Boston Monthly Meeting of Friends Records

Background on Boston Monthly Meeting of Friends

Although Quakers arrived in Boston at a remarkably early date, 1656, and held their first meeting there in 1661, they were late in the game in organizing a formal meeting. Small meetings for worship gathered in the city for several decades under the care of Salem Monthly Meeting, and despite the best attempts of colonial officials to hamper spread of the faith, they coalesced into a Preparative Meeting in 1707. The capitol of Congregationalism, however, never became a Quaker hotbed, and after a century of survival, the Boston Preparative meeting was officially laid down in 1808.

Quakerism returned to Boston in 1870, when a group of Friends based primarily in Roxbury petitioned Salem Monthly to authorize a new indulged meeting which became the core of the Boston Monthly Meeting of Friends when it was set off officially in 1883. A success, relatively speaking, this Meeting stewarded a preparative meeting in Lawrence in 1886, which was formally set off as a monthly of its own thirteen years later. In 1926, Boston Friends began meeting jointly with an independent meeting in Cambridge and the two merged in 1944 to create the current Friends Meeting at Cambridge: technically, the Cambridge independent meeting was laid down and its members accepted into Boston.

Since that time, two additional monthly meetings have been formed in the area: Beacon Hill (set off in 1958) and Fresh Pond (1991).