diversified and intensified industry, importation of expensive and stimulating comforts, leisure with its sources in wealth, and its tendencies toward reflection, and especially a differentiation of the homogeneous community into diverse classes, owing to lowered wages and multiplied embellishments of life, made up altogether the raw materials of discontent, criticism and division.

These factors go with a state of growing discontent and disintegration. The men and women possessed of leisure cultivated a humanist state of mind, with which arose a critical spirit, a nicer taste and a cultured discrimination. They were offended by literalism, bored by crudeness however much in earnest, and disgusted with the illogical assertions of pietists. The imperative mandate of the meeting awakened in them only opposition. They found many to sympathize with their state of mind.

On the other side there were those who seriously feared the incoming of luxurious ways. They distrusted books, remembering the values of one Book to the laborer who reads it alone; they believed in plainness, and their minds associated freedom of dress with freedom of thought. They resented also the new privileges conferred on some by wealth, because to most had come only harder work with discontent.

The schism which rent the community was an economic heresy, the belief in the use of money for embellishment of life. All the Quakers regarded with favor the making of money. The Liberals, however, saw ends beyond money, and processes of ultimate value beyond administration and business. They looked for household comforts, books, travel, and the leisure with great souls who have written and have expressed the greatest truths. They believed in a divinity such as could have made, and regarded with favor, the whole teeming world.

The Orthodox saw the values of prosperity only in plainness of life, recognized no divinity in humanized manners, and sternly but ineffectually called the community back to idealized commonplaceness, and to hear the utterances of rude ploughmen and cobblers in the name of Deity.

One ventures to believe, too, that there was a falling away from all religious exercises at this time, and that the pious of both schools were troubled about it, and accused one another. The poor were too hard worked and too poorly paid to feel anything but discontent; and the leaders of the community differed as to the solution of the religious problem. Hence came division.

The Quakers are conscious of religious "unity," but their mode of life is a true economic unity. The Quaker Community was re-arranging itself economically, but the members felt a religious change. Class division was coming upon them, and they felt it as a sectarian division. It was indeed the end of the old community ruled by religion, and the formation of a new neighborhood life; a new Quakerism, ruled by economic classes: the persons of influence being invariably persons of means, and the dominating leaders rich. Doubtless the Quakers who led in the Division of 1828 hoped, in each party equally, to maintain the old religious domination. The community has never granted that leadership to the divided Meeting, neither to the Orthodox, nor to the Hicksites. The real power has, since a period antedating the division, been in the hands of those who have owned farms centrally located; who in addition to owning land centrally located have been possessed of large means: the "rich men" and "wealthy women" have possessed a monopoly of actual leadership. If also, they have been religiously inclined, their leadership has been absolute.

[31] "Thomas Taber and Edward Shove—a Reminiscence," by Rev. Benjamin Shove; Quaker Hill Series, 1903.

[32] The matter is fully treated in "Quaker Hill in the Nineteenth Century," by Rev. Warren H. Wilson; Quaker Hill Series of Local History No. IV.



CHAPTER III.

RELIGIOUS LIFE IN TRANSITION.

In religion the solidarity of this country place has been best shown in the fact that, during most of its history, it has had but one church at a time. For one hundred years there was the undivided meeting. From 1828 to 1885 the Hicksite—Unitarian, branch of the Friends held the Old Meeting House, with diminishing numbers. The Orthodox had their smaller meeting house around the corner, attended by decreasing gatherings. In 1880 was organized Akin Hall, in which till 1892 were held religious services in the summer only. Since that time religious services have been held there all the year round. The early united meeting had a membership of probably two hundred, and audiences of three hundred were not uncommon.

The church in Akin Hall, named "Christ's Church, Quaker Hill," had in 1898 a membership of sixty-five, and audiences of fifty to two hundred and fifty, according to the occasion and the time of year. In the past the general attitude of the community toward religion has been reverent and sympathetic. It is no less so to-day.

Of religious ceremonies the Quakers claim to have none. But they are fond of ceremoniousness beyond most men. The very processes by which they abolish forms are made formal processes. They have ceremonies the intent of which is to free them from ceremony. The meeting is called to order by acts ever so simple, and dismissed by two old persons shaking hands; but these are invariable and formal as a doxology and a benediction. They receive a stranger in their own way. A visiting minister is honored with fixed propriety. An expelled member is read out of meeting with stated excommunicatory maledictions.

Worship has had on Quaker Hill a large place in characterizing the social complexion of the people. By this, I mean that the peculiarities of the Quaker worship, now a thing of the past, have engraved themselves upon character. Those peculiarities are four: the custom of silence; the non-employment of music, or conspicuous color or form; the separate place provided for women; the assertion and practice of individualism.

