This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
Among the many religious groups who arrived in our Mississippi River Valley after the Black Hawk War of 1832, each seeking to build its version of Eden, were the Quakers. By 1844, several small Quaker settlements were clustered around what is now West Branch, Iowa.
Quakers has originally come from England to Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, but they found the busy clamor of civilization a threat to their simple and silent way of life and had removed themselves again and again ahead of the rush of settlement.
In the peaceful fields of Iowa, they found their Eden. Here the Friends could hold services in their own way, without hymns or liturgy or sermon, sitting quietly waiting for the "inner light," that still small voice in each human that led them through this world, a voice that sometimes told a member to stand and testify, and at other times let the entire congregation hold an entire service without speech, the silence unbroken except for the wind and the songs of birds.
The silence lasted a decade. In 1856, almost directly east of the settlements, the first bridge across the Mississippi had been completed, and across that bridge the tracks of the Chicago, Rock Island, and Pacific Railroad were reaching toward nearby Iowa City, a serpent approaching Eden. Fifteen years later, the tracks of the Burlington, Cedar Rapids, and Northern reached West Branch itself, disrupting the solitude with steam whistle and belching smoke.
The railroad brought outsiders to the Quaker settlement: Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians and Danish Lutherans, and it made possible new industries that made inroads on the Quaker way of life. The West Branch Quakers themselves split into two factions that refused to greet each other on the streets.
And it opened the mysterious outside world to West Branch's young men and women, for the train led out of town to new possibilities. One young man who took that train out of West Branch with dreams of becoming an engineer, you all know:
Herbert Hoover.
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
