Geoffrey Plank, author of the new book John Woolman’s Path to the Peaceable Kingdom: A Quaker in the British Empire, will be giving a series of talks in the Philadelphia area in early October.  His complete schedule follows:

October 4, 7:00 p.m., Swarthmore College Science Center 199: “The Other Woolmans: Family Life and the Ideals of an Eighteenth-century Abolitionist”

October 6, 2:00 p.m.,  Mount Holly Friends Meeting, 81 High Street, Mount Holly, New Jersey: “The Other Woolmans” (as above)

October 7, 3:00 p.m., The Barn at the Pendle Hill Conference Center, 338 Plush Mill Road, Wallingford, Pennsylvania: “John Woolman and the Utility or Futility of History”

October 8, 4:30 p.m., Special Collections, Magill Library, Haverford College: “The Other Family Living with the Woolmans: African-Americans and Quakers Living Together, and the Process of Gradual Emancipation”

For more information you may contact Geoff at g.plank@uea.ac.uk

Throughout my time with Quaker Meeting Houses, I have found a couple of oddly named ones including Old Gunpowder Meeting House in Maryland.  However, it was a meeting house in T. Chalkley Matlack’s Notebooks that made me do a double-take.  In the index to Book 12, a name jumped out at me.  “Murderkill.”  I thought that there must be some mistake. When I turned to the pages devoted to “Murderkill,” I realized that I was not mistaken.

Here is the particular passage from Book 12 that clarified things for me:

“‘A Friend writes: “The name of said Monthly Meeting I find to be variously spelled on the Quarterly Meeting records; which would be of very little importance, if they did not convey ideas essentially different from each other.  By way of explanation, it may not be improper to state that Delaware having been settled by the Swedes, their word for stream, or creek, was in many instances retained with an English prefix, – as ‘Broadkil,’ and that a bloody battle fought by the Indians on the banks of one of those streams, gave it the name of Murderkil, which name was also imparted to a district of Kent County lying on said steam, and known as Murderkil Hundred, where the Friends’ meeting-house was located in which the meeting under consideration was held.  The Friends, being a murder-hating, peace-loving, and simple-minded people, and not approving of the word murder, adopted in lieu thereof that of mother as a prefix to kil, making the name of Motherkil for this meeting.  But the word kil is often, and I believe mostly, spelled kill, which, in combination with mother, makes a very inappropriate name for a Friends’ meeting, more objectionable than the one intended to be softened and improved.  It is sometimes written Motherkiln, a name that conveys a totally different idea, and is not objectionable in itself.”‘”

The struggle to correct the name of the meeting house is quite interesting.  I have a suspicion that Matlack found this name amusing since he listed it under Murderkill (with two ls)  instead of Motherkiln.  His choice was a good one because this passage may have escaped my notice if it had been titled otherwise.

For more information about T. Chalkley Matlack’s Notebooks, click here.

In a drawer filled with folders of meeting house images, I found a  folder with four  images of Burlington Meeting House.  Three of the drawings (pictured in the thumbnails below) appear to be drawings of the  first meeting house built in 1683.  This meeting is unusual because it is hexagonal.  Throughout my time with meeting houses (and regular houses too), I have seen many rectangular and square ones, but very few hexagonal ones.  I have not been able to find any information about why they built such an oddly shaped meeting house.

Unfortunately, this unusual meeting house met its end in the 1780s, when another meeting house was built in close proximity to it.

The fourth image is a little mysterious.  I assumed when I was scanning it that it was a plan for the new Burlington Meeting House.  So I took a look at images of the building on Triptych.  I soon realized that I was wrong.  Some digging did not get me very far, which is not surprising considering that the plan is undated.  Hoping to find out more about the person who drew the plans, I tried to find information on Wm. Dillwyn.  From what I could find out, he was born in Philadelphia, and married his first wife in Burlington, NJ.  However, he lived in England when the new meeting house was built, so he may or may not have submitted this plan.  It is also possible that there was another William Dillwyn living in the area at the time.

Even without knowing the exact history of the plan, it was really interesting to see the detailed notes and drawings for a meeting house, which is something I had not come across before this image.

Regardless of the roadblocks, trying to figure out this architectural mystery was quite enjoyable.  It’s just too bad that there seems to be no clear answer.

For more images of Burlington Meeting House, check out Triptych.

In this long overdue blog entry, I’ll recount the work I’ve been doing and the experiences I’ve had as a student assistant at Special Collections over the past month. I’ve been assigned with the conservation and digitization of the Friendly Association Papers, a collection of documents from the mid-eighteenth century that chronicle the efforts of a bunch of Philadelphia Quakers as they sought to arrest the escalating violence between Native Americans and settlers in Pennsylvania . The Papers contain a fascinating mix of journals, letters, minutes of conferences, receipts of trade between merchants and Native Americans, land deeds etc. The details of this effort to resolve conflict by  fiercely  advocating pacifism are worthy of several separate blog posts. For now, I’ll focus on my role in preserving this collection for posterity.

