Two Beginnings
The school is founded — small, all-Quaker, located in a house in Germantown. But there are struggles and questions. Must all the students be Quaker? Maybe it should be located nearer to the Meetinghouse? What is the appropriate education for these students? Tensions are evident and the school’s beginning is turbulent.
Alfred Cope was an old-fashioned man. His grandson said of him, “He was a gentleman of the older order.” He believed that honesty, simplicity, discipline and hard work were fundamental principles that added up to a world of “good order” a favorite phrase. In surviving letters to his sons away at school he tried to pass on his belief in the importance of finishing work once begun. In Alfred Cope’s world, obligations should be met, contracts honored, tasks completed. His sons may not have been impressed by these “skoldy” letters, but Alfred Cope meant every word. A good thing for Germantown Friends School that he did; without Alfred Cope’s old-fashioned ideas, there would be no GFS.¹
Cope was not the “founder” of the school. No individual was. “Friends School, Germantown”, as it was originally styled, was the creation of many people in the Germantown Preparative Meeting. But Alfred Cope was the driving force behind the school’s beginnings and its principal patron for almost thirty years.
Alfred Cope was thirty-nine years old in 1845. He looked older. In the profile he wrote of his grandfather, Alfred C. Garrett described him as “of good height, but thin and delicate, with slender spectacles and thin irregular hair. His dress was what we call ‘very plain’ — long coat with high straight collar, clothes of somewhat rough material and plain color, broad-brimmed beaver hat. This dress made him look a good deal older than he really was.” Almost as an afterthought, Garrett notes that the clothes “were always of the highest quality.”
Alfred was born in Philadelphia in 1806, the son of the important Quaker businessman and philanthropist Thomas Pym Cope and Mary (Drinker) Cope. The elder Cope had made and lost one fortune before Alfred, his third son, was born. In 1821 he had founded a very successful line of packet ships carrying goods between Philadelphia and Liverpool. “Cope Packet Line” (later “Cope and Sons”) had a fleet of eight full-rigged ships and profits sufficient to allow Thomas Pym Cope to retire from active direction of the business in 1829 as reputedly the second richest man in Philadelphia (second only to Stephen Girard).
Alfred inherited from his father not only wealth and the family business, but the belief that wealth should be put to the service of others. For the remaining twenty-five years of his long and productive life, Thomas Pym Cope devoted himself to public and private service. He was instrumental in organizing the first city waterworks, the Mercantile Library, and the Board of Trade. He served on the Board of Managers of Haverford College. He thought his greatest contribution to his adopted city (Thomas was born in Lancaster) was negotiating the purchase of Lemon Hill for Fairmount Park. He even held political office for a time, sitting in the Select Council in the two-chamber city government.
These were extraordinary activities for any man, but especially for a nineteenth-century Quaker businessman. Most Quakers preferred private philanthropy, and usually only Friends’-sponsored philanthropy, to the noise and glare of public action. Thomas Pym Cope believed himself little appreciated by “narrow minded Friends” who criticized his public works and no doubt expressed himself freely on the subject at family gatherings, where one imagines son Alfred listening, nodding, and perhaps half agreeing.
It is easier to know the father than his son. Thomas Pym Cope left a diary that is a delight to read today. He was opinionated, independent, sharp tongued, and a little embarrassing to his descendants who did not permit the diary’s publication until 1978. It is an indispensable document for understanding the source of the “old fashioned” ideas of Alfred and his commitment to both public and private service.²
Judging from the letters that survive in the Alfred Cope file at Haverford College, he was a gentler, sunnier man than his explosive father. The letters are warmly affectionate, even when chastising “bad Tommie” (evidently his nephew Thomas Pym Cope, Jr.) for some school failing. He frequently wrote light verse for his children and nephews and nieces.
Perhaps the gentler nature was because he had received a “guarded education.” That phrase, much favored by nineteenth-century Friends, meant, in Alfred’s youth “to encourage youth to come up in Plainness of Habit and Speech [and] also to endeavor to promote the readings of Scriptures and to advise against hurtful books and Company.”³ In short, education “guarded” from influences outside the Society of Friends. Alfred was educated at home, by Quaker tutors, and later at the Friends Boarding School in Plymouth, Pennsylvania.
