1998—A Century-and-a-Quarter of Preserving Friends' History

1998—ACentury-and-a-Quarter ofPreserving Friends' History Emma J. Lapsansky* "Where do we find ourselves?" is how Ralph Waldo Emerson opened his essay on "Experience." Emerson continues: "we awake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight." We might ask the same question of Friends Historical Association: "where do we find ourselves?" In 1998, the Friends Historical Association celebrated the 125th anniversary ofits founding. None ofthe nine Friends— the first rung of the "stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended"— who met in Philadelphia in 1 873 to form the Association is still living today. Yet their legacy has remained strong. Today, the Friends Historical Association has the largest membership ever. And it has a stellar history of participants in its leadership and lecturers. Twenty-five years ago, on the occasion of the Association's 100th anniversary, John Moore—who was then Acting Director of the Friends Historical Library at Swarfhmore— chronicled its history in a lecture at the November Annual Meeting.1 In his briefhistory of the development ofFriends Historical Association, and its merger with the Friends Historical Society of Philadelphia, Moore pointed out the role ofthe Friends Historical Association founders in leading the way in reuniting Friends communities that had been rent asunder by the Hicksite/Orthodox schism of a half-century before. When the organization was set in place, the original Board of Directors included seven members from the Orthodox branch and seven from the Hicksite branch—a radical merger indeed for its time, and one that created solid stairs for the next generations to ascend. The Association's early mission required the cooperation of all Friends, for they set themselves the ambitious task of "rescuing] from the hands of time the names and deeds of those Friends unknown to fame, whose memories are worthy of being perpetuated; to secure Books, manuscripts, Letters, Relics, etc. by which to illustrate the history of the [Religious] Society [of Friends].2 Never a large organization—Moore speculates that "perhaps it did not intend to be"—the FHA nevertheless benefited from the energies, attention and contribution of numbers of Friends from across America, and indeed from around the world. Its constituency included Isaac Sharpless, the dynamic president of Haverford College who helped found the Friends Historical Society of Philadelphia in 1904, which merged with the FHA in 1923. Orthodox Isaac Sharpless and William Jenks, as well as *Emma J. Lapsansky is Curator, Special Collections, and Professor of History at Haverford College. QuakerHistory Hicksite Nathaniel Janney and Samuel Parrish, who led the FHA into the twentieth century, would surely beproud ofthe "stairs" theybuilt, stairs upon whichOrthodoxElizabethGrayViningandHicksiteFrederickTolles helped the community of Friends interested in history to ascend to a solid plateau. Over its most recent quarter-century (1973-1998), as it has ascended new stairs, the FHA has benefited from the energies of the "new social history." Lectures over this period have included Phyllis Mack on the subject of "Quaker Women: Enthusiasts in the Seventeenth Century"; Carol Hoffecker, "A Family of Friends: the Ferris Family Through Several Generations"; and Anne Verplanck, "Anti-SlaveryAssemblages: the Quaker Silhouette Album," and Carol Karlsen's "Witchcraft and Quakerism in Colonial New England," as well as more traditional approaches such as Edwin Bronner's tercentenary view of Friends in Burlington, N.J., and Howard Lutz's biographical sketch of"Amelia Fogelklou: Swedish Friend, 1878-1972."3At two lectures per year (the Association has maintained a rhythm of an annual meeting at Arch Street Meetinghouse in November and aSpringMeeting which ishostedby meetings orotherFriends organizations affiliated with Philadelphia Yearly Meeting)—there have been more than fifty specialized topics covered in the public talks sponsored over the last quarter-century. Overthe pastquarter-century,new leadership has broughtthe Association forward. Edwin Bronner, J. William Frost, Kenneth Carroll, Margaret Hope Bacon, Eleanore Mather, Damon Hickey, Arthur Mekeel, Mary Hoxie Jones, Herbert Hadley, George Vaux are among those who have carried a standard that is now to be handed over to a new generation. And younger speakers, with new ideas, have joined the Association's movement into...