Quaker Hill Part 10

Farming, as stated above, is carried on with a view to the production of milk for the city market. It is a laborious and exacting occupation. The dairy cow, generally of the Holstein stock, or with a strain of Holstein in her blood, is the most common variety; though the gra.s.s of the Hill is so good that very rich milk is produced by "red cow, just plain farmer's cow," as the local description runs; and the demands of the middlemen have brought in some Jersey cattle, which are desired, because of the greater proportion of cream they produce. The largest profit from the "making of milk" is secured by those farmers who keep as many cows as can be fed from the land owned by them. But the more ambitious farmers rent land, and in a few cases on a small farm keep so many cattle that they have to buy even hay and corn. It is necessary for the farmer, in order to meet the demands of the city market, to feed his cattle on grains not raised on the Hill. One hundred years ago the lands of the Hill were planted in wheat, rye, corn and other grains, but to-day the farmers buy all grains, except corn, of which an increasing quant.i.ty is being raised, and oats, of which they do not raise enough for the use of their horses. There are no silos used on the Hill, the city milkmen having a standing objection to the milk of cows fed on ensilage.

The labor problem created by the milk business is an acute one. One man can milk not more than twenty cows, and he is a stout farm-hand who can daily milk more than twelve or fifteen. As a farmer must keep between twenty and forty cows to do justice to his acreage, on the average Hill farm, there must be at least two men, and often there must be five or six men employed on the farm. To secure this number of capable men, to keep them, and to pay them are hard problems. Their wages have risen in the past twelve years, from fourteen dollars a month and board to twenty-three dollars and board; or for a married man, who has house rent, wood, and time to cut it, garden and time to tend it, and a quart of milk a day, the wages have risen from twenty-eight to thirty-five dollars a month.

These men are recruited from a cla.s.s born in the country, and of a drifting, nomadic spirit; and from the city, the latter a sinister, dangerous element, whom the farmers fear and suspect. On a large farm, with five men in employ, the farmer may expect to replace one man each month; and to replace his whole force at least once a year. So changeable are the minds of this cla.s.s of laborers.

Those who are married are somewhat more stable; but of the others it is a.s.serted by the farmers that out of their wages they save nothing.

There has been a rise in the price secured by the farmers for their milk in the past ten years, but it has been only for limited periods. The variation was from 1.9 cents and 2 cents, the price in 1895-98, to 3 cents, the price paid in the winter of 1907. In the summer the price is always lower. The farmers have no control over the price paid them for milk, nor have they control over the prices to be paid for labor, though of course in this matter, there is room for a certain skill in bargaining and for the lowering of the total wages paid on the farm through the skillful employment of the cheaper kinds of hands.

There is also a difference in the price paid for milk by "the Milk Factory," a plant established at the railway in the past ten years, in each dairy-town. This establishment takes milk from the poorer dairies under conditions less exacting than are laid down by some buyers, and in consequence pays a price correspondingly lower than the market rates for milk and the higher prices secured by the better farmers.

One energetic farmer, who has in the past five years had large farms to manage, on hire, or on shares, has prepared milk for hospital use in the city, meeting the exactions of inspection, and the prescribed care of stables, animals, workmen and receptacles in a way intolerable to the average farmer. He receives in return a price twenty per cent above the market rate.

The effect of the above conditions is seen in the fact that in the twelve years under study nine owners of large farms have "given up the milk business," have sold their cows, or keeping them have made b.u.t.ter and fatted calves for market. The profits to be made in dairy-farming are so small, unless the farmer conduct his dairy in an exceptional manner, or on a very large scale, that the average man on the Hill cannot continue it. Indeed, the average farmer on the Hill is unable through lack of vitality or incapacity for application, to conduct any business, successfully, against compet.i.tion. The state of mind of such men, in the worst cases, is ill.u.s.trated by the remark of one of them who approached a successful dairyman, saying: "I am going to cease to make milk for the city market, and I thought I would come to you and find out something about the way to make b.u.t.ter--not the best b.u.t.ter, such as you make, but a sort of second-cla.s.s b.u.t.ter."

[34] Mr. E. I. Hurd is my authority for the following statement. "In the total income of the farmers of Pawling, nine dollars are paid them for milk for every dollar in payment for other products."

CHAPTER III.

NEW IDEALS OF QUAKERISM: a.s.sIMILATION OF STRANGERS.

