People on Quaker Hill are well-born. I suppose this may be in part due to the high morality of their fathers. I attribute it, in view of the contrast in this respect to the contiguous population in Sherman, Conn., to the highly organic communal life of Quaker Hill. Connecticut people, some of them of the same original Quaker stock, have settled on small holdings of lands, and held them till isolation and poverty have driven them to suicide, insanity or other miseries. Quaker Hill was from the beginning differentiated into a healthier diversity, and it has been the better for her people.
There are few mentally abnormal persons in the community. One may designate three persons as unbalanced, two of them unmarried women; and another such as probably insane, though residing at home. But even the aged do not die first in the head. There are no idiotic persons.
The prevailing morality is high. Very few would be classified as immoral, by the public disapproval of their conduct. Individuals have committed theft, or an act of cruelty, or adultery, in the years 1895-1905. They do not constitute classes.
The sociality of Quaker Hill seems to the writer relatively high. Response to a case of real need is prompt, wise and abundant; and common action for others is heartily begun and completed. There are no unsocialized persons; neither paupers, criminals, nor degraded, in the community; at least no class or classes of such. There is a man who perhaps drinks too much and too often; but even he is too far from the saloon to attain to the dignity of neighborhood drunkard.
Quaker Hill has not been of a mind to contribute institutions or resources to the public. Toward war hostile, toward the state always impassive, sometimes actively disloyal in times of war, Quaker Hill has lived a life apart.
Common school privileges are offered to all in the three school houses at Sites 12, 43 and 101 (school districts No. 1, 3, 4) and the advantages offered are generally studiously appropriated by the young. In the ten years under study two families alone have been unwilling to take full advantage of the school opportunities.
In the school at Site 43, for which alone an improved, modern building has been erected, there was, beginning in 1893, a determined effort made to provide a school better than the ordinary country school. By the co-operation of certain farmers with children in school, and through contributions of citizens of means who had no children, better teachers were employed, at increased expense, for the space of twelve years. During two years the school was graded, employing two teachers. But the effort in this direction seems to have ceased with the close of the year 1905-1906. This school has had, for the years 1904-6, only one Protestant child, in an enrollment of twenty to thirty.
The other school-districts are maintained "in the old back-country way," their attendance is small and no effort is made to raise the standard of teaching.
It has been accepted for generations among the authoritative leaders on Quaker Hill that "higher education was not good for the poor." Of this doctrine, Albert Akin, generally progressive, was a firm believer. He insisted, and other representatives of the leading families have done the same, that "to offer them higher education only makes them discontented"; "they won't work if you get them to studying—and somebody must do the work."
It seems in strict harmony with this opinion, which I never heard opposed on the Hill, that Quaker Hill has never until 1904 sent a young man or woman through the college or university. Albert J. Akin, 2d, was a member of class of 1904 of Columbia University, but he was not born on the Hill, and never long resided there. Indeed, the town of Pawling has not another college graduate among its sons. There have been, however, a few who have gone to school to the grade of high school and no normal schools. In the past ten years ten young men and women have done so. One youth all but completed a college course in 1906. Two young women are just completing courses as nurses.