Drumore Quakers’ Precious Habitation: A 200-Year History of Drumore Friends Meetinghouse and Cemetery

By Kris Miller and D. Douglas Miller

Built in 1816, the Drumore Quaker meetinghouse in southern Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, was home to the Drumore Friends Meeting for 120 years. Quakers moved to the area at the turn of the 19th century and became part of Little Britain Monthly Meeting. Many of its members were active in the Underground Railroad at mid-century, as were other Quakers thoughout Lancaster County and elsewhere.

By the early 20th century the meeting was in decline, but members who were concerned about the preservation of the meetinghouse and cemetery formed the Drumore Cemetery Association. Many of those Friends are pictured below at the time of the meetings 1916 centennial. The association has faithfully maintained the property and in 2016 is commemorating the 200th anniversary of the building of the meetinghouse.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781514473641

Kris Miller

Kris Miller is a Certifi ed Lifestyle and Weight Management Specialist who has been in the fi eld of Wellness since 2000. She has successfully coached hundreds of clients on health and wellness as well as provided weight loss counseling. Kris owned and operated her own Fitness Center and now spends her time speaking and training others to make healthy lifestyle choices to experience and restore balance in life.

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Copyright © 2016 by Drumore Cemetery Association.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2016903819

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-5144-7366-5

                Softcover       978-1-5144-7365-8

                eBook           978-1-5144-7364-1

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 04/28/2016

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Photos and Maps

Introduction

Chapter 1 Quakers in Lancaster County

Notes

Chapter 2 Drumore Friends Meeting

Notes

Chapter 3 Drumore and Other Lancaster County Quakers and the Underground Railroad

Notes

Chapter 4 Drumore Cemetery Association

Chapter 5 Drumore Cemetery

Notes

Conclusion

Bibliography

About the Authors

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I WILL HAVE occasion throughout the text and notes of this book to acknowledge and thank several people who have been of great help to me over the past two years. For some of them I'll do so briefly here at the outset as well.

Taylor Lamborn is without doubt the living person with the greatest knowledge of and involvement in Drumore Friends Meeting and Cemetery. His blood relationship to hundreds of Quakers from the meetings described here runs deep. And his encyclopedic knowledge of all things Quaker and genealogical is legendary. Taylor's contributions to this book, for which he was the instigator, are huge and permeate every chapter of the book. In all ways he is Mr. Drumore Quaker.

Suzanne Lamborn's historic, genealogical, and Quaker knowledge are responsible for many insights regarding the Quakers of Little Britain Monthly Meeting, of which she is the long-time clerk. Her studies of the Underground Railroad and experience as president of the Southern Lancaster Historical Society have also provided much valuable information.

Susanna Schaum is a member of the Drumore Cemetery Association who has been very helpful in guiding the publication aspects of this book. I am extremely grateful for that assistance. She and Suzanne Lamborn are also leading the efforts of the association in planning Drumore's 200th anniversary celebration.

Four friends have been kind enough to read portions of the book as it was being written and to offer their comments and contribute their knowledge. I am extremely grateful to Christopher Densmore, Curator of the Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College, for insightful information regarding Quakers, Quakerism, and the Underground Railroad. Nancy Plumley has not only provided very helpful information about Quakers and the Underground Railroad but has also shared photos from her impressive collection. David Morrison, a member of Lancaster Friends Meeting and a lawyer, has been very helpful in providing insight into the histories of both Lampeter and the first Lancaster Friends Meetings. Connie Webster, a member of Sadsbury Friends Meeting and a knowledgeable historian, has kindly clarified a number of facts regarding that important meeting's history.

The spouse of any author is deserving of gratitude for enduring the months of spaced-out absence resulting from single-minded book writing. My wife Grace is owed this expression in great abundance. But as a lifelong teacher of English and journalism she also contributed her professional perspective by reading and commenting on my drafts. I married wisely!

Finally, I am proud of and grateful to our daughter Kris, who has become my co-author of this book in multiple ways. As a university teacher of English her thorough reading of my manuscripts and her significant professional commentary have improved nearly every page of the book. But it is her artistic contribution as the book's photographer and photo editor that have elevated her role to share the book's author recognition. If a photo is worth a thousand words, then her portion of this book far outweighs mine. Kris is also responsible for selecting and placing the Quaker Quotes which appear throughout the book.

