2,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Warren H. Wilson
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
Fourteen years ago the author came to Quaker Hill as a resident, and has spent at least a part of each of the intervening years in interested study of the locality. For ten of those years the fascination of the social life peculiar to the place was upon him. Yet all the time, and increasingly of late, the disillusionment which affects every resident in communities of this sort was awakening questions and causing regrets. Why does not the place grow? Why do the residents leave? What is the illusive unity which holds all the residents of the place in affection, even in a sort of passion for the locality, yet robs them of full satisfaction in it, and drives the young and ambitious forth to live elsewhere? The answer to these questions is not easily to be had. It is evident that on Quaker Hill life is closely organized, and that for eighteen decades a continuous vital principle has given character to the population. The author has attempted, by use of the analysis of the material, according to the "Inductive Sociology" of Professor Franklin H. Giddings, to study patiently in detail each factor which has played its part in the life of this community.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
Ähnliche
Warren H. Wilson
Quaker Hill
Table of contents
INTRODUCTION.
PART I.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
PART II.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
Part III.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
Part IV.
APPENDIX A.
FOOTNOTES
INTRODUCTION.
PART I.
CHAPTER I.
THE SOURCES OF THIS HISTORY.
The sources of the history and descriptive sociology of Quaker hill are, first, the reminiscences of the older residents of the Hill, many of whom have died in the period under direct study in this paper; and second, the written records mentioned below. At no time was Quaker Hill a civil division, and the church records available were not kept with such accuracy as to give numerical results; so that statistical material is lacking.
The written sources are:
1. The records of Oblong Meeting of the Society of Friends until 1828; of the Hicksite Meeting until 1885, when it was "laid down"; and of the Orthodox Meeting until 1905, when it ceased to meet.[1]
2. Records of Purchase Meeting of the Society of Friends for the period antedating 1770.
3. Ledgers of the Merritt general store of dates 1771, 1772, 1839.
4. Daybooks and ledgers of the Toffey store of dates 1815, 1824, 1833.
5. The "Quaker Hill Series" of Local History, publications of the Quaker Hill Conference. In particular Nos. II, III, IV, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XIII, XIV, XV, XVI and XVII.[2]
6. Maps of Fredericksburgh and vicinity by Robert Erskine in the De Witt Clinton Collection, in the New York Historical Society Building.
7. Papers by Hon. Alfred T. Ackert, read before the Dutchess County Society in the City of New York, 1898 and 1899.
8. An Historical Sketch. The Bi-Centennial of the New York Yearly Meeting, an address delivered at Flushing, 1895, by James Wood.
9. A Declaration of some of the Fundamental Principles of Christian Truth, as held by the Religious Society of Friends.
10. James Smith's History of Dutchess County.
11. Philip H. Smith's History of Dutchess County.
12. Lossing's "Field Book of the Revolution."
13. Bancroft's "History of the United States."
14. Irving's "Life of Washington."
15. "Gazetteer of New York," 1812.
16. Akin and Ferris, Wing, Briggs and Hoag Family Records.
17. De Chastellux's "Travels in North America."
18. Anburey's "Travels in North America."
19. Thatcher's "Military Journal of the Revolution."
20. Wilson's "Rise and Fall of the Slave Power."
21. Barnum's "Enoch Crosby."
22. "The Writings of Washington," especially in Fall of 1778.
23. Proceedings of the New York Historical Society, 1859, etc.
24. New Milford Gazette, 1858, Boardman's Letter.
25. Poughkeepsie Eagle, July, 1876, Lossing's Articles.
26. Fishkill (New York) Packet, 1776-1783.
27. New York Mercury, 1776-1783.
28. Tax-lists of the Town of Pawling, New York.
CHAPTER II.
THE LOCALITY.
In the hill country, sixty-two miles north of New York, and twenty-eight miles east of the Hudson River at Fishkill, lies Quaker Hill. It is the eastern margin of the town of Pawling, and its eastern boundary is the state line of Connecticut. On the north and south it is bounded by the towns of Dover and Patterson respectively; on the west by a line which roughly corresponds to the western line of the Oblong, that territory which was for a century in dispute between the States of New York and Connecticut. Its length is the north and south dimension of Pawling.
