In the past couple of of months I’ve noticed various Friends using this image of Margaret Fox as a stand-in for Margaret Fell, the so-called “mother” of Quakerism who later married George Fox. Unfortunately it’s a few centuries late. This picture is Margaret Fox of Hydesville, N.Y. It’s from an 1885 book called The Missing Link in Modern Spiritualism, in which she and her family describe their haunted house. Their three daughters, Margaretta, Kate, and Leah, became known as the Fox Sisters, and became the most famous trio in nineteenth-century Spiritualism. In later years Margaretta admitted the hauntings were hoaxes, alas.
There is a Quaker connection, as the sisters helped convince leading radical Hicksites Amy and Isaac Post to adopt Spiritualism and start communing with the dead. Issac later wrote “spirit writings” under the bylines of people like George Fox and Benjamin Franklin.1 It would be super easy to make fun of the Posts but they also opened their home as an Underground Railroad stop and were personal friends of William Lloyd Garrison, Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth, and Frederick Douglass (who they helped escape to Canada after he was implicated in the John Brown raid at Harper’s Ferry). They were leading figures in what became known as the Progressive Friends movement, whose energy is still palpable in Liberal Quaker circles.
The internet being what it is, there are plenty of websites that have taken this out of context and presented it as Margaret Fell Fox. Unfortunately there are no contemporary images of Margaret Fell. The best we have is a twentieth-century representation of her by Robert Spence, who over thirty years made a number of charming line drawings of the life of George Fox (Friends Journal used one for an illustration in a recent article).
I am writing this post simply to show up in future search results. If I can prevent one person from mistakenly using this image as an illustration or basis for a piece of art then it will have been worth it.
Also, FYI, this is what portraits looked like in Margaret Fell’s time:
Last week my son Gregory’s scout troop headed to southern Pennsylvania to start a 50-mile backpacking trip south, to cover all of Maryland’s portion of the Appalachian Trail and end up in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia. I was asked to drive them, and as it seemed a little too far to commute back to South Jersey I spent four days by myself down there and had a great time. I thought I’d share various thoughts:
Hostels are great. I haven’t stayed in a hostel in forever but at $35/night, the price was right. I’m so glad I did. Every night was a new cast of people to get to meet, quirky and fun and delightfully weird. This was the weekend of the Flip-Flop Kickoff festival put on by the Appalachian Trail Conservancy. As I understand it, the “flip flop” is an alternate way of doing a through-hike on the Appalachian Trail (“the AT”). Instead of starting in Georgia and heading north along with hundreds of others, you start in Harper’s Ferry (the honorary halfway point) and go south, then find a ride back to Harper’s Ferry and go north. The festival brought a lot of hikers to Cross Trails hostel, where I stayed, and I even participated in a few events; I felt myself an honorary AT hiker!
I loved the ambiance and the characters at Cross Trails Hostel. The staff were great.
I love my bike. I put my bike rack on my old econobox car and used it every day to commute the five miles or so from the hostel to Harper’s Ferry. The C&O Canal Towpath is a mostly flat, beautiful trail that winds 180 miles alongside the Potomac River. One day I continued north from Harper’s Ferry and rode it to Shepardstown: a beautiful ride apart from the calf-breaking bluffs on either side of the trip.2 Also a lot of outdoor fun is whitewater rafting. There’s three companies in the area offering it and I had a good time with Harper’s Ferry Adventure Center.
The C&O Canal Towpath trail is wonderful.
Don’t forget the non-vegan restaurants. I was excited by a vegan option in Harper’s Ferry but my favorite meal by far was at a regular cafe in Shepherdstown. I had an amazing homemade black bean veggie burger, a sesame noodles appetizer, decent fries, and a tall cold glass of hard apple cider. Five stars to the Blue Moon Cafe. Extra bonus: there’s an actual creek flowing through the back patio.
Five stars to Shepherdstown’s Blue Moon Cafe.
There is so much history atop itself in Harper’s Ferry. It’s a tiny town and yet every time you turn around there’s something monumental going on. John’s Brown raid is perhaps the most famous but it was also the site of multiple Civil War engagements, a provisioning stop for Meriwether Lewis, and a place where Thomas Jefferson waxed poetic.
