Quaker Hill: A Sociological StudyWilson, Warren H. (Warren Hugh)
Religion
Quaker Hill: A Sociological Study
Wilson, Warren H. (Warren Hugh)
Quaker Hill (N.Y.)
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
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