"[6] Thomas developed Quaker Hill into a well-known haven for numerous successful business, news media, political, and legal figures.

[7] To keep the rural flavor of the area, Thomas forbade the building of shopping centers, large businesses or factories, or extensive housing developments on Quaker Hill while he lived there.

[8] Among the prominent figures who lived on Quaker Hill at one time or another from the 1930s to the 1970s were New York Governor and two-time Republican presidential nominee Thomas E. Dewey, the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale, famed CBS News journalist Edward R. Murrow, and Casey Hogate, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal.

Thomas held regular Saturday evening parties and dances for the residents of Quaker Hill at a community center he built called the Barn.

It was the subject of a Columbia University political science Ph.D. dissertation completed in 1907 by Warren Hugh Wilson, an early pioneering contributor to rural sociology.