New Garden Friends Meeting: The Christian People Called Quakers , and: White Plains Friends Meeting, 1850-1982 (review)

Abstract

54Quaker History historian would wish to see more fully explored, this volume on Hicks so expands our information on Hicks' life and spiritual concerns and on the meaning of his once enigmatic paintings that it will be a necessary resource for anyone interested in Hicks as either an artist or, more especially, the Quaker minister his contemporaries chiefly thought him to be. Swarthmore CollegeConstance Cain Hungerford New Garden Friends Meeting: The Christian People Called Quakers. By Hiram H. Hilty. North Carolina Friends Historical Society, 1983. 134 pp. $6.00. White Plains Friends Meeting, 1850-1982. By Frederic R. Crownfield , Hurley T. Simpson and Margaret E. Crownfield. North Carolina Friends Historical Society, 1982. 136 pp. $6.00. Nowadays there is a welcome trend to preserve, in a world where change has become so rapid, histories of individual Friends meetings , compiled while a few are still living whose parents and grandparents were active in the founding days. North Carolina Friends Historical Society has undertaken a series of such histories, and here are two of them. Hiram Hilty has carried the New Garden story back more than two hundred years, to the arrival of the first settlers from Pennsylvania (the name comes from Chester County, to which it was earlier brought by Friends from Ireland). Some also came from Virginia and Nantucket. The volume tends to be more anecdotal than analytical, which will undoubtedly serve a useful purpose for some but makes it less valuable for historians. Some of the earliest family names are Mendenhall from Ireland by way of Pennsylvania, and Coffin from Nantucket. How many of us realize that John Payne of New Garden was the father of Dolley Madison? The story runs through the revolutionary war period, the struggle over slavery (Levi Coffin, after his move to Indiana, was called the president of the Underground Railroad), and the founding ofNew Garden Boarding School which became Guilford College. In the early twentieth century New Garden became a pastoral meeting, but it has continued to emphasize traditional Quaker practices in its meeting for worship and in the relationship between the minister and the meeting. New Garden has a strong sense of outreach which is expressed both in missionary work and in a concern for service. It is an active supporter of the American Friends Service Book Reviews55 Committee, as well as the Friends World Committee for Consultation which held its Fourth World Conference at Guilford College in 1967. New Garden Friends were active in supporting the sit-ins which in 1960 launched the national drive for integrated lunch counters. The history ofWhite Plains Meeting goes back not quite so far. The first Friends arrived from Virginia in 1850, but there were not enough of them to form a Preparative Meeting until 1 870 and the Monthly Meeting was finally established only in 1890. The meeting was pastoral almost from its inception for this much smaller meeting needed the support and leadership of a paid minister. The pastoral system was adopted in many North Carolina meetings at this time. Much ofthe book concerns meeting activities from about 1920 up to the present, including the development of local missionary work and the organiztion and training of a choir. Again, the book is primarily descriptive, including the list ofa good many individual Friends. Kendal-at-LongwoodNorma Jacob Mr. Sidwell's School: A Centennial History 1883-1983. By William R. MacKaye and Mary Anne MacKaye. Washington, D.C, The Sidwell Friends School. 1983. 254 pages. $15.00. The significance of the title of the Centennial history—Mr. Sidwell 's School—Mes in the realization that what many of us consider to be "Sidwell Friends" was more Sidwell than Friendly for well over halfofits life. This excellent book by William R. and Mary Anne MacKaye, graduates of the class of 1951, will be of value to those interested in Friends' educational institutions and in the changing patterns ofeducational administration and governance in general. The MacKayes have not flinched from reporting what was, and what often is, kept from public view: ineptness, conflict, unpleasant exercise ofpersonal power—those human qualities that obviously can and do surface as often in Quaker schools as elsewhere. And they report with equal...