ll the year round upon the Hill, live after a
standard common to American country-people generally of the better
class.
The economic ideas and habits are in no way peculiar to the Hill. There
survive in a few old persons some primitive industrial habits. One old
lady, now about ninety, amuses herself with spinning, knitting and
weaving; keeping alive all the primitive processes from the shearing of
sheep in her son's field to the completed garment. Axe-helves are still
made by hand in the neighborhood.
The practical arts of the community are agriculture, especially the
cultivation of grass for hay, cooking and general housekeeping, and the
entertainment of paid guests, as "boarders" in farmhouse and hotel.
There is in addition on one farm, at Site No. 3, a slaughter-house, at
which beef and mutton and pork are prepared for market, the animals
being bought, pastured, fattened and killed on the place, and the meat
delivered to customers, especially in the summer months, by means of a
wagon, which makes its journey twice a week, over the length of the Hill
and in the country eastward.
There is also a fish-wagon owned and maintained by the resident at Site
No. 15, which buys fish during the year and maintains by means of a
wagon a similar trade. These two are the only food supply businesses
maintained on the Hill.
Economic opportunity has always appealed strongly to the Quaker Hill man
and woman. In 1740 John Toffey settled at the crossing of ways which is
called "Toffey's Corners," and began to make hats. Other industries
followed.
In recent years, in almost every Quaker house boarders have been taken,
and a better profit has been made than from the sale of milk. For
twenty-five years the Mizzen-Top Hotel, accommodating two hundred and
fifty guests, has represented notably this response to opportunity. The
beautiful scenery, which the Quaker himself does not appreciate, because
he has educated himself out of the appreciation of color and form, has
offered him an opportunity of profit which he has been prompt and
diligent to seize. All through the summer every one of the six largest
Quaker homesteads is filled with guests. The fact cited above that in
the summer there comes to the Hill a greater transient population than
dwells there through the year, a population of guests, illustrates this
lively economic alertness.
The emigration from the Hill since 1840 of so many persons, notably the
younger and more ambi
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