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In 1661, less than a decade after the first Friends arrived in British North America, the precursor to the New England Yearly Meeting was organized as the Rhode Island Yearly Meeting. As the oldest of approximately two dozen yearly meetings in the United States, the NEYM I currently organized into eight quarterly meetings and approximately 85 monthlies, which are the basic unit of organization for the Society.
With roots in northern England, the Society of Friends was one of the most successful of the radical sects that arose during the religious ferment of the English Civil War. Spreading rapidly under the visionary leaders George Fox, Margaret Fell, and James Nayler, among others, Friends were widely regarded as a threat to the established social order for their insistence on the possibility of a direct experience of the divine without the intermediary of an ordained clergy, and for their radical egalitarianism rooted in the concept of an Inward Light, a divine spark within all humanity.
Intensely evangelical during the first decades of their existence, Friends spread their teachings throughout Britain and overseas, first arriving in New England in 1656. Greeted with considerable hostility by the Puritan authorities in Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth Colonies. Their anticlericalism and egalitarianism were no less controversial in the New England theocracies than they had been in England, and the authorities responded with systematic repression, including banishment, corporal punishment, and in four cases, capital punishment: between 1659 and 1661, William Robinson, Marmaduke Stephenson, Mary Dyer, and William Leddra were all executed in Boston.
Despite the response, Friends found root in the more tolerant environs of Rhode Island, forming at least seven local meetings within a decade and organizing the first General Meeting of Friends in America in Newport, R.I., in 1661. The process of establishing governing structures for Quakerism in the colonies took on a new energy following the evangelical visit of George Fox in 1672, after which the General Meeting was formally constituted as the New England Yearly Meeting for Business, with Monthly Meetings constituted at the same time. New York Yearly Meeting was set off from New England in 1695. Three quarterly meetings were established between 1699 and 1705, which served as the official bodies for authorizing representatives to the Yearly Meeting.
The NEYM continued to formalize and strengthen church structures during the eighteenth century, emphasizing the distinctiveness of Quaker identity through insistence on adherence to basic tenets such as the peace testimony, opposition to slavery, and the enforcement of endogamy, though not without struggle. In 1784, the Yearly Meeting made its first attempt to establish a Friends school in Portsmouth, R.I., and although that school lasted only four years, it is regarded as a direct recursor to the Friends Boarding School in Providence, established in 1819 and known today at the Moses Brown School. The Oak Grove School in Vassalboro, Maine was established in 1849.
From early in their history, New England Quakers have been diverse in spiritual practice, leading to a legacy of sometimes profound doctrinal conflict. Although the Hicksite-Orthodox schism that shook Philadelphia and other Yearly Meetings had little impact in New England, outside of Nantucket, the NEYM suffered its own deep divisions. Beginning in 1817, several monthly meetings in New England underwent a brief, but intense period of conflict between "New Light" Friends, who questioned the divinity of Christ and emphasized the power of direct revelation, and their more conservative peers. Deeper splits, however, ensued in the 1840s between factions known as Gurneyites and Wilburites, named after their most vocal spokespersons, and each claiming to pursue the spirit of original Quakerism. Following the writings and preaching of the English Quaker, Joseph John Gurney, the more numerous Gurneyites were swept up in the evangelical tendencies shaping American Protestantism more generally, pursuing a Bible-centered, pastoral form of worship.
Responding to the Gurneyite surge, the Wilburites, named after John Wilbur of Hopkinton, R.I., grew concerned that evangelically-minded Quakers were tending to rely too much on the outward forms of Christianity and too little on the immediate guidance of the Holy Spirit. Wilburites (also known as Conservative Friends) retained simpler, unprogrammed meetings for worship. Throughout New England, but especially in Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts, monthly meetings divided between Gurneyites and Wilburites, organizing themselves into separate yearly meetings, the Gurneyite Yearly Meeting of Friends for New England and the Wilburite New England Yearly Meeting of Friends.
In the latter years of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, the Gurneyites pursued evangelical priorities including domestic and foreign missions that led to the formation of larger administrative structures to coordinate more effectively between Yearly Meetings, culminating in the establishment of the Five Years Meeting of Friends in 1902. The Wilburites did not prosper, and by the mid-twentieth century, only three monthly meetings remained. In 1945, the Gurneyites and Wilburites agreed to merge, bringing in independent meetings in the Connecticut Valley, Cambridge and Providence to form the modern New England Yearly Meeting of Friends.
