When I first became active in Dover Friends Meeting in the late 1980s, a group of members and attenders seriously explored the possibilities of creating a cohousing project. Their minutes filed in the meetinghouse could provide the foundation for a fascinating master’s degree exposition, but the wide range of differences in the participants’ needs and dreams proved to be too diverse to accommodate into joint action. Perhaps economic resource differences also came into play. On my end, I was single but had to consider what might happen if I met the ultimate partner and she had six kids. Ahem.
As it was, when I finally met and wed the almost perfect woman, she came with two marvelous daughters and a German mother-in-law, plus she needed or at least dreamed of and deeply desired space for a large garden. My ultimate party obviously would have required much more than a single bedroom with kitchen privileges.
Still, when I looked at what was then the Stringfellow house next to the Dover Quaker meetinghouse, I mused about how it might have evolved as the Friends shared housing project.
Maybe, as I’ve later learned, I wasn’t that far off target.
Better known as the Osborne-Cartland house, this was built by one prominent Dover Quaker and later owned by others with Friends’ connections.
In fact, it’s one more place the celebrated poet John Greenleaf Whittier likely stayed in his many visits to Dover, thanks to his Cartland cousins.
And it had carved off a slice of the original meetinghouse property.
Yes, it plays into my new book, Quaking Dover.
By the way, I should note that it suggests a Quaker neighborhood around the meetinghouse.
Between it and the Isaac Wendell home I recently posted about across Central Avenue was the Stephen Hanson house where Saint Joseph Roman Catholic edifice now stands. Hanson was somehow prominent in introducing manufacturing to Dover and built the house with his wife, Lydia Brown, after razing two smaller dwellings.
Wish I could show you what they, too, built.
