re
hatters. Jephtha Sabin, at Site 74, and Joseph Hungerford were saddlers
and harnessmakers.

Every farmer and indeed every householder raised hogs. Pork was salted,
as it is to-day, for winter use, in barrels of brine. Hogs also were
extensively raised and butchered for market, at a year and a half old,
the meat being taken to Poughkeepsie by wagon, and thence to New York.
Many who raised more pork than their own use demanded exchanged it at
the stores. Fields of peas were raised to feed the hogs.

Sheep also were raised for their wool; their meat afforded an acceptable
variety in farmer's fare and their hides had many uses. David Irish,
Daniel and David Merritt, Jonathan A. Taber and George P. Taber were
farmers whose product of wool was notably fine and abundant. Jonathan
Akin Taber "kept about eleven hundred sheep, some merino and some
saxony."

Butter and cheese making were an important part of the business and
income of the farmer's family, the butter being packed and sent weekly
to the Hudson River boats for New York markets, or to Bridgeport or New
Haven--a two-days' journey in either case. The cheese was ripened, or
cured, being rubbed and turned every day, and kept until the dealers
came around to inspect and purchase. On every farm was kept a flock of
geese, which were picked once in six weeks to keep up the supply of
feather beds and to furnish the requisite number for the outfit of each
daughter of the family.

In the year 1767, Oblong Meeting took action which resulted, after seven
years of agitation, in the clear declaration by the Yearly Meeting of
New York, earliest of such acts, in favor of the freeing of slaves. This
was one hundred years before the Emancipation Proclamation.

Wilson's "Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America" says that
"Members of the Society of Friends took the lead in the opposition to
slavery." There had been action taken in 1688 by a small body of
Germantown Quakers, in the form of a petition to their Yearly Meeting
against "buying, selling and holding men in slavery." But to this the
Yearly Meeting, after eight years of delay, replied only that "the
members should discourage the introduction of slavery, and be careful of
the moral and intellectual training of such as they held in servitude."

Meantime the Quaker Meetings on Long Island, in New York and
Philadelphia took action recognizing slavery, with only a gradual
tendency to regard the institution of slavery with