He did not go to college, and few Friends did. Historian Jack Marietta captures the attitude of Friends toward higher education in this period: “Quakers…believed that formal, liberal education did not necessarily serve religious ends; that the subjects taught in colleges and universities especially were superfluous and distracting.” An elementary education, such as Alfred Cope received, should be “utilitarian and vocational.”⁴
Instead he joined the Cope Packet line, became a partner at the age of twenty-one (along with his older brother Henry), and, after his father’s retirement, joined Henry in managing the firm. He travelled widely on business affairs and seems to have made a point in visiting schools where his business took him. Alfred Garrett mentions a visit to Providence where Alfred was much impressed with the school work of Moses Brown at the New England Yearly Meeting Boarding School (now Moses Brown School) and a trip to England where Alfred spent a day at the Friends’ School of Tottenham. He was not impressed with the English school: “too handsome.” “Why mahogany desks for the boys?” he wrote in a diary he kept for that trip.
In 1839 he married Hannah Edge, with whom he had three children, and in 1842, seeking “healthful air” and the pleasures of country living, he moved to Germantown. Hannah died in 1843, days after the birth of their third child. Alfred would later marry Rebecca Biddle and have a fourth child and third son. Alfred Cope is first mentioned in the minutes of Germantown Preparative Meeting in 1844. It is possible he had transferred his membership earlier, but there is not record of it. The first time his name appears is to record his selection as clerk of the Meeting’s School Committee.⁵
It is an astonishing first appearance. Although this School Committee was only three years old, a Committee on Education had existed in the Meeting for several years. Moreover, it was an important committee that attracted the Meeting’s “weightiest” members. It raised and dispersed funds for the education of members’ children in the little “academies” and “dame schools” Friends thought were sufficiently “guarded and selective” for their children, and it funded the required Meeting donations for Westtown School, the boarding school under the care of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting.
The new School Committee was even more important. It was charged with creating a school under the care of the Preparative Meeting. Why give direction of this task to a newcomer? Nothing in the terse meeting minutes explains the decision, but it requires only a little imagination to reconstruct the Meeting’s thinking. Cope was clearly the grandest and richest Friend ever to join the little Germantown Meeting. Germantown was not even a Monthly Meeting, only “preparative.” It held regular meetings for worship, but for business meetings it was attached to Frankford Monthly Meeting. Cope was not only wealthy, but a businessman who was running a very complicated business at that. Starting a school would surely require a man with his kind of experience. Perhaps Cope evinced an interest in education to Meeting clerk Samuel Morris. At any rate, Morris stepped aside as clerk of the School Committee (he remained clerk of the Meeting) to make way for Cope.
It may be pushing speculation too far, but perhaps the Meeting recognized in Cope an early arrival of a generation of Philadelphia Quakers seeking the “healthful air” and green fields of Germantown. The area was fast becoming a commuter suburb as rail lines pushed steadily northwest through Germantown toward Chestnut Hill. Alfred Cope, for example, was soon joined by his brother Henry, who purchased forty acres in west Germantown for his family in 1853. Called “Awbury,” it became home and social center to generations of Copes, Emlens, Evans, Scattergoods, and other prominent Germantown Meeting families. Alfred himself bought an estate he called “Fairfields” about two miles away on Old York Road. These newcomers would transform and enlarge Germantown Meeting in the next generation.⁶
Whatever the reasons, Alfred Cope assumed leadership of the School Committee, and he would guide the school through birth, re-birth, and yet another re-birth over the next thirty years.
