USA > Pennsylvania > Chester County > London Grove > Two hundredth anniversary of the founding of London Grove Meeting by the Society of Friends at London Grove, Pennsylvania, tenth month third, 1914 > Part 2
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place to warm their feet. The oaken floors and stairway were strong enough for him to walk to the upper room. There was a fire place above as well as below. All is in ruins to-day. Both markers are gone, taken away or destroyed. The first house was built in 1722. Then we drove down the narrow road or lane from the Street Road south, which divided the old Swayne property on the west from the old Taylor property on the east. Friend Swayne pointed out the spot where the last hitch was made.
Diagonally across the meadow a little to the north west, only a short distance away, was the old Homestead near the Street Road.
We then visited the graveyard to see the spot where sometime before Robert's death he had a grave dug for himself and wife. It was made wide and walled around with three inch planks arranged to cover the coffins to keep off the weight of earth above. This was kept in this condition for several years before the death of either. Robert died first. His grandson, Jonathan Lamborn, kept this grave in good condition while he had the care of the grounds. It is believed to be near the eastern wall, a short distance from the entrance by the little old gate.
This morning with love and reverence, we laid some flowers on the lonely spot, feeling that the united souls in heaven must know that they are not forgotten on earth.
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A Historical Sketch By DAVIS H. FORSYTHE, Philadelphia
I WOULD be posing under false colors, even in such a considerate audience as this, if I spoke to-day as a historian ; for I emphatically am not. You all know that the history of Southeastern Pennsylvania has been correctly written and the truth has been told about it by our lamented friend, Joseph Walton, and by two other men, whom we have, fortunately, with us to-day, Isaac Sharpless and Gilbert Cope. It is because those two last-named are to take part, in somewhat more elaborate fashion, in connection with this celebration, that a much more humble individual has been called on to read a paper which I have prepared, and which I hope is truthful: if not, certainly those two historians whom I have named are not responsible for any of my inaccuracies.
T HE early history of Pennsylvania calls up in review very few names indeed of those who were conspicuous because the element of romance or adventure entered largely into the story of their lives.
Our ancestors as a rule were a prosaic sort of people, and when the final history of the first century of their struggles in the American wilderness comes to be written it will not make exciting reading, but it will leave with the reader, I believe, a sense of satis- faction, that the race which begot us had possession of a breadth of view that combined in a remarkable manner a spirit of charity and toleration, with a firm and uncompromising devotion to individual promptings to duty that fails to find any approach to itself in all the other twelve neighboring colonies.
But if we fail to have the list of historical personages to grace the initial pages of our first century's history, we can justly claim that we head it with a man greater in all the elements that constitute greatness in statesmanship, and scholarly attainments, and true gen- tlemanliness than any other colony can show. The checkered career of this man offers all the variety that the most curious can expect, but his life's story was in marked contrast with those who made up his colony.
He left an abiding impress on the religious organization with which he cast in his lot, and the personal influence he exerted in creating his own colony found wider and wider avenues, till it has been justly said that now in the twentieth century it permeates the
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OL VER AND MARION E E EASTBURN WENNET" SQUARE IN OLD.TIME COSTUME
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PORTION OF HISTORICAL COLLECTION ELLEN P. WAY IN CHARGE
INTERIOR OF MEETING HOUSE
OLIVER AND MARION E E EASTBURN IN OLD GIG 1150 YEARS, BELONGING TO JAMES Y CLOUD KENNFIT SQUARE
A MITCHELL PALMER DELIVERING ADDRESS
fundamental structure of our national government more than any other one, two or three influences that could be named.
Neither history nor poetry has done justice to the name and character of the man, who above all others should be uppermost in the minds of Friends and their associates when they gather to celebrate the beginnings of Quaker history in early Pennsylvania.
