a Hopkins Taber,
1906; Quaker Hill Series.

[9] See Map II.

CHAPTER V.

AMUSEMENTS IN THE QUAKER COMMUNITY.

The Quaker community had little time for amusements, and less patience.
The discipline of the Meeting levelled its guns at the play spirit, and
for a century men were threatened, visited, disowned if necessary, for
"going to frollicks," and "going to places of amusement." The Meeting
House records leave no room for doubt as to the opinion held by the
Society of Friends upon the matter of play.

An account is given elsewhere of the discipline of the Meeting in its
struggle against immorality and "frollicking." The following quotation
from James Woods' "The Purchase Meeting," vividly depicts the confused
elements of the social life of that time: "On great occasions such as
the holding of a Quarterly Meeting, the population turned out _en
masse_. Piety and worldliness both observed the day. The latter class
gathered about the meeting house, had wrestling matches and various
athletic sports in the neighboring fields, and horse races on the
adjacent roads. The meetings regularly appointed committees as a police
force to keep order about the meeting house during the time of worship
and business."

The stories told by old Quaker Hill residents of the gatherings about
the meeting house, even on First Day, or Sunday, confirm the above
quotation. The field opposite the meeting house, for years after 1769,
when the earliest meeting house was moved away from that site, was used
as a burial ground, and later, no headstones being placed in those early
days, as a space for tethering horses. An old resident tells me that
crowds of men were always about the meeting house before and after
meeting, and even during meeting, and that in later years the resident
of Site No. 32, who owned valuable horses, used to exhibit a blooded
stallion on a tether, leading him up and down to the admiration of the
horse-owners present, and to their probable interest.

These conditions seem to have continued through that whole century. The
play spirit had no permitted or authorized occasions. It had to exercise
itself with the other instincts, in the common gatherings. It was, as
far as we can see, a time of asceticism. Men were forbidden rather than
invited, in those days.

The Meeting not only provided no play opportunities, but it forbade the
attendance of its members upon the "frollicks," which then were held, as
nowadays they