Friends in Germantown (and in other Meetings) had been under pressure from Philadelphia Yearly Meeting to start a school for several years. Yearly Meeting then and now communicates its concerns to Monthly and Quarterly Meetings not by directives but through “Queries.” These are questions each Meeting is asked to deliberate and respond to in writing. Some queries asked for information, some for self-examination. Germantown Preparative Meeting took the queries very seriously. The earliest minute books contain almost nothing except their query responses. One query dealt with education and asked the Meeting whether or not all Friends children attended school and whether the Meeting assisted poorer Friends with the costs. Germantown was always able to answer yes. A series of bequests from Meeting members (the earliest in 1809) had created an Educational Trust Fund that by 1840 totaled $450. Invested in safe securities, it yielded an income sufficient to assist, on average, seven children. A typical Germantown response to the Yearly Meeting was a list: twenty-four children of the Meeting are of school age, five are being educated at home, eight at select schools, four at Westtown, four at schools taught by Friends, one at Haverford, one not attending school, one in a mixed school. Four boys and three girls receive financial assistance (this from 1838).⁷ But in 1830, the query was changed. Meeting was asked not if children attended school, but if the Meeting operated a school. By 1840 the Yearly Meeting was expressing “serious concern” about the lack of Meeting schools and urging Friends “to make every effort and incur all sacrifices” to start schools. “The present is a period which calls for renewed concern and watchfulness,” the Yearly Meeting minutes recorded in 1842, and parents need “to be deeply impressed with the sense of the paramount duty of giving their children a guarded religious education.”⁸
There are two explanations for the Yearly Meeting’s growing concern for “guarded education.” The first was the result of the “Great Separation” or schism which had divided the Society of Friends into two hostile camps: “Orthodox” Friends and “Hicksites.” The conflict was a deep and angry one touching on issues of theology, social class, and even geography. The separation is dated 1827, when followers of Elias Hicks walked out of the Yearly Meeting, but it was still bitterly working itself out for years afterward. It would eventually produce two yearly meetings (“Arch Street Meeting” for the Orthodox; “Race Street Meeting” for Hicksites), rival colleges (Orthodox Haverford; Hicksite Swarthmore), boarding schools (Westtown and George), publications (The Friend and Friends Intelligencer), even rival neighborhood Meetings (Germantown and Greene Street).⁹
The schism led to battles over property. Contests were waged for control of the Meetinghouses, cemeteries, schools, and even trust funds. In 1830 the Committee on Education of the Yearly Meeting (Orthodox) reported that “Many of the schools formerly under the care of monthly and preparative Meetings, are now under the control of the Separatists and are chiefly taught by persons of that description.” The Committee urged action. “We have felt tender sympathy for religiously exercised parents who cannot conscientiously subject their offspring to the influence of each evil communications. We therefore recommend that the Yearly Meeting… promote in the subordinate meetings the establishment of schools.” It seems ironic that the new call for a “guarded” education was the need to guard children from other Quakers.¹⁰
Germantown Preparative Meeting remained Orthodox, but the split was nasty. In 1827 thirteen meeting members “separated.” Two of them, Abraham Deans and George Knorr, were meeting trustees and took with them part of the trust funds meant for education. The struggle over those funds went on for years. The discord in Germantown Meeting continued. In 1829 the Meeting took a census of its members. There were sixty names clearly identified as adults. Within fifteen years, nineteen of these adults had been “disowned” for “attending services out of our discipline,” a code phrase usually reserved for those caught at Hicksite meetings. Germantown Meeting seemed bent on self-destruction.¹¹
The Yearly Meeting’s call for safely Orthodox meeting schools must have resonated in Germantown. Membership declined as whole families defected to the Hicksites and were disowned. It was indeed a period calling for “renewed concern and watchfulness,” but the Germantown Friends could only answer the Yearly Meeting query with a sad no, “No Meeting school at present.”
There was a second reason for Yearly Meeting’s increasing insistence on meeting schools. In 1834, Pennsylvania passed its first public school act. Friends disagreed over the value of public schooling. Many supported the idea, at least for non-Friends. A few were active in the public school movement. But many more Quakers were suspicious and wondered aloud whether the public school act was really an attack on religion. Suspicion turned to alarm after 1840 as more public schools (called “common” or “district” schools) opened in and around Philadelphia.
Monthly meetings continued to gather statistics on attendance which were passed on to Quarterly Meetings for collation. The figures were disturbing. Abington Quarterly Meeting (which included Germantown) reported in 1842 that thirty-four out of 101 school-age Friends were in district schools. Philadelphia Quarterly Meeting that same year reported 102 out of 537 in district schools and called on the Yearly Meeting to do something. “The Committee [the Quarterly Meeting’s education committee] believes that the prejudicial effects likely to result from this law in obstructing the prosecution of the religious concern which has long been felt by this body for the guarded, select education of the children of Friends under pious and consistent teachers call for the close and weighty consideration of the Yearly Meeting in order that some means be devised to counteract its influence on our members.”
The Yearly Meeting hardly needed such wordy advice. It was alarmed already. In letters to other yearly meetings it warned against the passage of public school laws. To Indiana Yearly Meeting, for example, the Philadelphians warned that Quaker children in public schools were subject to “contaminating influences” and “the evil example of youthful companions.”
