Background on Concord Monthly Meeting
Abbie Loring in Cape Cod Quaker attire, ca.1930.
Photo by Alton H. Blackington
The Quaker monthly meeting in Concord, New Hampshire, has both a long and short history. In the latter part of the eighteenth century, Benjamin Hannaford moved from Haverhill, Mass., to Concord and set up a popular tavern in town. His son Greely Hannaford, a builder, became a convinced Friend after hearing a woman preach in meeting in Portland, Maine, "so appropriately to my state of mind," he wrote, "that I was astonished and like Paul, struck down to the ground at noontime."
Hannaford in turn convinced his sister to follow his lead and become a Quaker, and it was she who returned to Concord in 1805 to establish the first meeting. The first meetinghouse there was constructed in 1815, however when the site was sold to the state in the following year, the meetinghouse was relocated to a site adjacent to the Hannaford tavern.
The Concord meeting reached its peak in about 1820, but languished thereafter. By 1840, it was laid down, with the meetinghouse sold to the local school district in 1845, and then sold again in 1859 and turned into a private residence. A small Friends' burial ground is part of the Old North Cemetery on State Street.
Revived after the Second World War, the Friends meeting in Concord was accorded status as a preparative meeting under Weare Monthly Meeting in 1953, and was set off on its own as a monthly in 1967. It has been part of Dover Quarter since its founding.
