ly than he had in the preceding fifty years. He at once
interested himself in local enterprises, and Akin Hall Association and
Mizzen-Top Hotel were at that time founded by him and others. Until his
death, twenty-three years later, he was the leading citizen and the most
interesting personality among this social population. Such was his place
and so masterful as well as constructive his influence that it was a
true expression of the feeling of all which one resident wrote at that
time to another: "The king is dead, the man on whom we unconsciously
leaned and whom none of us thought of disobeying, though only his
personality held us to allegiance, is gone from us. And I for one feel
that I have lost a dear friend."

[Illustration: ALBERT JOHN AKIN BORN 1803, DIED 1903]

These three illustrations will serve to indicate both the kind of
persons who have come of the Quaker Hill community, and one of its
tendencies. They illustrate also the spirit of the community toward its
leaders.

Personalities of the austere type, men and women of the devotional side
of Quakerism, may be cited in the cases of [40]David Irish and
[41]Richard T. Osborn. The former was the last minister of the Hicksite
Society of Friends on the Hill. His preaching covered the years of its
separate existence, for he was made a minister in 1831, three years
after the Division, and he died in 1884, at the age of ninety-two. One
year after his death the Meeting was formally "laid down," in Oblong
Meeting House, and from a place of worship it became a house of
memories.

David Irish was austere. Believing that slavery was wrong, "he made his
protest against slavery by abstaining, so far as possible, from the use
of slave-products ... made maple to take the place of cane sugar, and
used nothing but linen and woolen clothing (largely home-spun). This
abstaining he continued for himself and family until slavery was
abolished." Yet "he never felt free," continues his daughter and
biographer, "to join with anti-slavery societies outside his own,
believing that by so doing he might compromise some of his testimonies."
He welcomed in his home the fugitive slave fleeing from the South, and
"there must never be any distinction made in the family on account of
his color; he sat at the same table and was treated as an equal."

David Irish was equally opposed to war, and to capital punishment. He
wrote, "testified" and "suffered" for these principles. "In the time