The Yearly Meeting established a special committee to study the impact of district schools, and in 1844 it returned a report. It was a scathing attack on the public schools. In district schools Friends’ children read “fiction thereby promoting a taste for that hurtful description of reading” and history “abounding with accounts of warlike achievement.” The district schools were crowded, often open only three to nine months a year, “of a character in most cases below mediocrity,” conducted by teachers “whose ideas and principles, manner and habit are altogether at variance with testimonies we hold dear.” The pernicious influences are already evident, the report claimed, in the abandonment of plain speech and dress by young Quakers. Moreover, the growth of public schools threatened the future of Quaker schools. Because of declining enrollments “many Friends have become discouraged and have laid them [schools] down and there is reason to fear that even the small number remaining will be lessened.” “Watchfulness” was no longer sufficient, the report concluded. “Danger threatens the Society of Friends.” “The cause of this deplorable state of things is the Public School Law of Pennsylvania. Whatever may have been the intentions of the framers of that law, the actual operation of its provisions for the instruction of all the children of the Commonwealth by the compulsory taxation of the citizens, has been to break down the private schools and to replace them by others seldom equal and in most cases inferior to them.”
The report advised (demanded might be a better word) that Yearly Meeting make it clear to all Friends that a guarded education was a duty. “Too many of our members allow themselves to be carried along with the tide of public opinion and being unwilling to lose the worth of their school taxes give their children…to the nearest district school.” There should be a renewed effort to start Meeting schools. The report conceded the difficulties and blamed “the Separation of 1827” for scattering meetings and reducing resources, but money must be found.
According to the minutes, when the report was read in Yearly Meeting it produced “a sensation.” The Yearly Meeting took the unusual step of ordering the report printed and copies sent to be read in every Quarterly and Monthly Meeting.¹²
The report was read in Germantown Preparative Meeting on July 5, 1844, where, the clerk reported, it “brought over us feelings of increasing anxiety and concern.” The result was a minute to the School Committee to make plans to start a school. At the same meeting Alfred Cope was added to the Committee and named its clerk.¹³
The School Committee had been established with just this purpose in mind three years earlier in September 1841. That year the Meeting had received two bequests of $1,000 each in the will of meeting member Isaac Jones. The first $1,000, which the Meeting was instructed to invest in real estate, was not immediately available. The interest was to be paid to Isaac Jones’s mother until her death (she died in 1841) and then could be used for any purpose the Meeting wanted. The second $1,000 (“placed upon good security at interest”) was to start a school “under the care of this Meeting.”¹⁴
Almost nothing is known about Isaac Jones or the reasons for his bequests. Presumably he had been moved by the same concerns that worried Yearly Meeting. At any rate, his will instructed that the school provide “a guarded and religious education.” Jones is listed in the 1829 Meeting census as the son of Thomas and Lydia Jones. He may have been (and probably was) the Isaac Jones described as “a successful agriculturalist” who had a house (“Rockland”) and farm near the Schuylkill River in East Falls.¹⁵
The School Committee (five men, clerked by Samuel B. Morris — like Cope, a merchant) invested the money as instructed, but apparently took no other actions. There are no surviving minutes and no record in the Meeting minutes to indicate it regularly met.¹⁶
The urgency of the 1844 Yearly Meeting Report and the leadership of Alfred Cope brought the School Committee to life. Its members (all men) would serve two-year terms, although in practice all served many years. At the first meeting under Cope’s direction, the Committee drew up procedures and agreed to meet regularly (“the afternoon of the Fifth Day preceeding the last Second Day of the Second, Fifth, Eighth, and Eleventh Months at half past three o’clock”). It has been meeting regularly ever since.
At the same meeting, on January 22, 1845, the School Committee took the first steps to acquire a school. The minutes raise more questions than they answer. “A proposition was made for an arrangement with Charles Jones, and he being introduced, a free conference was held with him. Whereupon it was concluded that the committee will appropriate such funds as may be in their power to the support and encouragement of his school as way may be open.”¹⁷ Who was Charles Jones? What school? Who initiated this meeting? What was the arrangement all about?
The answer to the first question is easy enough. Charles Jones was well known to the School Committee members. He was a lifelong member of Germantown Meeting, a birthright Quaker, and the son of respectable Meeting members John and Mary (Shoemaker) Jones. He was twenty-eight years old in 1845, born in 1817 in Cheltenham. Where he went to school is not known (presumably one of the little proprietary schools operated by Quaker schoolmasters in Germantown), but his education was sufficient to earn him admission to Haverford College in the junior class of 1835. He left Haverford in 1836 and became a tutor to the children of School Committee member Samuel Morris. In 1841 he had left Morris’s employ to start his own school for boys in Germantown located on East Haines Street.
