In the conventional telling of the early Quaker movement in New England, the focus soon centers on Rhode Island and Cape Cod. One was an independent colony; the other, in Plymouth, slightly less harsh than Massachusetts Bay to their north.
In contrast, the three northern Meetings – Salem, Hampton, and Dover – are largely overlooked or dismissed as agricultural and poor.
Well, a historian goes where the records are, and those three northern Meetings were largely underground before 1680, when religious toleration came to Massachusetts-governed districts.
Arthur J. Worrell's Quakers in the Colonial Northeast is slim pickings when it comes to those three Meetings, and Carla Gardina Pestana's Quakers and Baptists in Colonial Massachusetts helps rectify that with her concentration on Salem, but her references to Hampton and Dover are few and often cryptically sketched as "New Hampshire and Maine."
Well, Dover served both sides of the New Hampshire-Maine line, and for decades, it was the only Quaker presence in Maine.
As I keep calling out: Hello!
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