Saturday, September  8, 1866

Quarterly meeting today which was large. Several foreign preachers were there: Robert Douglas & Cyrus Carter from Ohio, also Benjamin Fulghum, John Carey & Joshua Jeffreys from different parts of our own state. A proposition for to establish another quarterly meeting to be composed of Carthage and Walnut Ridge monthly meetings was brought before the meeting. Unity was expressed with it and it was directed to the Yearly Meeting.

Mary Jane Edwards

As members of Elm Grove Friends Meeting, the Edwards family attended Spiceland Quarterly Meeting, the major center for Quaker business in Henry County, Indiana, four times each year. Frequently, family matriarch Elizabeth Edwards attended as the Elm Grove representative.

The year 1866 not only marked the concern for creating another Quarterly Meeting to accommodate the growing meetings further south, it also marked the expansion of the Spiceland Academy, which would have been a topic of general concern and excitement.

At that time, the high school program offered a rigorous course of study for students, including four years of Greek language and literature.

In this diary entry about Quarterly Meeting, Mary Jane also notes several “foreign preachers” who attended this session. One of them, Cyrus Carter, was an early preacher at Dover Friends Meeting in Clinton County, Ohio. 

In the early 1800s, four Tennessee Quaker families who traveled northward were welcomed by Indians to settle near a spring and a beehive. They soon held indulged meetings, and in 1824, Dover Monthly Meeting was established. According to the Wilmington, Ohio News Journal, Robert and John Henry Douglas and George and Cyrus Carter were early preachers at the Dover Meeting which included the Peelle, Hoskins, Townsend, Haworth, and Hadley families.

The 1844 Dover brick meetinghouse and 1883 school have remained consistently in Friends’ use since that time.

Despite her usually limited time away from the family farm, Mary Jane and other Friends were well informed of changes happening in the world of Quakers as they listened to guests speaking and even preaching at Quarterly and Yearly Meeting events.