The silence of the Quaker meeting is far from negative. It is not a mere absence of words. It is a discipline enforced upon the lower elements of human nature, and a reserve upon the intellectual elements, in order that God may speak. I think that in this silence of the meeting we discover the working of the force that has moulded individual character on Quaker Hill and organized the social life. For this silence is a vivid experience, "a silence that may be felt." The presence and influence of men are upon one, even if that of God be not. The motionless figures about one subtly penetrate one's consciousness, though not through the senses. They testify to their belief in God when they do not speak better than they could with rhetoric or eloquence. It is the influence of many, not of one; yet of certain leaders who are the organs of this impression, and of the human entity made of many who in communion become one. The self-control of it breathes power, and principle, and courage. One would expect a Quaker meeting to exert an imperious rule upon the community. It is an expression of the majesty of an ideal. I believe that the Quaker Hill meeting has been able to accomplish whatever it has put its hand to do. The only pity is that the meeting tried to do so little.

The original religious influence of Quakerism, carried through all changes and transformation, was a pure and relentless individualism. It was the doctrine that the Spirit of God is in every heart of man, absolutely every one; resisted indeed by some, but given to each and all. With honest consistency it must be said, the Quakers applied this—and this it was they did apply—to the status of women, to the question of slavery, to the civic relations of men. This it was that made Fox and Penn refuse to doff their hats before judge, or titled lord, or the king himself.

The character of the common mind of the community has been much influenced by the fact that the Quakers made no use of color, form and music either in worship or in private life; that they also idealized the absence of these. They made it a matter of noble devotion. In nothing do local traditions abound more than in stories of the stern repression of the aesthetic instincts. One ancient Quakeress, coming to the well-set table at a wedding, in the old days, beheld there a bunch of flowers of gay colors, and would not sit down until they were removed. Nor could the feast go on until the change was effected. So great was the power of authority, working in the grooves of "making believe," that those who might have tolerated the bouquet in silence, as well as those who had sensations of pleasure in it, supported her opposition.

I have spoken elsewhere of the effect of this century-long repression and ignoring of the aesthetic movements of the human spirit, in banking the fires of literary culture in this population. The present generation, all inheriting the examples of ancestors ruled in such unflinching rigor, has in none of its social grouping any true sense of color or of the beauty of color. Neither in the garments of those who have laid off the Quaker garb, nor in the decorations of the houses is there a lively sense of the beauty of color. None of the women of Quaker extraction has a sense of color in dress; nor can any of them match or harmonize colors. I except, of course, those whose clothing is directly under the control of the city tailor or milliner. The general effect of costume and of the decorations of a room, in the population who get their living on the Hill, is that of gray tones, and drab effects; not mere severity is the effect, but poverty and want of color.

In forms of beauty they know and feel little more. I do not refer to the lack of appreciation of the elevations and slopes of this Hill itself—a constant delight to the artistic eye. Farmers and laborers might fail to appreciate a scene known to them since childhood. But there is in the Quaker breeding, which gives on certain sides of character so true and fine a culture a conspicuous lack in this one particular.

As to music, even that of simplest melody, it has come to the Hill, but it "knows not Joseph." An elderly son of Quakerism said: "You will find no Quaker or son of the Quakers who can sing; if you do find one who can sing a little, it will be a limited talent, and you will unfailingly discover that he is partly descended from the world's people."

The effect of this aesthetic negation appears, it seems to the present writer, in a certain rudeness or more precisely a certain lack in the domain of manners, outside of the interests in which Quakerism has given so fine a culture. This appears to be keenly felt by the descendants of Friends. Not in business matters; for they are made directors of savings banks and corporations, and trustees, and referees, and executors of estates, in all which places they find themselves at home. Nor is it a lack of dignity and composure in the parlor or at the table. Nor is it a lack of sense of propriety in meetings of worship. But it is in matters ethical, civic and deliberate, and in the free and discursive meetings of men, in which new and intricate questions are to arise; in positions of trust, in which the highest considerations of social responsibility constitute the trust; in these, the men and women trained in Quakerism are lacking throughout whole areas of the mind, and lacking, too, in ethical standards, which can only appeal to those whose experience has fed on a rich diversity of sources and distinctions.

In this I speak only of the Quaker group and of those who have been under its full influence. It does not apply to the Irish Catholics, nor to the incomers from the city. The Quakers and their children lack precisely those elements of aesthetic breeding which would be legitimately derived from contemplation and enjoyment of beauty aside from ethical values. Ethical beauty, divorced from pure beauty, a stern, bare, grim beauty they have, and their children and employees have. But they have little sense of order in matters that do not proceed to the ends of money-making, housekeeping and worship. They do not seem to possess instinctive fertility of moral resource. It may be due to other sources as well, but it seems to the present writer that the moral density shown by some of these birthright Quakers, upon matters outside of their wonted and trodden ethical territories, is due to their long refusal to recognize aesthetic values, and to see discriminations in the field in which ethics and aesthetics are interwoven.

They made red and purple to be morally wrong, idealizing the plainness of their uncultured ancestry, and sweet sounds they excluded from their ears, declaring them to be evil noises, because they would set up the boorishness of simple folk of old time as something noble and exalted, "making believe" that such aesthetic lack was real self-denial and unworldliness. It is not surprising that in a riper age of the world, after lifetimes of this idealization of peasant states of mind, their children find themselves morally and mentally unprepared for the responsibilities of citizenship, of high ethical trust and of the varied ways of a moral world, whose existence their fathers made believe to ignore and deny.

Women have always occupied in Quakerism a place theoretically equal to that of the men, in business and religious affairs. George Fox and his successors declared men and women equal, inasmuch as the Divine Spirit is in every human soul.

After the influence of the early Friends ceased, the place of woman began to be circumscribed by new rules, and crystallized in a reaction under the influence of purely social forces; so that this most sensible people made women equal to men in meetings and in religious legislation through a form of sexual taboo.

Following the custom of many early English meeting houses, the men and women sat apart, the men on one side of the middle aisle, and the women on the other, so that men and women were not equals in the individualist sense, as they are for instance, in the practice and theory of Socialism, but were equals in separate group-life; to each sex, grouped apart from the other, equal functions were supposed to be delegated. Oblong Meeting House, on Quaker Hill, had seats for two hundred and fifty people on the ground floor, and in the gallery for one hundred and fifty more. The men's side was separated from the women's, of equal size and extent, by wooden curtains, which could be raised or lowered; so that the whole building could be one auditorium, with galleries; or the curtains could be so lowered that no man on the ground floor could see any woman unless she be a speaker on the "facing seats"; nor could any young person in the gallery see any one of the opposite sex; yet a speaker could be heard in all parts. The curtains could be so fixed, also, that two independent meetings could be held, each in a separate auditorium, even the speakers being separated from one another.

It was the custom for women to have delegated to them certain religious functions, at Monthly Meeting and Quarterly and Yearly Meetings, on which they deliberated, before submitting them to the whole meeting. This old Oblong Meeting House is a mute record and symbol of the century-old contest of the Puritan spirit among the old Quakers, striving for an inflexibly right relation between the sexes. They attained their ends through the creation of a community, but not until the community dissolved.

The position of woman among Friends is another eloquent tribute to the two-fold "dealing" of Quakerism with women. She is man's equal, but she is man's greatest source of danger. She must be on a par with him, but she must be apart from him. The relations of men and women are therefore very interesting. In doctrinal matters, in discussion, in preaching and "testifying," men and women are equal, and the respect that a man has for his wife or sister or neighbor woman, in these functions of a devout sort is like that he has for another man. Generally the men of the Quaker school of influence believe as a matter of course in the intellectual and juristic equality of women with men; and in the religious equality of the individual woman with the individual man. But in the practical arts and in business a woman is a woman and a man is a man. Here the women are restricted by convention to housekeeping, which on large farms is quite enough for them; and the men have the outdoor life, the "trading," and the gainful occupations—except the boarding of city people. There is no especial respect for the "managing woman" who "runs a farm"; the community expects such a woman to fail.

Moreover, between the sexes there is no camaraderie, no companionship of an intellectual sort between husband and wife, no free exchange of ideas except in circles made up of the members of one sex. In any public meeting the men habitually sit apart from their wives and from the women members of their families, even though the audiences be not bilaterally halved.

The orbits of man's and woman's lives are separate, though each ascribes to the individuals of the other sex an ethical and religious parity. The effect is seen in the diminishing of the numbers of men on the Hill, in the group-life of the women, and in the type of woman. It may be well to consider these in reverse order.

The individual Quaker Hill woman, so far as she differs from women generally, may be described as a woman almost perfectly conformed to type, presenting fewer variations than elsewhere, either in the form of youthful prettinesses and follies, or in the strenuous opinion of mature years. She is neither a flirt as a girl, nor a radical as a woman. Color has not yet come into her maidenly days, nor violence of opinion into her womanly years. She affects neither fashion nor intellectual eccentricity. Yet she attains to a better average of reasonable, sensible action than she could otherwise do. She knows less of the impulsive, emotional prettiness of adolescence than women of other country communities, and in later years gives herself less to intellectual vagaries. Women's rights are established on the Hill; it is impossible to be strenuous about them.

The numerous groupings and associations of women are especially interesting in view of the fact that the men of the Hill have no associations whatever, now that the stores are closed; and are assembled in no fixed groupings. It has never been possible, so far as records go, to maintain a society of men on the Hill. In the early part of the period under study a literary and debating society was organized, with social attractions; but it was feeble and short-lived. There are not enough leaders among the men to make such group-life possible. They are related by ties of labor, rather than of class-fraternity; and they have never acquired any interest common to their sex to assemble them in groups and companies; the discipline of the religion known to the Hill has discouraged and outlawed it.

This contrast may have something to do with the departure of men from the Hill. So long as the stores were in operation, at Toffey's, Akin's, and Merritt's places, the men could meet there, and had in their assembling a natural group-life, which satisfied many with life in the country. But with the closing of the stores after the coming of the railroad in 1849, this also failed, and the men having no capacity for general association with one another, and few interests possessed in common with the women, have been the more impelled to leave the Hill. Economic advantage had only to be as good elsewhere, and the man emigrated. I have not known those who have left the place, in my knowledge of it, to give as a reason inability to make a good living there; but always they have spoken most emphatically of the bareness and lack of interest in the social life of the Hill as their reason for emigrating to the city or large town.



Part III.

The Mixed Community, from 1880 to the Present.



CHAPTER I.

DEMOTIC COMPOSITION.

There are ninety-three dwellings on Quaker Hill, as defined above, and illustrated in Map II. The shaded area alone is referred to here as the area proper to the term "Quaker Hill." In these dwellings live four hundred and five persons. This gives a density of population of 26.667 per square mile. In the summer months of July and August there come to the Hill at least five hundred and nineteen more, increasing the density of population to more than 61 per square mile.

There is a steady emigration from the Hill, due to the departure of working-people and their families in search of better economic opportunities. This has in ten years removed thirty-nine persons. Death has removed or occasioned the removal of twenty-seven more, while only three have been removed by marriage.

Over against this there has been an immigration in the years 1895-1905 of thirty persons; of whom eleven have come in to labor, and nineteen for residence on their own property.

There were resident in 1905 on Quaker Hill the following social-economic classes: Professional men, three; one minister, two artists; wealthy business men, three; farmers, thirty-eight; laborers, forty (heads of houses).

There were fifty-three births in ten years, 1895-1905, of which fourteen were in the families of property-owners, and thirty-nine in families of tenants. There were in these ten years thirty-one deaths, of which twenty-five were in the families of property-owners, and only six in those of tenants. Thus the tenant class, bound to the community by no ties of property, contributed 73 per cent. of the births and only 20 per cent. of the deaths, while the property holders suffered 80 per cent. of the deaths and were increased by only 26.4 per cent. of the births. The number of persons in the families of property holders in 1905 was 184, and in those of tenants 221. These are as one to one and one-fifth. This difference is not enough to account for the great disparity in births and deaths between the two classes of families. For, allowing for this difference, births are two and one-third times as numerous in the working and landless class as among the landowners; and deaths are almost three and a half times as many among the landholders as among their servants and tenants.

The present population of the Hill is of a composition which is explainable by migration, and by the effect of the topography of the Hill upon that population. There is every evidence that before the coming of the railroad in 1849 the population was unified, and the community freer of neighborhood groupings. The lists of customers who traded at Daniel Merritt's store, given in Appendix B of this volume, indicates the centering on the Hill of a wide economic life. Every record and tradition of a religious sort indicates that the Oblong Meeting House was also the center of a religious community as wide-spread as the business of the stores. The Hill was one neighborhood until 1828, when the Division of the Meeting occurred; and 1849, when the railroad came to Pawling. It is not now one neighborhood. Three groupings of households may be discerned, roughly designated "The North End," "Quaker Hill Proper," and "Wing's Corners." The second of these, being the territory most under scrutiny in Part III, might again be divided into the territory "up by the Meeting House," and that "down by Mizzen-Top." The difficulty one experiences in naming these groupings of houses is a token of the indefiniteness of these divisions. They are accentuated by events occurring in the more recent history of the Hill. The older history which shapes the consciousness of the community does not know these neighborhood divisions. Yet the change of the emphasis of travel to the roads running east and west, from those north and south, has separated these neighborhoods from one another. "The North End," therefore, is composed of those households between Sites 1 and 15, who go to the village of Pawling for "trading" and "to take the cars," along the road which passes Sites 16 to 18. They include Hammersley Lake and Hurd's Corners in their interests.

The "Middle Distance," or as I would call it "The Meeting House Neighborhood," is composed of those households from Sites 21 to 41; "the Hotel Neighborhood," of those from Site 42 to 95; and these all, whether regarded as one or as two sections, go habitually to the village by the "Mizzen-Top road," past Sites 99 and 113.

