Established in 1708, the Nantucket Monthly Meeting of the Society of Friends has had a distinctive history marked by the separations that troubled Quakerism in the nineteenth century. In 1830, Nantucket became one of the few monthly meetings in New England to divide along Hicksite and Orthodox lines, and as that separation was healing in 1845, the Wilburite and Gurneyite factions separated. Uniquely, the Wilburites split further in 1863, when the “Primitive” or “Otisite” Friends departed. Quaker worship was effectively absent on Nantucket from 1894 to about 1939.

This fraction of the records of the Nantucket Monthly Meeting of Friends documents the history of the meeting up to and through the Wilburite-Gurneyite schism. With the exception of some loose materials from the Women’s Meeting from 1776-1781, the collection contains little from the first several decades of the meeting (these are housed at the Nantucket Historical Association), but there is rich content on the state of the meeting and the conflict that followed the separation of 1845, along with minutes from the decade leading up the Wilburite-Gurneyite reunion in 1944.

Having already separated between Hicksite and Orthodox factions in 1830, Friends on Nantucket separated again in 1845 between Gurneyites and Wilburites. While Gurneyites were the “larger body” in nearly every other meeting in the region, on Nantucket they were the minority. Drawing some of their members from the Hicksites, who were disbanding at the time, the Gurneyite monthly was under the care of Sandwich Quarterly Meeting. Never great number, the meeting was laid down in 1867, although a worship group under care of New Bedford Monthly Meeting continued to 1897.

This relatively small collection offers relatively complete documentation for a short-lived Gurneyite Friends meeting, including nearly complete runs of minutes (including rough minutes) for both the men’s and women’s meetings and records of meeting finances.