This area is six and a half miles long, north and south, and irregularly two miles in width, east and west. Quaker Hill can scarcely be called a hamlet, because instead of a cluster of houses, it is a long road running from south to north by N. N. E. and intersected by four roads running from east to west. The households located on this road for one hundred and sixty years constituted a community of Quakers dwelling near their Meeting House; and until the building of the Harlem Railroad in the valley below in 1849, had their own stores and local industries.
Before the railroad came, Quaker Hill was obliged to go to Poughkeepsie for access to the world, over the precipitous sides of West Mountain, and all supplies had to be brought up from the river level to this height. At present Quaker Hill, in its nearest group of houses at the Mizzen-Top Hotel, is three miles and three-quarters from the railroad station at Pawling. Other houses are five and seven miles from Pawling. On the east the nearest station of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad, New Milford, is nine miles away. The "Central New England" Branch of the N. Y. N. H. & H., running east and west, is at West Patterson or West Pawling, seven and eight miles.
The natural obstacle which does more than miles to isolate Quaker Hill is its elevation. The "Mizzen-Top Hill," as it is now called, is a straightforward Quaker road, mounting the face of the Hill four hundred feet in a half-mile. The ancient settler on horseback laid it out; and the modern wayfarer in hotel stage, carriage or motor-car has to follow. Quaker Hill is conservative of change.
The mean elevation is about 1,100 feet above the sea. The highest point being Tip-Top, 1,310 feet, and the lowest point 620 feet. The Hill is characterized by its immediate and abrupt rise above surrounding localities, being from 500 to 830 feet above the village of Pawling, in which the waters divide for the Hudson and Housatonic Rivers. On its highest hill rises the brook which becomes the Croton River. From almost the whole length of Quaker Hill road one looks off over intervening hills to the east for twenty-five miles, and to the west for forty miles to Minnewaska and Mohonk; and to the north fifty and sixty miles to the Catskill Mountains.
One's first impressions are of the green of the foliage and herbage. The grass is always fresh, and usually the great heaving fields are mellowed with orange tints and the masses of trees are of a lighter shade of green than elsewhere. The qualities of the soil which have made Quaker Hill "a grass country" for cattle make it a delight to the eye. Well watered always, when other sections may be in drought, its natural advantages take forms of beauty which delight the artist and satisfy the eye of the untrained observer.
The Hill is a conspicuous plateau, very narrow, extending north and south. It is "the place that is all length and no breadth." Six miles long upon the crest of the height runs the road which is its main thoroughfare, and was in its first century the chief avenue of travel. Crossing it at right angles are four roads, that now carry the wagon and carriage traffic to the valleys on either side; which since railroad days are the termini of all journeys. The elevation above the surrounding hills and valleys is such that one must always climb to attain the hill; and one moves upon its lofty ridge in constant sight of the distant conspicuous heights, the Connecticut uplands east of the Housatonic on one side, and on the other, the Shawangunk and Catskill Mountains, west of the Hudson, all of them more than 25 miles away.
Unsheltered as it is, the locality is subject to severe weather. The extreme of heat observed has been 105 degrees; and of cold—24 degrees.
Quaker Hill possesses natural advantages for agriculture only. No minerals of commercial value are there; although iron ore is found in Pawling and nearby towns. On the confines of the Hill, in Deuell Hollow, a shaft was driven into the hillside for forty feet, by some lonely prospector, and then abandoned; to be later on seized upon and made the traditional location of a gold mine. The Quaker Hill imagination is more fertile and varied than Quaker Hill land. No commercial advantages have ever fallen upon the place, except those resultant from cultivation of the fertile soil in the way of stores, now passed away; and the opportunity to keep summer boarders in the heated season.
Interest which attaches to Quaker Hill is of a three-fold sort: historical, scenic and climatic. The locality has a history of peculiarly dramatic interest. It is beautiful with a rare and satisfying dignity and loveliness of scene; and it is the choice central spot of a region bathed in a salubrious atmosphere which has had much to do with its social character in the past, and is to-day very effective in making the place a summer settlement of New York people. The population is increased one hundred per cent. in the summer months, the increase being solely due to the healthful and refreshing nature of the place.
The history of the locality is associated with the quaint name, "The Oblong." This was the name of a strip of land, lying along the eastern boundary of New York State, now part of Westchester, Putnam and Dutchess Counties, and narrowing to the northward, which was for a century in dispute between New York and Connecticut.
