Background on Sandwich Quarterly Meeting of Friends (Wilburite)
Abbie Loring in Cape Cod Quaker attire, ca.1930. Photo by Alton H. Blackington
Sandwich Quarterly Meeting was one of four original Quarterly Meetings comprising the New England Yearly Meeting (Wilburite), along with Rhode Island, Dover, and Salem. Formed in the split of 1845, Sandwich oversaw Monthly Meetings in Dartmouth, Nantucket, New Bedford, and Westport.
Sandwich was the site of a separation of its own in 1863, when the Nantucket Monthly Meeting (with associates in Newport and elsewhere in southeastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island) split to form the Annual Meeting of Friends for New England, generally known as the Otisite or Primitive meeting. Gathering in Newport, this meeting functioned as an annual meeting until 1885, after which the responsibilities of the annual devolved to the New England Quarterly Meeting. The separation lasted until 1911, when the Otisites rejoined the Wilburites as the Nantucket Monthly Meeting, despite meeting in Warwick, R.I.
After absorbing the Wilburite Salem and Dover Quarterly meeting in 1881, Sandwich was eventually merged into the combined Rhode Island and Sandwich Quarterly Meeting in 1935, and after the reunification of New England Friends in 1944-1945, it became the Narragansett Quarterly Meeting.