Among the beautiful homesteads that surround us here, there is one a short distance to the southeast which claims especial promi- nence to-day, but before we picture the home scene there, let us place ourselves in imagination on a spring morning in 1701 in the little village of Upland, a few yards back from the Delaware River. A score or less of simple log homes grouped in becoming symmetry give the little town, now less than nine years old, the air of impor- tance. There has been no little stir in the street since sunrise and something unusual is about to happen. Mounted riders are seen exchanging signals and then they vanish into the underbrush, that a mile or two back gives place to heavy timber. Later a cavalcade of them assemble in the most public part of the village street, and seem expectant and a trifle impatient for something to happen.
It is almost noon when a belated comrade appears. He has just left a barge at the river's edge, where an attendant had a well- groomed horse in readiness for him, and as he joins the twelve or more who have been awaiting his coming, he is recognized at once by an innate and natural quality to be of a different stamp from the rest of the group. This young Oxford bred aristocrat is none other than Wm. Penn, now on his second and last visit to his colony and about to lead an expedition through the woods of south Penn- sylvania and north Delaware to the river Susquehanna.
A readjustment of the saddle-bags, a few questions from the leader as to certain details of equipment for the trip and the line of march is taken up Chester Creek. Here by a ford they halt at a little stone and brick house, the only house of its character then erected in the settlement, and the oldest stone house now standing in the State. The noise of their approach brings the master of the house to the doorway. He is acquainted with Wm. Penn and would have gone with him on this expedition to the Susquehanna had not domestic matters detained him at home. There are a few questions as to route and then a farewell, and Caleb Pusey goes within doors and says to his wife: "Conditions are already growing cramped
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in our settlement, I should have gone with William and his com- pany to spy out fresh quarters; but when he returns I shall seek his company and learn what he has found;" and so it may be, in that historic ride of Wm. Penn and his companions to the "Nottingham lots," and Caleb Pusey's dialogue with his wife as she fried the ham and boiled the potatoes for their dinner that day long ago, are the beginnings of the history of London Grove Meeting of Friends.
The Friends, as we know, had affairs in their own hands in Pennsylvania until long after the day of Caleb Pusey. Penn's original settlement was at Upland, a part of the present city of Chester; the charter granted him included to the southward a tract of twelve miles radius from the settlement already made and called New Castle; with this as a centre and a radius of twelve miles, he drew a circle, which still survives on our maps and explains the curious boundary of north Delaware. Penn had previously gained from the Duke of York proprietary rights to the territory south of this line, but the boundary was not obliterated, and later it became an important part of the territory division that figured so con- spicuously in the events just antedating the Civil War.
What Wm. Penn's party accomplished during their three days' trip just alluded to has often been told. It was the first chapter in the history of the Nottingham settlement, appropriately celebrated thirteen autumns ago at the Brick Meeting-house in Cecil County.
A spirt possessed those early settlers, our great-grandparents, that was not all due to the intolerance of the English rule, for there was no intolerant spirit holding sway at Chester; it was this spirit that urged them to seek new homes, and this, more than anything else, is responsible for the settlements in Kennett, London Grove and Marlborough. Conditions were anything but congested in the region of Chester; the soil was fertile there, the tracts well watered and for the most part well drained, but before the first generation of boys had grown to manhood and become ready to assume the management of plantations themselves, and the first generation of daughters had been beguiled into assuming part management of a neighboring farm, the restive fathers were afoot seeking to make new settlements in the wilderness, and wherever they went, be it said to their everlasting credit, they seem to have demanded and to
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have obtained three community rights: their meeting-house, grave- yard and in many cases their school.
These are some of the dry dates that indicate in what quick succession the Friends established themselves in various sections, all of them now within an hour's journey of Philadelphia, but then seeming far away and out of reach of the Friends they may have left behind in Chester and Philadelphia.
Following the "setting up" of Philadelphia Quarterly Meeting in the year of Penn's arrival, we find meetings settled at Haverford the next year, at Radnor in 1686, and the Valley Meeting in Trediffrin in 1714.