It may have been Morris who recommended Jones to the committee, but other members also know him well. He had actually served briefly on the Education Committee of the Meeting (forerunner for the School Committee) and helped write that committee’s 1839 report to the Meeting, which found only two schools in Germantown it would recommend to members.¹⁸
Probably it was the School Committee who initiated the proposal to Jones, although this cannot be said with certainty. The speed with which the agreement was made argues against Jones making the offer. It is hard to imagine Quaker businessmen jumping so quickly at a deal which might involve financial risk unless they had originated the idea.
All parties stood to gain. Charles Jones could now style himself “principal” of the Friends School which, aside from prestige in the title, might bring him more students. At the least he could expect the children of Meeting members to choose his school over rivals. He was clearly sensitive to this advantage. Jones had been running an advertisement in The Friend under the heading “School for Boys.” After his agreement with the School Committee the heading changed to “Friends Boarding and Day School for Boys Under the Care of Germantown Preparative Meeting.” He also raised his fees.
For its part, the School Committee could report to the Meeting that the minute was satisfied. The agreement with Jones made it clear that the committee would directly supervise the school: approve the subjects taught, books read, and pupils admitted. The Committee would pay regular visits to the school to assure that all was “in good order.”
All this could be accomplished with little financial outlay or risk. The Committee did not propose to pay Jones a salary (he would earn his living from the tuition and fees paid to him by students), nor did it move to purchase the building on East Haines that housed the school and boarders. The Committee did agree to purchase for the school “two globes” and to start a school library. It also hinted vaguely about additional financial support “from time to time as way may be open.”¹⁹
In fairness to the School Committee, it must be said that they could promise little more. The first treasurer’s report in February 1845 listed only $2,125.88 in the Committee’s account. Only two more gifts from Meeting members had been received since Isaac Jones’s bequest in 1841. Since the Committee wouldn’t dream of invading the principal, only the interest on the account was available to help the school and to provide scholarships for needy Friends’ children. It should be noted, too, that Jones’s school was only for boys. Daughters, too, required education and would expect the School Committee’s help.
Jones’s school was not “select,” that is, limited to Friends only, and the Committee did not propose to change that. It did require all Friends’ children in the school (“and such others whose parents may desire it”) to attend meeting for worship in the Germantown Preparative Meetinghouse every Fifth Day (Thursday).
Over the next 18 months, the School Committee had many reasons to congratulate themselves on their new school — and they did. Enrollment rose steadily. Twenty-four boys signed up for the fall term, five of them receiving full tuition and boarding scholarships from the Committee (tuition was $10 and boarding $35). In addition, the Committee funded scholarships for two girls at a “dame school” run by Meeting member Ann Magarge.
Equally gratifying was the conduct of the school. The first visits were “satisfactory,” and the school found to be in “good order.” Subsequent visits produced warmer comments in the records: “entirely satisfactory,” “well satisfied,” “good progress and order.” In its first annual report to Meeting (a tradition which has continued to the present), the Committee praised “the proficiency in learning and especially the good feeling which seems to prevail throughout the school.”²⁰
What exactly the boys were learning is not made clear. Jones advertised “the usual branches of a general, literary, and mathematical education.” Latin was offered, and enough boys took it that Jones hired a part-time Latin teacher to help him. The only other courses mentioned were arithmetic and geography. The ages of the boys are not mentioned either, but the impression one gets from the record is that the school was more elementary than high school.
What seems to have impressed the Committee most was the behavior of the boys at meetings for worship. Once a week all the boys marched the half- mile or so down Main Street (Germantown Avenue) to the Meetinghouse. This was not the Meetinghouse familiar to generations of GFS graduates, but an earlier and smaller building erected in 1812 just to the east of the present structure. There they sat in respectful silence, probably outnumbered by Meeting members who could be expected to frown on any squirming and wriggling. There were no complaints.
The library grew steadily. Shortly after the school opened, the Book Committee of the Meeting donated forty-one books whose titles were carefully recorded in the minutes. These were all of a religious nature. Titles included George Fox’s Journal, of course; eight volumes of The Friends Library (a kind of Quaker encyclopedia then being published by the Yearly Meeting); and lighter reading (Piety Promoted, Penn’s Rise and Progress). There was no fiction, of course. By the end of the year there were about 100 volumes and a little over 200 in 1846.
In October of 1846, however, the committee received a shock. Charles Jones resigned. He had been offered a better position, “invited to take charge” of Friends Select, a larger and more established school in Philadelphia.
Regretfully, and a little reluctantly, the Committee accepted Jones’s resignation and suggestions. The school would continue under the care of the Meeting with Isaac Morgan as sole teacher.
Charles Jones never completely severed his connection with Germantown Quakers, although he never again had anything to do with the school. He married Ann Magarge, the “dame school” teacher and daughter of a School Committee member. After twelve years at Friends Select, Jones left teaching for business, rejoined Germantown Meeting, and served it in a variety of ways until his death in 1902. Perhaps he always felt a little guilty about his sudden departure from Germantown Friends School. Years later he wrote a biographical profile for the Haverford College Alumni Association in which he claimed to have been principal of GFS “for several years.” It was only eighteen months.
A daughter of Charles and Ann Jones would have a closer connection to the school. Hannah Jones was librarian of Friends Free Library from 1898 to 1931.
At first the school seemed to prosper under Isaac Morgan. Enrollment was twenty-two when Jones resigned. By the next February it was up to thirty, and Morgan hired an assistant teacher. But something was wrong. In May only eighteen boys were in the school, and the assistant was let go. In November there were only sixteen boys, and five of them were not Friends. The numbers improved a bit in the 1848 (twenty-two boys on average for the year), but in February 1849 the School Committee reported to the Meeting its decision to close the school.
This bare-bones outline is almost all that can be found in the surviving sources. A kind-of explanation was offered in the annual report to the Meeting in 1848, but it has been generally misread. The critical paragraph states: “The interference of the Public District School System with the prosperity of the school has been sensibly felt during the past year and to it we have, at least in part, to attribute the decrease which has taken place in the number of pupils. It is hoped this circumstance will not discourage Friends, but rather incite them to renew exertions in support of an institution so important to the well- being of children of our members.” The report then repeats the familiar complaint about “the injurious influences” of public schools on Quaker children.
In every historical sketch since written about the school, this paragraph has been read to say: a public school opened in Germantown and caused the Friends School to close. But it doesn’t really say that. Note the important qualifier, “at least in part.” Something else was wrong besides competition from a public school.
No one seems ever to have asked if, in fact, a public school was opened in Germantown in the late 1840s. None was. The Rittenhouse Public School on West Rittenhouse Street opened in 1844, before Charles Jones was ever approached. The next public school to open was at Bringhurst and Wakefield streets in 1852.²¹ Perhaps the Committee was referring to the Rittenhouse School, but it is certainly not clear why it would only cause problems for Friends School five years later.
Statistics gathered by the School Committee and reported to Frankford Monthly Meeting over the next decade do not support the implication that Meeting members were being seduced into sending their children to the free public schools. For example, in 1852 only three of thirty-eight school-age children were in public schools and still only three by 1858. Most important is the fact that if Meeting members really were sending their children to public schools, the School Committee’s most likely response would be to increase efforts to provide a guarded education and not to give up.
The argument that will be made here is that the School Committee was less worried about the public school and more concerned with the direction of their school. There are hints of growing irritation with Isaac Morgan and the school. Visiting committees all through 1847 repeatedly recorded that conditions “were not entirely satisfactory.” In February 1848, the minutes note “the deportment of the boys at recess…was not very satisfactory.” In September the verdict was “condition of the school much as heretofore.” There are complaints in the Meeting records of the boys’ behavior in Fifth Day Meeting.
In the School Committee meeting where the final decision to close is recorded, the public school is never mentioned. The emphasis is on “our finances and other discouraging circumstances,” and it may be significant that the call on the Committee for scholarship aid was increasing and the budget was not. In fact, in 1848 the committee ran a small deficit.
The decision to close is phrased in suggestive language: “[I]t would not be prudent or desirable to continue the school as it is now constituted.” The number of non-Friends enrolled seems to have increased along with the disorder. Is this what at the Committee meant by “as now constituted”? There had been opposition from some Committee members to purchasing the school building. Possibly some thought operating a school at such a distance from the Meeting was a mistake, that it made control or supervision impossible. In short, there were a lot of reasons why men seeking a guarded education for their children might have become discouraged with their creation.
Probably we will never know the whole story.
Isaac Morgan tried operating the school himself for a short time. He rented the East Haines property from the School Committee, but gave up by the end of the second term and followed Charles Jones to Friends Select School.