The following meetings are listed as "occasional meetings for worship" or "other meetings for worship" in the Yearly Meeting minutes from 1947 onward. They are presumably under the loose jurisdiction of the Yearly Meeting, without specific monthly or quarterly meeting ties. None of these meetings have records at the NEYM Archives; it is uncertain whether many of them ever created any records at all. Some, as indicated, were later joined to other formal meetings.
Consolidated beginning in the 1960s, the NEYM collection contains the official records of the New England Yearly Meeting from its founding in the seventeenth century to the present, along with records of most (but not all) of its constituent Quarterly, Monthly, and Preparative Meetings and records of Quaker schools and trusts. As varied as the Quaker practice they document, these records include minutes of meetings for business; committee records; newsletters, financial records; some collections of personal papers; printed books and periodicals; and an assortment of photographs, audiovisual materials, microfilm, and electronic records. Of particular note are the vital statistics recorded by Monthly Meetings, including records of births, deaths, marriages, membership, and obituaries, and specifically-Quaker information on removals (formal letters written as members moved from one meeting to another), denials, testimonies (beliefs and convictions), and sufferings (penalties Quakers suffered for following testimonies).
The Archives Committee of the NEYM is a partner in records management and on-going documentation of the Meeting and its constituent bodies. The collection also includes several hundred Quaker books and pamphlets, including the libraries of Moses and Obadiah Brown and several individual monthly meetings. The records of most monthly meetings in Maine are held at the Maine Historical Society, while important bodies of records are held at the Newport Historical Society (some Nantucket and Rhode Island Meetings) or at individual Monthly Meetings.
Please note that this finding aid is considered preliminary only and subject to change. Several boxes of materials have arrived in recent years that have not yet been inventoried nor integrated into the finding aid, and SCUA is in the process of formalizing the organization of the collection to reflect We have attempted to normalize the terminology used to refer to record groupings, however the complexity of record keeping practices will lead to adjustments
The collection is open for research.
Gift of New England Yearly Meeting of Friends, Mar. 2016.
After many years of being on deposit at the Rhode Island Historical Society, the NEYM approved of the transfer of their records to SCUA in August 2015.
A more detailed history of Friends in New England can be found in
An earlier, and still valuable version of this finding aid was produced by Richard D.
Stattler,
The following collections of personal papers arrived with the NEYM collection and have been described separately:
Much, but not all of the records of the NEYM are available on microfilm. Sets of the
film are available at the
Selected materials from the NEYM Records and associated collections have been
digitized and may be
Processed by I. Eliot Wentworth, May 2016.
The official records of the New England Yearly Meeting include a diverse array of administrative records comprising minutes of annual business meetings; records of the Board of Overseers and Permanent Board; epistles exchanged with other Yearly Meetings and with subordinate Meetings; information on Quaker schools; financial records; and materials produced and collected by the Yearly's clerks and committees. The records of the Wilburite New England Yearly Meeting of Friends are maintained as a separate collection.
The central records of the NEYM consist of official and semi-official records maintained by the meeting clerk and other offices. They include a diverse array of correspondence and administrative files, reports and correspondence, epistles sent and received from other Yearly Meetings, and reports from committees and subordinate meetings, interspersed with other materials, unpublished and published.
The majority of the materials in Series 1 consist of materials that were received and maintained annually, with each accrual consisting of a formal epistles send to, or received from, other Yearly Meetings, committee reports and correspondence, and communications with subordinate (usually Quarterly) meetings. We have these materials out into the groupings, rather than maintain them as annual bundles. Epistles sent by the Yearly Meeting to its subordinate meetings are maintained as communications with the Quarterly Meetings, not with the Epistles sent and received. Other materials were separated into thematic groupings, either by the meeting Clerk or previous archivists, including significant content relating to the Asa Rand controversy, the Gurneyite-Wilburite separation, and important topical issues such as slavery.
Note that the records of Quarterlies and NEYM Committees are contained in other series.
Oversight of the Yearly Meeting is currently placed under the care of the Permanent Board between annual sessions, and supported by the Board of Managers (responsible for managing and investing Yearly Meeting funds), and the clerk (reponsible for recording the discernment which a meeting has reached and for sending and receiving correspondence on behalf of the meeting).
