At Goose Creek, on the first of 6th month 1815, a committee of William Smith, Mahlon Taylor, Jonas Janney, Stephen Wilson and Samuel Nichols, Sr., were appointed to consider the building of a school on the Meeting lot. The committee reported in favor of the building on the 27th of 6th month, and in 8th month reported to build the school for the sum of about $400.00 or thereabouts; already subscribed was $346.00.
In 8th month, 1816, the following committee was appointed to have care and oversight of the school held in the recently erected schoolhouse: Israel Janney, Amos Gibson, Mahlon Taylor, Isaac Nichols, Bernard Taylor and William Kenworthy. Jonathan Taylor was the first teacher employed.
As committees were released, new ones were appointed whose duties were care and oversight, the hiring of the teachers and visiting the school. On such an occasion, a student of the school has told us, they looked forward to the visit of the dear old Friends, kindly offering to assist with a hard lesson or difficult problem. (How they have changed since his day.) When the lessons were all through the copy books were placed before them for inspection and marked 1, 2, and so on, down to the one containing “pot hooks and hangers” as the curves were then called.
This school continued right on through the summer without any intermission except for two weeks for wheat harvest. No holidays were observed. One teacher taught ten years with only one day off and that the day of his wedding. A roll of the students of the Oak Dale School shows one-third of them to be either Taylors, Nichols, Janneys, Hirsts, or Browns, with one-half the teachers of like surnames. For many years the bequest of Isaac Nichols, deceased, was used to defray the expenses of poor children going to this school.
Early Friends had schools in other places: one a spring house on the Isaac Wilson farm, where several families pitched in together to keep school. There was a log school at Ivandale, one called Summer Hill in front of the present driveway to Thomas Taylor’s home, where P. G. Clark now lives, built of logs hauled by Josh Hatcher, who has been called Loudoun County’s first bank. Another was Flint Hill Academy at Hugesville, run by Friends.
At Springdale, in Lincoln, Samuel M. Janney had a boarding school for girls, charging $32.50 per quarter in 1839-40, with extras, pen, ink, pencils and lights 50 cents additional per quarter. Drawing and French were three dollars extras. Day students paid twenty dollars the quarter. Supplies were taken in lieu of cash. Henry S. Taylor paid his tuitions in 1842-44 with several quarters of beef, barrels of flour, a horse and sheep (the horse for transportation, not eating). Henry B. Taylor states—“dried peaches and apples were standbys in the diet of that day and hominy was the universal substantial breakfast food, one that would stick to the ribs. Samuel Janney bought hominy at Waterford mills, 5 or 6 bushels at a time. No Shredded Wheat or toasted hay for breakfast food at Springdale.”
Before 1908, Will Smith and Josh Brown and others were canvassing the county and Philadelphia neighborhood for money to build a high school. At last $15,000.00 was raised, and in 1908 Lincoln High School opened its doors. The labors and work of erecting this school, the first high school in the county, was borne mostly by Friends. When the building burned in 1926, there was agitation to take the insurance money to another town to rebuild; a lengthy hearing was held at the Goose Creek Meeting House, but people had reckoned without the canniness of the original builders as the deed stated that the money was to be used to build a school within one quarter of a mile of the meeting house and that was where it was rebuilt. For the year the rebuilding was going on the students were taught in the meeting house, the present store building, and the old Phin Janney store building in Lincoln.
Friends engaged in businesses of all kinds, of course, stores, iron foundries, such as the William H. Taylor foundry at Lincoln, where the celebrated Taylor plow, bells, and frog doorstops were made, woolen mills, flour and grist mills and the like. Though transportation was a difficult problem Friends were right up front in the first turnpike and railroad ventures. Many a Quaker trunk contained crumbling shares of the stocks. Israel Janney was a trustee of the Leesburg-Dranesville turnpike and Phineas Janney of Alexandria, treasurer of the road from there into Alexandria. Phineas Janney’s reports are on file at Richmond, and are referred to by one writer as being “full of these and thous and common sence.”
The meetings became a sort of Chautauqua for visiting Friends having a ‘concern’ and many came to hear these people from far off. John Woolman visited Fairfax in the early 1740’s. The famous Elias Hicks visited in 1798, and several times later; Stephen Grollet in 1801 and Richard Mott in 1801; John Kersey (the book has it Jersey Kersey), a famous Quaker preacher and author of the driest book I have ever read; Elizabeth Robson, Bartholomew Wister and Ruth Ely, 1826. Elizabeth Robson was an English Friend with very Orthodox views as was Thomas Shillitoe, another English Friend who came to Loudoun on a preaching mission in 11th month 1827. Also gracing the fronting benches of the Loudoun Meetings were Elisha Bates, John Comly, Edward Hicks, whose primitive paintings are so much in demand, and the famous Benjaman Hallowell who started Robert E. Lee in mathematics.
Stephen Grellet, Elizabeth Robson, and Thomas Shillitoe were the so-called Orthodox Friends whose ministry throughout the country helped to cause such sad havoc in Friends meetings and brought about the separation of 1827-28. Loudoun Friends at this time were little affected by the ideas advanced by these people, based mostly on theology and evangelism which at the time was traveling thru many of the churches of the land. Some eight families took off from Goose Creek Meeting only, Fairfax being affected not at all. These Orthodox Friends, as they came to be called as opposed to the so-called Hicksite Friends, built a meeting house south of the graveyard in Lincoln on the next hill, a corner now of J. C. Chappell’s heirs. Here they had a meeting until the Civil War, when it was laid down.