Iowa
History Project
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Over fifty
years have passed since the first Yearly Meeting of Friends in Iowa was held,
and there are now few survivors among all those who attended that gathering.(127) Almost
within the life of a single generation there have been reproduced in Iowa the
salient features of two hundred years of Quaker history on the American
continent. Religious upheaval, sufferings from war, the issue of slavery,
contact with the Indians, and the problems of education, schisms, migration,
and decline—all of these form a part of the annals of Iowa Quakerism.
The future
appeared hopeful as the Iowa Yearly Meeting of Friends began its labors under
the direction of a group of the strongest men that this Yearly Meeting has
produced, and with a membership made up of sturdy, restless emigrants from the
East and South. But there came a time when the incoming migration from the East
ceased to exceed or even to equal the continued movement of the Quakers to the
farther West, and the effect on the Iowa Yearly Meeting was disheartening.
Stretching from the Mississippi to California there are long chains of isolated
and disconnected communities of Friends, the founders of which may be traced
back to the now depleted Iowa centers. In Iowa numerous Quaker communities,
once strong and flourishing, have entirely disappeared; and in fact, it may be
said that with but few exceptions the communities of Friends from the Atlantic
to the Pacific coast are engaged in a struggle for existence.
The effect of
this draining force on Iowa Quakerism during the last half-century is well
illustrated in the case of the Spring Creek settlement, the birthplace of the
Iowa Yearly Meeting of Friends. Thomas Stafford was the first of the Quakers to
settle in this fertile region, and close upon his heels came numerous other Friends,
who quickly built up one of the strongest Quaker centers in the State. The
after a number of years of prosperity came a turn of events.
As early as
1847, in his reconnoitering expeditions in the Des Moines valley, D. D. Owen
had discovered the fact that Mahaska County was underlaid with large quantities
of excellent coal.(128) This knowledge was put to little use, however, until about 1875
or 1876 when “the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad Co. opened up a
mine…about three miles south of Oskaloosa”, under the name of the Excelsior
Coal Company, which soon developed its output to 1500 or 1600 tons per day.(129) Mahaska County became the largest
coal producing county in Iowa, and with the constantly rising prices of land in
their neighborhood many of the Friends became restless, sold their lands, and
moved away. The climax came in 1890. The Excelsior Coal Company, which had
exhausted its earlier mines, moved its plant to the very heart of the Quaker
community and opened the Carbonado mines. Soon the erection of shacks was begun
and a turbulent mining element came to Carbonado. The few remaining Friends
could endure no longer the worldliness and profanity encountered on every side,
and as soon as possible they departed. Five years passed by; the church
property was sold; the meeting-house was moved away; and to-day the crumbling
ruins of an abandoned railway, great heaps of waste slate, fields made
dangerous by unsightly sink-holes, and a few dilapidated miners’ shacks have taken
the place of this once thriving Quaker community. An early resident of the
Spring Creek neighborhood has said:
At this
writing (1912) not a stone or fragment of either building of the school house
or old meeting house can be found or identified. The little old grave yard,
with many of the lost or unmarked graves, remains as a reminiscence of a once
quaker settlement. The nice grove has all disappeared, and even the very ground
where the two or three buildings stood is cultivated in growing crops.(130)
Within the State of Iowa there are many such localities where only desolate burying grounds, with their half-covered gravestones, now mark the sites of once thriving Quaker meetings; and there are also in Iowa many other communities of Friends which are now on the verge of extinction.
A brief survey
of the field of Iowa Quakerism as it exists to-day reveals a few striking
facts. First of all it may safely be said that after a period of three quarters
of a century there are not now in Iowa more than ten thousand Friends,
including the members of all branches of the Society. There are in Iowa the
Hicksites, the Wilburites, the Conservative, and the Orthodox Friends, each
almost as separate and distinct in their outward affiliations (except the
Wilbur and Conservative Friends) as are the Protestants and the Roman
Catholics. Indeed, the members of hese various branches have very curious ideas
concerning each other’s beliefs and manner of life. Again, it may be said that
in this western field there has been in progress one of the most interesting
experiments in Quakerism in the history of the Society.
