History of the Quaker Union Clinton County, New York

HISTORY OF THE QUAKER UNION CLINTON COUNTY, NEW YORK By Neal Burdick* The story of the people of the Quaker Union, members of the Peru Monthly Meeting of Friends, New York, is typical of many in the annals of our nation's youth. Local history archives abound with the Uves of inbred religious communities: exploration and settlement, growth, division, decline, and in some cases regeneration . The Quaker Union of Clinton County parallels this development closely. The setting is a tract of land in southern Clinton County about five miles west of Lake Champlain and forty miles south of the Canadian border, between the watersheds of the Great and Little Ausable rivers. It is now, as it was when its settlement began, a place of great scenic appeal. It is bounded on the west and south by a hill called Hallock and the thickening forest of the Adirondack uplands. The view from Hallock Hill shows that the area is framed by the St. Lawrence River valley reaching over the horizon to the north, and gently sloping foothills toward the Adirondacks to the west. Eastward lies Lake Champlain, with its islands below the Green Mountains of Vermont, giving the scene the appearance of an illuminated manuscript. The soil is rich in this pocket of fertility , but stone-wall patterns attest to the labor that went into working the land. J. Warren Harkness' observations in 1889 that "entire towns . . . are distinctly visible . . . like the blocks in a woman's crazy quilt"1 is true today. Directly below lies the site of the Union, the community within Peru Township surrounding the Quaker meetinghouses. Today it is a region of comfortably situated , satisfyingly prosperous dairy farms and apple orchards. All that remains of the Union is a burying ground in various states of deterioration and a few buildings wearing the disguise of other *Plattsburgh, N.Y. The author, now a graduate student at Case Western Reserve University, wrote this article as an undergraduate at St. Lawrence University. 1. J. Warren Harkness, "Early Settlers of Hallock Hill, IV," Plattsburgh Republican, May 18, 1889, in A Collection of Articles on Local History by J. Warren Harkness and Others, compiled by Grace Arnold, Eleanor Spaulding , and Cora Stafford, unpublished, Peru, New York, 1966, 1, 45. 90 THE QUAKER UNION91 purposes. The meetinghouses are no more and the Quakers have faded away; there are only hidden clues that this was once a thriving and populous community. William Keese was the first Quaker to make a life on the future site of the Union ; he traveled on the ice of Lake Champlain in the winter of 1789 to settle on his chosen lot. After the War of Independence the northern Champlain Valley was virtually uninhabited by white men. Except for a small settlement at the mouth of the Saranac River fifteen miles to the north (now Plattsburgh), it was the domain of wild animals and a few Indians. The fledgling government of the State of New York, wishing to see its territory occupied, adopted a policy of selling land to resident veterans, with the stipulation that they populate their purchases. One who secured vast acreage in the vicinity of the Ausable River watersheds was Zephaniah Piatt of Dutchess County; in 1784 he bought patent rights to 29,983 acres. This he divided into the "Great Location " of 17,983 acres and the more southerly "12,000 Acre Location." He hired surveyors to measure off lots of 425 acres, giving his employees options on lots of their choice. One of the first to acquire land in this way was Captain Edward Everett, a veteran originally from New Hampshire who had served with Benedict Arnold in the futile Quebec Campaign of 1776.2 He selected a site at the foot of the northern slope of the hill that separates the Great and Little Ausable Rivers and settled in 1786, his only neighbors being "a lodge of Indians, who were friendly."3 From this beginning, settlement proceeded without abatement. Surveyors made enticing reports about the quality and quantity of land, and people answered the call. The opportunity presented by virgin soil in an unbroken country, the impetus of the postwar land boom, the...