Condensation of an article by S. A. Zielinski in The Bulletin of the Friends Historical Association, Autumn 1961
The name Farnham Meeting comes from the township of East Farnham, Brome County, in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. This Meeting is unique in some respects. It was isolated from other Meetings; it started in a wilderness and lasted for more than a century; at the peak of its development it had more than a hundred members.
The village in which most of the members lived is the village today known as East Farnham, but was then called Allen’s Corner.
One remarkable fact about the Eastern Townships is that this was the only part of the Province of Quebec which was colonized exclusively by English speaking settlers.
The Friends who opened the Farnham Meeting came from or at least through Vermont, mostly between 1800 and 1820. All the Quaker families who settled in the Eastern Townships had been originally forced by circumstances to leave southern New England. Since they refused to take arms, they were considered to be enemies, or at least undesirable neutrals. Their exodus was slow. Most of them moved at first into northern Vermont, which was practically neutral during the Revolution, and some of them stayed there for more than fifty years, but they did not feel very secure and kept going north. The opening of colonization in the Eastern Townships was providential for Friends, and the first application of “a company of Quakers” for a grant of land was made in 1792, i.e., as soon as it could be made.
There were two “companies” of Friends who moved into Lower Canada. The first, under the leadership of Nicholas Austin of Somersworth, New Hampshire, settled on the western shore of Lake Memphremagog in 1793. As far as we know, they never established a meeting. The descendants still live in this area, and several localities bear the names of the original settlers: Peasley, Eastman, Austin. The Roman Catholic Church tries to obliterate the latter name by calling the village St. Austin, which is a variant form of the name of St. Augustine. This is probably the only case in history when a Friend became a Roman Catholic saint.
The second company was only very loosely organized, if organized at all. Several Quaker families, well acquainted with each other and even interrelated, slowly drifted into East Farnham township and settled around a place known later as Allen’s Corner.
The leader of this second group was Gideon Bull. His ancestors, his wife, and his children were Quakers, but he never joined the Society of Friends. The Bulls came to East Farnham township in 1800. Gideon brought with him his wife Abijah (also a Bull, and probably his cousin of the Connecticut line), as well as five children, among them Aaron, who was then thirteen. They were followed by the Knowleses (Samuel, his wife Sally Woodard, and eight children), Meaders, Bartons, Barnums, Hoskinses, Bassetts, Tabers, Purintons, and Stevenses.
And they established the Farnham Meeting.
Informal meetings for worship took place probably as early as 1814. They were held in the house of one of the Knowleses. By 1820 three families — Knowleses, Bulls and Meaders — sent a request to Ferrisburg to hold a meeting for worship on First Day. This request was signed by fourteen applicants: seven Knowleses, five Bulls and two Meaders. It was sent on September 4, 1820, and received in Ferrisburg twenty-three days later on September 27.
On January 3, 1821, the request was granted for one year — one meeting for worship on the First and one on the Fifth day. The place was, as before, in David Knowles’s house. At about this time the first burying ground was established on a lot south from the Knowles property. The earliest grave is marked 1826, but there are several older unidentified graves. Later on, this cemetery was known as Jewell’s burying ground.
On April 18, 1822, the Meeting was allowed as an indulged Meeting. A year later the first meeting house (a log house) was built on the Stevenses’ property. In 1826 Farnham Meeting became a Preparative Meeting. By this time it was developing normally and had plenty of committees: for the care of schools, Indian affairs, for the care of the the meeting house “and make fire therein” (this latter committee burned the house and all down five years later), for the poor, to investigate the morals of Henry Knowles, to establish the quota paid to Ferrisburg, and what not.
Although the first meeting house burned in 1831 after a prophesy to this effect by Aaron Barrton, it took three years to build a second one. Probably a unique feature of this new house were two rocking chairs in front of the gallery: one occupied by Stephen Bassett because of his infirmity, and the other by Frederick England for reasons unknown.
On the 22nd of June, 1840, the Farnham Meeting was allowed as a Monthly Meeting on probation, and finally, two years later, became a full-fledged Monthly Meeting.
