Springfield Friends Meeting celebrates 250th anniversary

Apr. 29—HIGH POINT — If you're wondering about the significance of Springfield Friends Meeting's upcoming 250th anniversary, just ask Joshua Brown, the church's pastor.

"We've been here for 250 years, which means we were founded in 1773," said Brown, who has pastored the church for the past eight of those 250 years.

"We were here three years before the Declaration of Independence was signed and 16 years before the U.S. Constitution. We were here before every state was admitted to the Union, and before George Washington became president. So yes, we've been here a long time, and this is a very big deal."

The church will celebrate its anniversary next weekend, beginning with a concert Saturday evening and culminating with a lunch following the Sunday morning worship service. The service itself will feature guest speaker Tom Hamm, a retired professor of history and archivist at Earlham College, a Quaker-founded school in Richmond, Indiana.

"He's probably the best living history professor on Quaker history in the world right now," Brown said. "He's written dozens of books and has lectured all over the world."

Although the church has a full slate of activities for next weekend, the truth is that the congregation has already been celebrating the 250-year milestone. The church created a timeline of important events in the life of Springfield Friends — it's 33 feet long! — and weekly history stories have been inserted in the weekly bulletins. The church has also hosted a number of historically themed programs.

"We're really going to town on this one," Brown said.

And with good reason, considering the church's rich history and its innumerable contributions to the greater High Point community.

The Quakers were among this area's first settlers, arriving here in the early 1770s. According to Brown, they came here from three places — the Camden area of South Carolina, northeast of Columbia; Pennsylvania; and the island of Nantucket in Massachusetts.

Springfield Friends held its first worship service — on its current site — on May 1, 1773, with about a dozen Quaker families in attendance. The church's early members included some prominent names in High Point history — names such as Tomlinson, Mendenhall, Blair, Haworth and English.

Prominent members of the church include the likes of Nathan Hunt Jr., High Point's first elected mayor; Solomon Isaac Blair, who operated a secret school before the Civil War to teach slaves to read; William Allen Blair, the first owner of The High Point Enterprise; and Allen Jay, a well-known Quaker minister from Indiana who lived here for eight years, and for whom the old Allen Jay High School was named.

"Anything with Allen Jay's name on it traces back to here at Springfield Friends," Brown said. "There was also a generation of kids who were named either Allen or Jay. He was probably the best-known Quaker in America of his generation."

The church's first two houses of worship were log cabins — both have long since been demolished — and the third meetinghouse was built in 1858. That building was replaced with a new meetinghouse in 1927, and the 1858 facility became what is now the Museum of Old Domestic Life, which showcases everyday items from Quaker families who lived in Guilford and Randolph counties in the 1800s.

Through the years, Quakers have been active participants in such historical events as the development of the local furniture industry, the growth of local public schools, and the Underground Railroad.

"A number of our members were active on the Underground Railroad, which was highly illegal and had major financial penalties which were designed to bankrupt anyone who helped slaves escape to freedom," Brown said.

The Museum of Old Domestic Life displays a large rock — taken from the farm of church member Allen Tomlinson — that is believed to have been a marker stone to point escaping slaves to the next station of the Underground Railroad.

For those who want to see the rock and/or learn more about the Quaker ways of life during the 1800s, the museum will be open during next Sunday morning's reception. It's also open by appointment.

Brown said next weekend's events will be a celebration worthy of such a long, rich history.

"Our numbers have gone up and down," he said, "but at 250 years, we're still going strong."

jtomlin@hpenews.com — 336-888-3579