PHOTOS AND MAPS

A LARGE PERCENTAGE of the photographs in this book were created by Kris Miller. These include all of the present-day photographs of Lancaster County Quaker meetinghouses and the photographs of current Drumore Cemetery Association members. She is also responsible for photographing and putting into digital form archival materials from several sources.

Many important photographs and archival Quaker records appearing in the book were photographed at the Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College. I am extremely grateful to the library's Curator, Christopher Densmore, for granting permission for these photographs to be used in this book. For the benefit of readers who might wish to pursue the originals I will list here the pages on which they appear:

Pages 16, 18, 19, 27, 32 (upper), 36, 48 (lower), 58, 61, 99, 101, 103, 109, 121, 219

Another major source of photographed materials for the book are the archives of the Drumore Cemetery Association. I am grateful to the association's president, Taylor Lamborn, for placing these materials in my hands during the writing of the book as well as providing some historic Lamborn photos.

Permission to include other single photographs was kindly granted by Nancy Plumley (photograph of William Rakestraw), Sister Anita Bolton (photographs of Leslie Bolton and Wilmer Bolton), and Tom Smith (photograph of Robert S. Smith). We are also grateful to artist Steve Roka for permitting his 1996 drawing of Drumore meetinghouse to be included, and to artist Myke Rogers for his drawing of the Lancaster meetinghouse.

The map of Lancaster County Quaker meetings in Chapter One and the map for the Drumore Quaker Tour in Chapter Two were created by graphic designer Emery Pajer. He is also responsible for editing the two 1864 township maps in that chapter. All four maps are accessible online and with apps through the link www.emster.com/quaker. Readers are especially encouraged to do so in connection with the Chapter Two self-guided tour of Drumore Quakers' historic farmsteads and homesites.

INTRODUCTION

Nothing, I believe, can really teach us the nature and meaning of inspiration but personal experience of it. That we may all have such experience if we will but attend to the divine influences in our own hearts, is the cardinal doctrine of Quakerism.

---Caroline Stephen, Quaker Strongholds (1891)

Greetings.

I 'M A 75-year-old Quaker/musician/retired professor. Several years ago my wife Grace and I moved to southern York County, Pennsylvania, to live on the vineyard property of our daughter Kris's family, spend some time on the mowing tractor, and watch our grandsons grow up. Allegro's Brogue, Pennsylvania, vineyard site is a great place to grow Bordeaux-style vinifera grapes. But it's also located nearly an hour away from any meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), of which we have been members for the last half-century. So for a few years now we have driven south and east to the Norman Wood Bridge, headed east on route 372 to The Buck, then north to Lancaster to attend Lancaster Friends Meeting.

Until two years ago, I had never set foot south of that section of route 372, except to frequently take advantage of the Amish supply store at the corner of route 372 and Susquehannock Drive. Then came a call from a man who identified himself as Taylor Lamborn from Reading Friends Meeting. He indicated that he was connected with an association which had responsibility for keeping up the meetinghouse and cemetery of a now-inactive Friends Meeting in Drumore Township which would in 2016 be commemorating the 200th anniversary of the year in which the meetinghouse had been built. He wondered if some Lancaster Friends might consider helping to plan that celebration.

Well, to make a long tale short, I attended a June 2014 meeting of the Drumore Cemetery Association (after learning that I could find the location simply by driving south three miles from that Amish supply store), and within a couple months somehow found myself in the position of agreeing to research and write a little booklet on the history of Drumore Friends Meeting and the Drumore Cemetery Association. That little booklet became thicker by the months, as I began looking into the lives of my newly-discovered F/friends. And the result is the book you have in your hands.

My hope is that what I've learned about the Quakers who worshipped in this small meetinghouse, the people who have been buried in its cemetery, and the conscientious Quakers and non-Quakers who have assumed responsibility for the physical properties since the Meeting ceased to exist in the early twentieth century will draw you into this place as it has me. Having spent my career in academia my instincts were originally to write a just the facts document about what I learned. But I've decided instead to share a bit more informally, and I invite you to join me in my two-year journey of discovery.

If you have family who have been a part of this story, I hope you'll gain a bit of additional perspective about the circumstances of their relationship to Drumore. If not, I hope you may catch a bit of the fever I have in seeing the past two centuries unfold here where Susquehannock Drive meets Furniss Road, at this quiet spot in the southern Lancaster County countryside.