The Oddfellows Hall. One of their members was taken hostage by John Brown. As if that’s not enough history, famed Civil War photographer Matthew Brady set up his camera here and took lots of pictures of soldiers from this vantage point.
Don’t defend Harper’s Ferry. There’s much one could say about John Brown’s motivations, tactics, etc., but really dude, how dumb do you have to be to try to force-start the Civil War there of all places? As soon as word got out about what was happening, militias from three states and federal troops poured in from the hills on all sides of the town and trapped him. It was over almost as soon as it began. The Civil War engagements were like that too. It’s a fishbowl with mountain ridges on all sides: you just set up your munitions on Maryland or Loudoun Heights and lob cannon balls down on the town until you get a surrender. A quote attributed to a Union lieutenant in an exhibit really summed it up for me: “Gen. Jackson and Gen. Hill told me personally, they had rather take it [Harper’s Ferry] forty times than to undertake to defend it once.”
These are the little hills behind Harper’s Ferry. On either side are much taller ones.
Visiting new meetings is great. On Sunday morning I had church time so I motored south to visit Goose Creek Meeting in Lincoln, Virginia. 3 It’s an old meeting, steeped in its own history. It’s aways fun to see a new meeting. They have honest-to-God pews with hymnal racks along the back, each carefully stocked with a Bible, an FGC hymnal, and Baltimore’s Faith and Practice. They have a loud clock, which I’ve always heard was a Hicksite marker and indeed I later learned the Hicksites held the meetinghouse in the nineteenth century schisms.4 There were only two messages and one was a fake Gandhi quote (you all will be happy that I didn’t fact-check it in real time and just let the sentiment behind it stand for itself). It seemed like a really grounded meeting. I was impressed that people got there early and sat quietly preparing for worship. Everyone was very friendly for the few minutes of coffee hour I could squeeze out before heading back north to pick up scouts.
Nice light in the main room before worship. Note the hymnal racks on the back of benches and also the prominent clock.
I’m sure I’ll share more about this in coming months, but I’ve been asked to present at an online event co-hosted by Barclay Press and Woodbrooke and Pendle Hill (talk about cooperation!). It’s related to the Illuminate Bible study publication, which I’ve written for a few times, including for a recent edition devoted to Christ and Creation.
As a unprogrammed Friend, it’s a bit outside my comfort zone to write formally about a religious topic like this but it’s a good kind of stretching. I look forward to hearing more about how others have approached it in October.
“Most Quaker communities now have no children’s meeting, and this has come to seem normal. Many people who have joined in the last couple of decades have never seen a child in a Meeting House, and take it for granted that a Quaker Meeting is only for retired people.”
I don’t know the situation in the UK where Barnett lives but around me in the U.S. the cynical answer would be that they’re at soccer practice. All of the churches I know have seen sharply declining Sunday School classes in recent decades.
Because neither my wife’s churches or my Quaker meetings have provided good Sunday Schools, our family has long juggled services to be able to go elsewhere to provide our kids with a Sunday School class and friends. For the past number of years it’s been with a very friendly Moravian church over in the next town. We’ve been so involved that we think of them as our other church family and many of the members have become friends. We’ve known them through years, from births to marriage break-ups to kids graduating and going off to college. Just earlier this week I took three of our kids to their bowling outing. It’s really community and something I don’t see happening in any nearby Friends meeting.
But even at this church, with a strong, longstanding program going back over 100 years, it’s not hard to notice classes getting just a bit smaller every year and Sunday school teachers getting a little more thinned out. Even the children of core members will miss Sunday morning classes for weeks at a time because of Sunday morning sports.
My wife’s new Orthodox church has a Sunday school, which is nice, but it doesn’t seem to be that large. I’m glad the kids have it though.
I’d like to build up a children’s program at the small Friends meeting that we’re rebuilding but I must admit to being unsure about what’s realistically even possible. This is a problem far greater
I had a nice interview with Wisconsin Friend Kat Griffith. She likes, even loves, going door-to-door in her “purple” district and talking politics to strangers. She’s a wonderful storyteller too and it was hard not to laugh as she talked about some of these adventures (spoiler: she’s braver than I am!). In a time of hyper-partisanship, it’s a good reminder to build our lives around curiosity and communication.
