Cornwall Friends Meeting House - History

History

Cornwall's Quaker meeting originated with David Sands-Ring, the American-born son of a Presbyterian family that had settled in the area, after a stop in Sands Point, Long Island, following the seizure of its English landholdings by the Crown for religious reasons. At the age of 14, in 1759, the spiritually curious boy found himself drawn to the local Quaker population, whose religious thinking was close to his own. Along with Edward Hallock, another displaced Long Islander from the nearby hamlet of New Marlborough (today's Marlboro), he began attending meetings at the Nine Partners Meeting House across the river. He was admitted to that meeting upon attaining adulthood and married Hallock's daughter. Eventually Sands-Ring converted his entire family to his new faith.

Others in the area soon followed them, and in 1773 the Nine Partners meeting allowed Hallock and Sands-Ring to hold their own meetings, alternating between the two locations. The congregations continued to grow and three years later, in 1776, the Cornwall and New Marlborough meetings became separate "preparative meetings", their business still subject to Nine Partners' approval. The Revolutionary War displaced more Long Island Quakers to Cornwall, and in 1788 it became a self-governing meeting. The next year a 10-acre (4 ha) parcel was deeded to the meeting for its house, as the Sands-Rings' could no longer host the growing congregation.

Meeting members directed the construction of the house in 1790, the first religious building in Cornwall. Its exterior reflects contemporary trends in vernacular residential architecture; the interior arrangements were dictated by religious requirements. The Cornwall Meeting gave rise to preparative meetings of its own in the area, including Smith Clove, and Cornwall became its own Quarterly Meeting in 1816, ending its last tie with Nine Partners.

The Cornwall Quaker community was almost 500 strong, including most of Cornwall's prominent families, in 1825, when it along with the entire American Society of Friends was torn by the schism resulting from the influence of Elias Hicks. He represented mainstream Quakers who kept to the Society's traditional forms of worship, while those who disagreed with him, the Orthodox Quakers, had moved toward practices typical of mainstream Protestantism, such as worshipping in churches under the direction of ministers. Hicks' supporters formed a majority of the Cornwall meeting, and the Orthodox, including the Sands family, left and built their own meeting house around 1829.

Over the rest of the 19th century the Quakers assimilated more into mainstream culture. The renovations made to the Cornwall meeting house reflect this trend, with not only new clapboard going on but the porch replacing what had been separate entrance lobbies for men and women. In the 1920s the north wing, with its kitchen facility, was added. There have been no other renovations since.