At Springdale, in Lincoln, Samuel M. Janney had a boarding school for girls, charging $32.50 per quarter in 1839-40, with extras, pen, ink, pencils and lights 50 cents additional per quarter. Drawing and French were three dollars extras. Day students paid twenty dollars the quarter. Supplies were taken in lieu of cash. Henry S. Taylor paid his tuitions in 1842-44 with several quarters of beef, barrels of flour, a horse and sheep (the horse for transportation, not eating). Henry B. Taylor states—“dried peaches and apples were standbys in the diet of that day and hominy was the universal substantial breakfast food, one that would stick to the ribs. Samuel Janney bought hominy at Waterford mills, 5 or 6 bushels at a time. No Shredded Wheat or toasted hay for breakfast food at Springdale.”
Before 1908, Will Smith and Josh Brown and others were canvassing the county and Philadelphia neighborhood for money to build a high school. At last $15,000.00 was raised, and in 1908 Lincoln High School opened its doors. The labors and work of erecting this school, the first high school in the county, was borne mostly by Friends. When the building burned in 1926, there was agitation to take the insurance money to another town to rebuild; a lengthy hearing was held at the Goose Creek Meeting House, but people had reckoned without the canniness of the original builders as the deed stated that the money was to be used to build a school within one quarter of a mile of the meeting house and that was where it was rebuilt. For the year the rebuilding was going on the students were taught in the meeting house, the present store building, and the old Phin Janney store building in Lincoln.
Friends engaged in businesses of all kinds, of course, stores, iron foundries, such as the William H. Taylor foundry at Lincoln, where the celebrated Taylor plow, bells, and frog doorstops were made, woolen mills, flour and grist mills and the like. Though transportation was a difficult problem Friends were right up front in the first turnpike and railroad ventures. Many a Quaker trunk contained crumbling shares of the stocks. Israel Janney was a trustee of the Leesburg-Dranesville turnpike and Phineas Janney of Alexandria, treasurer of the road from there into Alexandria. Phineas Janney’s reports are on file at Richmond, and are referred to by one writer as being “full of these and thous and common sence.”