CHAPTER ONE

Quakers in Lancaster County

PHOTO1-01B.jpg

To love and be loved is a universal human urge. Is it any wonder, then, that we are moved to seek God's love? . . . It is to this divine love that we are called. This is the high promise of man's life. We are called away from indifference, from meanness, malice, prejudice, and hate. We are called above the earthly loves that come and go and are unsure. We are called into the deep enduring love of God and man and all creation. Worship is a door into that love. Once we have entered it, our every act is a prayer, our whole life a continuous worship.

---N. Jean Toomer, An Interpretation

of Friends Worship (1947)

I 'M GOING to assume that many of you reading this book are not Quakers and may have a limited knowledge of who we are and who we have been over the past three and a half centuries. So, with apologies to those for whom this is well known, I'll briefly address the whos, whats, and whys of Quakers since their origins in seventeenth-century England before introducing Quakers in Lancaster County in the early eighteenth century and thereafter.

Early members of the Religious Society of Friends (also known as Quakers) were drawn to the revelation by young George Fox (1624-1691) and others that spiritual knowledge was available directly from God, without the help of any man, book, or writing.¹ Their beliefs and practices grew out of their inward religious experience of the Inner Light or Light of Christ² in worship. This worship involved silently waiting for the Spirit's leading, which replaced reliance on the structures, ministers, and creeds of the organized church, or even the written words of the Bible as the ultimate source of spiritual authority. For Quakers, then and now, God lives within each person and is available directly to each person without the intercession of an institution or set of written creeds. That Spirit is present as Friends gather within the community of the meeting for worship and as we move out into the world to live the testimonies of our faith in our daily lives, supported by one another.

It is not surprising that this denial of the organized church's authority was not well received in the seventeenth century by the Church of England, nor even by the dissenting Baptists, Presbyterians, and others. For decades many Quakers were persecuted and imprisoned for their beliefs and practices. Fox and others were led to carry their message to other parts of the British Isles and the continent, and also to colonial America. And in that effort, the establishment by Quaker William Penn (1644-1718) of the Holy Experiment in Pennsylvania was a major occurrence. Friends quickly populated the portions of Penn's Woods surrounding Philadelphia including Chester, Montgomery, and Bucks Counties, and beyond. By the third decade of the eighteenth century three of the Lancaster County meetings I'll describe in this chapter were already founded, with others soon to follow. It would be nearly another century before Drumore Friends would become part of that movement.

Some Quaker Terminology

As is true for many denominations, terms describing Quakers' organization and practices can be confusing for those not involved. So I'll take a couple pages here to briefly visit some of those terms and structures. They should make my discussions of Lancaster County Friends meetings easier to understand. For readers wishing to further pursue Friends' beliefs and practices, I recommend the Faith and Practice volumes of both Philadelphia Yearly Meeting and Baltimore Yearly Meeting as well as two helpful volumes by Quakers Howard Brinton³ and Wilmer Cooper,⁴ representing somewhat diverse Quaker perspectives.

MEETING: Friends refer to the gathered spiritual community as a meeting, rather than as a church. Each meeting represents an autonomous group whose purpose is to come together weekly or more often, seeking God's presence and guidance in our lives. We also refer to our worship services as meetings for worship.

MONTHLY MEETING: Once a month a Friends meeting comes together in a meeting for worship with attention to business. It is here that collective decision making and sharing of information take place, the former using a process of seeking unity which is somewhat unique to Friends. A monthly meeting may consist of one meeting, as described above, or it may involve more than one meeting, some of which may be preparative under the care of the monthly meeting. When an individual joins a monthly meeting he or she also automatically becomes a member of the quarterly and yearly meetings of which the monthly meeting is a part, and of the indulged or preparative meeting, when such exists under the monthly meeting.

PREPARATIVE MEETING; INDULGED MEETING: Historically, when small groups of Friends in a given area wished to begin worshipping together they would often formally approach an established monthly meeting to request recognition as an indulged meeting or a preparative meeting for regular weekly (or more frequent) worship. But they would once a month attend the monthly meeting which had approved their existence in order to take part in consideration of business. They were, in fact, part of that monthly meeting, even though they worshipped weekly in different places. In some cases an indulged meeting (usually a very informal, small gathering) would later request to be considered a preparative meeting (which might prepare business to take to the monthly meeting, and perhaps eventually become a monthly meeting of its own).

