Nantucket Monthly Meeting of Friends (Wilburite: 1845-1945)

Background on Nantucket Monthly Meeting of Friends (Wilburite)

The turmoil within Quakerism during the first half of the nineteenth century resonated more profoundly, and more complexly in Nantucket, than almost anywhere else. Having already experienced a split between Hicksite and Orthodox factions in 1830, a Wilburite-Gurneyite split ensured within the Orthodox body in 1845. While elsewhere in New England the Gurneyites were the “larger body,” on Nantucket, the opposite was the case, outnumbering and outlasting the Gurneyites, who were laid down in 1867.

The Wilburites continued to experience turmoil, however, undergoing another separation in 1863, when a small group of “Primitive” or “Otisite” Friends seceded from the Wilburite Sandwich Quarterly Meeting of which they were part, forming a new Sandwich Quarterly Meeting (Otisite) and taking with them a number of sympathetic Friends on the mainland, mostly in Rhode Island. Although meetings for worship on Nantucket effectively ended in 1894, the mainland Otisites, based in Lynn, Mass., and Warwick, R.I., carried on the name Nantucket Monthly Meeting of Friends until 1911, when the Otisites reunited with the Wilburites.

Quaker worship was revived on Nantucket with summer meetings beginning in 1939. The Nantucket worship group decided to remain independent after the Wilburite and Gurneyite reunification in 1944, however its members in Warwick affiliated with the Providence Monthly meeting. The Nantucket worship group eventually affiliated with New England Yearly Meeting in 1956, and with Sandwich Quarterly Meeting in 1990.