1654: Plymouth Court clamps down on Quakers

1654: Quakers are not wanted here
Most peaceful of Christian viewed as a threat by the Pilgrims

On this day in 1654, the Plymouth Court ordered that any boat carrying Quakers to the the area be seized to prevent the religious heretics from landing.

Although Quakers probably worshiped in Yarmouth as early as 1659, there is no record of a Quaker Meeting House being built until 1714. This early Meeting House was located on the Dennis side of Bass River. (The site is now owned and maintained by the Town of Dennis.) When the Indian Lands in Yarmouth opened for settlement, the Kelley family purchased much of the land and began a new village. Prominent in the Quaker community, David Kelley encouraged other Quakers to move across Bass River and offered a portion of his land to the Religious Society of Friends for the building of a new meeting house. Completed in 1809, the Quaker Meeting House in the old photo above looks much today as it did then, austere and simple, lacking ornamentation or religious symbols. 

A year earlier, Quakers in Sandwich, which was then part of the Plymouth Colony, had established the first Friends' Meeting in the New World.

Magistrates in both Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies were alarmed by Quaker teachings that individuals could receive direct personal revelations from God.

"To protect orthodox Puritanism, the courts passed a series of laws forbidding residents from housing Quakers. Quakers themselves were threatened with whipping, arrest, imprisonment, banishment or death. But driven by conscience, some Quakers repeatedly returned to Massachusetts to preach; four of them, including Mary Dyer, went to the gallows before a shocked King Charles ordered an end to the hanging of Quakers in 1661 ..." - as described at Mass Moments, a website maintained by the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities.

The photo on right shows the East Sandwich Friends Meeting House on Spring Hill road off Route 6A. Built in 1810, it is the third incarnation of the oldest Quaker Meeting House in continuous use in North America. Services are held every Sunday at 11 a.m.

When Cape Cod broke away from Plymouth

Barnstable County began in 1639 when Parson Joseph Hull and his small flock, apparently not wanted in Weymouth, came to settle in the land just east of the boundaries of Sandwich. Then, in October, that same year, the Reverend John Lothrop arrived with a larger flock of Congregationalists. We don't hear much more about Hull and his flock but the Lothrop settlement immediately incorporated itself as the Town of Barnstable (named after Barnstaple, Devon, England). The original boundaries of Barnstable included an area called Saconesset, which, in 1686 became incorporated and in 1693 changed its name to Falmouth.

See more "It Happened in Plymouth" here.

(photo credit, The Historical Society of Old Yarmouth and Cape Cod Quakers.)