Historical News

Historical News Friends Historical Association The annual meeting of Friends Historical Association was held on Eleventh Month 28, 1955, at the Library Company of Philadelphia, Broad and Christian Streets, Philadelphia. Richmond P. Miller, Vice-President, was in the chair. The Association was welcomed to the Library Company by Edwin Wolf, 2nd, the Librarian. William Mintzer Wills presented the Treasurer's report, which was accepted and is printed herewith. The following five Directors were re-elected for terms of three years: Samuel J. Bunting, Jr., Thomas E. Drake, Henry J. Cadbury, Edwin B. Bronner , and George Vaux. The Chairman of the Membership Committee reported that the current membership of the Association was 744, representing a net gain of eighteen since the previous Annual Meeting. She also announced that Albert Cook Myers had been elected an Honorary Member in recognition of his long membership and services to the Association and his outstanding historical contributions. Elizabeth Biddle Yarnall spoke briefly on the architectural work of her grandfather, Addison Hutton, who designed the Library Company building (formerly known as the Ridgway Branch) as well as a number of buildings for Friends schools and colleges. Frederick B. Tolles then delivered an address on the subject "James Logan, and the Penn Family: A Study in Loyalty." At the chairman's request Edwin Wolf made some closing remarks on the library of James Logan which is housed in the Library Company , and called attention to the exhibits of books and manuscripts from the Loganian Library. At its meeting on Second Month 2, 1956, the Board of Directors adopted the following minute: At this meeting we have with sadness to record the death of our dear Friend and Honorary President William Wistar Comfort on Christmas Eve last at his home on the Haverford College Campus. 41 42Bulletin of Friends Historical Association Having become a member of Friends Historical Association in 1908 —the year before he joined the faculty of Cornell University as head of the Romance Languages Department—William Comfort was elected to this Board in 1934, and in the following year became President of our Association upon the retirement of Charles Francis Jenkins. For almost two decades William Comfort served with the distinction to be expected of a President of Haverford College and sometime Clerk of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting held at Fourth and Arch Streets. By the time of his own retirement on the 9th of First Month 1953, William Comfort had published his two volumes on William Penn, as well as Just Among Friends: The Quaker Way of Life and Quakers in the Modern World, while we understand that shortly before his death the manuscript of another comprehensive study of Quakerism had been completed. But for us today these mellow fruits of his scholarship can do little to diminish our sense of the great loss to this Association, and to our whole Society, at the close of so long and productive and honorable a life. From Quaker Libraries Among other accessions to the Quaker Collection during the past year, Haverford College reports a large addition to the papers of Joshua L. Baily (1826-1916). This collection was begun in 1941, when the late William L. Baily began to deposit papers relating to his brother, who was a member of Twelfth Street Meeting in Philadelphia. Now Albert L. Baily, Jr., and Joshua L. Baily, Jr., have added some 800 more manuscripts—diaries, notebooks, letters , and essays of their father, illuminating some of his many interests in business and philanthropy. Of more recent interest, but now happily in the category of past history, is a typescript account of the events which transpired at the Media Friends School relating to the admission of colored children in 1937. This document is the gift of Dorothy B. James. A gift of Henry J. Cadbury from the estate of his father, the late Joel Cadbury, brings to Haverford a unique file of a previously unknown Philadelphia Quaker journal, The Young Spectator. Norwood Penrose Hallowell ( 1838-1914) , a Hicksite Friend who had attended the Introductory Department at Haverford from 1849 to 1853, edited The Young Spectator bi-weekly for six issues, from Third Month 15 to Fifth Month 24, 1856. He proposed...