Somerton Friends Meeting

U-57

George Fox, founder of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), visited this area in 1672 during a missionary journey to Virginia and North Carolina. His visit encouraged Friends who had settled nearby and led to the organization of Somerton Friends Meeting. Members conducted worship in private homes and later built a meetinghouse three miles southwest of here. The Somerton meetinghouse, along with a nearby school for African Americans, was burned in 1866. The congregation constructed its current building on the same site in 1869. Somerton is the oldest active Quaker meeting in Virginia.

Department of Historic Resources, 2015

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References/Bibliographic Citation:

Report by Elizabeth Saunders, archivist at the Friends Historical Collection, Guilford College (Sept. 2015) Jay Worrall, The Friendly Virginians: America’s First Quakers (Athens, GA: Iberian, 1994). Elizabeth Hare Lasley, Somerton Meeting: Three Hundred Years of Witness (Holland, VA, 1972). Martha A. Putnam, Early Quaker Records of Southeast Virginia (1996). William Wade Hinshaw, Encyclopedia of American Quaker Genealogy (1950), 6: 5-13, 21-25, 47-49. http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015051447657;view=1up;seq=12 http://trilogy.brynmawr.edu/speccoll/bym/lowrsmm.xml https://www.quakermeetings.com/Plone/meeting_view?anID=1829