Information Sheet

 

 

R         Fairview Friends Sabbath School (Jasper County, Mo.).

892                  Records, 1884-1979.

                                    Three volumes.

 

MICROFILM

 

 

These are minute books of the Sabbath School at the Fairview Friends church, six miles northwest of Carthage in Jasper County, Missouri.  The minutes note the number of teachers and students in attendance.

 

Society of Friends (Quaker) groups began to develop in southeastern Kansas and south­western Missouri after the Civil War.  The Union Meeting, at what later became Alba, Missouri, and the Fairview Meeting, near Carthage, were outgrowths of the Spring River Monthly Meeting in Kansas.  Union and Fairview held alternate monthly meetings until the 1870s, when they be­came separate entities.  Parker Moon, a native of Ohio, came to Jasper County in 1868 and is con­sidered to be the founder of the Fairview Meeting.  He was an organizer and long-term president of the Jasper County Sunday School Association, and became a minister in 1877.  Other promi­nent early members were Erasmus Folger and Samuel Weeks.  Folger donated the land for the Fairview Friends cemetery, and Weeks donated an adjacent tract in 1882 for the church.

 

It is not known when the Sabbath School at Fairview was organized, but by 16 March 1884, the date of the first extant records, there were seven separate classes numbering 116 students.  At this time, the officers of the Sabbath School (appointed by committee for one-year terms) were John M. Weeks, superintendent, and Mary Folger, secretary.

 

The records of Fairview Friends Sabbath School consist of three volumes of minutes of meetings beginning 16 March 1884.  The records from 28 August 1887 to 16 April 1950 are missing, after which they resume through 6 October 1979.  At the last meeting recorded there were twenty-five students and teachers present.  The minutes generally consist of a listing of the num­ber of officers, teachers, and students present for Sabbath School, notes on Bible passages studied and presentations made in the classes, and records of special activities.  Teachers are sometimes named, but the minutes do not contain rosters of students in the classes.

 

A newspaper article by Marvin L. VanGilder on the Fairview Friends appeared in the 12 August 1964 issue of the Carthage Evening Press.  It has been filmed preceding the minute books.  Additional information on the Society of Friends in Jasper County may be found in VanGilder’s Jasper County: The First Two Hundred Years (Carthage, Mo.: Marvin L. VanGilder and the Jas­per County Commission, 1995).

 

 

 

       

 

Shelf List for this collection
Index cards for this collection
Questions? Use our Researcher Registration Form
Return to WHMC-Rolla's home page.