There had been a half century in which this was all disputed land, between the Dutch at New York and the English in New England. Then followed a half century of dispute as to the boundary between sister colonies, which are now New York and Connecticut. As soon as this was settled in 1731 the immigration flowed in, and the history of Quaker Hill, the first settlement in the Oblong, begins. It was granted to New York; and in compensation the lands on which Stamford and Greenwich stand were granted to Connecticut after a long and bitter dispute. The end of the dispute and the first settlement of the Oblong came, for obvious reasons, in the same year. The first considerable settlement of pioneers was made at Quaker Hill in 1731, by Friends, who came from Harrison's Purchase, now a part of Rye.[3]
The historical interest of the locality dwells in the contrast between the simple annals of Quakerism, which was practiced there in the eighteenth century, and the military traditions which have fallen to the lot of peaceful Quaker Hill. The "Old Meeting House," known for years officially as Oblong Meeting House, experienced in its past, full of memories of men of peace, the violent seizures by men of war. That storied scene, in the fall of 1778, when the Meeting House was seized for the uses of the army as a hospital,[4] has lived in the thoughts of all who have known the place, and has been cherished by none more reverently than by the children of Quakers, whose peace the soldiers invaded. Both the soldier and the Quaker laid their bones in the dust of the Hill. Both had faith in liberty and equality. The history of Quaker Hill in the eighteenth century is the story of these two schools of idealists, who ignored each other, but were moved by the same passion, obeyed the same spirit. It is said that a locality never loses the impression made upon it by its earliest residents. Certain it is that the roots of modern things are to be traced in that earliest period, and through a continuous self-contained life until the present day.
In the eighteenth century Quaker Hill was the chosen asylum of men of peace. Yet it became the rallying place of periodic outbursts of the fighting spirit of that warlike age; and it was invaded during the great struggle for national independence by the camps of Washington.
There is a dignity common to Washington battling for liberty, and the Quaker pioneers serenely planning seven years before the Revolution for the freedom of the slave. But he was a Revolutionist, they were loyal to King George; he was a man of blood, brilliant in the garb of a warrior, and they were men of peace, dreaming only of the kingdom of God. He was fighting for a definite advance in liberty to be enjoyed at once; they were set on an enfranchisement that involved one hundred years; and a greater war at the end than his revolution. Their records contains no mention of his presence here, though his soldiers seized and fortified the Meeting House.[5] His letters never mention the Quakers, neither their picturesque abode, their dreams of freedom for the slave, nor their Tory loyalty.
Each cherished his ideal and staked his life and ease and happiness upon it. Each, after the fashion of a narrow age, ignored the other's adherence to that ideal. To us they are sublime figures in bold contrast crossing that far-off stage: Washington, booted, with belted sword, spurring his horse up the western slope of the Hill, to review the soldiers of the Revolution in 1778; and Paul Osborn, Joseph Irish and Abner Hoag, plain men, unarmed save with faith, riding their plough horses down the eastern slope in 1775, to plead for the freedom of the slave at the Yearly Meeting at Flushing.
What effect the beauty of the place had upon the pioneer settlers it is, of course, impossible to say, for they have left no record of their appreciation of its beauty. Probably their interest in the picturesque was the same as that of a Quaker elder, of fine and choice culture after the Quaker standards, who said to the author, with a quiet laugh: "People all say that the views from my house are very beautiful, and I suppose they are; but I have lived here all my life, and I have never seen it." A Quakeress confessed to the same indifference to the beauty of the Hill, until she had resided for a time in another state, and had mingled with those who had a lively sense of beauty of scene; returning thereafter to the Hill, it appeared beautiful to her ever afterward.
The land has been for several generations under a high state of cultivation. The keeping of many cattle has enriched the broad pastures; and the dairy industry has been carried on with constant fertilizing of the lands; so that the great fields, heaping up one upon another, high above the valley, and plunging down in steep slopes so suddenly that the falling land is lost from view and the valley below seems to hang unattached, are covered with a brilliancy of coloring and a variety of those rich tints of green and orange which spell to the eye abundance, and arouse a keen delight, like that of possessing and enjoying.
