to save to build wealth, it became the model for banks in the African-American community. It sought to improve the morals of its members by regulating marriages, condemning drunkenness and adultery. Working with the city, it acquired land at Potter's Field for a burying ground; it began to perform and record marriages and also to record births for the people of its community. To encourage responsibility and create a common aid fund, the FAS asked members to pay dues of one shilling per month. If they failed to pay dues for three months, they were cut off from the society, no longer able to share in its benefits. The dues collected were the fund for the community service projects that the FAS organized. Among these was a food program to help support the community's poor and widowed. Yellow fever epidemic of 1793 In aid to the sick, the FAS became famous for its members' charitable work as nurses and aides during the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793, when many residents abandoned the city. The doctor Benjamin Rush believed African Americans were immune to the disease. He wrote an open letter in the newspaper, under the pseudonym of a well-known Quaker who helped educate blacks, and appealed to blacks to aid others in the city during the epidemic. Allen and Jones decided to respond, together with other members of the FAS who served both black and white residents as nurses and aides during those terrible months. After all their work, Allen and Jones wrote a memoir about the events, which they published the following year, A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People during the late awful calamity ... They were trying to set the record straight and defend themselves against an accusatory pamphlet published by Mathew Carey, after he had fled the city for much of September 1793. He accused blacks of charging high prices for nursing, taking advantage of whites, and even of stealing from them during the epidemic. His pamphlet was entitled A Short Account of the Malignant Fever (1793). Allen and Jones noted that it was whites who charged high rates for nursing during the crisis. 1794 to early 1800s Many members who wanted more religious affiliation followed Absalom Jones when he founded African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas. It opened its doors in 1794 as the firs.E. Church|Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church]] (AME Church). In