The economic ideas and habits are in no way peculiar to the Hill. There survive in a few old persons some primitive industrial habits. One old lady, now about ninety, amuses herself with spinning, knitting and weaving; keeping alive all the primitive processes from the shearing of sheep in her son's field to the completed garment. Axe-helves are still made by hand in the neighborhood.
The practical arts of the community are agriculture, especially the cultivation of grass for hay, cooking and general housekeeping, and the entertainment of paid guests, as "boarders" in farmhouse and hotel. There is in addition on one farm, at Site No. 3, a slaughter-house, at which beef and mutton and pork are prepared for market, the animals being bought, pastured, fattened and killed on the place, and the meat delivered to customers, especially in the summer months, by means of a wagon, which makes its journey twice a week, over the length of the Hill and in the country eastward.
There is also a fish-wagon owned and maintained by the resident at Site No. 15, which buys fish during the year and maintains by means of a wagon a similar trade. These two are the only food supply businesses maintained on the Hill.
Economic opportunity has always appealed strongly to the Quaker Hill man and woman. In 1740 John Toffey settled at the crossing of ways which is called "Toffey's Corners," and began to make hats. Other industries followed.
In recent years, in almost every Quaker house boarders have been taken, and a better profit has been made than from the sale of milk. For twenty-five years the Mizzen-Top Hotel, accommodating two hundred and fifty guests, has represented notably this response to opportunity. The beautiful scenery, which the Quaker himself does not appreciate, because he has educated himself out of the appreciation of color and form, has offered him an opportunity of profit which he has been prompt and diligent to seize. All through the summer every one of the six largest Quaker homesteads is filled with guests. The fact cited above that in the summer there comes to the Hill a greater transient population than dwells there through the year, a population of guests, illustrates this lively economic alertness.
The emigration from the Hill since 1840 of so many persons, notably the younger and more ambitious, is in itself a token of this response. The railroad brought the opportunity; the ambitious accepted it; many whole families have disappeared. Their strong members emigrated; the weaker stock died out. The Merritt, Vanderburgh, Irish, Wing, Sherman, Akin, and other families offer examples. In the place of those who departed have come others, to fill the total population. There were in 1905 on the Hill twenty-five old families with seventy-five persons, and twenty-five Irish Catholic families with one hundred persons.
The response to economic opportunity has often been too keen, and the attempt too grasping. In 1891 wealthy New Yorkers offered for certain farms so located as to command beautiful views, prices almost double what they are worth for farming. The reply was a demand in every case of one thousand dollars more than was offered; and the result was—no sale.
Land is valued, though few sales are made, at $1,000 per acre, near the Hotel. The acre numbered 42, one mile from Mizzen-Top, on Map II, was sold in 1893 to a laboring man for $250. At 53, land was sold in 1903 for $700 per acre. At 52, three acres were sold by sisters to a brother in 1895, the asking-price being $1,000 per acre, and the price paid $800 per acre. For farming, this land is worth $50 and $75 per acre. Four miles further inland as good recently sold for $10 per acre. Quaker Hill has not neglected its economic opportunities.
Nearness to the soil has, under the influences of Quaker ethics and economic ambition, cultivated in this population a patient and steadfast industry, which expresses itself in the milk dairy, a form of farming by its nature requiring early hours and late, with all the day between filled by various duties. I have shown above that this industry is losing its hold on the farmers of the Hill, but for two generations it has been the distinctive type of labor on the Hill. To rise at four or even earlier in the morning and to prepare the milk, to deliver it at the station, four to eight miles away, to attend to the wants of cows from twenty to one hundred in number; to prepare the various food-products, either by raising from the soil, or by carting from the railroad,—these activities filled, ten years ago, the lives of one hundred and four of the adult males of the community; and these activities at present fill the time of sixty of the adult males of the community.[34]
While "the milk business" is a declining industry, other things are not less engrossing. The land must be tilled, and is tilled. Hay is the greatest crop, and the mere round of the seasons brings for a community used to agriculture a discipline and a course of labor, which make life regular and industrious.