I am attending the Ohio Genealogical Society conference this week. The classes have been excellent and I have had a really good time. Tonight Milton Cook and I met for dinner just down the road from the Great Wolf Lodge where the conference is being held. Milton and I chatted about the possibility of having a small Miami Monthly Meeting homecoming again this year. Annette and I had been talking about the possibility and Sharon had agreed that she would be willing to help as well. So look for an announcement of possible reunion in the month of September this year on this blog site.
Tonight I picked Milton's brain trying to get my head straight on orthodox and Hicksite factions and how they affected the Miami Monthly Meeting. I am going to write down what I took away from our discussion and then get Milton to proofread to see if I have carried away correct information.
The first building that the Quakers built for worship and monthly meeting was a log cabin that sat in the spot that the brick building sits now. By 1811 the Quaker families had built the white brick building that is being used today. When the split between the Orthodox and Hicksite Quaker groups occurred, the Orthodox moved into the older log cabin while the Hicksite group remained in the white brick building.
The Orthodox group wanted to have a programmed religious experience. The Hicksite Quakers wanted an unprogrammed worship service that was the traditional experience.
The orthodox Quaker group dismantled the log cabin and built a brick building that is NOT white on the site of the older log cabin. Eventually the orthodox Monthly Meeting was laid down. The brick building in which they had been meeting was owned by the Wilmington Monthly Meeting. They were having trouble maintaining the building. The Wilmington Monthly Meeting sold the building to the Hicksite group for a small amount. It remains in the hands of the Miami Monthly Meeting. It is the building that we used for many of our events at our last reunion.
Milton told a great story. The man who was the treasurer for the Indiana Yearly Meeting that was Hicksite and the man who was the treasurer for the Indiana Yearly Meeting that was Orthodox were neighbors. The mail service kept getting the bills confused and into the wrong mail box. This led to the Indiana Yearly Meeting changing their name to the Ohio Valley Meeting. There are Monthly Meetings in Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio that report to the Ohio Valley Yearly Meeting. This was a surprise to me as I did not expect there to be Quakers in Kentucky since my understanding would be that no Quaker would have moved to Kentucky which was a slave state. Milton explained that the Kentucky Monthly Meetings were relatively young. They did not have their beginnings in the early 1800s as our Miami Monthly Meeting did.
