Not many people know this, but I’m a birthright Quaker. I haven’t regularly attended meeting since I was a kid, but I found myself unexpectedly drawn back to that part of my story a few years ago. My mom has an 1866 diary kept by our ancestor Mary Jane Edwards, and we set out to follow the trail she left behind. One of those places was Rush County’s old Carthage Friends Meetinghouse.
Land near the Carthage Meeting -just east of the Big Blue River in Ripley Township- was first secured in 1821, when Joseph Henry of North Carolina and Robert Hill of Richmond purchased the property in what was then still a raw stretch of Rush County1. In time, Quaker families followed the familiar westward path from North Carolina and put down roots there.
In 1839, Carthage Friends sent a Request for Meeting to the nearby Walnut Ridge Meeting, which had been established twelve years prior2. The proposal was sent on to the Whitewater Quarterly Meeting and accepted3. The Carthage Preparative Meeting was formally organized in 1839.
From the outset, there was debate over where their new meetinghouse should stand. Some Friends argued it ought to be built near a nearby schoolhouse southeast of Carthage proper. Tradition holds that John Clark, a Quaker and one of Carthage’s founders, stepped forward with a solution when he offered to donate a town lot for the building and school4.
Carthage’s first recorded minister was William Binford5, who preached from a modest frame meetinghouse. As the congregation grew, the building eventually proved too small. In 1866, Friends responded by doubling its size with a western addition. The enlarged structure served the community for another fifteen years, until 1881, when it was replaced by the meetinghouse that still stands today.
My ancestor Mary Jane Edwards noted the Carthage Meetinghouse in a September 8, 1966, diary entry- the very year the original frame building was enlarged. More than a century later, on June 30, 2019, Mom and I stood at its brick successor and paid a visit ourselves. Aside from stepping inside through modern glass doors, it felt as though little had changed since 1881.
One different thing was the Carthage Friends Cemetery next door. What may have begun as a small burial ground has grown into a resting place for roughly 400, though not all were members of the meeting. Tradition holds that the first burial was Charles Henry Davis, just sixteen years old when he died in 1837. At the other end of the timeline is Emma Jean Rumple, who lived to ninety-five and was laid to rest in 2022. Together, those names bracket nearly two centuries of lives tied to the quiet ground beside the meetinghouse.
It’s hard not to feel the long continuity of the Carthage Friends Meetinghouse and cemetery. Generations of Quakers worshiped there, debated there, marked life’s beginnings and endings there, and then slipped into the ground beside it. For me, the meetinghouse is more than an old brick building along the Big Blue River. Instead, it’s a point where family memory, local history, and faith all intersect.
Sources Cited
1 Carthage Friends Meeting (1957, July 18). The Tri-County Banner [Knightstown]. p. 36.
2 National Register of Historic Places, Walnut Ridge Friends Meeting House, Rush County, Indiana, National Register # 84001616.
3 Centennial of Friends Held at Carthage (1939, June 30). The Tri-County Banner [Knightstown]. p. 6.
4 Hamm, T. & Dorrel, R. (n.d.). Carthage Friends Cemetery Inscriptions. Indiana History. Web. Retrieved December 16, 2025.
5 (See footnote 3).
“Generations of Quakers worshiped there, debated there, marked life’s beginnings and endings there, and then slipped into the ground beside it.”
Ted, this is a really good post but when I read this sentence all I could picture was a big yellow slide connecting a meetinghouse window to an open grave. ;^)
Hahaha! I LOL’d literally. You make me want to go change it, but I think I’ll leave it as is so your comment can live in infamy.