The Bulletin of the Loudoun County Historical Society, Volume IV, 1965Various
History
The Bulletin of the Loudoun County Historical Society, Volume IV, 1965
Various
Loudoun County (Va.) -- History
The meetings became a sort of Chautauqua for visiting Friends having a
‘concern’ and many came to hear these people from far off. John Woolman
visited Fairfax in the early 1740’s. The famous Elias Hicks visited in
1798, and several times later; Stephen Grollet in 1801 and Richard Mott
in 1801; John Kersey (the book has it Jersey Kersey), a famous Quaker
preacher and author of the driest book I have ever read; Elizabeth
Robson, Bartholomew Wister and Ruth Ely, 1826. Elizabeth Robson was an
English Friend with very Orthodox views as was Thomas Shillitoe, another
English Friend who came to Loudoun on a preaching mission in 11th month
1827. Also gracing the fronting benches of the Loudoun Meetings were
Elisha Bates, John Comly, Edward Hicks, whose primitive paintings are so
much in demand, and the famous Benjaman Hallowell who started Robert E.
Lee in mathematics.
Stephen Grellet, Elizabeth Robson, and Thomas Shillitoe were the
so-called Orthodox Friends whose ministry throughout the country helped
to cause such sad havoc in Friends meetings and brought about the
separation of 1827-28. Loudoun Friends at this time were little affected
by the ideas advanced by these people, based mostly on theology and
evangelism which at the time was traveling thru many of the churches of
the land. Some eight families took off from Goose Creek Meeting only,
Fairfax being affected not at all. These Orthodox Friends, as they came
to be called as opposed to the so-called Hicksite Friends, built a
meeting house south of the graveyard in Lincoln on the next hill, a
corner now of J. C. Chappell’s heirs. Here they had a meeting until the
Civil War, when it was laid down.
Along about the early 1880 this sad chapter in Friends history had to be
reopened when Richard and Mary Snowden Thomas, brother and sister from
Baltimore, raised the clarion call of evangelism. At first, in 1885, the
Orthodox meetings were held in the Lincoln Lyceum Hall until a house
could be built. In all about eight families withdrew from Goose Creek to
form this new Lincoln Monthly Meeting of Friends which occurred in April
of 1887 in their new meeting house. Daniel J. Hoge, Clark and Rebecca I.
Brown were appointed overseers with Joseph Pancoast as treasurer. A
subordinate meeting was organized at Silcott Springs in 1894 but its
life was short, being closed in the winter of 1904-5 and the building
sold in 1933.
As is usual with such religious separations there was too much feeling
on both sides, and I am not going to say there was not. Now we can laugh
at Will Brown’s sally to one of the Orthodox driving by the old meeting
to go up the road to the Orthodox meeting on a very blustery, wet day:
Brown, “Well, Hoge, the new road to heaven is a damn wet one, isn’t it?”
Or an Orthodox Friends referring to the Hicksites (in the words of a
Hicksite), as “those cigarette smoking, whiskey drinking, Christ
rejecting Hicksite Friends.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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