The Atkinson Farm and the Farm Journal

Upper Dublin Friends Meeting stood at the center of a quietly radical network in the years before the Civil War. Thomas and Hannah Atkinson, Quaker abolitionists, ran an Underground Railroad station at their farm next door to this meetinghouse, sheltering people escaping slavery as they moved north. Some of those individuals who passed through and died before reaching freedom are buried in the meetinghouse cemetery.

Their son Wilmer Atkinson grew up in that same tradition of practical service and took it in a different direction. In eighteen seventy-seven, he launched the Farm Journal, a publication designed to give working farm families clear, useful information rather than the preachy agricultural theory that dominated existing publications. It won a national readership almost immediately and ran for well over a century, becoming one of the most widely circulated agricultural magazines in American history.

The same property, father and son, gave the country both a freedom route and a farming voice.