A superficial
glance at the Orthodox body of Friends in Iowa to-day would convey the
impression that it has had a remarkable period of growth; for when the Yearly Meeting
first convened in 1863 there were but five constituent Quarterly Meetings,
while there were in 1912 some sixteen such meetings. But a more careful
examination of the facts reveals a situation which is alarming to the members
of the Society. In the first report on the membership of the Iowa Yearly
Meeting, made in 1866, there were on record 1284 families, and 502 parts of
families, with 3855 males and 3797 females, or a total of 7652 members; while
at the same time there were reported 1938 Quaker children from five to
twenty-one years of age.(131) In 1912
the records of the Yearly Meeting show a total membership of but 8383 persons,
2176 of whom are non-resident and largely non-supporting members, while 1130
are associate members, most of whom are under ten years of age.(132) This leaves but 5077 as the active, adult membership of the
Yearly Meting in 1912 and, as is always true in religious orders, the interest
of many these is merely nominal.
One other fact
must be borne in mind in this connection. In the early period the constituent
membership of the Iowa Yearly Meeting of Friends was confined to a much smaller
area than it is to-day and was strongly distinctive in character; while of
recent years, with weakened and more numerous centers, its members have come
more intimately into contact with the outside world, and have all but lost what
might be termed distinctive Quakerism.
The reasons for
this retrogression are not hard to find. One of the heaviest contributing causes
is, without question, the marked decrease in the birth-rate among the Friends
in this State,(133) together with the struggle
which the Society has had to hold its young people. A second reason for the
depleted membership of the Iowa Yearly Meeting is the tendency on the part of
those who have in later years migrated to the westward from the Quaker centers
in Iowa to either enter the fold of other religious denominations or to drop
their membership entirely. Thus their names no longer appear on the rolls of
the parent Society.
A third powerful
factor contributing largely in producing the present condition has been the
movement of the rural population to the towns. The Friends have always been a
rural people in the West, and their churches country churches. In this
shifting, therefore, large numbers of Friends who have gone to the towns and
cities have been absorbed by those denominations to which they felt most
inclined.(134) The extent to which this
factor has operated is now beginning to be appreciated. It is perhaps no
exaggeration to say that to a large degree the backbone of many of the
evangelical churches in the West is made up of people who are Quaker either in
ancestry or in training or both; and herein lies one of the greatest
contributions of this sect to modern religious thought. At a recent ministerial
meeting in one of the cities of Iowa a prominent Methodist pastor said:
“Gentlemen, there is no longer any real need for the Friends’ Church—we are all
Quakers at heart.”
A deeper
investigation into the present condition of the Society of Friends in Iowa and
the West reveals what is believed to be the true source of all its troubles,
namely, its inability to early adapt itself to new and changed environment. As
has been see, the Friends who first came to Iowa came form both the East and
the South, and they brought with them all of the inherited conservatism of the
past. Thus, when thrown into contact with the broad spirit of the West,
Quakerism received a great shock. In the mould of this new environment racial
differences, political ideas, religious creeds, and institutions of every kind
were recast, and out of the process there came forth that broad liberalism
which characterizes the West. When the pressure of such surroundings began to
be felt by the Society of Friends and some of its members were caught in the
current instead of attempting to adjust themselves to their new environment the
leaders undertook to purge the Society by frequent disownments. In one Monthly
Meeting alone there were no less than one hundred and thirty-seven of such
disownments between the years 1842-1875. This is but an illustration of the
destructive work wrought by this short-sighted policy among the Friends in
Iowa.
Combining,
therefore the influences of the decreasing birth-rate, the westward migrations,
the heavy flow into towns and cities where there are no Friends meetings, the
absorption into other more progressive denominations, and the wide-spread
disownment of members, with the internal dissensions which arose in 1877 and
split the Society into two irreconcilable factions, the real causes for the
present dormant condition of the Society of Friends in Iowa are apparent.
