Quaker Falls

Around 1804, Septimus Cadwalader and his family, Quakers from Brownsville in Fayette County, settled at Quaker Falls, and within two decades the settlement grew into a thriving agricultural community known as Quakertown after Cadwalader built his home and grist mill. The first local school was founded nearby in Mahoning Township around 1806, and by 1808 Talbot Townsend and Benjamin Sharpless had joined the settlement. These early families built mills along Falling Spring Run and helped establish the community, while their Quaker beliefs remained firm in the years leading to the Civil War. The three families were confirmed conductors on the Underground Railroad, and Quakertown appears to have been a productive stop relative to its size. Just outside Quakertown, Alexander Wright, Jr., and his son Joseph used their farm as a stop on the Underground Railroad, sheltering freedom seekers until they could move north to the next station, with the first people to pass through the Wright farm coming from Benjamin Sharpless. Much of Quakertown's role in the Underground Railroad is known mainly through first-person accounts because few records survive. In the late 1830s, Septimus Cadwalader, Jr., operated a tannery, part of the industrial and agricultural success the town reached in the later nineteenth century. In 1894, the Pennsylvania & Lake Erie Railroad Bridge was installed over the creek. After 1900, however, Quakertown declined as iron, steel, quarry, and munitions industries moved into the area and farm families sold their land, chiefly to the Burton Powder Company, later the Atlas Powder Company. Heavy industry also brought disaster when a massive explosion destroyed the Burton plant near Quakertown on April 4, 1912, killing one man instantly, fatally burning another, and sending a concussion that was heard twenty miles away and shattered windows five miles away. Despite repeated tragedies, men continued to seek work there, but by the late 1930s, about 130 years after its founding, Quakertown's last resident had left, its buildings decayed, and only foundations remained as the land returned to woodland.

Pennsylvania · United States