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DUKE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY [Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2014 https://archive.org/details/friendsatspringhOOnewl Friends "at the Spring" A History of Spring Monthly Meeting Algie I. Newlin Friends "at the Spring" Mary Ruth Perry at the Spring, 1983 Friends "at the Spring" A History of Spring Monthly Meeting by Algie I. Newlin North Carolina Friends Historical Society North Carolina Yearly Meeting Spring Meeting 1984 To all who have been or are now members of Spring Monthly Meeting and to their descendants near and far Friends "at the Spring": A History of Spring Monthly Meeting is the fourth in a series of Friends meeting histories to be published cooperatively by the N.C. Friends Historical Society, the N.C. Friends Yearly Meeting, and the local Friends Meeting. Copyright © 1984 by Algie I. Newlin Greensboro N.C. 27410 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 84-060647 Contents Introduction vii Acknowledgments ix 1 . Friends Settle at the Spring i Pioneer Friends Come to the Spring — Others Find the Way — The Roads to the Spring — The Beginning of the Meeting — The First Glimpse of the Meeting 2. The Meeting for Worship Established 13 Following Quaker Procedure — The Indulged Meeting for Worship — Established by the Quarterly Meeting 3. Through Colonial Crises 16 In the Days of the Regulators — Under the Scourge of the Revolution 4. The Meeting Comes of Age 23 The Preparative Meeting — Leadership Emerges — Spring Monthly Meeting Gets Established 5. The Geographic Limits of Spring Monthly Meeting 31 Spring Particular Meeting — Eno Meeting — Chatham Meeting — South Fork Friends 6. In the Wider Society of Friends 39 Within the Yearly Meeting — With Friends Beyond the Yearly Meeting — With Traveling Ministers 7. The "State of the Meeting" 45 The People Who Settled at Spring — Tradition Preserves a Crisis — Rivalry with the Baptists — As Seen by Visitors — Education 8. Spring Friends in the Great Migration 57 Reason for Emigrating — The Volume of Emigration — To Ohio — To Indiana — To Lick Creek Meeting — To Bloomfield Meeting — To Sugar Plain —Declining Membership of Spring Meeting — In the Wake of the Migration 9. In National Crises 74 Conscience and Slavery — During the Civil War 10. In the Wake of War 86 In the Grip of Poverty — Days of Political Turmoil 1 1 . The Post-War State of the Meeting 88 The Membership of the Meeting — Evangelism and Revival Meetings — Visiting Ministers — Meeting Houses — Life and Work — Use ofAlcohol as a Beverage — Zeal for Foreign Missions 12. Spring Enters the Twentieth Century ioi Changes in Rural Life — Interest in Education — Uniting Men's and Worn- ens Meetings — New Monthly Meetings — South Fork Monthly Meeting — Chatham Monthly Meeting — The Challenge of the "New Emphasis" — Spring Friends and the Separation — Pastoral Ministry at Spring 13. A Concluding Commentary 127 Appendix A 136 Appendix B 138 Notes 140 Bibliography 146 Introduction Writing the history of a Friends meeting is a serious and meticulous business. The monthly meeting is a vital element in the Society of Friends; Rufus M. Jones aptly called it the "Vital Cell." It is in this meeting that the membership of the Society is found. In it most of the transactions of the Society are made. Here the spiritual life of Friends is nurtured and given its major expression. And it must be said that here either vitality or sterility is found. Spring Meeting broke into history when an itinerant minister, who was hunting out the little meetings then emerging on the Carolina frontier, aptly referred to it as the meeting "at the spring." It had already acquired a name and when he characterized it as a "good meeting" he attached a quality to it which has accompanied the name through history. It is one of the oldest meetings in Piedmont North Carolina. The Spring settlement began soon after the Cane Creek and New Garden settlements planted the Society of Friends in that area. The history of this meeting covers more than two and one-quarter centuries. In its long history the spiritual stamina of the meeting has been one of the main factors which enabled it to face and work through many national and local crises, some of which have threatened the existence of the meeting. The War of the Regulators, the Revolutionary War and the Civil War shook the meeting to its foundation. During the Revolutionary War a battle was fought near the meeting house. Many of the men killed in the battle or who died from wounds received in it were buried in or near the Spring Cemetery and the seriously wounded of both armies were cared for in the homes of Spring Friends. Spring Meeting was a product of the great migration of Quakers out of Pennsylvania and Virginia and it is one of the vagaries of fate that its very existence would be