Quaker Hill has always been a community with great powers of a.s.similation. The losses suffered by emigration have been repaired by the genius of the community for socializing. Whoever comes becomes a loyal learner of the Quaker Hill ways. I think this is a matter of imitation. Personality has here made a solemn effort to perfect itself for a century and a half; and the characters of Richard Osborn, James J.

Vanderburgh, Anne Hayes, David Irish and his daughter, Phoebe Irish Wanzer, ripened into possession of at least amazing power of example. I must be sparing of ill.u.s.tration here, where too rich a store is at hand.

I will offer only this striking fact, observed by all who know the Hill: the Irish emigrant and his American-born children, of whom there are now as many as remain of the original Quakers, have come to be as good Quakers in character--though still loyal Catholics in dogma--as if they said "thee and thou," and wore drab. They are peaceable, gentle folk, sober and inoffensive; and the transforming influence of Quaker character is seen in certain of them in a marked degree.

The same statement may be made of the pervasive example of the Quaker character upon other areas of population; servants who come from the city, summer guests, artistic people who love the Hill for its beauty and suggestiveness, ministers and other public teachers who come hither.

The area to the southeast, called "Coburn," settled to a degree by those who have worked on the Hill in times past as employees, is touched with the same manner. Its meeting house, erected over sixty years ago, even retains the Quaker way of seating the men and women apart.

The Quaker Hill Conference, now in its ninth year, is another ill.u.s.tration of the charm and reach of the gentle influence of the Quaker Hill ideal upon personal character.

Suggestion also explains much. In such a social whole, manners and customs are fixed. The newcomer is often fresh, ingenuous, and sometimes intrusive. Little by little he becomes socialized. Ways of action are fixed for him, and a range of performance comes to be his. In harmony with this range, suggestion is very fertile; but one learns after a time that there is a limit to its force beyond which individuals will not go.

Suggestion, to be effective upon the many, must come from the sources which embody the community's religious and economic ideal.

Ideas, once broached, are usually, if they contemplate action, opposed, at least by inertness; but after a time they reappear as if native to the minds which would have none of them by reasonable approaches. This process is accelerated if the suggestion begins to travel from mind to mind. Some individuals are less slow than others; and the leaders of Quaker Hill thinking have always been able to work by the plan of academic proposal--to avoid rejection--followed by incitement of popular action in particular quarters. Quaker Hill cannot bear to be divided; and that which comes to be successful in one quarter soon comes to be universal. Things can be done by social suggestion which could never be accomplished by appeal or rational discussion.

The word that has formed the social mind of Quaker Hill has been, not "the Spirit," not "the inner light," but "orthodoxy" or "plainness." For this community, it must be remembered, had no great thinkers. It discouraged study, stiffened reason in formulas and dissolved thinking in vision. To its formulas the Hill has been exceedingly devoted. He who upheld them was accepted, and he who rejected them, as well as he who ignored them, was to the early Quaker Hill as if he did not exist.

This shibboleth has indeed always been religious. Even to-day the way of direct access to the common heart is a religious one. Catholic as well as Protestant, Quaker no more and no less than "the world's people,"

welcome religious approaches, respect confessions, and believe experiences. Nothing can a.s.semble them all which does not originate in religion and clothe itself in religious sanction. History is religious history. Business prosperity is approved when the prosperity has followed religious profession.

I do not mean to say that there are not other symbols than those of religion. Prosperity has spoken its shibboleths as well as orthodoxy.

"Business is business" on Quaker Hill. Not "to save money" is an unforgiven sin--and a rare one!

Much has been done in forming the common mind of Quaker Hill by antipathies and sympathies, chiefly again of a religious order modified by the economic. The community is markedly divided into rich and poor, and into orthodox and not-orthodox. These have no inclination one to another. Each group has its symbols and pa.s.s-words, and while neighborly, and answering to certain appeals to which the community has always responded, each resident of the Hill lives and dwells in his own group and has no expectation of moving out of it. So long as a man stays in his group he is, by a balancing of antipathy and sympathy, respected and valued. If he venture to be other than what he was born to be, he suffers all the social penalties of a highly organized community.

Authority, working along the lines of belief and dogma, has almost irresistible force for the Quaker Hill social mind. A visitor to the Hill said "These are an obedient people." Any barrenness of the Hill is to be attributed rather to the lack of leaders who could speak to the beliefs and in harmony with the dogmas, than to lack of willingness to obey authority. From the past the families on the Hill inherit their willingness respectively to command and to obey. This is true socially of certain families and religiously of others. That to-day some are not led is due solely to the decadence of initiative in the households which, by reason of wealth or dogmatic rect.i.tude, inherit and claim the first place.

