The first of the Colonies to hear Quaker preaching was Massachusetts in 1656, but Virginia was a close second; for in the following year Thomas Thurston and Josiah Cole of Bristol arrived in the Old Dominion and are said to have made a number of converts before they were promptly banished. The Quakers were as little welcome in either Massachusetts or Virginia as in England itself and both Colonies passed stringent laws for their repression. Virginia ordained that any shipmaster found guilty of smuggling in Quakers was to be fined £100 and upon the third return of a Quaker after banishment, he was to be treated as a felon. But even before the passage of the English Toleration Act of 1689 the persecution had died down. By the end of the century they had so increased in number that they were a major element in Rhode Island, controlled New Jersey and Delaware and had, under William Penn in 1681, founded and were supreme in Pennsylvania. Penn declared for liberty of conscience in the Colony he termed his "experiment," with absolute religious freedom "for Papists, Protestants, Jews and Turks"--if not an absolutely unique, at least a sorely needed attitude in the seventeenth century religious life. Thence forward Pennsylvania was to be a great centre of Quakerism and from it mainly but also from Maryland, New York and other Colonies, as well as directly from Great Britain, were recruited the Quakers of Loudoun. Undoubtedly the familiar combination of economic pressure, the cheaper and more fertile lands of the new settlement and the pioneering spirit inherent in the British race explains the migration. It is interesting to note that by 1694 a Quaker had become Governor of South Carolina and that from 1725 to 1775 there was a constant flow of Friends from Pennsylvania, New York, New England and Great Britain to that State. As a main north-and-south highway, the famous Carolina Road, passed through the Loudoun to be, doubtless many came that way and we may believe that not a few of those emigrants joined their coreligionists who they found living in such comfort and prosperity in their fertile Virginia colony.