The Meeting for Sufferings (now called the Representative Meeting) was appointed by the Yearly Meeting and was initially charged with attending the Friends who were persecuted due to their beliefs, and over the years, they have been instrumental in raising concerns over moral and religious issues such as slavery, war, and inequality. The Meeting for Sufferings acted for the Yearly Meeting between sessions and later developed into the Representative Meeting. The Archives Committee is also part of the administration of the Yearly Meeting and is responsible for the care of records, correspondence, and other manuscript material entrusted to it by the yearly, quarterly, monthly and preparative meetings, Yearly Meeting committees, New England Friends Institutions, and individual members of the Yearly Meeting.
Committee work is an important part of the life and ministry of the Yearly Meeting and committees address a range of social and spiritual concerns. The nature, scope, and especially the names of committees vary widely through the years, but there has been a relatively constant attention to social justice, education, and the spiritual life of the community.
The series contains particularly rich documentation for Friends' educational concerns, particularly the Moses Brown School (founded ca.1780 as the Friends Boarding School), the Oak Grove School in Maine, and the Maryville Freedman's Normal Institute. Ministry and counsel (also called Ministers and Elders)
The Finance Committee stewards the financial resources at all levels of the NEYM, proposes annual budgets, nominates a Treasurer, and oversees the Meeting's accounts and investments.
Series 4 contains a small body of miscellaneous photographs associated with the Yearly Meeting along with a set of the microfilm of NEYM Records prepared by the Rhode Island Historical Society.
The records of Monthly and Quarterly meeting vary considerably in depth and detail, but often include data on membership (births, deaths, marriages, removals), discipline, and committees, in addition to minutes of business meetings. In line with the records of men's and women's meetings were typically recorded separately until about the turn of the twentieth century.
Please note that not all monthly meetings are represented in the NEYM Records
held by SCUA and not all monthlies are fully documented. Other significant
repositories for monthly meeting records include the Maine Historical
Society (which houses records of many of the monthly meetings in Maine), the
Nantucket Historical Association (housing materials relating to Nantucket),
the Old Dartmouth Historical Society, and the Newport Historical Society
(Rhode Island Monthly Meeting). Richard Stattler's
Series 4 includes miscellaneous materials produced retained by the Yearly Meeting, primarily on the history of the meeting and its membership. Most notable are materials collected on the history of meetinghouses in New England and biographies and testimonials on deceased Friends.
The NEYM collection includes hundreds of books, pamphlets, and periodicals on the Society of Friends and Quakerism with an emphasis on New England. Among these are significant works on Quaker doctrine, culture, and practice; personal testimonies, biographies, and histories; and works on Quaker responses to slavery, Native Americans, and the status of women; and there are some secondary works on Quakerism and Quaker history.
The printed materials were assembled from the personal libraries of Moses and Obadiah Brown and those held by individual monthly meetings. Nearly all of the books and pamphlets, but not the periodicals, have been cataloged in the UMass Libraries' online catalog.
The official records of the New Yearly Meeting are a diverse body of administrative records comprised of minutes of annual business meetings; records of the Board of Overseers and Permanent Board; epistles exchanged with other Yearly Meetings; information on Quaker schools; financial records; and materials produced and collected by the Yearly's clerks and committees. The records of the Wilburite New England Yearly Meeting of Friends are included (Wilburite Monthly records are included in Series 2).
Epistles are a formal advisory or admonitory letter sent by Quaker meetings to other meetings. The epistles included here were exchanged between Yearly Meetings, usually annually, and may be either printed or in manuscript form. They were among the primary means of communication between Yearly Meetings, treating with issues of significant concern in the Quaker world.
The collection includes a strong representation of epistles from the yearly meetings in London, Ireland, Philadelphia, New York, and Baltimore and in later years, Ohio and Indiana. In the twentieth century, the collection includes an increasing number of epistles from meetings outside of North America. Epistles were also issued separately by the Women's Meeting.
Epistles from the NEYM to its subordinate meetings are filed under "Quarterly meetings: reports and communication."
The communications between the Yearly Meeting and its subordinate Quarterly and Monthly Meetings typically include the annual responses by Quarterly Meetings to queries from the Yearly regarding the spiritual state of the meeting and adherence to Quaker principles and formal epistles on topics of concern.
Includes minutes and advance documents; digital files.
The records of each Monthly and Quarterly Meetings are listed in separate findings.
NEYM books are listed individually in the UMass Amherst online catalog. The periodicals and pamphlets are still in the process of being cataloged.