It was said above that Quaker Hill has shown great power of a.s.similating foreign material, and of causing newcomers to be possessed of the communal spirit. The agency which from the first accomplished this was religious idealization, embodied in the meeting, the dress, language and manners of Friends. Generally the Meeting was recruited from births, and members were such by birthright. In former times the community and the Meeting were one. This a.s.similating of foreign material by social imitation to the Quaker type, and into organic subjection to the Quaker Hill community, was wrought by six agencies. They were language, manners, costume, amus.e.m.e.nts, worship, and morals. In each of these the Quakers were peculiar. In the use of the "plain language" the Quakers had a machinery of amazing and subtle fascination for holding the attention, purifying the speech, and disciplining the whole deportment of the young and the newcomer. No one has ever been addressed with the use of his first name by grave, sweet ladies and elderly saints, without its beginning an influence and exerting a charm he could not resist; the more so that the Quaker in so doing is guarding his own soul, rather than seeking to save his hearer.

The grave manners of the Quakers, both in meeting and without, are framed upon their belief that all days are holy, and all places sacred.

Their long and triumphant fight against amus.e.m.e.nts is a tribute to the gravity of life. The contest to which I have elsewhere referred for pure morals, in matters of s.e.x, of property and of speech, was a victorious battle.

In all these matters Quaker Hill was a population socialized by religion. Central to it all was the worship of the Meeting on First Day, and on other occasions; and the great solemnity of the annual Quarterly Meeting. Fascinated by that "silence that can be felt," men came from far. They would come as readily to-day. They went away under the domination of that idea of pure and spiritual faith, which kept a whole houseful of men silent for an hour in communion.

As I have looked into this matter it has seemed to me that the induction to be drawn from the history of Quaker Hill is this: Religion was a true organizing power for this social population. Whatever the meeting determinedly strove to do it accomplished. If it had tried to do more it would have succeeded.

This was a gain, moreover, without corresponding losses; a total net gain in all the moralities. The whole area on which this meeting exerted its influence was by it elevated to a higher moral and social tone, and organized into a communal whole, characterized by a loftier and cleaner standard than that of surrounding populations.

Why, then, did it die out? First, because of the bareness of its worship, the lack of music, color and form; through which it lost in the nineteenth century some of its best families. Then through dogmatic differences, of no interest to human beings, it lost its primacy in the community and so its authority.

In the chapter on "Ideals of the Quakers," I have dwelt upon their dramatization of life. They "made believe" that "plainness" was sanct.i.ty. They fixed their minds upon the commonplace as the ideal. It is probable that the early population were men and women of no such talents as to disturb this conviction; and the variations from plainness in the direction of gayety were sternly denounced as immoral. Also the struggle with the wilderness occupied and exhausted the powers of the exceptional as well as of the average man. But when with wealth came leisure, there were born sons of the Quakers who rebelled against the discipline of life that repressed variation, who demanded self-expression in dress, in language, in tastes, and in pleasures.

Gradually but surely, as the outside world was brought nearer, these persons were influenced in their restiveness by books and examples, by imitation and other stimuli from new sources, until they cast off in their minds the Quaker ideal of plainness. To be ordinary no longer seemed to them a way of goodness. They were oppressed and stifled by the ban of the meeting upon variation. And though the ideal of plainness has subtly ruled them even in their rebellion and freedom, it has done so by its negative power, in that the community has never furnished exceptional education. The positive dominion of the meeting broken, the negative "plainness" of the community rules all the children of the Hill to this day. So few are the sources of individual variation furnished, in the form of books, music, education, art, that no son or daughter of Quaker Hill has attained a place of note even in New York State. The ideal of "plainness" has been an effectual restraint.

CHAPTER IV.

THE COMMON MIND.

The common mind has been formed to a great degree by strong personalities; for the common mind has held an ideal of perfection in a person. The force which at the beginning a.s.sembled its elements was personal. The type represented by George Fox, as interpreted by Barclay, embodied this influence. In all the history of the place response to strong personality has been immediate and general. The past is a history of names. William Russell led the community in erecting a Meeting House, and then a second one--which still stands. Ferriss, the early settler, located the meeting house on his land, as later Osborn located the Orthodox Meeting House, at the Division, on his land. Judge Daniel Akin, in the early Nineteenth Century, was a leader of the economic activities of this Quaker community, then differentiating themselves from the religious. So, too, his nephew, Albert Akin, in the last half of that century was a leader, gathering up the money of the wealthy farmers to invest in railroads, founding the Pawling Bank, the Mizzen-Top Hotel, and launching Akin Hall, with its literary and religious basis.

