Location: SR 1005 (Greensboro-Chapel Hill Road) at SR 2338 (Stockard Road) west of Eli Whitney
County: Alamance
Original Date Cast: 1973
By 1751 there were enough Quakers in the vicinity of Cane Creek, now in Alamance County, that the group was able to organize and establish a regular meeting for worship. As the Quaker population in the Piedmont grew, the large membership of Cane Creek Meeting began to splinter into smaller and more convenient meetings. Spring Friends Meeting was gathering as a congregation by 1761 at a meeting house about five miles east of the Cane Creek site. The group held their first “indulged meeting” in 1764. The phrase simply means that the group’s formal request to hold a meeting separate from the Cane Creek meeting was granted or indulged. The Spring Friends were recognized by the Quakers in 1773, and were given permission to hold a preparative meeting, a step in the process of gaining monthly meeting status, in 1779. Spring Friends attained monthly meeting status in 1793.
A meeting house was present at Spring by 1756. A second structure was built in 1877. The present building was erected in 1907. The Revolutionary War Battle of Lindley’s Mill in September 1781 left over 250 killed and wounded men from both sides on and near the grounds of the Spring Friends Meetinghouse. The Quakers nursed the wounded and buried the dead in a mass grave.
References:
Seth B. and Mary Edith Hinshaw, eds., Carolina Quakers (1972)
Bobbie T. Teague, Cane Creek, Mother of Meetings (1995)
Francis Charles Anscombe, I Have Called You Friends, The Story of Quakerism in North Carolina (1959)
Lindley S. Butler, “200 Years Ago At Lindley’s Mill,” The State (October 1981), pp. 12-13