A GLANCE AT FRIENDSWOOD

Fig orchards, satsuma orange groves, and rice fields once flourished where Friendswood homes now stand. The last vestiges of them and the homes that the Quakers constructed are nearly gone, but the legacy left by those founders and early settlers remains. That legacy is the heritage of a way of life that did more to shape the character of the community than any brick and mortar buildings ever could.

In the spring of 1895, a Quaker named Frank Jacob Brown, who had been an adventuresome buffalo hunter, and a Quaker named Thomas Hadley Lewis, who was a college educated man, felt directed to this area of the Gulf Coast to establish a community dedicated to God. Starting Quaker colonies was a common practice of the religious sect called Quakers or Friends, as they were part of the westward movement across the nation in the middle to late 1800s.

 

When Brown and Lewis came upon this area in northern Galveston County, they found 1,538 acres of prairie, well-drained by Clear Creek, Coward's Creek, Mary's Creek, and Chigger Creek, and beautifully framed with the dense woods along the creeks. Feeling this surely was their "Promised Land," they negotiated with the owner, Galveston banker J. C. League, for a deed of trust, and on July 15, 1895, they recorded the name of the colony at the Courthouse in Galveston.

 

They named it Friendswood.

 

Word of the colony spread among Quakers in the northern and midwest states, and soon more than a dozen families joined them. Friendswood developed as a farming community marked by hard work, simple, clean living, and a deep respect for God, the family and education.

 

After the colony survived the Galveston Storm of 1900 with no loss of life, they used their sawmill to convert the swaths of trees felled by the storm into lumber for the construction of a two-story building they called the Academy. It served them as church, school, and community meeting place until it was replaced by the present stone church building in 1949. The Quaker operated Academy (high school) offered a classical curriculum through 1928 and attracted students, in its earliest years, from surrounding towns that had no high school.

 

That spirit of community involvement has continued as an unbroken tradition in Friendswood, as demonstrated by enthusiastic participation in educational and civic activities and the city's Fourth of July celebrations. The Quakers have long been outnumbered by new settlers, but the values they lived by are still viable, still working to make this a good place to live. Those values include an emphasis on the value of the individual and the individual's role within the family and community, a deep respect for God and for education, a sense that a man's life can be measured by the way he habitually treats his neighbor, and a tolerance and love that still operates to make newcomers feel they've finally come home.