David Irish, the preacher of the Hicksite Meeting in the middle of the nineteenth century was leader and exponent of the most representative phases of Quakerism, for at that time it was still possible for the business and the religion of Quakerism to be united in the minds of the majority; Unitarian Quakerism was the result, and of this David Irish was the ideal embodiment.

The respect paid by the community to leadership is shown in the place a.s.signed to Admiral John L. Worden, commander of the "Monitor," who married a Quaker Hill woman, Olive Toffey, spent the summers of his life on the Hill, and is buried in the Pawling Cemetery. There was universal pride in his charming personality, interest in his sayings, and no pious condemnation of his warlike deeds. His nautical names of the high points on the Hill have been generally accepted; so that the Hill rides high above all surrounding lands, her heights labelled like the masts of a gallant ship: "Mizzen-Top," "Main-Top," "Tip-Top."

There is indeed by contrast a corresponding unwillingness to be impressed by great personality. The residence of Washington with his troops in the neighborhood left no impression on the records of the Meeting, though he turned out the worshippers and filled the place with sick soldiers; no impression upon the devout tradition, except the story of his being seen once in the woods alone on his knees in prayer; and no impression upon the social tradition, except the cherished claim of one family that he used their residence as his headquarters. Washington was the embodiment of all that this community opposed, and he was ignored.

Another instance of grudging allegiance was the following given to a New York broker, who set out to build a modern schoolhouse, and was permitted only by a packed school-meeting, and by paying two-thirds of the expense himself, to build in 1892 the comely structure at 43, with which Quaker Hill is content.

The same resident was discouraged from further acts of public service, in 1894, by the declining of his offer made to the town of Pawling, to build one mile of macadam for every mile built by the town. He had constructed in 1893, at 113, a sample piece of such road, covering at his own expense an ancient sink-hole in the highway, through which during two months in every year for a century and a half Quaker Hill had wallowed; and he desired with this object-lesson to convince the town,--to win the support of at least his neighbors,--to the proposal to transform the highways into good roads. But there was never a response, and even his neighbors on the Hill, who cheerfully enjoy his smooth stretch of stone road over the ancient wallow of their fathers, manifested no active appreciation of his generosity. The generous resident had purchased a stone-crusher and other necessaries for the work; but they have been used only on private grounds.

The most conspicuous instance of following leadership in recent times has been the measured devotion given by the community to the activities which have centered in Akin Hall and in the inst.i.tution known as Hill Hope, on Site 35. The leaders in this activity have been themselves under the influence of New York city ideas. Two of the three most conspicuous persons are of this neighborhood, but have resided in New York for years, returning to the Hill for the summers. The third is a New Yorker by birth, and trained in Presbyterian religious experience and especially in charitable activity.

Akin Hall has in the years 1892-1905 expressed the leadership in religious confession and worship, after the forms of the Reformed Christian order, and has embodied this leadership in the conventional activities of a vigorous country parish.

For ten years Hill Hope, supported personally by the third member of this group of leaders, was, until it was closed in 1904, a country home for working girls. By a liberal policy it became also a center of much interest and of a pervasive influence to the neighborhood. Meetings of a social and devotional character were held there, to which the residents were pleased to come, and in which the young women from the city met and mingled with the Protestant residents of the Hill, especially with those of the Quaker stock. The influence of Hill Hope was very marked, and its power in representing to people of a narrow experience the ideals of a richer and broader life was obvious to any one who saw the place it held in the interests of the whole resident community.

These influences, thus compounded of the humanitarian, the liberal-orthodox and the devotional, but in all things confessedly religious, exerted themselves for the ten years named, unbroken. The death of one member of this group of leaders, the head of one of the three households peculiarly identified with its work, appreciably weakened the group. But in the thirteen years of its influence, it united the whole community in the formation of a church, to some of whose services came all the Protestant population; in whose membership were representatives of all groups of the Protestant residents; and which was able at least once a year to call the Catholics also together at Christmas festivities.

To this group of leaders a guarded, though at times cordial following was given by Orthodox Friends, the Hicksite group, the farmer cla.s.s, laborers, Catholics and Protestants, and summer people. It was generally inert and negative in spirit, seldom actively loyal. At its best it was willing that leaders should lead and pay the price, and be more admired than upheld. At its worst it was alert to private and blind to public interests, peevish of change, incapable of foresight.