The South Plainfield Historical Society has received word from Middlesex County Cultural and Heritage Commission that
the site of the first Quaker Meeting House will be recognized with a historic marker. The bronze marker is a gift of
Middlesex County and the Board of Chosen Freeholders working in collaboration with the Cultural and Heritage
Commission. The Commission is particularly interested in sites that are little known to the public.
Residents may remember that a Quaker Meeting House marker once stood along Woodland Avenue near the Plainfield
Country Club. That location, however, did not jive with maps drawn in the 18th century. Local historian Larry Randolph
extensively researched and examined British and American Revolutionary War era maps. The military maps show the
Meeting House to be located in the vicinity of Block 221, Lot 30 on a parcel of land presently occupied by the Community
Pool.
Writing in �Looking Back at South Plainfield,� Randolph notes that the first settlers in this area appear to be Quakers.
Fleeing persecution in their native Scotland, they came to New Jersey in the 1680s. Their numbers never became large,
for they found the religious and political climate more tolerant of them in the settlements of West Jersey and
Pennsylvania. Pioneering Quakers in the Plainfields include the names of Vail, Compton, Gordon, Webster, Fullerton
and Barclay. Two of the most prominent and influential Quakers in this immediate area were the Laing brothers who
purchased 700 acres of land in what would become So. Plainfield from John Barclay, a proprietor, in 1692. William Laing
would build the village�s first major industry, the grist mill on the Cedar Brook, in the early 1700s, establishing more than
200 years of milling at the site.
The Laings were members of the local Society of Friends. In 1732, the year of William�s death, they donated land near
their farmhouse along present-day Crescent Parkway to construct a Meeting House. While the Laings also owned
property along Woodland Avenue, the Quaker Meeting House appears on both the Clinton British military maps and the
Erskine American military maps of the period to be located at the site of the Community Pool. A map by C.C. Vermeule,
�Battlegrounds of the Revolution,� also shows the Meeting House at this location. Furthermore, when constructing the
parking lot for the swimming pool, construction crews encountered graves which may have been those shown in the
picture contained in The American Revolution in New Jersey, a Pictorial Essay edited by Edgar and Betty Bradbury Vail.
This photo is described as a �pre-Revolutionary burying ground� on the land of the �Holly Farm.� What may be Holly
Pond is in the picture�s background.
Around 1906, the Holly Farm was sold to Milton Mendel who sold it to the Helmer family in 1922. Mrs. Carmen Helmer
Smith grew up on Holly Farm and confirms in her oral history interview the existence of the headstones, as do others of
her generation, many of whom were Boy Scouts who camped in the immediate area. Because Quakers buried near their
Meeting House, and because there is no evidence of a cemetery on Woodland Avenue, Randolph is certain that this is
the correct site of the original Quaker Meeting House.
Eventually the Friends outgrew the Meeting House. In 1788, they constructed a new building (which is still in use) on
Watchung Avenue in Plainfield. It was said that the move to Plainfield was necessitated by a lack of space to enlarge
their structure on the Laing land. The military maps cited above show the Meeting House as located on a small knoll
bounded by swampy ground on two sides which would have limited expansion. Some of the topography from the
Revolutionary War period has survived decades of residential development. Part of the original knoll still exists, and
photographs taken in the 1920s by the Helmers confirm that the area was swampy.
No date has been set for the presentation of the Quaker Meeting House historic marker. The South Plainfield Historical
Society has also nominated the New Brooklyn Grist Mill and the Revolutionary War encampment site of Gen. Conway.
The Nike Base, Drake�s Crossing and the Lehigh Valley Railroad Perth Amboy line will be nominated in the near future.