Quaker Hill Part 8

After the influence of the early Friends ceased, the place of woman began to be circ.u.mscribed 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 s.e.xual 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 s.e.x, 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 s.e.x; 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 s.e.xes. 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 s.e.xes 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 s.e.x. 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 s.e.x 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 a.s.sociations of women are especially interesting in view of the fact that the men of the Hill have no a.s.sociations whatever, now that the stores are closed; and are a.s.sembled 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 cla.s.s-fraternity; and they have never acquired any interest common to their s.e.x to a.s.semble 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 a.s.sembling 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 a.s.sociation 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 ill.u.s.trated 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 cla.s.ses: 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 cla.s.s, 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 cla.s.ses of families. For, allowing for this difference, births are two and one-third times as numerous in the working and landless cla.s.s 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 pa.s.ses 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 t.i.tle 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 h.o.m.ogeneous. 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 cl.u.s.ters of houses stand. In the days before the railroad, the population pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sing poorer land had diminished use, and the cl.u.s.ters 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 pa.s.sive 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 a.s.sessed 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 cla.s.ses, 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 cla.s.s 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 inst.i.tution of learning, being in his last year at West Point.

The Irish population who have remained on the Hill are singularly h.o.m.ogeneous, 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 ma.s.s 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.