hat the milk might be sold in bulk to the city
middleman. The time had not come, however, in which farmers or their
laborers imported condensed milk, or used none. Quaker Hill farmers lived
too generously and substantially for that; but they ceased, during the
Civil War, when milk was bought "at the platform" for six cents a quart,
to make butter or cheese.

Thus the Harlem Railroad transformed Quaker Hill from a community of
diversified farming, producing, manufacturing, selling, consuming,
sufficient unto itself, into a locality of specialized farming. Its
market had been Poughkeepsie, twenty-eight miles away, over high hills
and indifferent roads. Its metropolis became New York City, sixty-two
miles away by rail and four to eight miles by wagon road.

With the railroad's coming the isolated homogeneous community scattered.
The sons of the Quakers emigrated. Laborers from Ireland and other
European lands, even negroes from Virginia, took their places. New
Yorkers became residents on the Hill, which became the farthest terminus
of suburban traffic. The railroad granted commuters' rates to Pawling,
and twice as many trains as to any station further out. The population
of the Hill became diversified, while industries became simplified. In
the first century the people were one, the industries many. In the
Period of the Mixed Community, in the second century, the people were
many and the industries but one. I speak elsewhere of these elements of
the mixed community. Suffice it to have traced here the simplifying of
the economic life of the Hill, by the influence of the railroad, which
made the neighborhood only one factor in a vaster industrial community,
of which New York was the center. When the Meeting House and the Merritt
store were for a century the centers of a homogeneous Quaker community,
it was a solid unit, of one type, doing varied things; when Wall Street
and Broadway became the social and industrial centers, a varied people,
no less unified, did but one thing.

[30] "Some Glimpses of the Past," by Alicia Hopkins Taber.

CHAPTER II.

ECONOMIC CHANGES.

The transition from the mixed or diversified farming of the Quaker
community to the special and particular farming of the mixed community
is written in the growth of the dairy industry, which in the year 1900
was the one industry of the Hill. In 1800 dairy products were only
beginning to emerge from a place in the list of products of the Quaker