Within a few days of starting my job, I was left wondering about the extent to which the alkalinity of a solution of ammonium hydroxide decreases after a container of it is left open overnight. Let me backtrack and elaborate on my duties to shed some light on how I managed to land myself in such a quandary. I alternate between working in the main Special Collections section located towards the back of Magill and the bindery on the library’s 1st tier.

In Special Collections, I operate the camera-stand shown on the left to photograph the documents after they’ve been treated in the bindery and catalog the images before they are uploaded online to Triptych, the tri-college digital library. All of the above tasks take place under the watchful eyes of Anne Moore, the Digital Collections Librarian, and Bruce Bumbarger, the Library Conservator responsible for the bindery. The bindery is a pretty neat place, containing books and manuscripts in varying stages of disrepair as well as housing the hardware and chemicals needed to treat these books and bring them back into a satisfactory condition. The ammonium hydroxide I previously mentioned is one such chemical used in the conservation of the Papers to insure the documents are thoroughly de-acidified before they are re-housed. Besides being treated with ammonium hydroxide, the documents are also put through a series of baths (pictured above) to make them less brittle and remove the iron in the ink responsible for the corrosion endangering the documents. Recently, Magill hired two summer interns (one of whom is the possessor of the appendage in the right picture)  specializing in library conservation to speed along the process of conserving the Papers. Hopefully, you’ll be hearing from them soon.

In my time at Haverford, I’ve developed the lucky habit of meeting interesting people in the most random of places. My streak continued when I ran into David Cook, MD, class of ’64 in the bindery where he occasionally volunteers. I remember a conversation with David in which I was really struck by the numerous changes Haverford has undergone since he was a student here. Apart from the obvious dearth of XX chromosomes, there were many open areas of land that are now carrying the weight of buildings which we take for granted, including Gummere. After being forced to live there in the 1st week of summer, I have to say that sounds like a reasonably fair trade-off, even though I’m sure most of my peers would beg to differ. Anyway, I’m veering off-track now. It just seems really cool that an alumnus  has continued to maintain such a close association with the college after the elapse of such a long time. I can only wish that I have the same relationship with Haverford long after I graduate.

This week, I’ve been feverishly adding to the skeleton that is the Archivists’ Toolkit version of the WWC finding aid—so feverishly, in fact, that the details of each letter I copy and paste often blur together as they whiz by my eyes on the screen, jumping from their home in Microsoft Word to land safely in their fresh new digs in AT. At this point in processing a collection, I’m always torn between reading every letter’s description in order to really get to know the materials and actually getting some work done. The latter usually wins out, but a few key phrases caught my attention earlier this week, so I let my curiosity get the better of me, if only for the benefit of this blog post.

I stumbled across this description of a September 1912 letter from William Warder Cadbury to his parents: “Sara’s condition has worsened considerably.” Reading it felt almost like a dream—thrust into the middle of the action, not knowing how or why you got there in the first place—so I went to the beginning of the folder of letters and did some background research. I pulled the letter to see what was happening and found out that, in fact, Sara Imbrie Manatt (pictured above), Cadbury’s wife of exactly one year, was gravely ill. I knew that Cadbury had two wives, but his second wife, Catharine, is the one who is featured heavily in this collection. What happened to Sara? What was their marriage like? I had lots of questions that demanded answers.

The first letter in Box 6 of this collection holds the key: written from Cadbury to Sara while he is in China and she is in Berkeley, CA, this love letter is probably the most beautiful thing I’ve ever read. Though he is thousands of miles away, Cadbury writes with such affection for Sara that I had to briefly pause the song playing on my iPod; somehow, 90s *NSYNC ballads pale in comparison to the words of William Warder Cadbury. In the letter, Cadbury speaks of their upcoming wedding and marriage, and gushes about his “dear Sara,” only later to call her, rather solemnly, “my precious Sara” when he writes of her worsening condition to his parents.

Now I had to figure out what happened to Sara one year after their marriage that caused Cadbury such grief. Reading frantically through a few more letters from Cadbury to his parents, I found out that Sara, then three months pregnant with their first child, unexpectedly became so sick with what Cadbury later called “the Toxemia of Pregnancy” that eventually the child had to be removed in an attempt to save the mother’s life. Sara died a few days after the removal of the child. Cadbury speculated after the fact that had they done the procedure a month earlier, her live might have been spared, but she wanted a child so badly that they waited for any sign of recovery, which, sadly, never came.

