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  • Southern Friends in the Settlement and Organization of Randolph County, Indiana, 1814–1830
  • Gregory P. Hinshaw (bio)

The story of the migration of southern Friends (Quakers) to the old Northwest Territory has been told many times and in many places. Where it has been told, however, the story has been incomplete. For much of period since the state was settled, Indiana Friends have exercised considerable influence in Quaker circles, yet no one has carefully looked at the patterns of settlement and community organization in Indiana pioneer Quaker communities. A dozen or more Indiana counties can claim Friends among their earliest and most important pioneers, but in few places was the Quaker influence so strong and as enduring as in Randolph County, Indiana, a rural county in the heavily Quaker district of eastern Indiana. From the first settlement, through the organization, and, in a sense, until the present, Quaker pioneers from the South and their descendants have exercised a disproportionate influence on this county.1 This period of settlement represents the dichotomy then present among American Friends: moving westward in an effort to preserve their faith and guard their youth, while at the same time confronting the increasing outside influences of the world. The Friends studied here created a community that was notable in many ways. First, while they often moved in groups and continued to maintain their old connections, their new communities usually brought together Friends and non-Friends from various places. Second, they entered fully into civic life, exercising political, legal, and economic power in nearly every imaginable way. Third, as the Hicksite Separation rent eastern Friends, most Indiana Friends, including those in Randolph County, cast their lot with the Orthodox faction almost without question.

Relatively few academic studies of Quaker communities exist. One of the few is Martha Paxson Grundy's Evolution of a Quaker Community, a study of Middletown Meeting and its community in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Grundy's two basic approaches, the role of faith development as an analytical tool and the use of Quaker families to search for patterns of orientation toward the meeting, political activity, or economic activity, can be used in studying any Quaker community, including Friends in Randolph County. Serious studies of Quaker migrations are even rarer, though two, James Harris Norton's "Quakers West of the Alleghenies and in Ohio to 1861" and Larry Dale Gragg's "Migration in Early [End Page 26] America: The Virginia Quaker Experience," present conclusions that can be applied to the Quaker community of Randolph County.2

Indiana was, unlike many other states, settled first from the south and the west, meaning that a disproportionate number of its early settlers came from southern states. This settlement pattern so influenced the state, particularly its southern two-thirds, that one modern Indiana historian has said that Indiana's long tendency toward southern-style conservatism is the "Indiana Way."3 The first Friends to settle in the Indiana Territory arrived in 1806, settling along the Whitewater River in what was then Dearborn County on Indiana's eastern border. Without exception, every Quaker family that arrived in the area before Whitewater Monthly Meeting was established in 1809 came from a monthly meeting in North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, or Virginia.4 The first settlers in the area were non-Friends who arrived in 1805.5 The area was organized as Wayne County in 1810, and, though Friends were active citizens, none of the original officers of the county were Quakers. Two Friends were appointed to the commission that was to select the location for the county seat of Wayne County.6

In the northern part of Wayne County, which became Randolph County in 1818, settlement was also occurring. Thomas W. and Anne (Peele) Parker and their three children made the first white settlement in what became Randolph County in April 1814. The Parkers were members of Piney Grove Monthly Meeting of Friends in Marlborough County, South Carolina, but had been residents of Richmond County, North Carolina. They settled in what is now Greensfork Township, Randolph County, on Nolan's Fork, just west of where the village of Arba today stands. Their son Jesse recalled years later that he believed that...

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