Chester, of course, antedates Philadelphia, as a matter of fact by seven years; Springfield, now often spoken of as Marple, was established in 1686, Providence, on the outskirts of the present village of Media, just ten years later, for almost a century an important stopping-place on the mail and coach route from Phila- delphia to Baltimore and the far South. Middletown in Delaware Co., dates the same as Springfield; Darby, Chichester and Concord a few years earlier, and almost immediately following Wm. Penn's return to England after his first visit here; Newton Square was "set up" in 1696 and Goshen six years later; Birmingham in 1690; New Castle and Newark were among the first, one in '84 and the other in '86; Kennett in 1707, New Garden in 1712, London Grove in 1714, Centre in 1687, Bradford and Caln to the north of us in '19 and '16, respectively, and Sadsbury, still farther north, and west, in 1723; Uwchlan and Nantmeal, nearer the northern bound- ary of the county, in '12 and '39, while still further north and beyond the river Schuylkill, in the Oley and other rich limestone valleys of Berks Co., Friends made settlements, as they did likewise in the Pequea and Conestoga Valleys to the west, while to the south and west of us the two Nottinghams, dating from 1705 and 1719, soon became parents to other settlements and other meetings to the west of them.
And so it would seem that no event of peculiar importance marks the opening of a meeting at London Grove. Friends, more than two hundred years ago, had settled all about the place where we are gathered to-day; to the south their large farms almost touched one another from here to the Delaware River; settlements were being made along the Marlborough Street road to the east and
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west and in the Doe Run Valley to the north, and the houses of the farmers soon were too small to accommodate the large company which would gather on First-days, and in the middle of the week as well, at the meetings for worship, and so London Grove Meeting- house, a necessity, became a reality, and this is the story of its building and rebuilding.
By deed a tract of ten acres had been bought as a meeting site, other acres were afterward added. One Friend gave the needed timber, in no sense a tax on his resources; another hauled the stone for the low foundations, others hewed logs into shape, still others cut a driveway from the wagon-road that ran close by, and all gave willingly of their time and strength, and in due time a low log structure under wide-spreading oak trees stood on the slope just south of the present grave-yard. The giant oak that is now the pride of the neighborhood was a sturdy sapling when the Friends gathered in their new house for the first time. There were Puseys, Pennocks, Swaynes, Lamborns, Bailys, Speakmans and Hayses, and were there stones to mark the scores and scores of graves in yonder grave-yard, these names and others associated by kinship with them would be often repeated there.
The history of the building of meeting-houses and that of building meetings are different matters altogether. To give any- thing like completeness to this sketch you must be told a little of the former, though the story may be tedious enough.
The first Friends' meeting in these parts was at the home of one John Smith; it dates from two hundred years ago this year. Ten years later, proceeding in regular fashion, permission was obtained from the superior body, which in this case was Chester Quarterly Meeting, now called Concord, and the house erected. This was the building of logs just referred to, and were we to cele- brate the actual opening of a Friends' meeting at this spot we would have to adjourn our celebration to-day for another ten years, but there had been a meeting regularly held, mostly but not always, at the house of John Smith for the ten years just preceding. The new house served the Friends for only nineteen years, for during the interval and before the nineteen years had passed, some Friends made the kindly complaint that the house was too small and sug- gested that it be made larger, "the better to accommodate the meet-
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ing." The words come from an ancient minute which with others have been freely used for the facts and dates that are to follow.
In 1743, or less than twenty years after the completion of the original log house, there was tacked on to it a brick building; there were now two contiguous buildings, separated by a brick wall, a condition which forced from the clerk's pen more than once in the years immediately following remarks on the "inconvenience of this house." The floor was of brick, for most of the builders in this part of Chester County laid brick floors, while their neighbors north and east of them would have used stone flags.
However, the brick floor was changed to one of wood at slight expense, and in a few years after this modern improvement was made the clerk entered this minute, "On consideration of the incon- venient construction of this house, Benjamin Mason (and others ) are appointed to inspect the same, and, if profitable alteration can be made, report accordingly."
The Committee gave a report that rivals the annual budget of a twentieth century Boarding School for definiteness and detail, and every item, so far as we know, of their recommendation was carried into effect. It would be trivial now to give them; the divi- sion wall gave place to great wooden shutters; new windows were cut here and doors there; a youths' gallery was added and much else; the $1600 needed were contributed and the minutes for eight- een years are virtually silent as regards repairs and improvements.