The tragedy of such a loss affected Cadbury quite a bit, which is evident not only in the way in which he speaks about her final moments, but also in the way he manipulates pen on paper; throughout the emotional letter, written over the course of many days, his handwriting becomes looser and more dramatic. When Sara’s still alive, his writing is neat, as if he’s conserving all his energy for her, but when she passes, he seems to let go of everything and write truly from the heart. Click on the thumbnails below for larger images of the letter.

Photo of Haviland Meeting House from "The American Friend" (First Month, 1897; p.79).

For the past few weeks, I have been scanning and cataloging pictures of meeting houses from all over the United States. Photographs, newspaper clippings, and post cards document the many variations of these buildings. Although they share the same function, meeting houses varied in their locations, materials, and styles.

The meeting houses that I have found were spread all over the country from Philadelphia to Seattle. Their locations in time varied too. The earliest I worked on was the High Street or Great Meeting House in Philadelphia from the 1690s!

Trying to find the histories for the meeting houses can be a daunting task, but it is very interesting to learn about how they evolved over time. Many meeting houses started out as log structures. As time passed, more permanent stone or brick structures replaced these earlier buildings.

A unique example of a more ephemeral meeting house is one in Kansas. Dating to 1885, the Haviland Friends Church started out as a building constructed of sod!

Buildings featured many different styles. Most of them were simple one or two-story buildings; however, there were some exceptions to the rule. There were several large Greek Revival buildings and a few that had Gothic details.

Working with these images has been really interesting so far. The most challenging ones are the unknown meeting houses, but it is fun to be a detective!

For more information and images of meeting houses, see Triptych.

Hello, library fans!

Now that you’ve heard from Patrick a couple of times about our work with the William Warder Cadbury and Catharine Jones Cadbury papers, I thought I’d give you an idea of what goes on from my side of the desk.  While Patrick’s expertise is East Asian history, mine deals with the more technical aspect of processing a collection and creating a finding aid.  I’m pretty sure our pairing for the summer was somewhat orchestrated by the powers that be (i.e. the wonderful staff of Special Collections), whose mysterious ways I have always admired.

The last students to work on this project left us with a Microsoft Word document version of an almost-completed finding aid for the WWC collection.  At that point, we were not yet using Archivists’ Toolkit, which is an open-source archival data management program used to create finding aids. It has also been my best friend for the past year, since I’ve been using it to create (from scratch!) a finding aid for the Haverford College History Collection, a daunting yet wildly fascinating task.

In fact, much of what goes on in Special Collections on any given day can be described as “daunting yet wildly fascinating,” but usually it’s more of the latter and less of the former. This holds true for the WWC collection, which, at first glance, looks like an amassing of letters, photographs, and pamphlets.  But as you get to know the collection, you realize that, yes, it is many decades’ worth of papers, but it tells a story rife with history, and breathes life back into what most of us only read about in textbooks.

As you might have noticed from Patrick’s blog posts, some of the seemingly most pedestrian details can be of significant importance to a researcher.  It is our job to make those details available for potential researchers, giving the pedestrian a chance to become paramount. Less poetically, our job is to use Archivists’ Toolkit to create a finding aid that can be posted online, and easily found by a Google search. This required first that we be trained in AT through a boot camp led by Holly Mengel and Courtney Smertz, who are currently part of the team that is working on the PACSCL’s “Hidden Collections” project. Having worked with AT before, I felt at ease with most of what Holly taught us, but she was still able to teach me a few tricks that make inputting data considerably easier and faster (rapid data entry, anyone?).

We hope to finish processing the last few boxes and be able to complete a finding aid for this collection by the end of the summer. We will continue blogging about our progress along the way, so stay tuned!

Questions or comments about the project can be emailed to me (dbailey@haverford.edu) or Special Collections (hc-special@haverford.edu).

-Deanna

I was pleased to receive in the mail recently a copy of Pierpaolo Polzonetti’s Italian Opera in the Age of the American Revolution, published in 2011 by Cambridge University Press.  The cover of this excellent book displays a copy of our striking oil painting of The Quaker meeting: woman preaching from a tub by Egbert van Heemskerck.

Given the delicate and sometimes strained relationship that Quakers have had with music—especially in the religious movement’s earliest years—few would suspect that the cover of a book about Italian opera would be graced with an image of a Quaker meeting.  Yet 18th- and 19th-century Europeans were fascinated by Pennsylvanian Quakers.  Voltaire is noted for extolling their virtues in a series of letters.  And when Benjamin Franklin went to Paris he was mistaken for being a Quaker and did little to correct the misunderstanding.  Polzonetti’s book explores issues of American identity, including the depiction of Quakers, through the receptive lens of Italian opera.

Our painting by van Heemskerck is one of several from the late 17th century by the Dutch artist living in England.  These were copied frequently, especially as engravings.  It seems depictions of Quakers were popular no matter the medium, and in this case, at least, the treatment is dramatic, even worthy of opera.