"Wing's Corner" is properly the name of Site 100, but it may serve for a title of the southern neighborhood from Site 122 to 104. From this neighborhood all travel to the valley by the road westward from the "Corners."

The "North End" and "Wing's Corners" are settled almost entirely by Americans, and until within the past two years, by families derived from the original population. "Quaker Hill Proper" is the place of residence of the Irish-Americans. It has been also the place of residence of the last of the Quakers during the period, just closed, of the Mixed Community. It is also the territory in which land has the highest value. Here also are the residences of all the persons of exceptional wealth.

The community most cherishes the central territory, lying upon the two miles of road between the Mizzen-Top Hotel and the Meeting House, and extending beyond these points and on either hand one-half mile. Within this area land is nominally held at a thousand dollars an acre.

"The proximate causes of demotic composition," says Professor Giddings,[33] "are organic variation and migration. The ultimate causes are to be looked for in the characteristics of the physical environment." The Quaker Hill population, drawn originally from a common source, was in 1828 perfectly homogeneous. The very intensity of the communal life had effected the elimination of strange and other elements, and preserved only the Quakers, and those who could live with the Quakers. Since 1849 this population has become increasingly heterogeneous. It is not yet a blended stock. There is but little vital mixture of the elements entering into social and economic union here. They do not generally intermarry. They are related only by economic facts and by religious sympathies, so that the effect of organic variation does not yet appear among them. But in this chapter the effect of immigration will be indicated.

The influence of the physical environment is worthy of brief notice. Between one and another of the three neighborhoods lie stretches of land, nearly a mile wide, valued less highly than that on which the clusters of houses stand. In the days before the railroad, the population passed over this territory to the centers of the community in the three stores at Toffey's, Akin's and Muritt's places, and to the Meeting House. But with the necessity of driving westward to the railway, the stretches of road passing poorer land had diminished use, and the clusters of households, once closely related, ceased to interchange reactions and services; so a segregation of neighborhoods began, which is increasing with time.

The list of members of the Meeting in Appendix A, and that of customers of one of the stores in Appendix B, will serve to show the extent of the community, religious and economic, in the eighteenth century. A steady shrinkage has drawn in the margins of this communal life. At this date Quaker Hill receives no tribute from any outer territory; and might be confined to the limits of "Quaker Hill Proper," as some indeed call the "Middle Distance." The present writer, while not so limiting the Hill, has omitted both Burch Hill to the south and the stretches toward Webatuck to the north, which lie in other towns.

Just a word about neighborhood character. There is no especial character localized in the Wing's Corners neighborhood. The central territory has been fully described in this book, and especially in the chapters on "The Common Mind," and "Practical Differences and Resemblances." "The North End" is the most isolated of any neighborhood included within the Hill population. Its families are less directly derived from Quaker stock. The older Quaker families once living there have disappeared. It is a genial, kindly, chatty neighborhood, without the exalted sense of past importance or of present day prestige which affects the manners of "Quaker Hill Proper." It has, moreover, none of the Irish-American residents, and until recently no New York families. The seven family groups resident in these fifteen houses have been long acquainted, and have become used to one another. A kindly, tolerant feeling prevails. Gossip is not forbidden. Standards of conduct are not stretched upon high ideals, and a preference for enjoyments shows itself in a greater leisure and a laxer industry than in the central portion of the Hill.

The greater distance from the railway also forbids some of the activities of "Quaker Hill Proper." The milk wagon which in 1893-1899 was driven each day from Site 1 to the railway, gathering up the milk cans on the successive farms, has been discontinued, and in winter the road between Sites 15 and 21 is often blocked with snow for weeks. The resident at Site 3 has for about twenty years maintained a slaughter-house and a wagon for the sale of meat, using his land for fatting cattle and sheep, and selling the meat along two routes. The resident at Site 15 maintains a fish-wagon, buying his fish at the railways and selling at the houses along selected routes, through the summer. The other residents follow the diversified farming, based on grazing, which in this country includes fatting of calves and pigs, raising of poultry and other small agricultural industries. One family only in this neighborhood takes boarders in the summer.

The peculiar religious character of Quaker Hill had by 1880 drawn in its margins to "Quaker Hill Proper," though the population in these outlying neighborhoods had a passive acquiescence in it. They still respond to the activities which are centered in the focal neighborhood. Of themselves, none of these neighborhoods originates any religious activity.

In this connection mention should be made of the Connecticut neighborhood known as Coburn, in which a certain relation to Quaker Hill has always been maintained. It is not here regarded as a Quaker Hill neighborhood. Its characteristics are those of Connecticut, and its traditions are not Quaker, in a pure sense; but Quaker Hill has influenced it not a little, religiously. In Coburn remains a measurable deposit of Quaker Hill population.