There is also a large dignity in the outlines of every scene, which constantly expands the sensations and gives, on every hand, a sense of exhilaration and a pleasurable excitement to the emotions, which seems in experience to have something to do with the industry and application characteristic of Quaker Hill.
With this the atmosphere has had much to do, no doubt, being dry and soft. The first sensation of one alighting from a train in the town is one of lightness and exhilaration. This sensation continues through the first hours of one's stay on the Hill.[6] After the first day of exhilaration come a day or more of drowsiness, with nights of profound sleep. In some persons a heightened nervousness is experienced, but in most cases the Hill has the effect upon those who reside there of a steady nervous arousal, a pleasure in activity, and a keen interest in life and work.
Whether the early settlers, in selecting the highest ground in this region, had a sense of this excellence of the climatic effect we do not know; but their descendants believe that such was their reason for settling the highest arable land on the Hill before the valleys or the lower slopes were cleared.
It is the common tradition that they settled on the Hill first, and on its highest parts, in order to avoid the malaria of the lowlands; as well as because they thought the hill lands to be more fertile.
The excellence of the climate is witnessed in the long lives of its residents. There were living in 1903, in a population of four hundred, five persons, each of whom was at least ninety years of age; and fifteen, each of whom was more than seventy-five years of age.
CHAPTER III.
THE ASSEMBLING OF THE QUAKERS.
The social mind of the Quaker Hill population was formed, at the settlement of the place, in a common response to common stimuli. The population was congregated from Long Island and Massachusetts settlements, by the tidings of the opening of this fertile land of the Oblong for settlement in 1731. I infer from the fact that settlements were previously made on both sides, at Fredericksburgh on one side, and at New Milford on the other,—at New Milford there was a Quaker Meeting established in 1729, fifteen years before Quaker Hill—that the value of the lands in the Oblong was well advertised. From the fact noted by James Wood (The Purchase Meeting, p. 10) that "the first settlement in any considerable numbers was upon Quaker Hill in the Oblong," I infer that the uncommon promise of this hill land had been made known to the Quakers then assembling at this "Purchase in the Rye Woods," and that Quaker Hill was settled in response to the stimulus of valuable, fertile lands offered for occupation and ownership.
It seems to have been the desire of the first settlers to form a community where they could live apart, maintain their form of religion and possess land fertile and rich. The Quakers are always shrewd as to economic affairs, and the business motive is never lost sight of in the spiritual inner light. In choosing Quaker Hill soil they selected ground which after one hundred and sixty-seven years is the richest in the region, sustains the best dairies, and is able longer than any other in the neighborhood in time of drought to afford abundant green grass and verdure.
MAP No. I.Quaker Hill and Vicinity.(From Robert Erskine's Map, 1778-1780, in De Witt Clinton Collection, New York Historical Society.)
MAP No. II.Quaker Hill and Vicinity.(Based on a tracing of United States Geographical Survey.)
To this place thus secluded, came Benjamin Ferriss in 1728, and Nathan Birdsall. They settled upon the sites marked 31 and 39; which are 1,200 and 1,100 feet above the sea, and very near the highest ground for many miles. There was at this time, 1729, a meeting of Friends at New Milford, nine miles away; but these two men came from Purchase Meeting in the town of Rye, forty miles directly to the South. There soon followed others, bearing the names, Irish, Wing, Briggs, Toffey, Akin, Taber, Russell, Osborn, Merritt, Dakin, Hoag. In ten years the tide of settlement was flowing full. In forty years the little community was filled with as many as could profitably find a living.
Complete records of the sources of this immigration are not available. John Cox, Jr., Librarian of the Yearly Meeting of Friends, says "the records do not show in any direct way where the members came from. A few came from Long Island meetings by way of Purchase, but most of them from the East, and I believe from Massachusetts. Indirectly the records show that the members occasionally went on visits into New England, and took certificates of clearance there (to marry)." Dartmouth, Mass., a town between Fall River and New Bedford, was the original home of so many of them that it easily leads all localities as a source of Quaker Hill ancestry. The Akin, Taber, Briggs families came from Dartmouth, which was in a region of both temporary and permanent Quaker settlement. Quaker Hill, R. I., is within fifteen miles of Dartmouth. The residents of Quaker Hill, New York, preserve traditions of the returns of the early Friends "to [...]
