Excerpt from Quaker Hill in the Eighteenth Century: Second Edition

In the eighteenth century Quaker Hill was the chosen asylum of men ot peace. Yet it became equally the rallying place of periodic outbursts of the fighting Spirit of that warlike age; and it was invaded during the great Struggle for national independence by the camps of Washington.

There is a dignity common to the noble Washington battling for liberty, and the Quaker pioneer serenely planning seven years before the Revolution for the freedom of the slave. But he was a Revolutionist, they were loyal to King George he was a man of blood, brilliant in the garb ofa warrior, and they were men of peace, dreaming only of the kingdom of God. He was fighting for a definite advance in liberty to be enjoyed at once; they were set on an enfranchisement that involved one hundred years and a greater war at the end than his revolution. Their records contain no mention of his presence here, though his soldiers seized and fortified the meeting-house. His letters never mentionthe Quakers, neither their picturesque abode, their dreams of freedom for the slave, nor their Tory loyalty.

Each cherished his ideal and staked his life and ease and happiness upon it. Each, after the fashion of a narrow age, ignored the other's adherence to that ideal. To us they are sublime figures in bold contrast cross ing that far-off stage: Washington, booted, with belted sword, spurring his horse up the western slope of the Hill, to review the soldiers of the Revolution in 1778 and Paul Osborn, Joseph Irish and Abner Hoag, plain men, unarmed save with faith, riding their plough horses down the eastern Slope in 1775, to plead for the freeing of the slave at the Yearly Meeting at Flushing.

Both the soldier and the Quaker laid their bones in the dust of the Hill, in common faith in liberty and equality: we have not yet settled the problems for which they fought. The history of Quaker Hill in the eighteenth century is the story of these two schools of idealists, who ignored each oth er, but were moved with the same passion, obeyed the same spirit. It is said that a locality never loses the impression made upon it by its earliest residents. Certain it is that the roots of modern things are to be traced in that earliest period, and through acontinuous self-contained life until this day.

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