Among the changes wrought by the railroad was the introduction of new social elements into the community. The Quaker population had become divided into rich and poor, but all were of the same general stock. The parents of all had the same experience to relate. Their fathers had come to Quaker Hill in the early or middle part of the eighteenth century, had endured together the hardships of pioneer days, had known the "unity" of Quaker discipline for one hundred years, and had held loyally to the ideas and standards of Quakerism.

With the approach of the railroad came Irish laborers, who settled first in the valley below, generally in the limits of Pawling village, and later came on the Hill as workers on the farms in the new forms of dairy industry to which the farmers were stimulated by the railroad. This immigration continued from 1840 until 1860. In that time, a period of about twenty years, there came laborers for almost all the farmers on the Hill. I am informed that in the decade following the Civil War the work on all the farms, "from Wing's corner to the North End," was done by young Irishmen.

The first Irishmen of this immigration whose names appear upon the tax-lists of the town of Pawling are Owen and Patrick Denany, who are assessed upon one hundred acres in 1845, the land upon which they first settled being in the western part of the town. These two brothers came before the railroad was extended to Pawling, in 1840. In 1867 Patrick moved to Quaker Hill and bought a place, midway between Sites 128 and 131. Thomas Guilshan in 1858 and years following was taxed upon nine acres, the land upon which his widow still lives, at Site 93. John Brady lived for years at Site 71, and in a house now removed except for traces of a cellar, about fifty feet southeast of the Akin Free Library, lived Charles Kiernan. Among the earliest Irish Catholics came James Cullom and Margaret, his wife, who acquired land at Site 34. Other names of the earlier Irish generations are Hugh Clark, who acquired land at Site 116, James Rooney, Fergus Fahey, James Doyle, Kate Leary, James Hopper, who settled in Pawling or Hurd's Corner, and David Burns, who became a landowner at Site 117.

The Irish Catholics early differentiated into two classes, only one of which, with their children, remains to the present day. There were the "loose-footed fellows," who followed the railroad, worked for seasons on the farms, drifted on with the renewal of demand for railroad laborers, and disappeared from the Hill. Their places were taken, in the years following 1880, by American laborers, and a very few other foreigners, of whom I will speak below. The other class of Irish Catholics sought to own land. The details given above indicate their promptness in acquiring interest in the soil. From them has been recruited almost all the present Catholic population of the Hill, which in 1905 amounted in all to twenty-five households and one hundred persons.

Whereas the early immigration of Irish worked in all the dairies from one end of the Hill to the other, the land owned by Irish-Americans now is all in the central portion of the Hill, within a radius of one mile from Mizzen-Top Hotel. Within this mile also all the Irish laborers employed on the Hill are at work. They are employed about the Hotel, on the places of the wealthier landowners of the Hill, and in such independent trades as stone-mason, blacksmith or wheelwright. Only an occasional Irish-American is found among the hired hands on the dairy farms.

In contrast to the indifference of the original population of the town to education, it is worthy of note that the grandson of an Irish-American named above promises at this writing to be the first youth born in the town to graduate from a higher institution of learning, being in his last year at West Point.

The Irish population who have remained on the Hill are singularly homogeneous, and thoroughly imbued with the spirit of the place. In the chapter on "The Ideals of the New Quakerism," I have commented on Irish acquisition of a character like that of the Quakers. The gentleness of manner, the quickness of social sympathy and the industrious quietness of the Quakers have come to be theirs. Yet they are loyal Catholics, and with very few exceptions support their Church in the village regularly. Many of them who have not conveyances have for years employed a stage-driver to transport them on Sunday morning to St. Bernard's Church. This church has been built by the Irish and Irish-Americans. At the time of their coming in 1840-1850, there was no Catholic church, and "if you wanted to hear mass said, you had to drive to Poughkeepsie." Later, a tent was erected for a time, for the Catholic services, then a Baptist church building was purchased. This building was destroyed by fire about 1875, and the present structure in the village was erected.

The Catholic population of the Hill is now equal to the Quaker population, there being of each twenty-five households; the old and the new. But each has gone through striking changes since the Catholics came, sixty years ago. "When I was a boy," says a prominent Irish-American, "you could hardly see the road here for the carriages and the dust, all of them Quakers going to the Old Meeting House, on Sunday, or to Quarterly Meeting. But now they are all gone." The religious faithfulness of those Friends of two generations ago has descended upon no part of the population more fully than upon the handful of Catholic families, who now drive to Pawling every Sunday in great wagon-loads, while the members of the Quaker households have closed their meeting houses forever.

Of the Irish-Catholic population here described only eleven are Irish born. The rest, about ninety in number, are American born of Irish parents.

