Locals: I’m real­ly excit­ed about a pro­gram Crop­well Meet­ing is host­ing this Sun­day: local his­to­ri­an Paul W. Schopp will come and talk about his­tor­i­cal Black towns around Marl­ton, South Jer­sey, and their involve­ment in the Under­ground Railroad.

The Quak­er con­nec­tion is not just the venue of course. The ear­li­est Friends in the Marl­ton area enslaved Africans, which was the norm among Quak­ers in the ear­li­est colo­nial days. From my read­ings, slav­ery was on the decline (immi­grat­ing Ger­mans were a more desir­able work­force) until the dis­rup­tions of the French and Indi­an war threat­ened to kick the slave trade back into high gear, which in turn inspired a new gen­er­a­tion of Quak­er abo­li­tion­ism. This includ­ed Joshua Evans, of what lat­er became Marlton/Cropwell, who was a trav­el­ing com­pan­ion of the more well-remembered John Wool­man in his anti­slav­ery trav­el­ing ministry.

By the ear­ly nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, most Quak­er towns in South Jer­sey had freed Black towns near­by, on land typ­i­cal­ly deed­ed by Quak­er farm­ers. Friends have a ten­den­cy to some­times over-sell our his­tor­i­cal involve­ment in the Under­ground Rail­road but the real key to the rail­road­’s suc­cess were these freed Black towns. In the area around Crop­well, a town called Mil­ford (now Kres­son) served this role. I don’t know any­thing about it specif­i­cal­ly but Schopp has stud­ied it, along with lots of these his­tor­i­cal Black towns and I’m very inter­est­ed to learn more about them.

Fol­low the link below for some more on Mil­ford, includ­ing a TV episode fea­tur­ing two descen­dants of the Tru­itt fam­i­ly and part­ly filmed at Crop­well Meeting.

Over on the Crop­well Meet­ing web­site, sto­ries and pic­tures from a talk George Rubin gave this past week­end. George is a dear friend, a mem­ber of Med­ford (N.J.) Meet­ing, and a for­mer Friends Jour­nal trustee. But in the win­ter of 1944 – 45, he was a 19 year old kid from Brook­lyn fly­ing through heavy flak in a B‑17G Fly­ing Fortress over Munich. His expe­ri­ences as a bomber and pris­on­er of war turned him into a com­mit­ted paci­fist: “Human beings are too pre­cious” he told us. I tried to tran­scribe as quick­ly as he spoke, tak­ing pic­tures in the paus­es in between sen­tences. It’s all quite a story.

I wrote this mon­th’s Friends Jour­nal intro col­umn, “A Hum­ble Band of Prophets”:

I’ve been think­ing a lot about that phone call [from a mem­ber of a strug­gling meet­ing] and about this month’s lead arti­cle by ​​Andy Stanton-Henry, who urges us to think about what it would mean to focus our atten­tion on a radius of ten miles. This exact mea­sure­ment comes from a rous­ing line from twentieth-century Friend Thomas Kel­ly: “Such bands of hum­ble prophets can recre­ate the Soci­ety of Friends and the Chris­t­ian church and shake the coun­try­side for ten miles around.” Kel­ly in turn got it from seventeenth-century Quak­er founder George Fox, who said that any­one raised up as a mod­ern prophet might “shake all the coun­try in their pro­fes­sion for ten miles round.”

Ten miles seems like such a tri­fling­ly small dis­tance to us today. It’s a few min­utes at high­way speeds. The U.S. Cen­sus Bureau tells us the aver­age work com­mute is 27 miles; the Depart­ment of Trans­porta­tion cal­cu­lates that U.S. dri­vers aver­age 36 miles per day.

Per­son­al elec­tron­ic com­mu­ni­ca­tion has made dis­tance even more mean­ing­less, and it’s easy to build and main­tain friend­ships unbound­ed by any geog­ra­phy. There’s a mea cul­pa in this: I’m one of those extreme­ly online peo­ple who spends their days in con­stant com­mu­ni­ca­tion with peo­ple well out­side of a ten-mile radius. This can be pro­duc­tive, and yet: those ten miles.

You can read the whole arti­cle by fol­low­ing the link.

A Hum­ble Band of Prophets 

Learn how to revi­tal­ize a Friends Meet­ing by focus­ing out­reach efforts with­in a ten-mile radius of your community.

Friends Journal