QUARTERLY MEETING: From the earliest days of its English history, Quaker leaders recognized the importance of having Friends from a wider geographical area come together to support one another in their spiritual journeys. So quarterly meetings were established, made up of a number of monthly meetings, and were so named because they gather once each quarter of the year. They gather together to worship, to conduct the business of the quarterly meeting, and to strengthen the wider community of Friends.

YEARLY MEETING: Similarly, Friends in a wider geographical area composed of multiple quarterly meetings come together once a year as a yearly meeting. They do so for the same purposes of worshipping together, conducting business, and connecting with Friends beyond their immediate area. There are a number of yearly meetings in the United States, with two of them overlapping in Pennsylvania. Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (PYM) is primarily constituted of monthly meetings in eastern Pennsylvania plus the Eastern Shore of Maryland, Delaware, and southern New Jersey. Baltimore Yearly Meeting (BYM) includes monthly meetings in central Pennsylvania, Maryland west of the Chesapeake, Virginia, parts of West Virginia, and the District of Columbia.

As I'll discuss throughout this chapter, various of the Lancaster County Friends meetings have had affiliations with both Philadelphia Yearly Meeting and Baltimore Yearly Meeting.

ORTHODOX/HICKSITE FRIENDS: One of the periods of our history of which Friends are least proud is a period of time from 1828 until the mid-twentieth century during which Quakerism separated into two distinct branches. (Philadelphia Yearly Meeting reunited in 1955 and Baltimore Yearly Meeting in 1968.) A very simplified description of this separation is that some Friends (Hicksites) held strongly to the belief that God was most revealed through the experience of the Inner Light. Others (Orthodox) placed a higher emphasis on the Truth of scriptures and the teachings of Jesus Christ. But most Friends would confess that the division was not well-founded nor exclusive, and we are grateful that for the past half century it no longer exists.

I'm mentioning this period of separation because meetings chose, in 1828, to become Hicksite or Orthodox, and in some cases two different meetings (and sometimes meetinghouses) resulted. In general, most of the Lancaster County meetings became Hicksite, with a few Orthodox meetings being created. Most of the latter, as I'll discuss, died out after short periods.

SILENT WORSHIP: Historically Friends do not hire clergy to lead their meetings. (I should acknowledge that in some parts of the U.S. and world this is not currently the case, though it has always been true of the Lancaster County meetings.) Instead, as the spiritual community gathers in silent worship, the center of worship is to seek within each worshipper and within the gathered community the presence of God. (Friends variously use Inner Light, Christ within, Inner Spirit, and other terms when speaking of God.) Out of this silence individuals may be led to share a spoken message, a prayer, a song. None of this is predetermined, but is different each time the community gathers in expectant worship. We refer to it as unprogrammed worship.

CLERK: When Friends gather for the purpose of conducting business, they still do so within the context of a meeting for worship. But on these occasions a clerk leads the meeting. That clerk, who is a member of the meeting, has been approved to serve for the current year and leads the community in its process of seeking unity around matters of business.

MINUTES: The term minutes is familiar as the recording of organizations' activity when they conduct business. For Friends a minute is also a particular statement around which a meeting for business seeks to come to unity. Friends do not vote in this process. Rather, they approve a minute only when all present have expressed approval of the minute's language (or have stepped aside if they cannot unite but do not wish to stand in the way of the meeting moving ahead).

Quakers tend conscientiously to create and preserve their minutes. Thus, much of what we can learn about Friends meetings' history is through the reading of those preserved minutes in libraries such as the Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College and the comparable library at Haverford.

TESTIMONIES: Quakers place a high value on letting our lives speak, meaning that we believe our outward lives should reflect the inward leading of the Spirit. This has led over the centuries to a commitment to several testimonies which we value highly. They include:

Simplicity: A striving to live a spirit-centered life in which we live simply, in our use of time, our life style and habits, and our material possessions relative to others' needs.

Peace: A striving to live our lives seeking non-violent alternatives to conflict, both as individuals and as citizens of the world. Quakers, Mennonites, and Brethren have shared