New England Yearly Meeting school record book

New England Yearly Meeting is headquartered in Worcester, Massachusetts and includes Friends from the New England region of the United States.

Among the first quakers to arrive in New England were Mary Fisher and Ann Austin, who landed in Boston in July, 1656. Rhode Island was a particularly prosperous area for early New England Quakers, and within months after the arrival of the first Quakers there in August 1657, there were numerous conversions in Newport and Portsmouth. Very soon the whole of Rhode Island became a base for Quaker missions to other parts of New England. Although nowhere else in New England did the Quaker movement prosper as it did in Rhode Island, it continued to grow throughout the late 1650's and 1660's. At Sandwich and Falmouth on Cape Cod and to the north of Boston in Salem were gathered some of the earliest groups of Quaker converts. Within a few years Quaker settlements were established in southeastern Massachusetts, on Long Island, and in Dover and Portsmouth in New Hampshire and across the Piscataqua River into Maine. These Quaker settlements would become the Meetings that would make up the New England Yearly Meeting. The first New England Yearly Meeting was held in 1680, and yearly meetings continue to be held today.