History

Core Sound Meeting was active in Carteret County from the 1720s to the 1840s. The worship group resumed in 1979, formed by boatbuilders, as the earlier meeting had also been. On Highway 101 just north of Beaufort is a silver historic sign: 

    CORE SOUND MEETING   

Quaker center for more than 100 years after 1733.

Migration west was one cause of decline. Meeting

House was 50 yards west.

In 1736 Quakers built a Meeting House north of Beaufort east of Core Creek. Spartina marsh rings several acres of low ground, with landings for skiffs and fifty old gravestones. Lichen obliterates the names on leaning headstones by rounded brick mounds, some from 1600s. The earliest dates still legible are 1801 and 1805.

Because Quakers opposed slavery, many moved from Beaufort to the Midwest in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1841, Core Sound Meeting closed. Most of the Quakers who remained in Carteret County became Methodists or joined the Contentnea Friends Meeting, northwest of New Bern. Tuttles Grove Methodist Church now stands where Core Sound Meeting once stood, on Carteret County’s oldest church site.

In 1721 Quaker boat builders William Borden and Henry Stanton moved to Carteret County from Newport, Rhode Island. Borden built a sawmill and shipyard at Mill Creek. The county elected him to the legislature, but he too refused to swear an oath and did not serve. Stanton had 1,900 acres east of Core Creek. He was the great-grandfather of Edwin Stanton, who was Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of War. Robert Williams, another eighteenth-century pioneer Quaker build a gristmill for flour and timber on 1,100 acres near Beaufort. A wealthy ship owner and merchant, he started a salt works. He freed his slaves in 1780.            

Eastern North Carolina has a lot of Quaker history. In 1672 George Fox, founder of the Religious Society of Friends in England, forded rivers and waded swamps to visit Friends (called Quakers) in eastern North Carolina. By 1694, Royal Governor John Archdale and a third of the North Carolina Legislature were Quakers, but they all left office, refusing to swear loyalty oaths to the Crown, following a tenet of their faith not to swear oaths.