Briefer Notices

BRIEFER NOTICES By Henry J. Cadbury The History of Bryn Motor, 1683-1900, by Barbara Alyce Farrow (Bryn Mawr, Penna., 1962, 98 pages) is a town history with several contacts with Quakerism. Welsh Friends were among the original settlers and one of them brought the name from his birthplace. The Pennsylvania Railroad adopted the name for its new station and summer resort (formerly Humphreysville), nine miles west of Philadelphia. Finally Quakers founded there a college and one of the notable private schools. * * * Thomas B. Taylor (1809-1852) as an employee of a Philadelphia bank went on business by boat via Pittsburgh and Cincinnati to Natchez, Mississippi. Two letters home by him are published in the Journal of Southern History, XXVII (1961), 513-520, edited by Edwin B. Bronner under the title "A Philadelphia Quaker Visits Natchez, 1847." Neither the country nor the experiences described were very attractive to the writer. * * * Pencoyd and the Roberts Family by David Loth (New York: privately printed, 1961, 62 pages, illustrated) deals with seven members of the same family from 1684 to the present, who have been successive owners of an attractive home in Merion, Pennsylvania, called "Pencoyd." From the father of John Roberts, who migrated to Pennsylvania from Wales in 1683, until the American Revolution, the proprietors were Fnends. * * * Paul A. W. Wallace writes in the "Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography on "Historic Hope Lodge" (LXXXVI [1962], 115-139). This attractive house was built at an unidentified date on land in Whitemarsh village, which had been conveyed in 1684 to Major Jasper Farmer and his sons. Its Quaker connection was while it was owned by Samuel Morris (1709-1770), a miller and farmer, who probably also built it. * * * In a book entitled Five Remarkable Englishmen (New York: DevinAdair , 1961, 245 pages) Denis Meadows gives a fresh account of five persons who had part in establishing the English-speaking dominions in North America. The longest (pp. 125-182) is on William Penn. He does not suffer by juxtaposition to Walter Ralegh, Captain John Smith, John 46 Briefer Notices47 Winthrop, and James Oglethorpe. And the portrait given of him is generally fair and accurate in spite of a number of minor confusions and errors. Its value is in the easy style of writing and in the context which the book provides. * * * In "Quaker Merchants and the Slave Trade in Colonial Pennsylvania" (Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, LXXXVI [1962}, 143159 ) Darold D. Wax acknowledges the well known Quaker objection to the trade raised very early and especially in Pennyslvania, but gives evidence that Philadelphia merchants were often sent on consignment by their correspondents in the West Indies a few slaves to dispose of with other merchandise on a commission basis. They found them inferior in quality and hence expensive and difficult to sell. This economic objection is often used in die letter books of Isaac Norris I and Jonathan Dickinson. A few other Philadelphia Quakers continued to be involved in the trade in the middle of the eighteenm century until they were disowned. * * * The History of Washington County, New York, has the subtitle, "Some Chapters in the History of the Town of Easton, N. Y." (Washington County Historical Society, 1959, 160 pages). This was a partly Quaker settlement, settlers coming from Massachusetts, me Oblong, and elsewhere. A noteworthy Quaker group were sea captains from Nantucket and New Bedford with familiar surnames. Records from the minute books and also Friends marriages are quoted. Besides antislavery and oüier activities congenial to Friends, there was a Friends boarding school or seminary there. The place is best known to modern readers because of the story of "Fierce Feathers," which is here given as usual on the basis of Rufus Hall's Journal and with no reference to the earlier official record, first printed in 1940 in this Bulletin, XXIX, 54. A very comprehensive and useful but unpretentious summary of "The Overseas and International Service of British and Irish Friends in the 20th Century (to 1961)" has been compiled by Barnard G. Lawson (Jordans , Beaconsfield, Bucks, 1962, 48 pages including contents and index). Widiout a full description or evaluation this pamphlet shows, to quote Hugh Doncaster's foreword, "the...