Meeting House & Farm House

In 1963 Frederick B. Tolles wrote a very good book about the city Quakers entitled Meeting House and Counting House. For some years I have desired to write about the country Friends during the first hundred years of Penn's colony on the Delaware. My ancestors for eight generations have been country Friends so I have a special interest in them. These rural Quakers lived in smaller communities than their city cousins and, because of the nature of life in the country, they were able to examine each other's conduct more minutely.

Little material is available on the local government and life in Pennsylvania during the colonial period except in the minutes of the monthly business meetings of the country meetings. Therefore, as Part II of this pamphlet, I have included a number of quotations from these minutes. These minutes give us a detailed account of how Friends took care of each other, and how they dealt with offenders against the discipline. Since offenses are more likely to be recorded than good deeds, we know more about them. In fact, offenses against the Discipline did not appear to be numerous; acknowledgements, or apologies, are recorded only about twice a year in each meeting's minutes. In choosing excerpts for this pamphlet, I have been tempted to select those lapses which have a certain dramatic character.