The other elements who have been adopted into the Quaker Hill population are small in number in comparison with the Irish. They are among the working people, one Swiss, two Poles, who have bought small places at Sites 42 and 75, respectively; and two New York ladies who about 1890 purchased places at Sites 41 and 35, who have become a strong influence, being socially and religiously in sympathy with the original Quaker population. Their influence is described in the chapter upon "The Common Mind of the Mixed Community." Purchases of land have been made in the years 1905-1907, more than in the preceding decade, by persons coming from outside the Quaker Hill population, all of the buyers being from New York City. These purchases are all upon the outer fringes of the Hill territory, at Sites 107, 108, 111, 118, in the southwestern part, and Sites 6 and 10 in the "North End," and in the Coburn neighborhood, Sites 88 and others near the Meeting House, Site 139. The land in the central section has changed hands, in the years 1890-1907, only through the increase in the holdings of those who owned large estates before the period of the Mixed Community.

[33] Descriptive and Historical Sociology, p. 118.



CHAPTER II.

THE ECONOMY OF HOUSE AND FIELD.

The hospitality of the Quakers is worthy of a treatise, not of the critical order, but poetic and imaginative. It cannot be described in mere social analysis. It has grown out of their whole order of life, and expresses their religious view, as well as their economic habits. I showed in Chapter VII, Part I, that the hospitality of the Friends acquired religious importance from their belief that in every man is the Spirit of God. With the simplicity, and direct adherence to a few truths, which characterized the early Friends this belief was practiced, and became one of the religious customs of the Society. They entertained travellers, "especially such as were of the household of faith." They made it a religious tenet to house and welcome "Friends travelling on truth's account."

With equal directness they proceeded further to welcome every traveller, and to endure often the intrusions of those who would not be desired as guests, because they believed that such might be acting by the divine impulse.

The hospitality, therefore, of such a community is very beautiful. For they have their ways of asserting themselves, in spite of non-resistance. They open their doors, they set their table, with a religious spirit. A thoroughness characterizes all their household arrangements, a grace is given to all their housekeeping, which infuses an indescribable content into the experiences of a guest in these homes. Their hospitality to one another has been therefore a powerful enginery for continuing and for extending the domains of Quakerism.

On Quaker Hill the living generations have known this hospitality in two notable ways only, in the Quarterly Meetings, and in the transformed hospitality of the boarding-house. The Quarterly Meeting is now gone from the Hill. Both the Hicksite Meeting, which was "laid down" in 1885, and the Orthodox Meeting, which ceased to meet in 1905, brought in their day to the Hill, once in the year, an inundation of guests, who stayed through the latter days of a week, and then went their way, to meet quarterly throughout the year, but in other places, until the season came again for Quaker Hill.

The Quaker Hill Quarterly was in August, and "after haying." "The roads were full of the Quakers going up to the Meeting House." In every Quaker home they were welcomed, whether they had written to announce their coming, or whether they had not. All through the days of the Meeting, they would renew the old ties, and discuss the passing of the Society, the interests of the Kingdom, as they saw it, "the things of the spirit."

They meet no more. In the Quarterly Meeting, which comprises the Monthly Meetings of an area comparable to Dutchess County, there are still some Friends, and some meetings which are not "laid down." But they come no more, at "Quarterly Meeting time" to Quaker Hill. Many of the older members are dead. Of the younger members many have only a passive adherence to Quakerism, only sufficient to excuse them from undesirable worldliness, and from irksome responsibility in other religious bodies.

The hospitality of the old Quaker assemblings has passed over into the business of boarding city people. The same table is set, the same welcome given; but to the paid guest.

The passing of the old hospitality of the Friends was illustrated in the years of the writer's residence on the Hill, in the person of an old peddler, known as Charles Eagle. It had been the ancient custom to entertain any and every wayfarer; and Eagle journeyed from South to North about once a month in the warmer seasons, for many years. He had enjoyed the entertainment of the Quakers, following the ancient line of their settlements along the Oblong, and stopping overnight in their ample, kindly households. He carried a pack on his back and another large bundle in his hand. His pace was slow, like that of an ox, but untiring and unresting, hour after hour. His person, sturdy and short, was clothed in overall stuff, elaborately patched and mended. At first sight it seemed to be patched from use and age; but closer inspection showed that the patches were deliberately sewed on the new material. He wore a straw hat in summer, decorated with a bright ribbon, in which were flowers in season. He wore also a red wig, tied under his chin with a ribbon. His face was like that of an Indian, with broad cheek-bones and small shifting eyes.

Eagle was French, and professed to be a refugee, a person of interest to foreign monarchs. On the inner wrapping of his pack was written large, "Vive le Napoleon! Vive la France! Vive!" He had little hesitation about speaking of himself, though always with stilted courtesy, and always furtively.

