c. 1600s -- Woods part of the lands of the Saura and Keyawee peoples.
Mid-1700s -- Initial settlements of European Americans in the area that is now western Guilford County. Slavery already present in the state so a part of the local economy from this period forward until abolition.
1752 – First meeting of New Garden Friends held at home of Thomas Beals, who held a concern against slavery and later moved west as one of the early Quaker settlers of Ohio.
1754 - New Jersey Quaker John Woolman’s Some considerations on the keeping of Negroes published and accessible to North Carolina Quakers. Woolman traveled South to meet with Quakers and also with non-Quaker slave owners to persuade them towards change.
1758 – London Yearly Meeting admonishes Friends to stay away from slavery. A growing number of Quaker yearly meetings published papers discouraging the buying and selling of slaves and condemning the institution overall as Quakers in both Britain and America spoke in favor of gradual emancipation.
1770 – New Garden Friends Meeting urges Friends not be involved in slavery and issues stronger statements than most other Quaker meetings in the state at the time.
1776 -- Slave ownership becomes a disownable offense for members of North Carolina Yearly Meeting. North Carolina Quakers are no slower than Quakers elsewhere to speak out against slavery and pursue ways to legally untangle themselves and bring an end to the practice of slavery.
1780s and 1790s -- North Carolina Yearly Meeting routinely sends petitions to the North Carolina Legislature stressing the immorality of slavery and the importance of abolition.
1808 – North Carolina Yearly Meeting becomes a large owner of enslaved people due to the desire to discourage individuals to profit from slavery and increasingly restrictive manumission laws. The Yearly Meeting served as trustees, legally owning several hundred people -- supporting them in local apprenticeships and assisting them with relocation to freedom further north and abroad over the next half century.
1814 – North Carolina Manumission Society organizes at New Garden Friends Meeting. Levi Coffin (1798-1877) and Vestal Coffin (1792-1826) among the founding members of this interdenominational Quaker-dominated organization committed to gradual emancipation and legal reforms to bring an end to slavery.
1817 -- With support from local Quakers Vestal Coffin, George Swaim and Enoch Macy, Benjamin Benson’s case to reclaim his freedom after an unlawful kidnapping was initiated in Guilford County Supreme Court. The case was resolved in Benson’s favor in 1820.
1818 – North Carolina Manumission Society votes to amalgamate with new American Colonization Society, for “repatriation” of free blacks to Africa, causing some members to withdraw and focus on options with more direct support from and by local African Americans, such as supporting those wishing to move northward within the U.S. and those wishing to remain South as long as possible due to family ties.
1819 -- North Carolina and Virginia enact changes to facilitate interstate slave trade.
1819 – John Dimery is kidnapped by his former master’s heirs and escapes to the woods to gain assistance from Vestal Coffin. According to Vestal’s son, Addison, this was an early documented example of the Underground Railroad operating in Guilford County, as Dimery soon landed in Wayne County, Indiana.
1819-1852 – Active years of Underground Railroad activity in Guilford County.
1820s – The New Garden community, and Vestal and Levi Coffin in particular, become known for friendliness to enslaved fugitives.
1821 – Vestal and Levi Coffin establish a school, using the Little Brick Schoolhouse at New Garden Meeting, to provide reading instruction to local enslaved African Americans on Sunday afternoons.
1824 – North Carolina Yearly Meeting increasingly withdraws institutionally from anti-slavery action and direct work with African Americans as conditions become increasingly prohibitive. Individual efforts move underground with growing tensions and entrenchment of the slave economy.
1826 – Vestal Coffin dies, leaving his widow Althea and young son Addison, to carry on his work. Levi and Catherine Coffin relocate to Newport (later Fountain City) in Wayne County, Indiana where they continue their anti-slavery work by assisting people to freedom and promoting the free produce movement.
1826 – Regular “convoys” sent northwest as African Americans legally owned by North Carolina Yearly Meeting and others with legal papers to travel are accompanied by Quakers to seek freedom as a part of the “overground railroad.” Wagons were stopped and searched, as slaveholders knew trails used for this purpose along the route from New Garden, North Carolina northwest to Ohio and Indiana.
1830 – North Carolina emancipation law requires posting of $1000 bond for each slave to be freed to require good behavior and insurance that the freed slave would leave the state within 90 days, making it increasingly difficult for Quakers and others supporting emancipation to legally assist people to freedom.
1831 – Nat Turner insurrection in Southampton County, Virginia, raising fears among many whites and encouraging increasingly restrictive legislation against African Americans -- enslaved and free.
1831 – North Carolina law prohibits teaching the enslaved to read or write.
1833 – Abolition of slavery in British Empire
1833 – Rowland Greene, a Rhode Island Quaker minister who held a strong concern about the evil of slavery and the moral damage done to all living in the midst of it, visits North Carolina and advises Friends in the founding of New Garden Boarding School.
1834 – Last meeting of North Carolina Manumission Society held at Marlborough Friends Meeting
1835 – Hamilton’s Saul, an enslaved African American known to have assisted in setting up escapes for others with Coffin almost twenty years earlier uses the Underground Railroad to gain his own freedom.
1835 – Revision of the North Carolina State Constitution disenfranchises free blacks. North Carolina also formally requests other states to suppress abolition societies and anti-slavery literature.
1837 – New Garden Boarding School, chartered in 1834, opens. Faculty include Rhode Island abolitionist activist Harriet Peck. She documents assisting in a Sabbath school for African Americans -- evidence that the work done by the Coffins in the 1820s continued, but not publicly due to increased illegality and danger. Peck also discusses the Free Produce Movement with her students, noting that the boarding school leadership was supportive of the movement as well, and distributes The Liberator and other anti-slavery literature in the surrounding community.
1845 -- Vestal Coffin’s son, Addison, moves to Indiana. More research is needed to document who remained in North Carolina as active conductors in these later years of activity, especially after the departure of the Coffins and Hamilton’s Saul.
1847 -- Virginia Yearly Meeting of Friends is discontinued, leaving North Carolina Yearly Meeting as the only Quaker organization entirely located in what would later become the Confederate States.
1850 - Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 requires that all escaped slaves were, upon capture, to be returned to their masters and that officials and citizens of free states had to cooperate in this law.
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