Starting in 1850, the Quarterly Meetings were held once a year in East Farnham. This took place in October. Many Friends from Vermont
… and many visiting ministers attended. It probably did not occur to our Friends that their situation was peculiar from the political point of view; it was not a Canadian but the Vermont Quarterly Meeting (a part of New York Yearly Meeting) which was held in Canada.
The Wilbur-Gurney controversy affected the Meeting very badly. The Wilburite minority was very small, but there were many Friends who were disgusted by the hostility between the two factions. Many were disowned, and many left the Meeting of their own will. However, this was not the reason why the Meeting finally declined. The division was followed by a revival, parallel to the great revival in the United States. More than a dozen new members joined the Meeting and a new meeting house was built in 1871, although it was not necessary at all. Was it an act of defiance or of wishful thinking?
After the short revival in the seventies, the number of members started to decline rapidly. In the nineties there were about a dozen attending the meeting for worship. In 1900 “only a handful of Friends remained,” and the meeting was laid down in 1902. A few years later the house was sold for lumber.
The life of the Meeting was fairly normal in its weekly routine, and similar to the life of hundreds of others. But there were a few rather unusual factors in its history. For a small, primitive and strictly farming community, the Meeting had quite a number of traveling ministers. And some of the travels were remarkable indeed.
The first such journey in which these Friends took part started even before the Farnham Meeting was allowed. In 1823 Joseph Hoag went with Samuel Knowles on one of the longest trips on record. They covered not less than 7600 miles in twenty-one months. According to Joseph’s journal, they went to Peru and Black River, New York, and then to Upper Canada, Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Indiana and Illinois.
Another visit of this kind was made in 1839-40 by David and Drusilla Knowles. David was lame. They felt a concern to preach to the Indians, and they departed in a one horse buggy to make a trip of 5000 miles. They never worried about Indians, and that they did not speak any Indian language. The first stage to New York took them twenty days. They went to Philadelphia and then west; it took them two weeks to cross the Alleghenies in snow sometimes three feet deep. They had to walk most of the time. They crossed the Ohio River in February. In May they boarded a boat in Cincinnati, buggy, horse and all, and ultimately reached Little Rock, Arkansas. The next few weeks they spent among Indians, but with rather disappointing results. They …
They came back by way of Kansas City, St. Pauls and Richmond, always in the same buggy.
Although we have no proof that Allen’s Corner was a terminal of the Underground Railroad, the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming. We know from the records of the Vermont Underground Railroad that there was a branch line going to Franklin, Berkshire and Enosburg, thus reaching the territory of Farnham Meeting. We know also that there were a few Negroes living in Potton and Brome. One of them lived in Allen’s Corner and attended the meetings for worship.
Among other activities of these Friends, there is one other that deserves attention, because it is rather unexpected. They were inordinately fond of writing. This would be understandable in the case of the few scholars, such as George A. Barton, who left Allen’s Corner, acquired higher education, and became professor at Bryn Mawr College and an author of distinction. But there were other members of the Meeting who could hardly be described as educated, who nevertheless left all sorts of “writings” for posterity.
Even after the Farnham Meeting was laid down in 1902, not all activities connected with the Meeting’s different properties ceased. Just a year before the last meetings for worship took place, a sort of committee was formed to take care of the original burying ground. Keziah Jewell made a gift of land on which the burying ground was situated “in consideration that the said Plot of ground shall remain forever as such burying ground sacred to the memory of those whose mortal remains are and were buried there…”. Six Tabers, two Bulls, and ten other names appear on a subscription list “for the purpose of cleaning up the ground and further beautifying and fencing the Jewell Burying Ground”. This cemetery is in remarkably good shape today. In January 1917, “The Friends Cemetery Company” was incorporated in Cowansville. This company still exists and takes care of the meeting house burying ground.
There is no moral to this story, but there is a sequel. If one visits the site of the old meeting house on a sunny Sunday morning in summer just before noon, one may occasionally see a Quaker Meeting for worship taking place. It is the Friends from Montreal, from the Eastern Townships, and perhaps a few from across the border in Vermont. Friends are sitting in the shade of a large maple tree; there are graves of long departed members of the Farnham Meeting all around them. And there is silence.
The Farnham Meeting goes on.