Penn’s Treaty with the Indians, Edward Hicks (c. 1830–1835)
Philadelphia Museum of Art, 125th Anniversary Acquisition
What is Quakertown?
The site, known as Quaker Falls, is at the entrance to the former village of Quakertown. The remnants of the village of Quakertown lie just 1⁄2 mile Northeast of the falls. Located in Mahoning Township, Lawrence County and owned by the County of Lawrence, the site provides an experience in learning about the first Quaker settlement in the Lawrence County area. In 2019, archaeological digs were excavated throughout the area, where flint pieces were found, dating to the Precontact Period.
Known as the Religious Society of Friends, the Quakers are a Protestant group, who originally immigrated to the United States of America from England and Wales in the 17th century. Notable Quakers were Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, Herbert Hoover, John Cadbury, and William Penn. Some values that the Quakers were known for are refusals to participate in war or to swear oaths, opposition to slavery, wearing plain dress and practicing teetotalism.
Between 1799 and 1804, the Cadwalader family moved to Western Pennsylvania and settled the area, where they laid out the village of Quakertown. Others joined them including the Sharpless, Shearer and Townsend families as the town grew in number, it became a self-sustaining community with a grist mill, saw mill, train station, machine shop, and schoolhouse.
After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, a group of citizens from Lawrence County said that they would, “make a war upon that infamous law.” Around the mid-century, many residing in Quakertown grew to prominence as conductors on a secret collaborative effort to assist the former slaves to freedom, known as the Underground Railroad.
Quakertown Falls is a fifty foot waterfall on Falling Spring Creek located just northwest of the town of Hillsville in Mahoning Township, Lawrence County, Pennsylvania.
What is our goal?
Our goal is to help uncover and commemorate the history of Quakertown. By the late 1930s, some 130 years after its founding, the final resident of Quakertown left and the buildings followed a natural course of decay as the landscape returned to its woodland origins. All that remains today are foundations of a once thriving American community. The graves of Quakertown were no exception, as we quickly found out, and so we set to work to better honor their memories and past.
What do we do?
We began our expedition of going to one of the sites that desperately needed attention, as due to the size of the overgrowth one could easily have walked past by without ever realizing that there was a burial grounds at all along the trail. We then proceeded to work together in clearing and depositing the rampant flora encapsulating the cemetery. Afterwards we started planting stakes, as markers, for each of the gravestones we uncovered, and we removed some of the heavy logs that were covering a small portion of the cemetery. We then switched our attention to marking the dimensions of the cemetery. This was accomplished by extending the measuring tape and passing it to different group members until it covered both corners of a side of the cemetery. We repeated this for each side. Then we started to measure the location of the gravestones relative to one of the corners of the cemetery to increase accuracy. We also cleared some of the flora that surrounded the gravestones. Finally, for documentation purposes, we took pictures of each of the gravestones and their designated stakes.
