History of Blue River Quarterly Meeting

Quick Overview

Blue River Quarterly Meeting was established in 1819 as part of Ohio Yearly Meeting, and originally consisted of Friends meetings in South-Central Indiana. It is named for the Blue River, which flows through that area.

Blue River Quarterly became part of Indiana Yearly Meeting when that was formed in 1821, and was divided in the Hicksite Separation of 1828.

The Hicksite branch of Blue River Quarterly gradually expanded westward into Illinois, and joined with Prairie Grove Quarterly Meeting to form Illinois Yearly Meeting in 1875.

After an initial expansion, Illinois Yearly Meeting went into a long decline in numbers, and by 1940 consisted of just three meetings, all in Blue River Quarterly. ILYM and BRQ began to expand again in the 1940s and 1950s, as new urban and college-town meetings requested affiliation. ILYM was large enough to divide into two quarterly meetings in 1952, with the southern meeting retaining the name of Blue River Quarterly.

Although our meetings near the Blue River have long since died away, and we now meet on a semiannual basis, we continue as Blue River Quarterly Meeting of Friends, with eleven affiliated meetings organized into seven monthly meeting across downstate Illinois and eastern Missouri and Iowa.

For more on the history of Blue River Quarterly, see:

200 Years of Blue River Quarterly Meeting (Powerpoint slideshow, 385MB)
Telling the Story of Blue River Quarterly (an older powerpoint slideshow, 23MB)
Two Hundred Years of Blue River Quarterly Meeting (book, available on Amazon.com)
Minutes of Blue River Quarterly Meeting
Historical Changes in the Function of Quarterly Meetings (PDF format, 131K)

Genealogical Queries:

Please note that records of membership, births, deaths, and marriages are kept by monthly meetings, not by quarterly meetings such as Blue River Quarterly. We cannot do genealogical look-ups. The records of our 19th century monthly meetings are held at the University of Illinois and Swarthmore College libraries; please contact these institutions for information about access. Most materials have been microfilmed and are available through LDS Family History Centers. Genealogical information from the minutes of several meetings has also been abstracted and summarized in standard sources such as Hinshaw’s Encyclopedia of Quaker Genealogy or Hamm’s Abstracts of the Records of the Society of Friends in Indiana.