Old Neck Friends Meeting

Before there was a Carolina colony worthy of the name, there were Quakers. In sixteen seventy-two, the English minister William Edmundson held worship at the home of Francis Toms in Perquimans County, making this corner of the Albemarle Sound one of the earliest centers of the Society of Friends in all of North America. By sixteen eighty, regular meeting was established here at Old Neck, and Quaker records from that period survive.

This meeting belonged to the Quaker community that grew into the North Carolina Yearly Meeting, which eventually reached as far west as the Piedmont. The meeting was later discontinued, but its legacy shaped the colony's conscience from the very beginning.