The Guilford College Quaker Collection

THE GUILFORD COLLEGE QUAKER COLLECTION By Dorothy Gilbert Thorne* The Quaker Collection is housed in two rooms, the vault, and a closed section of the stack room in the Guilford College Library. Display cases are situated in the hall opposite the entrance to the Quaker Research Room, so designated because it contains the genealogical collection—215 volumes, Quaker and non-Quaker. Here those hunting their ancestors can examine the books and search without any special assistance; original records from the vault may be consulted with supervision. Rare books are also shelved in this room, the most recent addition to the collection being a first Philadelphia edition of William Bartram's Travels. The outstanding small collection here consists of a number of rare books on the life of General Nathanael Greene, once a Quaker, and on the Battle of Guilford Court House fought four miles from New Garden (now Guilford CoUege) in 1781. In the center of the long wall of the Quaker Research Room is a large map of North and South Carolina drawn by Henry Mouzon in 1775. Mouzon's map was used in campaigns of the American Revolution , but it bears a Quaker significance, also. New Garden Meetinghouse is located on it as well as two other meetinghouses, which according to location are surely Deep River and Cane Creek. Cornwallis camped with his army at these three meetinghouses before and after the Battle of Guilford Court House. British soldiers are buried in two of the Quaker graveyards, but the monthly meeting minutes make no mention of the battle. At the end of the war, however, North Carolina Yearly Meeting reported Friends sufferings (financial losses) to London Yearly Meeting. On one side of the map there are a number of pictures significant in the history of Guilford College; on the other there are thirteen of the Robert Spence etchings illustrating The Journal of George Fox. The long table below the map was used in President Louis Lyndon * Curator of the Quaker Collection and Professor of English, Guilford College. 108 Notes and Documents109 Hobbs's office; the walnut chairs were given by the Baltimore Association in 1883 when New Garden Boarding School was renamed Friends Boarding School and its two buildings remodelled and refurbished . These chairs were part of a set of sturdy Victorian parlor furniture; they represent the period in which the College emerged. Other pieces in the room are in the same tradition. To represent the earlier period when the boarding school opened, there is a small black leather trunk once the property of Harriet Peck, teacher from 1837 to 1839. It now contains a few items from the costume collection, notably the alpaca cape with velvet collar and silk lining which "the elegant and opulent" Joseph John Gurney seems to have left behind on his 1838 visit to New Garden, and Eliza Kirkbride Gurney's brown wool shawl, a recent gift. The remainder of the costume collection is stored in the Quaker Room storage space and consists of bonnets and shawls, hats, and black broadcloth coats worn by outstanding Friends—Lewis Lyndon Hobbs, J. Franklin Davis, John W. Woody, and others; and of dresses ranging from Naomi Harrison Jay's gray satin wedding dress to the three blue and red wool homespun dresses made by the Benbow family more than a century ago and on occasion worn by the three great-granddaughters of Anna Clark Benbow, one of the first twenty-five girls to enroll in New Garden Boarding School. Other items of interest in the Quaker Research Room are Nathan Hunt's clock and his hat, Jemima White's plain bonnet which is the last one worn in New Garden Meeting, an 1855 sampler, pictures of Joshua and Abigail Hunt Stanley and Jonathan and Elizabeth Cox, couples who served as superintendent and matron for New Garden Boarding School, a Bundy watercolor, two collections—one of pewter, one of blue china, both loaned by Charles Hendricks—and a lamp made from a Chinese vase and given in memory of Evelyn M. Haworth. The Quaker Room itself is just beyond the Quaker Research Room and contains about 265 Quaker and anti-Quaker books, the majority of which were...