To gain a true
perspective of what the past half-century has meant to the Iowa Yearly Meeting
of Friends, that organization must be viewed through the medium of its western
appendages. As was previously state, the membership of the Yearly Meeting in
1863 was about seven thousand, chiefly located about strong centers within the
State of Iowa. By the end of the succeeding quarter-century, however, this
number had increased to 10,234(135) and was
scattered over the vast expanse of the entire West, far out to the Pacific
coast. Then began the lopping-off process. In 1893 the two Quarterly Meetings of
Newberg and Salem in the State of Oregon were set off as an independent Yearly
Meeting with a membership of 955 persons.(136) In 1895
the California Yearly Meeting of Friends, with a membership of 1166 and two
Quarterly Meetings, was likewise set off.(137) In 1908
the field was again curtailed by the establishment of the Nebraska Yearly
Meeting of Friends, composed of Denver, Hiawatha, Mt. Vernon, Platte Valley,
Spring Bank, and Union Quarterly Meetings, and with a membership of 1679
persons.(138) Not that the Society in
Iowa has dwindled in numbers under these circumstances but that it has been
able to maintain and, in fact, increase its activities is the marvel.
The history of
Iowa Quakerism during the last fifty years is indeed checkered. Among the older
members to-day there is a wide-spread uncertainty as to what the future holds
in store. The decay of so many of the early Quaker centers in this State; the
present scattered condition of the constituent meetings; the lack of sympathy
and coherence among the various sects of the Society in Iowa; and the general
breaking down not only of denominational but even of church ties in general—all
of these facts are disquieting to the Quaker mind. Nevertheless, for more than
a generation there have been forces at work within the Society of Friends in
Iowa tending toward the modernization of its ancient teachings and the
construction of a religious organization adapted to the spirit of the times.
Notes and References
127- In the new thirty thousand dollar yearly meeting-house at
Oskaloosa the Iowa Yearly Meeting of (Orthodox) Friends celebrated its fiftieth
anniversary on September 5 and 6, 1913. A full account of the proceedings may
be found in the Oskaloosa Herald, September 5 and 6, 1913.
128- Iowa Geological Survey, Vol. II, pp. 37, 38, 340.
129- Iowa Geological Survey, Vo. XIX, p. 559.
130-
Acknowledgments should here be made of the kindness of Dr. J. W. Morgan of
Oskaloosa, Iowa, who made a special trip to this locality with which he was
once so familiar, in order that he might correctly write this sketch.
131- Minutes of Iowa Yearly Meeting of Friends,
1866, pp. 12, 26.
132-Minutes of Iowa Yearly Meeting of (Orthodox)
Friends, 1912. See statistical table attached.
133- Between the five-year periods, 1876 to 1880
and 1906 to 1910, the additions in membership by births to the Orthodox Friends
in Iowa fell from about 2 1/10 per cent to 1 1/20 percent of the total membership,
respectively. Though this is not the actual rate of birth, it is strongly
indicative of what has been suggested. The same fact for the earlier years is
even more markedly true, as is shown by the hundred of biographical sketches of
pioneer Quaker families in this State which the writer has collected.
134- It is a noticeable fact that the Orthodox
and Conservative Friends usually unite with such denominations as the Methodist,
Presbyterian, or Congregational, while the Hicksite an Wilbur Friends generally
affiliate with the Unitarian and Universalist bodies.
135- Minutes of Iowa Yearly Meeting of (Orthodox)
Friends, 1888, p. 9.
136- Minutes of Iowa Yearly Meeting of (Orthodox)
Friends, 1893, p. 8. The number of members is based on the statistical report
of 1892, which gives Newberg 791 members and Salem 164 members.
137- The two Quarterly Meetings originally
composing the California Yearly Meeting of Friends were Whittier and Pasadena.
See the Minutes of Iowa Yearly Meeting of (Orthodox) Friends, 1894, pp. 11, 20,
and 1895, p. 7.
138- For a statistical report of the Quarterly
Meeting composing the Nebraska Yearly Meeting see Minutes of Iowa Yearly Meeting
of (Orthodox) Friends, 1907, pp. 47.
For the report of the committee
which aided in establishing the new Yearly Meeting see the Minutes of Iowa Yearly
Meeting of (Orthodox) Friends, 1908, pp. 6, 7.