He made a study of astronomy, and every night would ask his hostess, with much apology but firm insistence, for a pitcher of water, and for the privilege that he might retire early to his room, open the window and view the stars. Strange to say, in this he was not merely eccentric; for his reading was of the latest books on the science, and he exchanged with Akin Hall Library a Young's Astronomy for a Newcomb's, in 1898. He accompanied the presentation of the later book, in which was the author's name inscribed with a note to Mr. Eagle, with a demonstration of a theory of the Aurora Borealis.

Eagle never tried to sell his goods on the Hill, and indeed it is doubtful if he carried them for any other purpose than to conceal his real commodities, which were watches. Of these he carried a good selection of the better and of the cheaper sorts, all concealed in the center of his pack, among impossible dry goods and varied fancy wares.

An attempt was made to rob him, or at least to annoy him, by some young men; and he shot one of his assailants. For this offence he was, after trial, sent to the Asylum for the Criminal Insane.

His earlier journeys over the Hill found him a welcome guest at the Quaker homes. But the substitution of boarding for the ancient hospitality made the peddler unwelcome; and he passed through without stopping in his later years.

The Quarterly Meeting of the Society of Friends was the annual culmination of the hospitality of the Hill population. Coming in August, "after haying," it was for a century and a half the great assembly of the people of the Hill, and of their kindred and friends; and until the Orthodox Meeting ceased to meet, in 1905, there was Quarterly Meeting in the smaller Meeting House. The old hospitality was never diminished by the Quakers as long as their meetings continued. Even though the same house were filled with paying boarders, the family retreated to the attic, the best rooms were devoted to the "Friends travelling on truth's account;" and the same house saw hospitality of the old sort extended for one week to the religious guests, and of the new sort faithfully set forth for the guests who paid for it by the week.

The Quakeress and daughter of Quakers has produced the summer boarding-house; which is no more than the ample Quaker home, organized to extend the thrifty hospitality continuously for four months, for good payment in return, which has always been extended to Friends and visiting relatives for longer or shorter periods in the past, as an act of household grace.

The Quaker Hill woman is a good housekeeper. The substantial farmhouses on the Hill are outward signs of excellent homes within. The table is well spread, with a measured abundance, which satisfies but does not waste. The rooms are each furnished forth in spare and righteous daintiness, over which nowadays is poured, in occasional instances, a pretty modern color, timidly laid on, which does not remove the prim Quakerness. Ventures in the use of decoration, however, have been crude in most cases, and the results, so far as they have been effected by the taste of the woman of the Hill, are incongruous in color, and ill-assorted in design. It is in house-furnishing that the tendency of the daughter of the Quakers shows the most frequent variation. Occasionally one sees the outcropping of a really artistic spirit—peculiarly refreshing because so rare—which has only in a woman's mature years ventured to indulge in a bit of happy color; but the venture if successful is always reserved and simple; and the most of such ventures are of unhappy result.

The housekeeping arts have reached a high degree of perfection on the Hill. Cooking is there done with a precision, economy and tastefulness in sharp contrast to the non-aesthetic manner in which the Quakers conduct most occupations. It is, moreover, a kind of cooking after the Quaker manner, at once frugal and abundant. For of all people, the Quakers have learned to manage generously and economically.

The outcome of this housekeeping is the diversion of much of the business energy of the Hill to the "keeping of boarders." Seven of the old Quaker families, and one Irish Catholic household are devoted to the keeping of boarders; five of them being supported in the main by this business. Of these five families, however, four reside upon farms of more than one hundred and fifty acres apiece. These families sell at certain times in the year, a certain quantity of milk, or make butter, or fatten calves, but not as their central means of support.

To these farmhouses come year after year the same paying guests, each house having its own constituency, built up through thirty years of patient and unbroken service. The charm of the Quaker character, the excellence of the cooking and the enjoyable character of the other factors of the household, bring patrons back; while the benefits of the elevation and pure air are, to city dwellers, material returns for the moneys expended. For this board, the price charged is, in the Irish Catholic household, five dollars per week; in one of the oldtime Quaker houses, six dollars, and in the others from eight to ten or twelve dollars per week.

The season in which boarders can be secured in paying numbers is a period extending from June fifteenth to October first, with the houses filled only in the months of July and August. For this period, which is one continued strain upon the housekeepers and their aids, preparation begins as early as the month of March. The housework is generally done by the women of the family, with some employed help, of an inferior sort. The horses and carriages on the farm must be used for the transportation of guests, and for hire to those who drive for pleasure. On one farm sheep are kept; though most of the boarding-houses buy their meat supplies of the dealers mentioned below.