The Disappearance of Ohio Yearly Meeting (Hicksite)

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF OHIO YEARLY MEETING (HICKSITE) By Bruce Crauder* A mystery of nineteenth century Quaker history is the rapid depletion and disappearance of the Ohio Hicksite Yearly Meeting, which was laid down in 1919. There were several thousand Friends in this yearly meeting in 1828, the time of the separation; a century later it was gone. Only Virginia Yearly Meeting suffered a similar fate in this period, and the anti-slavery position of Friends adequately explains their emigration to the North and West. In Ohio, the other yearly meetings remain active to the present; only the Hicksites disappeared. With the opening of the Northwest Territory by the Ordinance of 1787, Quakers emigrated from the South and East to Ohio and farther west. Seventeen Quaker families west of the Alleghenies by 1 780 increased to more than 800 by 1800.1 Ohio Yearly Meeting was set off from Baltimore Yearly Meeting in 1813 with more than 19 monthly and 34 preparative meetings. New meetings were established until the middle of the 1840's, after which no new meetings were formed.2 Ohio Yearly Meeting extended from the Ohio River to Lake Erie and from Columbus to the Allegheny Mountains , including the western quarter of Pennsylvania and the eastern half of Ohio. The Hicksite separation in Ohio was a violent and bitter schism. Each of the five quarters of the yearly meeting had already spHt, so two sets of representatives, one Orthodox, one Hicksite, were sent to the yearly meeting of 1828. The preachings of EUas Hicks and Thomas ShilHtoe added to the bifurcation, resulting in a separation never to be resolved. However, both groups continued to use the Mount Pleasant meetinghouse for yearly meeting sessions.3 *Bruce Crauder is a recent graduate of Haverford College. 1.Quaker Sesqui-Centennial, (Damascus, Ohio: 1962), p. 19. 2.Minutes of Ohio Yearly Meeting (Hicksite), 1828-1919. Friends Historical Library, Swarthmore College. 3.Janney, Samuel M., An Examination of the Causes Which Led to the Separation of the Religious Society of Friends. . . , (Philadelphia: T. Ellwood Zell, 1868), p. 293. 93 94QUAKER HISTORY The statistics of the Hicksite separation are not known, and there remain no sources from which to determine them reHably. Secondary sources provide only vague references. William Hodgson's The Society of Friends in the Nineteenth Century, written with a blatant anti-Hicksite bias, concludes that not more than one-third of the yearly meeting became Hicksite.4 Samuel Janney, writing in the 1860's with a pro-Hicksite bias, recorded the spHt as being even, though he admitted that he knew of no census having been taken.5 Rufus Jones mentions that the spHt was about even.6 While this figure seems reasonable for the ratio of the split, the actual numbers involved are unknown. Watson Dewees cites 8,873 as the number of Quakers in Ohio Yearly Meeting in 1826,7 two years before the separation, a figure in agreement with that of H.E. Smith, who goes so far as to give membership statistics for each monthly meeting.8 Such apparently precise figures, with no references to the minutes or any census by the monthly or yearly meetings, seem dubious at best. Compilations based on primary sources, the minutes themselves, are unavailable since the records of only a few meetings are complete and extant. By studying all the data contained in monthly meeting records in the Ohio Hicksite Yearly Meeting, hopefully one could account for its disappearance. The minutes of Redstone Monthly Meeting, set off in 1794 and laid down in 1864, and those of West Monthly Meeting, set off in 1845 and laid down in 1923, are among the few sets of complete records left. Redstone, in western Pennsylvania , was one of the oldest and largest meetings in Ohio Yearly Meeting. West Monthly Meeting was located in northeastern Ohio. The minutes of these two meetings were used as data for this project . The following information was sought: 1. total membership and age distribution by year, 2. complete data on immigration and emigration to and from Ohio, 3. yearly rates of births and deaths, 4. average age of disownment, 5. age distribution of those who traveled farther west as...