Quaker Hill

Pawling Town, Dutchess County, NY

Historic Quaker Community [1]

Established as a Quaker Community in 1758-1760 with the conveying of title for a total of 1,000 acres to Thomas Taber and Nehemiah Merritt by King George III, Quaker Hill, located four miles west of Pawling, New York, came to encompass some 30-35 individual homesteads by the late 1790s. The Quaker Community which had developed steadily during the 18th century at Quaker Hill began to experience major change with the advent of the 19th century. Factors that contributed to this development included the 1828 division of the Quaker Hill Meeting into Orthodox and Hicksite societies of Friends, which resulted in the flight of Quakers to southeastern Pennsylvania. Even more significantly, the completion of a railroad link connecting Pawling to New York City in 1849 caused the self-supporting Quaker community of homesteads and small businesses to disappear. It was replaced by the farms and estates of wealthy individuals, including Albert J. Akin, accompanying the northward extension of the Harlem line of the New York Central Railroad from Croton Falls to Dover Plains.

1. Kuhn, Robert D., New York State Office of Parks, Recreation & Historic Preservation, Akin Free Library, nomination document, 1991, National Park Service, National Register of Historic Places, Washington, D.C.

Street Names
Meeting House Road • Old Quaker Hill Road