Collecting area: Quakers

The Friends’ Monthly Meeting at Berwick, Maine, divided during the Wilburite split of 1845, with the smaller Wilburite Meeting organized under the Wilburite Dover Quarterly Meeting (1845-1851) and then under the combined Salem and Dover Quarterly. Berwick was laid down on April 28, 1881, with its last recorded meeting on May 26, 1881. Its members joined Dartmouth Monthly Meeting (Wilburite).

Surviving records of this short-lived Wilburite Friends meeting include one volume each of minutes from the Men’s and Women’s meetings.

A Quaker worship group was formed in Bolton, Mass., in 1763 and grew into a separate monthly meeting in 1799. Always a small outpost, regular worship continued there until 1954, when the meetinghouse was sold to the museum at Old Sturbridge Village. The meeting was formally laid down to Worcester Monthly Meeting in 1972.

The surviving records of Bolton Monthly Meeting include relatively complete minutes from 1799 to 1972, plus records of marriages, births, and deaths into the latter years of the nineteenth century.

Although Quakers first worshipped in Boston in 1661, they were late in the game in organizing a formal meeting. A preparative meeting operated in the city for just over a hundred years (1707-1808) under the auspices of the Salem Monthly Meeting, and a second attempt at building a community began in 1870 with authorization of an indulged meeting in Roxbury. Set off formally as the Boston Monthly Meeting Friend in 1883, this meeting continued until 1944, when it merged with an independent meeting in neighboring Cambridge to create the current Friends Meeting at Cambridge.

The records in this collection offer thorough documentation of the Boston Monthly Meeting of Friends from its establishment as an indulged meeting in 1870 through to its merger in 1944 and change of name to the Friends Meeting at Cambridge. In addition to the meeting minutes, the collection includes substantial records of the monthly’s Friends Guild and Women’s Foreign Missionary Society.

In the early Republic, Moses Brown emerged as an ardent abolitionist, a social reformer, and one of the best known philanthropists in his native Providence, R.I. A Baptist who converted to the Society of Friends in 1774, Brown had made a fortune as a merchant, partly in the triangular trade, but a crisis of conscience brought on by the ghastly results of an attempted slaving voyage in 1765 and the death of his wife in 1773 led him to reexamine his life. Withdrawing from most of his business affairs, Brown joined the Society of Friends and emancipated his slaves. He was a founder of the Providence Society for the Abolition of Slavery in 1786 and a strong voice for peace, temperance, and universal education.

A small, but rich archive of the personal papers of Moses Brown, this collection centers on Brown’s activities in antislavery, peace, and educational reform and his connections to the Society of Friends between the 1760s and 1830s. In addition to significant correspondence with major figures in early antislavery cause, including Anthony Benezet, George Benson, William Dillwyn, and Warner Mifflin, and some material relating to the Providence Society for the Abolition of Slavery, the collection includes outstanding content on peace activism. In addition to materials from Moses Brown, the collection includes letters to Moses’ son Obadiah Brown and some fascinating letters and manuscripts relating to Moses’ friend and fellow Friend, Job Scott.

The Brunswick Friend Meeting was established in 1983 after a year of unaffiliated worship under Falmouth Quarterly Meeting.

The records for the Brunswick Friends Meeting consist solely of State of the Society reports for the years 1990-1994.

Quaker merchant and farmer from Dartmouth, Massachusetts. Includes two major notations about a large cheese purchase and the sale of hoes in Washington County, New York. Also contains inventories of goods, notations for notes payable and notes receivable, and accounts of his farm (including amounts of cheese made, accounts of farm tools, and the keeping of cows and sheep).

Friends in Burlington, Vermont, began gathering as an informal, unaffiliated worship group in 1951, joining the New England Yearly Meeting five years later as part of the Upper Connecticut River Valley Monthly Meeting. With the continued growth of Quakerism in the state, the meeting was divided in two with Burlington and Hanover becoming monthly meetings in 1959, jointly comprising the new Northwest Quarterly Meeting.

The somewhat spotty records of the Burlington Monthly Meeting include minutes for two brief spans of time in the early 1980s and early 1990s, leavened by a fairly complete run of newsletters from 1969 through 2010.

Cobscook Monthly Meeting of the Society of Friends began in 1978, growing from the independent Whiting Meeting for Worship. Located in the town of Whiting in the easternmost stretch of the state of Maine, it is a member of the Vassalboro Quarterly Meeting.

The records of Cobscook Monthly Meeting include a nearly comprehensive set of meeting minutes, with only a few brief gaps in the early years.

Although a Friends’ meeting met in Concord, N.H., from 1805 to 1840, the current Monthly Meeting dates to 1953, when it was accorded status as a preparative meeting under Weare Monthly. It has been part of Dover Quarter since it was set off on its own in 1967.

The records of the Concord Friends Meeting contain a relatively complete set of minutes from 1967 through 2006, and newsletter starting in about 1992.

Connecticut Valley Quarterly Meeting is one of eight quarterlies currently comprising the New England Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends. In 1935, the Connecticut Valley Association of Friends was formed as “a temporary organization to promote fellowship among… meetings in and adjacent to the Connecticut Valley, but which was otherwise unaffiliated.” At the time of the general unification of Wilburite and Gurneyite meetings in New England in 1944, this Association was accepted into New England Yearly Meeting as a quarterly.

The record of Connecticut Valley Quarterly Meeting are an important resource for documenting the post-World War II growth of the Society of Friends in western Massachusetts and Connecticut. The bulk of the collection consists of minutes of the Quarterly from its formative year to the present, however the minutes often extend beyond simply the recorded transactions of the meeting. In many cases, the minutes include quite an array of supporting material, correspondence, calendars, state of the society reports from constituent monthlies, ministry and counsel reports, minutes of concern on social issues, planning documents, and budgetary information.