The property was sold in 1850 at a profit (which Alfred Cope quickly invested in railroad securities), and the books were boxed up and moved to the Meetinghouse and then to Paschall Eastbourne’s house on Main Street. The globes went home with Samuel Morris. The School Committee continued to meet, although less regularly. There were still tuitions to be paid.
The role of Alfred Cope thus far in the history of GFS has been obscure. As clerk he wrote the reports and minutes, and the words quoted in this text are usually his. But what he actually did on the Committee remains hidden in the records’ frustrating anonymity. In the 1850s Cope’s leadership is clearer.
He wrote the annual report for 1851 and it is clearly his voice — cautious but determined. The committee has “unfinished business,” he acknowledges, and assures the Meeting that their object remains the creation of a school. This time, however, he wants there to be sufficient funds at hand to guarantee success. Left unsaid in the report, but stated in the Committee’s minutes, is that the new school should be built on the Meeting’s property.²²
Cope set about raising money. He raised $600 in 1852 and invested it in Pennsylvania Railroad securities; he raised another $600 in 1853 and a little over $1,000 in 1854, all of it tucked away in public utility stocks and bonds.
Cope was also taking an interest in the library, which had been moved once again. It was now located in the Meetinghouse cloak room, open just one day a week, and supervised by volunteer librarian Elliston P. Morris. (In 1940 Morris’s children would contribute substantially to the enlargement of the Friends Free Library in their father’s memory). Cope became the library’s largest contributor, although the exact amounts are not recorded.
In 1857 Cope finally saw “the way open” to launch a new beginning. In June he wrote a letter to the School Committee which he asked to be read into the record. He had learned that the property adjacent to the Meetinghouse owned by George W. Rose was available for $6,500. The lot, which fronted on Germantown Avenue (where the Friends Free Library now stands), contained two buildings, one of which he thought could be converted into a school and the other used as a boarding house. He estimated the cost of conversion at $1,500 (he had obviously already consulted experts). The School Committee had nothing like $8,000 of course, so Cope offered to advance the full amount and take a mortgage on the property for twenty years at 5%. He reasoned that the property could be rented to a principal teacher for $300 per year. That, plus income from the Committee’s investments which he figured at $500 per year, added up to $800, more than enough to pay the mortgage of $400 per year and have enough left over “to sustain a school and to form a sinking fund by which the debt might be extinguished.”
The School Committee jumped at the proposal. Actually, Cope’s generosity turned out to be greater than this indicates. In 1863 he cancelled the mortgage and urged the Committee to use the money saved for the school’s endowment. Events moved quickly, at least by Quaker business standards. The next month the Meeting approved Cope’s proposal; plans were drawn up and approved, and a contract let to a builder by March 1859. The plans called for the conversion of the smaller building into a boarding house (forever called “the dwelling house”) and the larger into the school. The latter was a two-story, stone structure with a one-story attachment. Three rooms were created. Two classrooms large enough for twenty-five desks each were carved out of the two- story section, one on the first floor and one on the second. The reborn school was co-educational from the start, and boys and girls would be schooled on separate floors. Shoehorned into the one-story attachment was the library (now close to 800 volumes), the Committee meeting room, and a fire-proof safe to house all the Meeting and school records.
While construction proceeded that summer, the committee wrestled with two other matters. The first was whether or not to make the new school a “select” one. There was clearly strong sentiment to restrict admission only to Friends. The annual reports to the Meeting regularly promised that the Committee was working for that end. But in June it was decided that that course was too risky and admission was opened “without regard to membership in our religious society.”
The second matter was finding the right teacher. The Committee thought it had found a teacher in June, but at the last moment she balked at the asking price. The Committee planned to lease the buildings to a teacher who would, in turn, collect tuitions, in an arrangement similar to Isaac Morgan’s. They were asking $400.
Finally, a young woman named Sarah Albertson agreed to their price. She would take the school while her mother Amy operated the boarding house. Between the fees each of them collected, they hoped to manage.
By August the buildings were ready, desks had been purchased, and blackboards, maps, “and other appropriate apparatus” moved in. The two globes — which the Committee never failed to mention — were hauled back from Samuel Morris’s house, dusted off, and installed in each classroom.
School opened September 1, 1858. Two beginnings.
