Personality is the field in which the conscious purpose cherished on Quaker Hill would have wrought its best efforts. But personality was always on Quaker Hill inhibited, restrained and schooled into mediocrity. Variation was repressed. Spontaneity was forbidden. Ingenuous spirits were firmly and effectively directed into channels believed to be harmless.
The result has been that mediocre people have both lived on the Hill, and gone away from it, in voluntary exile from its beautiful scenes, but not in exile from its spirit of plainness. No person of brilliant mind or of uncommon talents has ever come of the Quaker Hill population. There is not among the sons or daughters of this place one whose name is of lasting interest to any beyond the limits of Pawling. No artist or poet has ever ventured to express the intense feeling of the aesthetic which pervades the place, but has always been hushed from singing, restrained from picturing.
I think the end for which the Quaker Hill population have lived could be called Individual-Social. They are consciously individual, and unconsciously, inevitably social. These people have sought generation after generation for personal salvation and personal gain. "And that," says a resident, "that is why the place is dying." Yet the common interest was a logical corollary of the Quaker doctrine of God in every man, and therefore a community was formed, a community indeed which was no one's conscious care. In the chapter upon "The Common Mind," above, I have showed that all the leaders of the community as a whole, save one, have been outsiders, who came to see the integrity of the community with eyes of "the world's people," and these leaders in communal service have been grudgingly followed.
That one, Albert J. Akin, who founded Akin Hall Association, lived away from Quaker Hill, in New York City, the most of the months of fifty years, 1830-1880, and fell under the influence of outsiders.[39]
Indeed, a rare beauty characterizes these children of the old Quaker Community; and a fine harmony blends the members of the Mixed Community into one another. The type of country gentleman and lady was perfectly embodied in James J. Vanderburgh, who died about 1889, in his residence at Site 30. He was a good man, hospitable, large-minded, well read, humane; he was sufficiently reverent to be good neighbor to the Orthodox; and he was sufficiently wealthy to express the Quaker economic ideal. He had the Quaker genius of thrift expressing itself in bounty.
Mrs. Zayde Akin Bancroft, resident at Site 32, who died in 1896, was an example of the ideal Quaker Hill lady. A woman of leisure and culture, accustomed to the possession of wealth, and enjoying it in books and travel, she surrounded herself for several of her last years with an atmosphere, and secured for herself enjoyment, of the highest aspirations of the Quaker Hill economic ideal.
No one quite so much embodied that ideal as Albert J. Akin, who died in his hundredth year, in January, 1903. His fortune, which amounted at his death to more than two million dollars, was the culmination of the wealth of his family, acquired since his great-great-grandfather, David Akin, the pioneer, came to Quaker Hill about 1730. He was a far-seeing and brilliant investor, and through his long business life, which lasted until 1901, he followed the growth of railroads in the United States with steady optimism, and almost unvarying profit. After the year 1880 he came to live on Quaker Hill, in the interest of his health, more constantly than he had in the preceding fifty years. He at once interested himself in local enterprises, and Akin Hall Association and Mizzen-Top Hotel were at that time founded by him and others. Until his death, twenty-three years later, he was the leading citizen and the most interesting personality among this social population. Such was his place and so masterful as well as constructive his influence that it was a true expression of the feeling of all which one resident wrote at that time to another: "The king is dead, the man on whom we unconsciously leaned and whom none of us thought of disobeying, though only his personality held us to allegiance, is gone from us. And I for one feel that I have lost a dear friend."
ALBERT JOHN AKIN
BORN 1803, DIED 1903
These three illustrations will serve to indicate both the kind of persons who have come of the Quaker Hill community, and one of its tendencies. They illustrate also the spirit of the community toward its leaders.