Collecting area: Religion

After eight years as a Quaker worship group, Farmington Monthly Meeting was set off from Pondtown in 1991, becoming one of the newest members of Vassalboro Quarterly Meeting. Worship at Farmington is unprogammed.

Particularly for the early years, minutes for the Farmington Monthly Meeting were recorded (or preserved) somewhat irregularly, though continuously from 1984 to 2012. The collection also contains a set of state of the society reports. information on membership, and memorials.

Personal, financial and legal papers of Flint and Lawrence families of Lincoln, Massachusetts including wills, estate inventories, indenture documents, receipts of payment for slaves and education, correspondence; and records of town and church meetings, town petitions and receipts relating to the construction of the meeting house. Papers of Reverend William Lawrence include letter of acceptance of Lincoln, Massachusetts ministry, record of salary, a sermon and daybook. Personal papers of loyalist Dr. Joseph Adams, who fled to England in 1777, contain letters documenting conditions in England in the late 1700s and the legal and personal problems experienced by emigres and their families in the years following the Revolutionary War.

A native of Salisbury, Massachusetts, Robert Fowler (b.1805) was a prosperous shipbuilder and merchant with a trade extending from Nova Scotia to the Gulf South. He and his wife Susan Edwards, whom he married in 1830, had at least four children.

Kept by Robert Fowler between 1831 and 1854, the volume includes both diary entries (primarily 1841-1846) and accounts. With occasional commentary on local political matters, commerce, weather, and family matters, the diary is largely a record of Fowler’s spiritual concerns and his wrestling with doctrinal matters and the relationship of religion and daily life. An ardent temperance man, he commented on religious topics ranging from the Millerite movement to the resurrection, salvation, and the duty of prayer.

Beginning as an informal gathering in the home of Margaret Welch in 1959, Framingham Friends Meeting of the Society of Friends evolved organizationally into a formal worship group under the care of Cambridge Monthly Meeting in 1961 and then a preparatory meeting (1964). It was set off as an independent monthly meeting in 1979.

A newer monthly meeting, Framingham is well documented through a continuous set of meeting minutes from 1983-2022 (with some extending back to 1963) and a long run of newsletters and directories of members. The minutes often include official reports and other documents.

A scholar, linguist, and bibliophile, Jacob Freedman (1903-1986) served as Rabbi at Temple Beth-El in Fall River, Mass., during the 1930s and early 1940s, and later at congregations in Pittsfield, Springfield, and Stratford, Conn., among others.

The collection contains the published newsletter of Temple Beth-El from 1937-1941, as well as other published materials and a photograph of Rabbi Freedman.

Since the merger of the Boston Monthly Meeting with the Independent Cambridge Monthly during the second quarter of the twentieth century, the Society of Friends has expanded in the Boston area. Fresh Pond began as an allowed meeting under Cambridge Monthly in 1989 and was set off as a monthly meeting of its own in 1991. It has been under care of Salem Quarterly Meeting since its inception.

The records from Fresh Pond include a nearly complete set of minutes for the meeting’s first five years and a nearly comprehensive set of newsletters.

The present-day Friends Meeting at Cambridge began as an independent, informal, unprogrammed meeting for worship that met between 1899 and 1901, and then again beginning in 1911. After holding joint meetings with neighboring Boston Monthly Meeting starting in 1926, Cambridge became an official independent monthly meeting in 1937, and during the Quaker union of 1944, merged with Boston Monthly to create the new Friends Meeting at Cambridge.

Although records from Cambridge are beset with significant gaps, they nevertheless provide a rich opportunity for examining the growth of a monthly meeting in New England during the post-World War II era and the commitment shown by its members to creating social justice. The collection includes extensive records of the Peace and Social Concerns Committee (and related endeavors), documenting peace activism during the Cold War and Vietnam years, and initiatives to fight poverty and racial injustice.

A Cape Cod Quaker, and lifelong member of the West Falmouth Friends Meeting, Cecilia Bowerman Fuglister was born in West Falmouth, Mass., in 1906. After receiving a BA in mathematics and biology at Earlham College in 1928, she went on to earn an MA in Library Science from Columbia (1932), where she remained as a librarian. Two years after marrying the oceanographer Frederck C. Fuglister in 1939, however, she returned to Cape Cod when he took a position at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. She helped to establish the document library at Woods Hole and served as its librarian until her retirement in 1977. She died in Falmouth on Jan. 14, 2005, at the age of 98.

The Fuglister collection consists of a miscellaneous assemblage of records, mostly from Sandwich Monthly Meeting from 1797 through the 1840s, with a few later items. The collection also included fifteen memoirs and memorials for Friends, nearly all from the mid-nineteenth century.

Quaker worship in Rochester, New Hampshire, began in 1742 under the care of Dover Monthly Meeting, becoming the Pine Grove Worship Group by 1846. After the meetinghouse was moved to the Gonic neighborhood of Rochester in about 1862, the name of the meeting was changed to Gonic. Gonic became a preparative meeting in 1950 and was finally set off from Dover as a monthly meeting in 1981.

The scant records of Gonic Friends Meeting consist solely of newsletters: one run from Gonic in the late 1980s and another from the West Epping Preparative Meeting from 1982-1996.

Born in Middletown, R.I., on May 25, 1730, Thomas Gould was part of an extended Quaker family in Newport County and descendant of one of the first Quaker converts in Rhode Island. Enjoying success as a “mechanic” and farmer, according to Representative Men and Old Families of Rhode Island (1908), he married Alice Chase of Portsmouth in March 1757 and raised a large family of five boys and five girls. Gould died on May 3, 1795.

This slender volume includes a chronological record visits to New England by Public Friends: Quakers who were considered to have a special gift in prayer or public speaking and who often traveled widely to minister.