Statehood for New Hampshire was accompanied by growth in the Merrimac Valley and western side of the state, including Quaker Meetings.

Weare, especially, became a Friends center, with two large meetinghouses in town and another in neighboring Henniker. There was also the Clinton Grove academy.

Much of that growth, however, came from Massachusetts, not Dover, and so it fell outside the focus of my Quaking Dover story. They were even in a different Quarterly Meeting than the one encompassing the communities emanating from Dover.

Just in case anyone was wondering.

It would be an ambitious project, and I’m not sure quite how one would structure it, spanning six states and many subjects as it would from early colonial times to today.

Dover Friend Silas Weeks’ book of meetinghouses and burial grounds remains my go-to volume, but it’s mostly about buildings rather than people.

I’m still surprised to hear Rhode Island Yearly Meeting as the body’s early name, rather than New England Yearly Meeting. When did it change officially?

Well, I have seen some genealogies that get impossible to follow after, say, the third generation.

I even feel something like that in Dover, once the textile mills take over.

Still, the conventional histories of Quakers in America focus on Philadelphia, overlooking or slighting the unique challenges and characters of New England, North Carolina, Ohio, and more.

For now, my Quaking Dover is a microcosm of the bigger picture. I’m hoping it will prompt more.

In New Hampshire, Hampton is often touted as Happy Hampton, at least in summer, reflecting its long, broad, honky-tonk ocean beach and the rock concerts at the casino. Let me warn you it can be pretty crowded this time of year. Inland a bit, it’s also known for the Hampton Tolls on Interstate 95, which can be a major travel delay.

In the colonial era, Hampton was renowned for its saltmarsh hay and related agriculture.

It was also the center of the colony’s other Quaker Meeting, one at least as old as Dover’s, as far as I can tell.

As I was researching my book, Quaking Dover, I kept wondering what happened to the Hampton Friends over time. And then I discovered that, like Dover, Hampton had small, neighborhood worship groups, or “preparative meetings,” that came together once a month to address their joint affairs and personal conduct. The monthly sessions rotated among the meetinghouses under the Monthly Meeting’s care, in Hampton’s case including Amesbury, Massachusetts, which became home to the celebrated poet John Greenleaf Whittier.

Amesbury continues, while Hampton fell away long ago.

Since the boundary line between New Hampshire and Massachusetts kept shifting in the colonial era, sometimes reaching down to the Merrimack River – or Merrimac, as Massachusetts insisted – I feel safe in saying New Hampshire had two Monthly Meetings, while the Bay colony had only one, at Salem.

Either way, it could be a rich story in the telling.

In the conventional telling of the early Quaker movement in New England, the focus soon centers on Rhode Island and Cape Cod. One was an independent colony; the other, in Plymouth, slightly less harsh than Massachusetts Bay to their north.

In contrast, the three northern Meetings – Salem, Hampton, and Dover – are largely overlooked or dismissed as agricultural and poor.

Well, a historian goes where the records are, and those three northern Meetings were largely underground before 1680, when religious toleration came to Massachusetts-governed districts.

Arthur J. Worrell’s Quakers in the Colonial Northeast is slim pickings when it comes to those three Meetings, and Carla Gardina Pestana’s Quakers and Baptists in Colonial Massachusetts helps rectify that with her concentration on Salem, but her references to Hampton and Dover are few and often cryptically sketched as “New Hampshire and Maine.”

Well, Dover served both sides of the New Hampshire-Maine line, and for decades, it was the only Quaker presence in Maine.

As I keep calling out: Hello!