Ohio's First Quaker Meeting: Colerain Township

Colerain Township in Belmont County holds a distinction that most people drive past without knowing: it was home to the earliest Quaker settlement and the very first organized Friends Meeting in the entire state of Ohio. Quakers began gathering here around the turn of the nineteenth century, and by eighteen hundred they had built a log meeting house on this ground. That first structure burned, and in eighteen fifteen the community replaced it with the sturdy brick building that stands here today, used by the Hicksite branch of the Society of Friends after the great Quaker schism of eighteen twenty-seven.

The Hicksite split was a defining moment in American religious history, pitting Hicksites, who emphasized the Inward Light of personal spiritual experience, against Orthodox Friends, who placed greater weight on scripture. This building, and the meeting it housed, sat at the center of that transformation in Ohio.