This 350th Anniversary Celebration is Saturday

The Original Yearly Meeting Quaker site will make history again on 4/23/22

A 350th anniversary and re-dedication of the West River Quaker Burying Ground (WRQBG)  in Galesville, Maryland will take place on Saturday, April 23, 2022, at 1 p.m. at the Galesville Memorial Hall, 952 Galesville Road, Galesville, Md.

Quakers from around colonial Maryland, plus a few from England, first gathered at the site on April 23, 1672.  The 1672 meeting participants included the colonial governor, justices of the peace, and wealthy tobacco-plantation owners.  The eventitself, effectively acknowledging Quakers as respectable citizens, showed a historic change: Less than 20 years before, in 1659, colonial leaders had ordered the first Quaker preachers “whipped from constable to constable until they should reach the bounds of the province” for the Quakers’ controversial opposition to war.

By 1777, Maryland Quakers at their Yearly Meeting on the same site decided those who insisted on keeping enslaved people “must be disunited from our religious Society.”  Later tensions over this decision, in part, led Quakers to cease meetings in this original meeting area for more than 100 years. The Meeting House once on the site reportedly was burned down during the Civil War. Despite the loss of the 18th-century meeting house, local families and Quakers collaborated to operate and preserve the Burying Ground continuously since 1672.