In the interval, or to be exact, in 1758, Western Quarterly Meeting was established and from the first was held at London Grove.
In 1810 report was made that the house was unsafe. The breaking through of windows and doors had weakened the walls, which in turn had cracked and bulged. A few repairs were made, and then the statement appears on record that, safe or not safe. "the building is too small to accommodate the large number of Friends who generally attend this meeting," and a definite plea comes for a larger and more up-to-date building, a proposition altogether natural and proper when one reflects that the well-to-do members of the meeting, numbering several score families, had grown, many of them, to possess ample of worldly goods, as the large and well-planned brick and stone mansions they were build- ing attested. These homesteads are still all about us, and of them
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one well-informed and competent to speak says they have no counterpart in our country outside of the James River Valley in Virginia and a few sections in South Carolina.
The minutes for three years after 1810 refer to the needed building and then, as though certain conservative judgments had prevailed, we find this minute which sounds as though the whole matter was ended: "The further consideration of altering or rebuilding the house occupied by the meeting is discontinued."
It may be the clerk indulged a sigh of relief as he read the above minute, but it was only four years later that he or his suc- cessor was busy on the same topic.
The meeting was far from a unit, and the big house which accommodates us to-day, the outcome of the differences of opinion, was not an easily accomplished fact. Not able to reach a har- monious conclusion by initiating the work in the Quarterly Meet- ing, London Grove Monthly Meeting sent a full-planned outline to the Quarterly Meeting in Fifth Month, 1817. Their report began : "This meeting in view of the incommodious and decaying state of what is called the old meeting-house at London Grove, has taken into consideration the expediency of building a new one." Then follows a detailed plan of length, width, heighth, doors, windows, etc., etc., stating that it is to be roofed with red cedar; they close their report with the significant remark that $3000 will be con- tributed by them if the Quarterly Meeting and other Monthly Meet- ings can enter into the spirit. The Quarterly Meeting of course read the minute and "the further consideration of the subject was referred to the following committee," the clerk's pen halted on the thirty-fourth name. No thirty-four Friends to-day could see eye to eye on a proposition like this, but these Friends got together more than once and in due time reported back to the meeting sub- stantially in line with the original plans submitted to them.
These were the Monthly Meetings at that time and the assess- ment of each was as follows: Centre, $487; Kennett, $750; New Garden, $809; Fallowfield, $508; or a total from these four of $2554. London Grove gave $3000 and the disparity in the amounts explains in part the modesty that forced other Friends to delay the work. When this stage of the project had been reached, all went forward with great harmony and on Eleventh Month 18, 1818, the first Quarterly Meeting was held in this house.
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We have now reached a point in our narrative in which the great-grandchildren of the original founders were taking a part in the affairs of the church and the community; the times are too close at hand to be dignified by the name of history, and we will turn back for a moment to those earlier days that mark the beginnings.
The Caleb Pusey who stood by his gate and waved William Penn and his party off on their excursion the autumn morning in 1701, already referred to, was a man conspicuous for greater things than his acquaintance with William Penn and his ownership of the one stone house in the colony. Whoever in this audience can trace his family line back through the John Smith already men- tioned, or his brother-in-law, George Painter, may in some justice lay claim to traits handed down from Caleb and Ann Pusey, but none of that name need claim anything, for Caleb Pusey was blessed with no son to grow to man's estate to pass his name on; the large families who bear the name are descended, in the main, from two nephews, who were trained by him to become millers, and who with their children and grandchildren to remote generations have planted grist and saw-mills on the streams of Delaware and Chester County until the name "Pusey's Mill" has become the synonym of this kind of industry.
As Caleb Pusey stood by the gate at his Upland home and chatted with Penn, two daughters, aged seventeen and twelve, respectively, may have stood beside him, and the family group was completed when the mother came to the doorway and asked Penn to alight and share their mid-day meal then in preparation.