threatened by another great Quaker migration in the second half-century of the history of the meeting. Two decades after the end of the Revolutionary War the membership of Spring meeting reached the highest peak in its history, but at that point emigra- tion of Spring Friends to the Middle West began. During the next fifty years this movement sapped the numerical strength of the meeting until Vlll FRIENDS AT THE SPRING I at the outbreak of the Civil War the membership of the meeting was reduced to a "little remnant" of its former strength. From this blow Spring Meeting never recovered but in its role as a small meeting it has experienced some of its "finest hours." A little band of Friends has kept the meeting alive and alert to its mission as a body of Friends. When some of the members of the meeting acquired slaves the conscience of the meeting asserted itself. The corporate judgment of the meeting put it solidly against the institution until all slaves were set free. One important feature of the story of Spring Meeting is the rather long line of able leaders interspersed through its history. In this line men and women stand together. Together they have bolstered the spiritual stamina of the meeting both when it was strong in membership and since it has been small. To them much of the credit is due that Spring Meeting has lived and still lives as a "vital cell" in the Society of Friends. Acknowledgments \ My gratitude goes to several of my friends who have read the manu- script for this history of Spring Monthly Meeting. They are: Edward F. j ! Burrows, Wade Fuquay, David Hobson, Rausie Hobson, Damon Hickey, Jane Lindley, Mildred Marlette, Mary Edith Hinshaw, and Mary Ruth Perry. Suggestions which came from them were very helpful. I am grateful to Bertha Zachary Lindley and Hazel Zachary Fuquay for their I assistance with the minutes of Spring Monthly Meeting and to their brother Alpheus Zachary for information about the meeting within his lifetime and for some of the traditions bearing on the history of the meeting. I am indebted to David and Rausie Hobson for typing the final draft. October 14, 1983 Algie I. Newlin A tradition relative to a burial which took place in 1805 indicates that the grave "was beneath the branches of a large cedar tree." This cedar may be as old as Spring Meeting. The cemetery has been the burial ground for many pioneer families, andfor many soldiers from both armies in the Battle of Lindley's Mill. 1 Friends Settle at Spring Pioneer Friends Come to the Spring The coming of Quakers to what became the Spring Quaker settlement was a significant event in the history of Friends in the Piedmont of North Carolina. It was a part of the first great migration of Quakers away from navigable waters into the interior of the Seaboard Colonies. The settle- ment at Spring started soon after the settlements at Cane Creek and New Garden. It gives a clear illustration of the pattern followed in the establishment of a large part, if not all of the settlements in that part of North Carolina. Spring was started by families who stopped off from the great stream of migrations from the northeast — a stream which fol- lowed the foothills of the Blue Ridge to the southwest. This settlement did not begin as an offshoot from Cane Creek or any other settlement. These migrating Friends who began it came directly from Pennsylvania. The colony at Spring was not planned or promoted by any Friends meeting or committee and yet it was a venture well-planned by the prospective emigrants. This migration from Pennsylvania grew out of a frontier fever which had been generated by a keen interest in seeking new homes on some frontier, by people in some of the relatively new settlements in Chester County, Pennsylvania, and adjacent areas in Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware. For more than a decade before the middle of the eighteenth century migration had been one of the favorite topics in the conversation of the people in Quaker communities of these areas. They sought all the information they could get about the frontier of their special interest before they started to migrate. When related, or neighboring families caught the "frontier fever" they planned together for the successive steps in the pattern of migra- tion. A group of men, usually one from each prospective emigrant family, went out together on horseback to the area agreed upon. When the destination was reached each one would select a desirable tract of land. The difficult parts of the construction of log cabins could be done cooperatively. Perhaps a limited crop could be planted and cultivated. Since all of the available land in the northern half of North Carolina was 2 FRIENDS AT THE SPRING in one big monopoly, controlled by the Earl of Granville, the prospective emigrants would work together in getting some sort of claim on their respective tracts.