THE new exhibition in Darlington library is entitled Quaker Women in 19th Century Darlington and it is a fascinating collection of faces from a bygone age.

Nearly all of them are dressed in plain Quaker clothes, which were usually just black and white, but many of them try to add fancy adornments to their material and their hair without causing outrage in the older generation.

Nearly all of the Quakers of this period are inter-related – in fact, by the end of the century, the inter-marrying was beginning to cause mental health issues in the younger generation.

And nearly all of the Quakers are connected to Joseph Pease (1799-1872). He is Darlington’s most famous son and he stands on his statue at the end of High Row. Joseph was a railway promoter who created Middlesbrough as a port for his railway and then created the town’s iron and steel industry. With his wife Emma he lived in Southend, a mansion which was then at the south end of Darlington and which is now Duncan Bannatyne’s Grange Hotel.

The captions beneath today’s pictures attempt to show how the women are connected back to Joseph – although Quaker family trees are incredibly complicated, so we hope things are right.

The Northern Echo:

This picture shows Katherine Pease (1840-1915) surrounded by her daughters and her sisters.

Was it taken at Woodside, or at one of her other homes, like Walworth Castle, or at Joseph’s home of Southend?

Katherine – who is also to be seen this page – came from the Wilson family of Quakers in Kendal. In 1839 she married Joseph Pease’s fourth son, Gurney – Gurney still has a school named after him in Darlington.

They had two daughters, Lilian (born 1865) and Katherine Maria (born 1866), plus three sons before Gurney died in 1872 aged only 33. After his death, the family installed Katherine in a vast mansion in the West End of Darlington called Woodside. It was demolished in the 1920s and now Hartford, Ravensdale, Woodvale, Woodcrest, Greenmount and Manor roads are on its site.

The Quakers left numerous albums crammed with photographs, and many of them can now be seen around the walls of the Crown Street library. The exhibition runs until August 28.

All of today’s pictures are courtesy of the Darlington Centre for Local Studies.

The Northern Echo:

CLOSE COUSINS: Caroline Joanna Fowler (1864-1922) was the daughter of William Fowler, the Liberal MP for Cambridge. She married Wilson Pease, the grandson of Joseph Pease in 1894. She is with Edith Rebecca Fowler (1859-1895), who was the daughter of John Fowler, the agricultural engineer who invented the steam plough and who has a monument dedicated to him in Darlington's South Park. Edith's mother was Elizabeth Lucy Pease, a daughter of Joseph Pease.

The Northern Echo:

SLENDER WAIST: Caroline Joanna Fowler (1864-1922) married Wilson Pease – the son of Gurney and the grandson of Joseph – on December 6, 1894. Wilson Pease ran a successful iron and engineering business on Teesside, and they lived primarily in Hanover Square, London. She was known as Joan.

The Northern Echo:

QUAKER MISSIONARY: Hannah Chapman Backhouse (1787-1850) was the sister of Emma who married Joseph Pease. Hannah married Darlington banker Jonathan Backhouse in 1811 and they lived at Polam Hall – only she referred to it as Polam Hill, because it sounded less grand. In 1830, she and Jonathan left their four children aged under 16 at Polam and toured the US as Quaker missionaries. Even when Jonathan came home in 1832, Hannah pushed on alone into the slave-owning states of Tennessee, Kentucky and Ohio. She drove her own carriage, crossed a river in a hollowed-out canoe and slept on straw on the floor of a railroad coach – incredibly brave for a solo woman of her day.

The Northern Echo:

TWO GENERATIONS: In 1844, Mary Wilson, left, married in Kendall John Harris, the Stockton & Darlington Railway engineer. They came to live in Woodside, a now demolished stately home in the west end of Darlington. In 1856, their daughter, Bertha, right, was born in Woodside.

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BABY PEASE: Helen Blanche Pease (1865-1951) was the grand-daughter of Joseph Pease. She grew up at The Woodlands in Darlington and Hutton Hall at Guisborough, and in 1890, she married her first cousin once removed, Edward Lloyd Pease. They lived at Hurworth Moor House, near the Mowden Park rugby stadium. Blanche Pease Hall, which was part of Darlington Arts Centre, was named after her.

The Northern Echo:

COUNTESS OF PORTSMOUTH: Beatrice Mary Pease (1866-1935) was the grand-daughter of Joseph Pease. This picture was taken in Milan in 1870. Beatrice opened Darlington library in 1885 as her late father, Edward, had been its principal benefactor. She married Newton Wallop, the 6th Earl of Portsmouth, whose demands to get his hands on her inheritance were one of the causes of the Peases' financial collapse in 1902.

The Northern Echo:

DISOWNED DARLINGTONIAN: Elizabeth Pease Nichol (1807-1897) was a cousin of Joseph Pease. She grew up in the Feethams mansion which is where Darlington Town Hall is today. She paid for the Mechanics Institute in Skinnergate to be built to enable the education of working men, but in 1853 married Dr John Pringle Nichol of Glasgow University. He was a renowned astronomer – the Brian Cox of his day – but as he was a Presbyterian, Elizabeth was disowned by the Quakers, and moved to Edinburgh, where she continued her radical campaigning against slavery and for women to get the vote. Edinburgh has recently considered erecting a statue in her honour.

The Northern Echo:

ETHNOGRAPHER: Katherine Maria Pease (1866-1935) was born in Southend, the home of her grandfather, Joseph. She struggled with the confined nature of the Quaker upbringing, and against mental illness, but escaped by marrying William Scoresby Routledge and travelling to Easter Island where she became the first person to study the ancient statues. A plaque was recently placed on Southend in her honour.

The Northern Echo:

PIERREMONT PEASE: Mary Lloyd (1826-1909) was the second wife of Henry Pease, the younger brother of Joseph. They married in Birmingham in 1859 and she was nearly 20 years younger than her husband. She lived in Henry's extravagant mansion of Pierremont in Darlington.

The Northern Echo:

COURT DRESS: Sophia Pease (1837-1897) was a cousin of Joseph who married Sir Theodore Fry of the Bristol Quaker family of chocolatiers. They lived in Woodburn, the now demolished mansion that was a twin of Elm Ridge, which is now a church. Sir Theodore became Darlington's second MP in 1880 and Sophia, a leading campaigner for women's rights, appears to be going to a ceremonial occasion in a huge gown.

The Northern Echo:

PLAITED PEASE: Katherine Wilson (1840-1915) of Kendal was 24 when she married Gurney Pease, the fourth son of Joseph. They had five children before Gurney died aged 33 in 1872. She lived much of the rest of her life in the Woodside mansion which used to be in Darlington's West End.