Let me start with a question that I have been thinking about since I worked on our current exhibit: Why did the Rochester militias respond to so many “alarms at Dartmouth”? Now let me digress before I get to the answer.
I know from research that Quakers in Colonial Massachusetts, beginning with their arrival in 1656, did not get a warm welcome. They were hounded, whipped, scourged and banished. In 1660, Mary Dyer, a Puritan turned Quaker, was hanged in Boston for defying Puritan law that demanded banishment of all Quakers from the city. The Quaker interpretation of the Puritan religion was considered blasphemy.
Away from Boston and on the south coast, Quakers found safe haven in Sandwich. John Wing and Savory Clifton began a Quaker congregation in Rochester, and there is no record of persecution. In fact, in 1709, long before it was mandated in Massachusetts, Rochester’s town meeting voted that those who were “professed Quakers” did not have to pay dues to the Congregational Church.
“Old Dartmouth,” which at the time was a close neighbor of “Old Rochester,” had one of the biggest Quaker settlements in New England. The Dartmouth Monthly Meeting of Friends was established in 1699. The picture is of one of the Dartmouth Meetinghouses.
Quakers were smart landowners and businessmen. Many in both Nantucket and later in New Bedford (once called Bedford and part of Dartmouth) made fortunes with their whaling enterprises, which included ships, wharves and warehouses. They were also strongly anti-war. This presented a problem when the British targeted their properties, burning homes and businesses.
This answers my beginning question. When British soldiers attacked Dartmouth, neighboring militias, including Rochester, were called to the alarm. Indeed, later during the war, Dartmouth had difficulty coming up with the number of recruits required by the quotas set by the Continental Congress.
By Connie Eshbach
