Quaker Hill / A Sociological Study

by Warren H. Wilson

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.