History

Our present-day meetinghouse is located at 6 Quaker Road in East Sandwich, Massachusetts within the Spring Hill Historic District. Cape Cod Quakers played a significant role in the establishment of The Religious Society of Friends in the Americas.

The roots of the East Sandwich Quaker Meeting and its connection to this rich history reach back to 1656 when Quaker missionaries began arriving in Boston from England, with Mary Fisher and Ann Austin being the first among them. Their religious beliefs and practices were strongly counter to Puritanism, the dominant social and religious order of the time, and they and other early Quakers were severely persecuted and, often, imprisoned.

Nicholas Upsall, a prominent Boston Puritan, was an early supporter of the Quaker missionaries, secretly arranging, for example, for Fisher and Austin to receive food during their imprisonment, and speaking out against legislation prohibiting any individual from assisting any Quaker. These and other acts of compassion and independent thought led to his banishment.

Upsall left the Puritan Church and joined with Friends, coming to Sandwich in the winter of 1656. Here he found a town where many had become disaffected from the Congregational Church (a religion sharing the theological background of Puritanism) and who had sent their minister away two years earlier.

Upsall attended some of the dissenters’ religious meetings, sharing his new beliefs and the doctrines he had learned from the persecuted Boston Quakers. Thus, when English Quaker missionaries, Christopher Holder and John Copeland, arrived in Sandwich in 1657, they found a people ripe for conversion. 

The first official notice of a meeting of Friends on Cape Cod was on April 13, 1657 at the house of William and Priscilla Allen in Sandwich. Because of the persecution by the Puritans, the Friends needed to meet in secret. They often worshipped in a secluded glen in Sandwich, known as Christopher’s Hollow, named after Christopher Holder.

Persecution of Quakers in the Plymouth Colony began to ease around 1665, allowing them to gather more freely. Historical records indicate that the first meetinghouse in Sandwich was built in 1672 on or near the site of the present one.

During the next 150 years there were multiple alterations and expansions of the meetinghouse to accommodate a rapidly growing membership. The East Sandwich Meetinghouse became the center for other Quaker meetings on Cape Cod including West Falmouth and Yarmouth. Together the three meetings became known as Sandwich Monthly Meeting, the oldest continuously organized Quaker meeting in the Americas.

By the 19^th century, Quaker meetings were scattered across New England. The present East Sandwich Meetinghouse, built in 1810, needed to accommodate several hundred Quakers. They traveled by horse and carriage from as far away as Rhode Island for regional meetings to worship, attend to business matters, and strengthen community.

“The Great Meetinghouse,” as it was called then, was prefabricated on the Kennebec River in Maine, a large Quaker outpost. The building was then disassembled, shipped into Cape Cod Bay, unloaded in the creek north of Spring Hill, and reassembled at the present site according to matching Roman numerals on the timbers, as shown below. These markings are visible in the attic. There are carriage sheds on either side of the meetinghouse.