The town’s textile mills don’t get a lot of attention in my book Quaking Dover, in part because I haven’t found a lot of interaction between the emerging industry and the town’s Friends. Indeed, the Quaker Meeting was seriously aging about the same time the thriving mills transformed the town into an industrial power.

Dover’s conventional histories, on the other hand, have good reason to focus on the big brick mills along the Cochecho River, world famous for the quality of their calico and their stunning print designs and execution.

You might be surprised to learn, though, that they were in operation much earlier than the legendary cotton mills at Lowell, Lawrence, and Manchester on the mighty Merrimac River.

Largely overlooked, as one Friend reminds me, are the woolen mills on the Bellamy River south of Dover’s downtown and only a few blocks from the Quaker meetinghouse. These operated from 1824 to 1899 and were often innovative, employing up to 600 workers before being sold and continuing till 1954.

They were renowned especially for their flannel and were, at stretch, the largest woolen mills in the Granite State.

Today the mills and their historic housing have emerged as a charming residential district.

While there were some Sawyers in the Meeting, I’ve not yet found any connection to those owning the mills.

Based on the naming of some of their children, those were apparently Methodist.

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.