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The Oblong: A Quaker Settlement on the Borderlands
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In 1728, Quaker surveyor Nathan Birdsall and his pregnant wife journeyed from Long Island to the remote frontier that would become the Oblong. With no roads beyond Danbury, Connecticut, they continued on horseback, pressing into a largely unsettled landscape.
At the time, the boundary between New York and Connecticut remained unsettled. The 1731 Treaty of Dover finally defined the border: Connecticut gained the "Horse’s Neck" area (today's Stamford, Greenwich, and Byram), while New York claimed the Oblong, a narrow strip of land 1.8 miles wide stretching from Purchase to the Massachusetts line. Remarkably, the treaty was not formally ratified by both state legislatures until 1881. Drawn by the Oblong’s isolation but convenient access to a north-south travel route, Quaker families migrated from Westchester, Long Island, and New England. In 1742, they built their first Meeting House on the south side of the road. As the community grew, a larger Meeting House was erected in 1764 on the north side, where it still stands today. |
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The Oblong Query: A Challenge to Conscience
In 1767, deep in the hills of the Oblong, Quaker voices raised a radical question:
Can a people devoted to God justify holding another human being in bondage?
This “query,” sent from the Oblong Monthly Meeting to the Purchase Quarterly Meeting, marked the first official challenge to slavery by a legislative body in New York. When Friends gathered at the Flushing Yearly Meeting that May, the question struck a nerve. Unwilling to act, they postponed a decision for a year—and even then, remained divided.
Refusing to wait, the Oblong and Nine Partners Meetings took a bold step. In 1769, they became the first Quaker meetings in America to formally free the people they had enslaved. Change did not come easily. Resistance within the community meant that the last enslaved person on Quaker Hill was not freed until 1777.
The Oblong Query reminds us: true change often begins with a single courageous question—and a determined will to see it through.
Can a people devoted to God justify holding another human being in bondage?
This “query,” sent from the Oblong Monthly Meeting to the Purchase Quarterly Meeting, marked the first official challenge to slavery by a legislative body in New York. When Friends gathered at the Flushing Yearly Meeting that May, the question struck a nerve. Unwilling to act, they postponed a decision for a year—and even then, remained divided.
Refusing to wait, the Oblong and Nine Partners Meetings took a bold step. In 1769, they became the first Quaker meetings in America to formally free the people they had enslaved. Change did not come easily. Resistance within the community meant that the last enslaved person on Quaker Hill was not freed until 1777.
The Oblong Query reminds us: true change often begins with a single courageous question—and a determined will to see it through.
From Worship to War: The Meeting House in the American Revolution
On a quiet Sunday in August 1778, Quaker families gathered for worship at the Meeting House on Quaker Hill. Midway through the service, Continental Army soldiers entered, quietly setting their muskets by the door. They waited in silence until the last Friend rose to leave. Then they took possession. The Meeting House became a field hospital for the next six months.
Relations with the Quakers were strained. Bound by principle to nonviolence and neutrality, the local Friends refused to provide food or aid to the wounded. When Army surgeon Dr. John Fallon tried to gather wagons to move the sick to hospitals in Fishkill and Danbury, he was met first with silence—and then with open resistance. At one Quaker widow’s home, a hostile crowd forced Fallon to call for armed backup. Several unidentified soldiers who died at the hospital are buried across the road.
Yet small gestures of humanity remained. When Mrs. Tabor offered a cheese wheel to the first officer she saw, it was accepted by none other than an aide to General George Washington.
Relations with the Quakers were strained. Bound by principle to nonviolence and neutrality, the local Friends refused to provide food or aid to the wounded. When Army surgeon Dr. John Fallon tried to gather wagons to move the sick to hospitals in Fishkill and Danbury, he was met first with silence—and then with open resistance. At one Quaker widow’s home, a hostile crowd forced Fallon to call for armed backup. Several unidentified soldiers who died at the hospital are buried across the road.
Yet small gestures of humanity remained. When Mrs. Tabor offered a cheese wheel to the first officer she saw, it was accepted by none other than an aide to General George Washington.
