Mount Toby Friends Meeting

The Steps that Led to the Formation of the Mount Toby Friends meeting in Leverett

Quakers, members of the Religious Society of Friends, in Western Massachusetts have had an interesting and complicated history over the decades.  This program will review some of the steps along the way as the demographics changed during the 50s and 60s and large Friends meetings (congregations) were formed in this more rural region of the state.

The first recorded monthly meeting in the ancestry of Mt. Toby was the Northampton Meeting, which organized as an independent Meeting under the Friends Fellowship Council in Philadelphia in 1939. There had been other occasional worship groups of Friends in the Valley – in Amherst in 1924 and in Northfield in the 1930’s – but it was the initiative of a European couple who came to Smith College that led to the formal organization. The new monthly meeting was called the Middle Connecticut Valley Monthly Meeting because it was in the middle of the Connecticut Valley Quarterly Meeting. A meeting in Amherst was revived by Francis and Becky Holmes when they came to the University of Massachusetts in 1954. In 1964 the meeting moved to their current location in Leverett.

This lecture will take place at noon, in the Woodbury Room of the Jones Library.