Quaker Hill / A Sociological Study

by Warren H. Wilson

"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 homogeneous. 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 clusters of houses stand. In the days before the railroad, the population passed 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 passing poorer land had diminished use, and the clusters 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 passive 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 assessed 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.