Mary Esther Williams Dasenbrock spent her early years in Michigan and graduated from Vassar College in 1943. While a student there, she happened to hear a speech by Haverford professor Douglas Steere, who was also to head up the Relief and Reconstruction (R&R) program at Haverford College. Later, the chaplain at Vassar recommended she join R&R and that’s how she ended up in the R&R masters’ degree program at Haverford in the fall of 1943. There were 22 members in that first group of R&R students, all but one of whom were women. Only two of them were birthright Quakers, but by 1990, almost all of them were Quakers, which Dasenbrock felt demonstrated the impact of the program. The group was unified by age and socio-economic background and they were well-received by Haverford students. They lived in Language House (2 College Lane) and Professor Manuel Asensio and Elisa Asensio were their house parents.

The R&R curriculum included language (she took Polish & advanced German) and area studies, international relief administration, social case work, bookkeeping and an “applied work” program, as well as philosophy taught by Douglas Steere. Dasenbrock thought Haverford was lenient with them. She wrote her thesis on “Camps for Migrant Laborers…” in 1945, which is now in the college archives. The following summer she spent in a Federal migrant labor camp in Texas, both screening people for communicable diseases and running a day care – even though she never liked children – where everyone spoke Spanish and she didn’t.

Directly after, she was sent to Puerto Rico for 11 months to work in a Quaker Civilian Public Service health clinic. She averred “I never have felt that I was capable for what I was supposed to do….” Upon returning home in 1946, she began work with the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and was sent to Poland working on clothing and food distribution. After the relief effort was disbanded, she helped establish a work camp in Poland that succeeded in building a school.

Mary Esther Williams married Henry Dasenbrock in Poland in 1947. Shortly thereafter, they returned to the U.S. and spent a year as directors of a work camp in Mexico. After their children were born, they lived in Ohio and she was asked by the superintendent of schools to help found a college, now a branch of Wright State University. She was on the Board of that college and thought that one of the most worthwhile activities she had ever undertaken. When Henry got a job with AFSC as a fundraiser, they moved to Baltimore, and Dasenbrock volunteered in the local AFSC office. Under the auspices of the AFSC, she was able to go to Poland again in 1958 to lead an international work camp, again building a school. She was the executive of the World Federalist office in Baltimore, then worked with UNICEF. Finally, the family came to live in Haverford and she became a member of Haverford Monthly Meeting. She served on the board of Haverford College from 1979-1990 and worked to raise an R&R Scholarship for the college, all the while keeping the R&R group together through a newsletter that she wrote continuously from the early 1950s. Toward the end of the 90s, she and Henry moved to Quadrangle, a Haverford retirement community. She was awarded a Doctor of Humane Letters from Haverford in 2004. Mary Esther Williams Dasenbrock died in March 2011.

This information primarily comes from an oral history interview recorded in 1990. What this summary cannot convey is Dasenbrock’s lively intelligence, self-effacing character and personality so full of a zest for life, but which the interview so amply affords. The interview can be heard at: thesis.haverford.edu/dspace/handle/10066/1644 Unfortunately, the very beginning of the interview conducted by Carolyn Tolles is not on the recording but it is set down here:

Q. I understand, Mary Esther, that you were brought up in Grosse Point, Michigan and graduated from Vassar in 1943. What did you major in?
A. I majored in euthenics and nobody ever knows what that is. It’s from the Greek “well-being.” It was a catch all. I didn’t know what …

Gest Fellow Katharine Gerbner is a Ph.D. Candidate in the History of American Civilization at Harvard University. Her research is on Protestantism and Slavery in the early Atlantic World.

Katharine Gerbner 2010 Gest Fellow

During my month at Haverford, I have examined the early Quaker stance on slavery. Quakers—renowned abolitionists by the late eighteenth-century—were deeply conflicted about the significance of slavery in the seventeenth-century. Hundreds of slave-owning Friends lived on Barbados, the sugar-rich British island in the Caribbean, and most found no contradiction between owning slaves and preaching equality. In Pennsylvania, Quaker merchants were active participants in the slave trade and a number of Quaker families held slaves.

Using the resources at the Haverford Quaker Collection, I have sought to understand and contextualize seventeenth-century Quaker views on slavery. My primary sources include Meeting Minutes from Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia, as well as epistles and books of discipline. In these documents, I have examined not only Quaker slavery and antislavery, but also other contemporaneous debates and controversies within the Quaker community. By comparing debates on slavery to debates on other topics, I have developed a better sense of the cultural and political context that accompanied seventeenth-century Quaker slave owning.

Having the opportunity to spend a month studying Quakers and slavery at Haverford has been both productive and fascinating. I am very grateful to the staff at the Quaker Collection for welcoming me so warmly and offering such excellent advice about how to proceed with my research!