Visitation among Friends: FGConnections, Summer 2004
Visitation in Quaker History
by Margaret Hope Bacon
Mary Fisher traveled alone from Venice to Constantinople in 1657 to pay a religious visit on the Sultan of Turkey. Ann Moore, on her way to England in 1760, was captured by pirates and deposited on the coast of Spain. Rhoda Coffin always remembered her first trip to Indiana Yearly Meeting, at age sixteen in 1841, traveling for two days with her family by horse and buggy over rough roads, and staying in a country inn, traveling from their home near Waynesville, Ohio to Richmond, Indiana. Tabitha Rowland Moore of Easton, Maryland struggled with the decision to leave a year old baby behind, and to travel for four days, stopping three nights with relatives, in order to attend Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in 1815.
From our earliest days, Quakers have been a traveling lot. The Quaker message was spread at first by the valiant sixty, who traveled up and down England and Scotland, over to Ireland and on to Holland and Belgium. Other messengers brought the good news to the American colonies, first to Virginia and the Massachusetts Bay colony, then down the coast as far as South Carolina.
Travel was important, not only for spreading the Quaker message but also nourishing the small preparative and monthly meetings which were organized, as early as 1660, giving some structure to the Quaker movement. Ministers and Elders gathered to discuss problems and create policy. Ordinary men and women and children got together, the adults to attend both silent meetings and business meetings, the children to meet cousins and new friends and all to learn to know other Quakers outside their immediate family circle and the small group of neighbors with whom they regularly worshiped. Traveling ministers not only preached in meeting, bringing fresh inspiration and a sense of being united with the larger Quaker movement to the adults, but they also met with each family within the meeting, thus exposing the children to their spiritual message. Lucretia Mott remembered being deeply influenced in 1800 by Elizabeth Coggeshall when she came to Nantucket to preach and to meet with families.
As the Society of Friends evolved, these traveling ministers helped the smaller, sometimes isolated meetings, keep in touch with new developments. In the middle of the eighteenth century, a new spirit swept through Quakerism, first in the American colonies, and then abroad, warning Friends against too much involvement in the ways of the world, strengthening the discipline and urging them to consider the evils of owning slaves. Over one hundred Quakers, both men and women spread out to carry this new message to all Friends, on both sides of the Atlantic. John Woolman was one of this number.
An early Quaker minister was Elizabeth Webb, who first visited the American colonies from 1697 to1699, traveling from New England to South Carolina where she saw her first black person and had a vision that God’s outreach was to the blacks as well as the whites. In 1700, she moved with her husband to Philadelphia and in 1704, to Chester County. Despite having ten children she continued traveling in the ministry, returning to England in 1710–1712 to visit Friends there.
When she was home in Chester County, however, Elizabeth traveled regularly to all the meetings in the Concord Quarter, preaching in meeting but also visiting with, or “having an occasion with,” as Friends said, all the families belonging to the various meetings. Taking news and messages with her from meeting to meeting, she helped to weave the meetings and the people of quarter together into a seamless whole.
Although Friends were very serious about the spiritual purposes of this intervisitation, the gatherings at quarterly and yearly meetings were lively affairs, allowing Friends to visit relatives who lived at a distance. When Tabitha Moore finally reached Philadelphia to attend yearly meeting, she stayed with cousins in Philadelphia and visited other cousins in Merion before settling in at her brother’s house for the balance of the visit. From there she dined with one aunt, drank tea with one cousin and spent an evening with another.
During both quarterly and yearly meetings there were youth meetings, which served as informal ways for young men and women to get to know one another. Because young Friends were expected to marry within the Society of Friends, and—after the separation of 1827–1828—to marry Friends of their own branch of the Society, these gatherings were important to make sure young Friends chose mates within their own group. Rhoda Johnson first met Charles Coffin at Indiana Yearly Meeting.
The youth meetings also served to keep young Friends in close touch with one another, and bind them to the Society of Friends. In August of 1814 George Bacon, aged 31 and married, traveled with his mother, sister and another woman from Greenwich, New Jersey, to attend quarterly meeting in Woodbury, arriving that night in time to find lodging. The next day he took his mother to the select meeting of ministers and overseers, following which they went to John Reeves house at Red Bank to dine and to John Tatum’s to lodge. On August 11, they attended the quarterly meeting, then back to John Reeves to lodge, (“mosquitoes quite troublesome here”).
The following day he attended the youths meeting then went to James Cooper’s to dine, where there were about thirty Friends. “Woodbury Friends entertain with great freedom,” he remarked on his return home. “I feel glad I attended quarterly meeting. We had much good advice.”
For most Friends, the yearly meeting gathering was the most exciting event of the year, a time of sociability as well as spiritual challenge. One Friend described yearly meeting at Race Street when she was a child shortly after the turn of the century:
From a purely social point of view the week’s climax came around noon on First Day when, at the close of meeting for worship, anywhere from one thousand to three thousand people (depending on the degree of balminess of the May-time weather) milled around the meeting house yard, determined to see as many as possible of their old friends. At these First Day gatherings, unlike the midweek ones, men, women and children met together. . . . To obviate the danger that the words [of the ministers] might be rendered inaudible by the competing sounds of horse’s hoofs and wagon wheels, the committee in charge saw to it that both Race Street and Cherry Street were thickly strewn with sound-deadening tan bark while yearly meeting was in session. The tanbark had an entrancing smell which gave yearly meeting week quite a fragrance of its own as the tang of salt air gives to a day at the seashore.
None of these Quaker gatherings was complete without the common meals prepared by loving hands and shared by all. Fellowship was developed across the dining table, a glue which has helped bind Friends together, along with the inspiration of gathered meetings and the preaching of inspired ministers.
Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, some Friends have returned to the early missionary zeal of the first Friends, carrying the Quaker message all over the world. Today there are more Friends in Africa and Central and South America combined, than in the United States and Great Britain. The Friends World Committee for Consultation has been creative in bridging this gap. There are many differences between different branches of Quakerism today. But to attend a triennial session of FWCC is to experience that sense of fellowship that has kept scattered bands of Friends together from the days of George Fox to the present.
In our day too, the concept of a traveling ministry is being revived by Friends General Conference, FWCC and others. International gatherings of Quaker women have begun deep and abiding spiritual friendships across national boundaries. Individual Friends meetings are releasing Friends to travel in the ministry. Youth Quake brings young Friends from many traditions together for work, fun and fellowship. From Mary Fisher to the present, there is a continuing stream of intervisitation, making glad the City of God.