These attractive maidens were heart-free the day we are recording, but in due time, and that not far off, the little home on Chester Creek, a certain early spring morning, presented an unusu- ally festive appearance, and the two daughters became the brides of well-appearing young Quaker farmers. One of these was from New England. As a mere lad he had had a taste of the hardships of prison life, having been confined on an English ship and forced to hard labor because he refused to render military service. The captain later dropped him as by intentional accident at some
James Logan, William Penn's secretary, writing to a friend, 4th of March 1706/7, says :- "Doct. Moore with his wife and son, after nine weeks spent here, are returned home to-day with their son Joseph. To-morrow they take Caleb Pasey's in their way, who marries both of his daughters together, the eldest to Jno. Smith of N. England, that lived some little time at S. Preston's; the other to George Painter, at which marriages many more of us are to be present."
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British port and soon afterwards, or in 1705, he turned up in Phila- delphia. In a few months he found his way to the little house on Chester Creek and laid siege to a heart that soon surrendered. George Painter was proving himself an adept at the same ancient art at the same time and place, and, as just recited, on Third Month 5, 1706, there was a joint wedding celebration and the two daughters were soon installed as mistresses in homes of their own.
John Smith, the one who had married the elder sister, Ann, the New Englander and youth of many adventures, now turned Pennsylvanian, took up a tract of land in Marlborough, within a mile and a-half of this place, where we are met to-day, due east on the Marlborough street road and to the south of it, the tract is known as the "Bailey Farm," now owned by William Scarlett. Here the next year, 1714, began what we are celebrating to-day, London Grove Meeting of Friends. Caleb and Ann Pusey soon came and settled on a tract near them and this was their home during the few remaining years they lived.
I have looked with some care into the annals of all those I mentioned awhile ago as the pioneers in this neighborhood, and to the list I know I should, in justice, add others.
We cannot tell you how they were grouped as they gathered in their meetings long ago. Probably Caleb Pusey and Ann sat at the head of their respective galleries. It may be close to Caleb Pusey sat Joseph Pennock, wrapped in reverential silence in the meeting-house, but with a mind at other times alert about all man- ner of things, and even now doubtless laying plans at this early date for his spacious mansion, which is even yet, though one hun- dred and seventy-seven years old, the wonder of the countryside.
Francis Swayne, we can imagine, sat next to Joseph. He was the man whose record ten years earlier reads, "My father and mother and myself were convinced and received the truth." It is possible Robert Lamborn sat next to him and Joel Baily just below. Men of sterling qualities and large families, who have representatives to-day all over the country.
Thomas Speakman was not far from the front, "Who with the approbation of Friends and consent of his mother, Elizabeth," came in 1712 from Reading, England, and settled at London Grove to rear his group of hopefuls, among them Ebenezer, Micajah, Joshua, Ann and several others. Then there was Henry
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Hayes, the man with more acres and more children than any of the others, so far as my search has revealed. He had at one time three hundred and eighty-four acres south of the present town of Coatesville, six hundred acres including the present village of Unionville and several hundred more close by, and a few years later eleven hundred acres more in East Marlborough. The story goes that he added at the rate of one hundred and fifty acres for each child born to him and the meeting records number fifteen. Of these fifteen it is recorded that one was a leading participator in the first marriage solemnized in the then new meeting-house (now ninety-six years old); a photograph of the certificate can be seen in the historic display here to-day.
Most of the London Grove families of those days were large. It seems to me nine and not seven was the charmed number. In explaining the steady maintenance of the membership of those days this is a factor that we should consider.
How familiar these names sound to us to-day! Is it any won- der with such homes? What could induce all the children to scat- ter?
The recorded testimonials of some of these Friends are part and parcel of ancient Quaker biography. They are couched in language rather stately and severe, but they tell the simple story of devotion to duty and lives surrendered in good measure to the Master's service.
Caleb Pusey and his son-in-law exercised acceptable gifts in the ministry and so did many others. I believe the former was not a "recorded minister," John Smith was, however, and his memorial recites: "His ministry was savory, though not very elo- quent; he was zealous for good order and serviceable in the discipline of the church, etc."
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