In April 1945 the school commemorated the first beginning with an elaborate three-day centennial celebration. Among the events was a play, The Open Door Then and Now, written and produced by Miss Haines’s sixth-grade class. The students had read the minute-book manuscript and used the dry words there to create dialogue. It is accurate enough, although somehow Alfred Cope had become “Jonathan” Cope, and there were an awful lot of thees and thous. Their material exhausted after one short scene, the sixth graders imagined a school day. Teacher Charles Jones teaches reading: “Today we will work on ‘Twinkle Little Star’. I will read a line; then you say it after me.” It is a sweet little scene, but wholly imagined. Quickly the play jumps from “Then” to “Now.” Forgotten or ignored was the abrupt departure of Charles Jones, the school’s closing, the building sold. The first beginning left few memories.
Next: The Old School
Notes
1. Information about Alfred Cope is drawn from A.C. Garrett’s profile in Quaker Biographies, series 2, number 2; The Stokes/Cope/Emlen/Evans Genealogy prepared by F. Joseph Stokes; and the Alfred Cope file in the Evans Family Papers, manuscript collection 1170, Box 3 in the Quaker collection at Haverford College.
2. Eliza Cope Harrison, Philadelphia Merchant: The Diary of Thomas P. Cope 1800–1851, Gateway Editions, 1978.
3. This description of a “guarded education” is from the Query on Education framed by Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. It first appeared in the Germantown Preparative Meeting minutes in 1804 and varied only slightly through all the years Alfred Cope was in school.
4. Jack D. Marietta, “Quaker Family Education in Historical Perspective,” Quaker History 63 (1974), p.10.
5. Minute book, Germantown Preparative Meeting, 1798–1860. Entry for 12th month, 6th, 1844.
6. For a lovely memoir of Awbury, see A History of Awbury by Mary C. Scattergood, privately published (Henry Regnery), 1972.
7. Minute Book of Germantown Preparative Meeting, Committee on Education report to Frankford Monthly Meeting for 1838.
8. Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, Miscellaneous Papers, microfilm reel 45 Q, Quaker Collection, Haverford College.
9. For an introduction to the complexities of the Great Separation, see Robert H. Doherty, The Hicksite Separation: A Sociological Analysis of Religious Schism in Early Nineteenth Century America (Rutgers University Press, 1966). In general, Orthodox Friends put great reliance on Scripture, were more likely urban and professional, inclined toward conservatism both in religious and social views. Hicksites followed more earnestly the “inner light”, and tended to be rural, agrarian, and liberal. This simplifies matters too much, but it is roughly accurate. The main point is that there was a great bitterness between the two parties. Doherty observes that while Quakers were a quietist faith “Quietism did not produce quiet people.”
10. Report of the Committee on Education to the Yearly Meeting of Friends, 4th month, 24, 1830 in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Miscellaneous Papers, microfilm reel Quaker Collection, Haverford College.
11. Minutes of Germantown Preparative Meeting, various entries for 1827 and after. In the 1829 census, names of children are usually listed indented under their parents’ names, but ages are not always given so that sixty may be an undercount. “Disowning” became quite common in Germantown Meeting. Many more than eighteen members were disowned in the 1830s and 1840s, many for marrying non-Friends, some for irregular attendance, a few for moral offenses. These latter disownments did not necessarily come from the 1829 list of names.
12. The controversy over the public school law can be traced in the minutes of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting from 1842 to 1844. The statistics gathered by Quarterly meetings and the 1844 Report on Education can be found in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Miscellaneous Papers.
13. Minutes of Germantown Preparative Meeting 7th month, 25, 1844 and 12th month, 26, 1844.
14. Minutes of Germantown Preparative Meeting, 9th month, 23, 1841.
15. “Recollections of Marmaduke Cope” in The Friend, 6th month, 19, 1922.
16. The other committee members were Thomas Magarge, who served as treasurer, Abraham Keyser, Samuel Johnson, and Jonathan Robeson. All except Robeson are listed as Meeting members in 1829.
17. School Committee Minutes, 1st month, 22, 1845.
18. Information about Charles Jones comes from scattered reference in the minutes of Germantown Preparative Meeting, the School Committee, and Biographical Catalog of the Matriculates of Haverford College (1922).
19. The agreement with Charles Jones is in School Committee minutes 1st month, 22, 1845.
20. The first annual report is dated February 19, 1846. All the comments are in the School Committee minutes.
21. Edward W. Hocker, Germantown 1863–1933 (n.p., 1933), pp 211–212.
22. Minutes for 5th month, 26, 1853. In that meeting a subcommittee was appointed “to procure plans and estimates for a building or buildings to be erected on the premises of the Preparative Meeting, sufficient to accommodate a school and library.”
