Mount Toby Friends Meeting Records

Background on Mount Toby Friends Meeting

Several attempts were made to establish a Quaker meeting in the Connecticut River Valley prior to the union of New England Friends in 1944, including formation of worship groups in Amherst (1924-1925), Greenfield (1937), and Northfield (1930s). The first to prosper, however, was the independent Connecticut Valley Association of Friends founded in Springfield in 1929, and the Middle Connecticut Valley Monthly Meeting, originally based in Northampton.

According to the History of Mount Toby Monthly Meeting up to 1964, by Helen Griffith, a small group of students who had come from Quaker backgrounds were seeking an opportunity to worship in Quaker style, and found support through a college chaplain, Burns Chalmers. In 1935, he and his wife opened up their home for Sunday evening meetings. Word spread and others joined, notably an Austrian Quaker, Walter Kotschnig, and his Welsh wife Elined Prys Kotschnig who joined the faculty at Smith College and helped gather the handful of Quakers in Northampton and Easthampton with the aim of establishing a regular meeting. They were joined by Daniel and Mary Test, now living in the area, who had been established members of the Philadelphia Quaker community and were familiar with Quaker ways. Unwilling to choose between membership in either the Gurneyite or Wilburite New England Yearly Meetings, Northampton Friends affiliated with the Fellowship Council in Feb. 1939.

Near the end of World War II, with gas rationing, meeting members who lived further away from Northampton were finding it hard to attend, so smaller, more local worship groups started to arise in Greenfield, Amherst and South Hadley. Consequently, in 1945 with the growing disparity in location, the Northampton Meeting decided to broaden its boundaries and change its name to the Middle Connecticut Valley Monthly Meeting (MCVMM) that it met bi-monthly through 1952, and then monthly starting in 1953. At that time, in the general reunion of New England Friends, the Connecticut Valley Association united with the New England Yearly Meeting to become the new Connecticut Valley Quarter, connecting monthlies from New Haven, Connecticut, northward into Vermont.

Although the initial gravity of the meeting was in Northampton, in 1954, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Francis Holmes, and his wife Becky revived meetings in Amherst. Their efforts soon bore fruit. By 1959, Middle Connecticut Valley Monthly attempted an "experimental consolidation" in which they rented the Grange Hall in Amherst for First Day worship and for a First Day School. In the face of the success of this experiment, members of the meeting agreed to build a new meetinghouse, selecting a site on Long Plain Road in Leverett, Massachusetts just north of Amherst. When construction on the meetinghouse was completed in 1964, Middle Connecticut Valley Monthly Meeting changed name to Mount Toby Friends Meeting, after a mountain that loomed nearby. Two monthly meetings have subsequently been set off from Mount Toby: South Berkshire in 1984 and Northampton in 1994.

Mount Toby has cared for a number of small worship groups and preparative meetings, including: