What’s the first thing that comes to your mind if you hear the words “Quaker” and “Pennsylvania?”

The most common answer has to be “William Penn.”

But a long-lost place name in Warren County ties back to a Quaker community in northeast Warren County.

All that’s left might be “Quaker Hill Rd.,” which, as you might suspect, doesn’t appear to have been haphazardly named.

The original village name was “Friendship” and was located in Elk Township, north of Scandia.

“Warren County maps prior to 1840 show the village of Friendship,” Ernest Miller, a local historian reported back in the 1960s. “The Quakers bought the lands from the county about 1824 and gave this name to the settlement and also named Quaker Hill.”

Additional information on Quaker influence in the area can be found on the Scandia Covenant Church website in a history written by Julie Boozer.

She writes that what we now know as Scandia was known as Quaker Hill “well into the 1930s. Actually, it is unclear just when the name Scandia was officially adopted.”

While the Elk Township area has a strong Swedish history, they were by no means the first people here.

“Elk’s original settlers were Iroquois Indians and by 1798, Quakers from Philadelphia Yearly Meeting had established a school for them, at the request of Chief Cornplanter, on their grant along the Allegheny River,” Boozer wrote.

“The first Elk Township house of worship (1798) was a Quaker mission for the Iroquois; however it appears that the only member was the Quaker school teacher.”

Early in the 1800s, she adds, Quaker families – Daniel Pound, his father Elijah and several brothers – “purchased several thousand-acre tracts front he Warren County Commissioners and soon the ridge-tops of Elk Township became known as Quaker Hill.”

“Most of the members of this remarkable family,” Schenck wrote in his History of Warren County, “were determined Abolitionists, both in practice and principal. For example, Daniel would use neither clothing nor food that was the product of slave labor.

Quakers were generally abolitionists from the outset of the movement.

Schenck notes that Daniel was surveyor and ultimately subdivided much of what we now know as Elk Township.