Joseph Maddock’s Diary and Letters

Joseph Maddock (1811–1889), the great-grandson of the Joseph Maddock of Wrightsborough, Georgia, was an active and dedicated member of Elk Monthly Meeting (Orthodox) of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in southwestern Ohio. He kept a diary over a fifty-year period, during which he witnessed (1) the bitter separation over theological differences among Midwestern Friends; (2) the work of Quakers on the Underground Railroad route through West Elkton to Levi Coffin’s home in Indiana; (3) the tumultuous years of the Civil War which challenged the peace testimony of all Quakers; and (4) the changes that post–Civil War Evangelicalism brought to his beloved unprogrammed Orthodox Quaker meeting. Not an eloquent writer but a sincere one, Joseph Maddock’s diary and letters to his daughter at Earlham College provide details of nineteenth-century daily life fascinating to historians, as well as an Orthodox Friend’s perspective on larger events of interest to Quaker historians. Because Maddock liked to travel, he took every opportunity to visit Friends near and far and seems to have been acquainted with just about every Quaker in the region, leaving a goldmine of names for genealogists tracing ancestry through the Quaker immigration from the South.