First Friends at New Garden in North Carolina

BULLETINOF Friends Historical Association Vol. 34Autumn Number, 1945No. 2 FIRST FRIENDS AT NEW GARDEN IN NORTH CAROLINA By Dorothy Lloyd Gilbert NEW GARDEN MEETING in North Carolina has been a center of Southern Quakerism since the middle of the eighteenth century, when the migration of Pennsylvania Quakers to piedmont Carolina began. There had been an organized Yearly Meeting in Eastern Carolina since 1698 (although the minutes do not begin until 1708). By 1776 Friends had moved into the Cane Creek - New Garden area in such numbers that it seemed advisable to ask the Yearly Meeting to meet on alternate years in that locality. The request was not granted until 1784, and the first yearly session to convene at New Garden was that of 1791. Since then 120 of the 248 sessions of North Carolina Yearly Meeting have been held at New Garden. In 1837 New Garden Boarding School, ancestor to Guilford College, was built not far from the old meeting house; in 1881 the Yearly Meeting gave its new meeting house built only a few years before to the school to supply the need for a men's dormitory and class rooms, and the Yearly Meeting convened at High Point from 1883 until 1904. The present meeting house built in 1912 belongs both to the monthly meeting and the yearly meeting and stands squarely across the line dividing college property and meeting property, thus typifying the unity which has always existed between college and meeting. The first settlers brought the name with them from New Garden Meeting in Chester County, Pennsylvania. It in turn had been named for an earlier New Garden, that in County SlVol. 34, Autumn 1945 52 BULLETIN OF FRIENDS HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION Carlow in Ireland.1 There is a pleasant tradition that the New Garden in North Carolina was named out of the admiration that the settlers felt in finding their "new garden" spot,2 yet as late as 1833 Rowland Greene, a visiting Friend from Rhode Island, remarked that the name was liable to "lead the mind of a stranger into an error" because the meeting house stood in an old and majestic wilderness containing about fifty acres.8 Addison Coffin also suggested that the first residents considered the place as their new Garden of Eden, but so ancient an association as that must give way to County Carlow, and the literal qualities of the name yield before its Quaker connotations. No one knows exactly when the first Friends came through the majestic wilderness to settle at New Garden, but a few families were there by 1751. That year Friends at Cane Creek4 requested a monthly meeting, informing Perquimans and Little River Quarterly Meeting : "There is Thirty Families and upwards of Friends settled in them Parts and Desire still in behalf of themselves and their Friends to have a Monthly Meeting settled amongst them." Some of the thirty families lived at New Garden, for the first piece of business to come before Cane Creek Monthly Meeting (7th day of 10th month, 1751) was a request from Friends of New Garden for permission to hold a meeting for worship. At first there was no meeting house, and one of the stories Nathan Hunt loved to tell to the earliest students of New Garden Boarding School concerns the outward form which this pioneer meeting sometimes took. Two great logs were so placed as to form the long sides of a narrow triangle. Those who sat 1 Albert Cook Myers, Immigration of the Irish Quakers into Pennsylvania (Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, 1902), p. 130. 2 Addison Coffin, "Early Settlement of Friends in North Carolina, Traditions and Reminiscences." MS., p. 144. All manuscripts are in the vault of North Carolina Yearly Meeting at Guilford College, unless otherwise indicated. 3MS. Journal of Rowland Greene (1770-1857), 13 vols., in the Quaker Collection of the Haverford College Library, vol. xiii, letter 44, New Garden, North Carolina, 11 mo. 8, 1833. 4 Cane Creek Meeting in Alamance County was the first permanent meeting settled by the Pennsylvania Friends. It belonged to Perquimans and Little River in Eastern Carolina at first, becoming a monthly meeting in. 1751. Vol. 34, Autumn 1945 FIRST FRIENDS AT NEW GARDEN53...